Drawing Dead is a documentary film exploring the highs and lows of online poker from two very different perspectives: a poker pro, and a gambling addict.
That sentence has stood as the description of this film since the site went up, and everything on these pages sits underneath it. Two people, the same game, the same client, two entirely different accounts of what the hours were for.
What a two-perspective film is for
A single-subject documentary about gambling has a strong pull toward one of two endings: the recovery, or the ruin. Both are satisfying and both are misleading, because they resolve a subject that does not resolve. Setting a professional's account beside an addict's account removes the option of a tidy ending, since neither perspective can be read as the correct one without the other becoming a warning.
The point of the pairing is not that the two are secretly the same. It is that the surface is identical and the substance is not, and that no amount of watching the screen will tell you which is which. That is an uncomfortable thing for a visual medium to be built on, and it is the honest premise for a film about a game played alone in front of a monitor.
The journal
Alongside the film, this site keeps a journal of writing about the subject it sits in: the terminology, the mechanics of variance, what the always-open table changed, how the game reads on a screen, and why it fits so poorly into the documentary shapes available to it. The entries are essays about the material rather than notes about production.
They are ordered by date, oldest at the bottom, and the full run is listed in the archives.