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There isn’t much Jason Alexander hasn’t done. His resume is brimming with leading roles and brilliant character turns; often hilarious takes on misfits, most notably the hapless George Costanza in Seinfeld. He also won a Tony award for his role in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway. But on the road to the top of the acting industry, Alexander’s career not only introduced him to the stage and screen, but also to poker.
“Every actor will eventually learn to play poker because it’s the crew game,” he explains. “Say you’re a Shakespearean actor, and you’re in Act 1, Scene 2, and you don’t go back on stage until Act 5, Scene 1 – you’ve got to kill that time, and more often than not, we played poker. Everyone starts out with 7-card Stud, and then you learn your variations. It’s just a really great game and I find myself addicted to playing. I’ve even played when there was no money on the table. I learned the game in high school, so it’s been thirtysomething years that I’ve been playing.”
As his acting career began to blossom, Alexander began looking for other outlets for his creativity and soon realized that the sense drama that arises during a poker game was exactly what he was looking for. “For me, it’s definitely the drama of sitting around a table with a bunch of people who are, at various points of any given hand, acting up a storm. You’ve got your heroes and villains as well as your fall guys, clowns, and patsies.
It really is a full theatrical experience every time I play the game, no matter what seven or eight guys I sit down with. Whether I know them or I don’t know them, everyone sort of falls into a part. It’s a very unscripted and intriguing drama.”
For Alexander, as much human drama can be found on the tables as on the movie set. “Nothing is more enticing to me about this game than sitting down and watching six, seven, or eight egos go into their different personas on how they play, what pot they’ll play, or even when they’ll play. To me, it’s the world’s greatest ongoing drama,” he says.
Besides finding a fix for his acting bug, Alexander also found several doors opened to him that would not have been there had he not been knee-deep in poker. “In some ways, poker has been a very big boon to my career. I have gotten appointments and have met with people based purely on the outcome of a poker tournament far more often than whether they like or dislike my work. There is a persona that goes with playing and winning the game and it’s bought me entrance into a lot of places that you normally can’t get to,” he says.
Taking advantage of those opportunities and landing roles like George Costanza not only padded Alexander’s bankroll, but also gave him a tricky table image that leaves many of his opponents unsure of how to play this comedic genius. “It’s interesting. I have been fairly fortunate on camera. I sit down at a poker table with cameras around and I have usually ended up at the final table and, on occasion, taken the purse. This is an interesting balance between what people think of me and what they think of George Costanza. People aren’t exactly sure what to do because I’m holding my own in another format.”
For all his poker prowess, however, Alexander admits he feels more comfortable treading the boards than sweating the felt. “I feel much more like I know what I’m doing when I’m acting. I’m a trained thespian so I’m comfortable acting. My poker knowledge is really secondhand experiential with some reading and some mentoring.
“When I sit at a poker table, I am still, at least as far as I am concerned, just a toddler,” he muses. “I’m just coming into a sense that I’m starting to own my own game – good, bad, or indifferent. That’s certainly not true of my acting career. Plus, so far, the acting has been paying the bills a little more steadily than my poker game, so I’m going to stick with that.”
Shifting character roles like Doyle Brunson shifts his playing styles, Alexander says he has learned to take bits and pieces from each character and bring them to the tables to use to his advantage. “I think actors have a distinctly unique advantage at the table. This is not the same type of advantage that the pros have, however. These guys are great at flash-crunching the numbers and they are on their home turf because they feel really comfortable playing; but as an actor at the table, you can work some real magic.
“With nothing but pure acting ability I have easily suckered people in and out of hands that they shouldn’t have been in. But this works both ways since I have also been suckered in and out of hands by actors who have just floored me. I think I can read their hands as though I have X-ray vision. Then they turn over their cards and they have taken me for the biggest ride of my life, all done on the strength of performance. Having acting experience is huge at the tables.”
When asked which is more important, winning an Academy Award or winning a World
Series of Poker bracelet, Alexander smiles and says, “That’s an interesting question, for
two reasons. One, I grew up wanting to be in the theatre; so when I was growing up, I
dreamt of winning a Tony Award, not the Academy Award. As I get older in the acting profession, I realize that there are many times when those awards are given for reasons other than pure merit. It is a very political process and it is so difficult to compare the merits of one performance to the other. I mean, what do you use as a barometer? In some cases, I find people get awards for things because they missed getting one five years earlier.
“The thing about winning the WSOP bracelet is that you either earn it or you don’t. It’s unequivocal. It’s not a matter of opinion; it’s a matter of cold, hard facts. On that day, at that time, you had the nuts and you proved it. I’d be a fool to turn down an Oscar and a fool to turn down a bracelet. Although at this point, I think I have a better shot at getting a bracelet than I do of winning an Oscar.”
Alexander doesn’t get as much time at the tables as he would like these days. “I don’t have a steady game, but I get invited to a bunch,” he says. “I can’t tell whether this is good, bad, or indifferent, but I have a casino program that I spend a lot of time playing.
The players are programmed to be consistent, but they always switch roles, so I never know who I’m dealing with. I’ll play fast and that gets my mind to thinking about what I’m looking at very quickly. It forces me to do the stats quicker than I normally would, which is great for my game.”
Playing against his computer might have given Alexander a mathematical understanding of the game, but he knows that being a winning player has a lot to do with intuition. While at the tables, he says, he retreats to a quiet place in his mind, which allows him to zone in on the game.
“I’ve got to tell you that in the last two tournaments I played — one I went to the final table and the other I won — I’ve gone to this very quiet place and I have mentally pictured what the turn or the river card is going to be and if it doesn’t come up for me in that moment of fantasy, I get out; but if I saw the card and played it, good things would come. I don’t know if it was instinctual or that third-eye thing. I’ve played some risky hands when I was in big trouble and, of late, it’s really paid off. You know, I just saw it happen as if it had been turned,” he says.
Thanks to Alexander’s acting success, he has been able to transform his love of the game into a force for the good by participating in numerous charity tournaments. Ironically, this is when the trained actor feels the most pressure. “I get very stressed out at the tables when I’m playing for a charity. Especially the last celebrity tournament I was in for these New Orleans charities. Every one of them desperately needed the money. The heads of the organization are sitting right behind me and I’m getting killed. I’m getting thrown off my blinds and getting bad beats. I’m looking at them and in my head I’m saying I’m sorry. If it were my money, I would feel much better about playing, as opposed to playing with money that could help a number of families.”
But don’t feel bad for Alexander, because he feels much more comfortable when he’s backing his own action and seems to do just fine when it’s his hard-earned cash at stake.
“When I play for myself, I don’t usually get stressed out. I know what I’m going to sit down at the table with and I don’t play above my means. I never go to the tables to win.
I go to the tables to have a good time. If it’s going well, that’s great, but I look at it as an opportunity to meet new people and have some laughs. I guess I took my coaches in high school way too literally when they said, ‘I just want you to go out there and enjoy the game.’ ”
Ultimately, poker is both an escape and an open stage for Jason Alexander. Free to create any table image he wants, this wily, mercurial actor is always a mystery behind his chip stack and his happy-go-lucky smile always begs a call. In the long run, Alexander is a winner both at the tables and away from them. “For me,” he summarizes, “being at the tables is simply about joy.”
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