The Card Players Come to Aix
Key Takeaways
- Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players captures the concentration, silence, and psychology that poker players still recognize today.
- The famous painting features local workers from Aix-en-Provence, where the PokerStars Open takes place next week.
- The PokerStars Open Aix-en-Provence runs November 2 to 8, with the €1,100 Main Event scheduled for November 4 to 8.
- The festival also features a €5,000 Super High Roller, €2,200 High Roller, €550 Second Chance, and €400 Mystery Bounty Cup.
The Card Players
Two men from Aix have been sitting across a card table from one another for more than 130 years. Back in March, during the Pokerstars EPT Paris, I visited the Musée d’Orsay and, for the umpteenth time in my life, I stopped and stood and stared at Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players. Beneath the Provençal light, the two laborers seemed imprisoned by the seriousness of the task before them, their cards fanned neatly and their bodies leaning into the table.
The subject of card players had a precedent in an earlier painting by the Le Nain brothers. Not to disparage their work, but in Cézanne’s hands, this scene is elevated to something monumental. Between the two men stands a re-corked bottle, dividing the composition into two little territories. The specific cards are incidental. Instead, what is captured is the silence, the concentration and the strange intimacy of two people trying to understand one another without saying a word.
Cézanne painted his card players in the 1890s, producing several versions of the scene, but they all depict the same basic confrontation. It is not, strictly speaking, a painting of poker. The specific game that the men play is unknown. However, anyone who has spent enough time in a poker room will immediately recognize the atmosphere.
The Art of the Read
Poker is, at its most elemental, a study in stillness, a game in which the players are compelled to reveal nothing while desperately attempting to discover everything. Poker players are forced to act with incomplete information, constructing stories from fragments. A subtle glance could be a piece of evidence. A barely perceptible moment of hesitation could be testimony. The seemingly innocent act of reaching for a drink could be tantamount to a confession.
In a way, Cézanne and the other post-Impressionists did something rather similar with paint. They tried to impose structure upon the world around them, using color and form to give solidity to things that were fleeting. His card players have the physical weight of statues but the psychological weight of men who have decided that the next bet should be taken seriously.
Poker players know that feeling all too well. The modern tournament table might feature iPads and action clocks. It might be surrounded by screens depicting tournament clocks. It might be in a room where every wall and pillar is branded in poker paraphernalia. However, underneath the clutter, the ritual remains remarkably primitive. Wait. Look. Think. Bet.
The Cards Return to Aix
Cezanne’s models were local workers and peasants from Aix-en-Provence, making it a rather fitting destination for the PokerStars Open next week. From November 2 to 8, players will descend on ‘Le PasinoGRAND’ in Aix-en-Provence for a week of PokerStars Live tournament action. The €1,100 Main Event runs from November 4 to 8, surrounded by a schedule that includes a €2,200 High Roller, a €550 Second Chance, a €5,000 Super High Roller and a €400 Mystery Bounty Cup.
Players from all across Europe will make the journey to the South of France, tournament regulars chasing another score and recreational players hoping for a week to remember. The stakes will be different, but the fundamental proposition will be the same: I have something you cannot see, and you have something I cannot see.
Cézanne spent years returning to the landscape around Aix, looking at the same mountain, the same countryside and the same world, absorbing all that he could until the underlying structures began to reveal themselves. Poker players do much the same thing, although their landscapes are less picturesque. They return to the same tables, the same situations and the same human behaviours, convinced that if they look closely enough they can find the pattern underneath the chaos.
Cézanne’s players exist in a world of muted colors and unhurried afternoons, while their modern descendants will bet, raise and call beneath casino lights surrounded by the accumulated accoutrements of professional poker. The bottle will be replaced by a tower of chips but the composition will remain. Two men from Aix have been sitting across a card table from one another for more than 130 years. Next week, they will have company.
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