PZ105: Better Ranting with Dan Arfin

There are endless characters in poker, but the “post-literate” world only has so many journalists and bloggers recording and transforming them into stories. The ubiquitous vlogger, focused on selling his image, and photographer, focused on selling the industry’s image, can’t do it for legal and casino and formal reasons. This means the skill of storytelling is still in demand. One of the best doing it in poker right now is Las Vegas’ Dan Arfin.

Dan, like many writers, is focused on therapeutics for better living, and I don’t only mean storytelling. (He likes to open the show with a clock tower bell, which summons the monasticism of the grinder or the insanity of the lone gunman, but his most natural sound effect is the unthrottled vape that follows.) Poker results rock the player psyche, so a mental health angle has a strong tradition among its regulars. Grinders often need to come down from the performance high, or like Dan, must vent about the stressors. The main stressors in Dan’s case are the players themselves. That’s us. Yes, we torment Dan, so we’ve got a good and funny plot going on at Dead Money.

Dan divides his personality sharply, as many performers do. And like any good performer, he takes the show very seriously. Dan doesn’t even want to really talk at the table. I saw this when he played in my game, which pushes people to be social. Dan is one of the few kinds of players who doesn’t really like it, as he was clearly focused on beating the fish. Still, his big bluff versus the Gipper, which he described on his pod, was a lot of fun to watch in real time because any decent player recognized exactly what was going on. (If anyone had been listening as the cards were dealt, they would have heard me say, “Dan is going to win this pot.”) Off the felt, Dan is completely different, being talkative to the point of garrulousness. I didn’t even get to half my questions during our interview.

Dan says he “failed at comedy” but I think still has aspirations. Comedy is notoriously cathartic and so there is a strong link between it and poker. There are many poker comedians, including Clayton Fletcher, Joe Stapleton, and Yasar Al-Keliddar, who Dean in fact interviewed for the Zoo. We don’t have to look far for the reason: the dangerous, grey-area life, the constant stress, and the endless hungry and exasperating people in your face and in your business. The poker life absolutely demands a release. Stand-up does a lot for this; I remember recommending it to