CLOSING DAYS OF THE WORLD SERIES OF POKER FOR $10 MILLION FIRST PRIZE IN LAS VEGAS: 2/4: Seven Games: A Human History, by Oliver Roeder.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 13 July 2025
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Games-History-Oliver-Roeder/dp/1324003774
Checkers, backgammon, chess, and go. Poker, Scrabble, and bridge. These seven games, ancient and modern, fascinate millions of people worldwide. In Seven Games, Oliver Roeder charts their origins and historical importance, the delightful arcana of their rules, and the ways their design makes them pleasing.
Roeder introduces thrilling competitors, such as the evangelical minister Marion Tinsley, who across forty years lost only three games of checkers; Shusai, the Master, the last gochampion of imperial Japan, defending tradition against “modern rationalism.” and an IBM engineer who created a backgammon program so capable at self-learning that NASA used it on the space shuttle. He delves into the history and lore of each game: backgammon boards in ancient Egypt, the Indian origins of chess, how certain shells from a particular beach in Japan make the finest white gostones.
Beyond the cultural and personal stories, Roeder explores why games, seemingly trivial pastimes, speak so deeply to the human soul. He introduces an early philosopher of games, the aptly named Bernard Suits, and visits an Oxford cosmologist who has perfected a computer that can effectively play bridge, a game as complicated as human language, itself.
1910 CLARK COUNTY
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchel. Joe Pappalardo's new book is Red Sky Morning, the epic true story of Texas Ranger Company F. |
| 0:11.8 | The shootout that takes place in March of 1887 is led by a man named Will Scott. |
| 0:17.8 | Where does he come from? Why is he such a tough guy? Why is he so good at running |
| 0:21.8 | a Ranger company that's about 10 or 11 or 12 men coming and going, but it's discipline? |
| 0:28.8 | And Captain Scott sets the tone of everybody, very stoic, hard riding, extremely hard riding, |
| 0:42.4 | living the life in the wilderness as they move around the state as law enforcement. |
| 0:46.9 | His beginning is as a volunteer detective. How so, Joe? |
| 0:56.5 | Yeah, the toughness and the guile, you can see from the beginning of his law enforcement career because he's a self-appointed undercover detective. |
| 1:02.6 | He infiltrates a very infamous, the most infamous gang at the time, the Sand Bass gang. |
| 1:06.6 | It was committing a series of very brazen robberies. |
| 1:13.5 | And outside of Dallas, he decides independently to track them down, infiltrate the gang, |
| 1:17.2 | and turn over information to the Texas Rangers had been hunting them. So he does this all in his own as a very young man, and it works. |
| 1:22.6 | He almost gets killed for his pains, but it does work. |
| 1:26.2 | He delivers some information to the Rangers, and he becomes a Ranger, and that's how he |
| 1:31.7 | earns his entrance. |
| 1:34.6 | That is his style. |
| 1:35.8 | It's Gile-backed with deliberate force, and his approach is very, feels very modern to me, |
| 1:43.5 | more modern than I thought. |
| 1:44.5 | I think Texas Rangers, you think they come into town, they know who the bad guys are, |
| 1:49.0 | and they shoot them, and that's the end of it. |
| 1:51.0 | But the very modern feeling use of informants of undercover officers, intelligence operations, |
| 1:58.0 | the way that they would set up an ambush versus setting up an arrest |
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