The Noble Hustle Read online

  With a full house, we’re back to Western measures. A full house is empire-building, conspicuous consumption: a pair and three of a kind. And four of a kind, say four Aces? First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women, then you get a really great deal on a time-share.

  The highest ranked hand in poker is the straight flush. It’s the least likely hand you’ll be dealt, rare as a true catastrophe. Like, five health-related disasters, one after the other. That’s being stabbed by a hobo with a penknife, an infected hangnail, ashy elbows, tummy trouble from “three-times washed” greens only washed twice, topped off by double stigmata. A real straight flush of bodily complaint. A sign from above.

  HOLLYWOODING: Using all your years of deceiving others to put on a show at the table. Ever said, “Cute baby,” about some newborn who’d found a portal between their Hell Dimension and our world? You may have a career in poker.

  Playing dummy hands on the living-room floor. But who among us has not played out demented scenes on a dirty carpet? That was basically my entire twenties in a nutshell. Sure, I lived one block up from crack houses, black plastic bags twisting on the bare branches outside, but my pastime acquainted me with some of the hidden physics of the game. I’d have to go beyond my mad-scientist experiments now that I was going to Vegas. I was soft.

  I ordered books, the website’s previous customers serving up recs via algorithm. No Limit Hold ’em: Theory and Practice by David Sklansky and Ed Miller, and the morbidly titled Kill Phil: The Fast Track to Success in No-Limit Hold ’Em Poker Tournaments and Kill Everyone: Advanced Strategies for No-Limit Hold ’Em Poker Tournaments and Sit-n-Go’s. Didn’t get too far into the Kill books, but I admired the authors for their ambition, after they’d set their sights too low with the first volume.

  I’d flipped through Sklansky’s famous The Theory of Poker some fifteen years earlier. Sklansky was one of poker’s philosopher-kings, and wrote the first book on Hold’em in 1976. Smiling in his author photo, with his receding hairline, trimmed beard, and oversize specs, here was the face of a player who knew the holy probabilities, the math teacher come at last to explain the numbers. Sklansky’s prose was cool, exact. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

  Not that it would have helped in my ’90s home game that much—our trash, wild-card games spoiled any aspirations of rigor. Poring through this new, Big-Boy Sklansky years later, I felt invigorated underlining phrases such as “Winning the battle of mistakes means making sure that your opponents make frequent and more costly mistakes than you do.” The Battle of Mistakes. It sounded like commentary on life in the big city, where sometimes good fortune is just having fewer messed-up things happening to you.

  My friend Nathan hosted a one-off game, twenty whole bucks to buy in. Figured I’d employ my new expertise, even if it was only a few chapters’ worth. I was pretty high on my assignment. It’d be like one of those pieces where someone does a thing for a year and then writes about it, like cook a classic Julia Child recipe every day, or follow the Bible to the letter, or re-create Ted Bundy’s notorious spree with “special noogies” in lieu of murder and whatnot. But instead of one year, it would be two months, because of time constraints and my short attention span on account of the internet. Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia. Eat, Pray, Love for depressed shut-ins. Energized for Nathan’s game, I’d bust out some crazy Sklansky-Fu on these knuckleheads.

  It was the most money I’d ever lost in a home game. The gathering was civilized enough. We shared a profession, all writers of one sort or another, five men and three women. More poets than usual (one), perhaps the circus was in town. Home games, you generally play with your own kind. Every night, all over the country, CPAs were playing with CPAs, firemen with firemen. You’ve been driven to the sanctuary of the card table by the same forces. It helps if you have something in common, and this night we warmed our hands by the fires of our undying grievance and anxiety.

  The spread was top notch. Sliced meat that came from European pigs that seemed to have succulent body parts American pigs didn’t. We ordered fancy pizzas and Middle Eastern food, drank small-batch bourbon and local vodka fermented from stuff pulled from the Gowanus Canal or something, it was hard to read the label. Good to see everybody. We talked apartments (one bedroom or two), kids (one child or two), work travel to boondoggle festivals in exotic lands, teaching gigs in Podunk college towns. The music was niche indie: Everyone kept asking “Who’s this,” “Who’s this,” and then the creator of the playlist expounded. And hand after hand, I lost.

  The pleasant tableau described above is what a home game is all about. It’s not what a casino game is about. That night I played as if those guys knew what I meant by wagering 2.5 times the Big Blind here, betting half the pot on the Turn there. Sklansky, Sklansky, I tried, brother. But what use is my semi-bluff when my nonfiction-writing friend blindly threw chips into the pot, more intent on sharing his story of how his eczema was “really flaring up.” His doctors wrote a scrip for a new topical steroid, what the heck, he’ll try anything at this point. Sklansky, Sklansky, tell me: How can “The Hammer of Future Betting” pierce the armor plate of “Level with me, guys. How old is ‘too old’ for breast-feeding?” I was being outwitted by allergies. “You wouldn’t think it, but there are some not-bad gluten-free beers on the market. It’s my turn? Sure, I’ll throw in two bucks. See, instead of using hops …” If no one’s paying attention to my new, hot-rod playing strategy, does it even exist?

  No. I bought in for another twenty, and then another.

  They weren’t going to drop, these romantics. In love with the final card, the River. They will stay in to see the River, for it will save them, always, plug the holes in the straight, gussy a pair of 5s into trips, reverse the evening’s bad luck. The River will wash away their sins, of which they have many: holding on to cards that are real long shots to improve (I’d never do that); ignoring ominous developments on the board and textbook-strong betting from across the table (i.e., from me); and ruining the night of a pal who is stressed out about going to the World Series of Poker and could use a break (me again). My twenty-five-year-old self would’ve been broken by the losses. A hundred and forty bucks was everything back then. It was beer, cable, and cigarettes. Hope.

  That’s why serious poker players deride low-stakes limit games as No Fold’em Hold’em, like cineastes sneering at the latest Texas Chainsaw retread. This is not art but a massacre of all that is holy. The common folk, they like their cheap entertainment, play for social currency more than cold hard cash. Tomorrow it’s back to filing the quarterly reports, that conference with Kaitlyn’s teacher about her absences, getting the boiler checked out. But tonight you are free. You dragged your sorry ass out to forget your daily disasters. Why let an obvious flush muck your hand when the River is going to abracadabra your two pair into a full house? It’s fifty cents, it’s four more bucks, whatever, to see that last card. Just wanna have some brews and try out that new joke you heard at work, not conform to some Sklanskian ideal of the Game.

  Yes, it was everybody else’s fault. Not mine for letting these fools draw out on me, for making it cheap to call my bets, for not changing gears to adjust to a loose game. For not realizing the simple fact that a money game is not a tournament. It was like writing short stories and thinking it was the same thing as writing a novel. That night I started sleeping more poorly than usual.

  YHS: “Your hand sucks,” from online play. You post the breakdown of a hand to get advice from the community, but your cards are so bad the situation is a no-brainer. “YHS, moron,” is the response that pops up in the chat box. If that’s too hard to remember, think of it as “Your High School.” Surely you’ve not forgotten that particular awfulness.

  Memorial Day Weekend. Six weeks until the start of the Main Event.

  Saturday morning, the Tropicana Poker Room was a whisper. The players were still bent over their late breakfasts, chewing over last night’s loss
es and delivering surething declarations of today’s successes. One last, shallow interaction with non-poker-playing companions before everyone diverged to their chosen gambling arena.

  In those other quicksand places—beeping and blinking slot sinks, blackjack maws, and overpriced buffets—the casino makes its daily bread. The poker room is a loss leader. That precious square footage eats up room that could be used for any number of more devious money-sucking machines. The house takes a rake, a tiny percentage of each pot, but that’s it. Caesars, the Trump Taj Mahal, and all the other casinos sticking up out of the boardwalk like rotten teeth, they host a couple of tournaments a day. Morning, afternoon, evening, recouping the operating expenses (electricity, staff, the inhibition-lowering mist dispersed into the ventilation system) from rooms, meals. The various acts of larceny perpetrated upon the poker players’ companions.

  For my part, I was not enthused about reading a poker how-to while queued for the omelet station of the buffet. Might as well get caught highlighting Beyond First Base: Advanced Booby Tips of the Pros on the way to the prom. I grabbed a grande coffee and performed some lastminute cramming in my room. I was only a third of the way through my tournament primer. It would have to do.

  While today was my first casino tournament, I’d played in half a dozen homegrown ones over the years. Once at a bachelor party. At a pal’s house once or twice someone had suggested an impromptu tournament, everyone bought in. Unaccustomed to the new pace, folks busted out quickly and pouted on the sidelines, so we gave everybody their money back and started playing Omaha again. One time a friend of a friend organized an eighty-man tournament. He cleared out the desks in his office—some sort of internet boondoggle or design studio—to make room for rented chairs and tables. It was all guys, a real sausage party when we lined up for our table draws, sweating testosterone, trying to figure out who in the room was a chump or a ringer. Was this the set of a gang bang? Gang-bang shoots probably have beer and pizza, too.

  I usually ended up placing in the top tier in these scrabbly events, despite my ignorance of tournament physics. The half-dead thing. Today the Trop would show me the real deal beyond those earlier ramshackle affairs. Before the Feds’ crackdown, I would have been practicing on the internet, on PokerStars or Full Tilt, Robotroning through tournament after tournament. Online poker was like one of those “learning helmets” in sci-fi movies, where you plop it in your head and download the knowledge of a dead civilization in, like, five minutes. I had to do it the old-fashioned way, with my pants on.

  A few money games chugged along around the tournament tables, which sat like lonely atolls, empty save for their tiny columns of chips. The floor manager chatted with a dealer. I asked him how many people usually signed up for a weekend tourney. He surveyed the quiet room. “Depends.” He directed me to the Cage, where the cashiers transacted through barred windows, safe as bodega guys dealing cigarettes and Similac through Plexiglas boxes.

  The tournaments I sampled in AC that spring ranged from fifty to a hundred and fifty bucks. Not bad for a couple of hours’ escape from one’s troubles, plus free booze. The Tropicana morning game cost sixty-two bucks. Fifty went to the prize money, and twelve went to the house. I saw where the twelve bucks was going: to pay for plastic name tags for the dealers and “flesh”-colored hose for the post-nubile cocktail waitresses, who slipped between the tables offering “BAVERGES.” It was unclear whether BAVERGES was a question or a command.

  Depends was right: only eighteen people signed up that morning. Of course I’d picked a bum game for my first outing; most of my later training missions would have fifty or sixty entrants. There were ten seats at each table, your draw noted on the registration card. I was the first arrival, counting down to my seat number clockwise from the dealer.

  “Here?”

  “There.”

  I murmured Starting Hands to myself, the hierarchy of the two cards you are dealt before the flop: JJ can get you into trouble, play 88 in middle position, mess with suited connectors if I was feeling fancy in late position. Despite my trepidation, I wanted to be tested, wanted adversaries unshackled from the gladiator pit beneath the Poker Room—grim Moors, dour Phoenicians, battle-scarred Russell Crowes. Instead I was joined by big-mouth Big Mitches down for the Memorial Day weekend with the missus, a single Robotron initiating search-and-destroy subroutines behind his glasses, and two Methy Mikes, both with a felonious air and a desiccated mien, probably killing time until the cockfight.

  For our sixty-two dollars, we received $10K in chips, motley colored. In a tournament there’s no correlation between the money you give the Cage dwellers and the number of chips you get, which are really just arbitrarily designated pieces of germ-covered plastic. Every poker room had worked out their turnover rate, of how many starting chips will get the players out in time for the next tournament and make room for the night players. In the World Series of Poker, I’d receive a neat stack of $30K in chips for the $10,000 entrance fee the magazine was ponying up for me. Eventually I’d have to wrap my head around that ludicrous jump in magnitude, but today just playing a whole tournament was enough.

  POKER GODS: Those entities who watch over your poker existence, engineering deep cashes, bad beats, poor position, crappy players to fleece. An eccentric pantheon, to be sure. Among them, Barda the Two-Faced, who reminds you about that morning meeting, but then fills the gutshot straight in your hand, whereupon you keep losing for another two hours. Don of a Thousand Brain Farts sprinkles magic dust in your eyes so that you bet a flush that is really, really not there. And Tim Old Spice, who is probably responsible for much of the “God is dead” talk the last two centuries. He’s in charge of making sure the mouth breather next to you is wearing deodorant. Bit of a slacker.

  And so it began! With luck I’d get in a few hours of play. In contrast to a tournament, a money table possesses an unpredictable life-span, like a fad diet or a good mood. After collecting a critical mass of waiting-list hopefuls, the floor manager gives the signal, and then the cash game waxes and wanes as players join, split for the sports book or mani appointment or face time with the wife, lose their roll, or somehow muster the willpower to quit while they’re ahead. Late night, when the cards get hazy, the sensible head back to the room, and drunks sit down with pros who have gotten out of bed at 3:00 a.m. so they can feast on these boozy losers. Weekly runs at a $30/$60 table can subsidize Little Gary’s orthodontia. Then the table dies, and the process starts again. It’s a dry riverbed in the desert, quickened by a sudden cloudburst into brief life before the heat decimates it again.

  In a tournament, you play to the last man or woman sitting. Here’s how it works:

  We get our starter stacks, and then the clock begins. I’d never noticed the TV screens on my previous casino visits, but here they were, on tripods, mounted to the wall, counting down tournament time and stats: six minutes to the next increase in blinds, one hour to the next rest break, here’s how many players still survive. Because every twenty minutes or so, the blinds (the initial forced bets) increase. At the start, the Big and Small Blinds were $25 and $25. After twenty minutes, the dealer or floor guy announced the increase, and they became $25 and $50, then $50 and $100, and so on.

  After a couple of levels we got a ten-minute rest break. The tables cleared and Big Mitch hightailed it to the bathroom for a meditation over the urinal abyss. (Why did Kaitlyn have to call our weekend getaway “CialisFest”? Makes me feel kind of low.) The Methy Mikes split to the boardwalk for sunlight and a smoke. The mercury bobbed in the eighties, the first hot weekend after a mean winter and tepid spring.

  BAVERGES!

  I declined. On breaks I parked myself at a one-armed bandit. Out of sight of the Poker Room, scanning my poker tips. “Play the cards they have,” my notes said, “not the cards you want them to have.” Don’t get all starry-eyed and ignore what the cards are saying just because you like the flop. “Are Ace-Jack suited really worth risking your tournament life???” Underlined, sta
rred in the margin, circled in unignorable loops. I don’t know how “STAY SEXY” snuck in there, but I nodded thoughtfully.

  After the break, I measured my stack against the rest of the table: Well, that guy over there is fairly crippled, I’m not the worst here. Then steeled myself for the next round of meat-grinder levels. My notebook had one voice, encouraging and handing out sticker-stars of achievement like a second-grade teacher, but my stack spoke in a different register: “You better step up, son.” The chips, the chips wouldn’t shut up, a One Ring hectoring my hunched Gollum self.

  “Whoever invented poker was bright,” the saying goes, “but whoever invented chips was genius.” Uncouple cash money from its conventional associations, and people gamble more freely. Sure, green cash is already a metaphor, but the real pain of seeing actual money disappear into a lost pot is not. No longer milk, meat, and rent, the plastic tokens are tiny slivers chipped off an abstraction, an index of two things: Time and Power.

  Obviously, the more chips you have, the longer you can play. But a tournament has more hyperinflation than a CIA-toppled banana republic. As in real life, chips don’t buy as much as they used to as time goes by. The blinds are escalating every level—$300 and $600, $500 and $1,000 blinds, $3,000 and $6,000. Your stack becomes more worthless every hand. The more chips you accumulate, the more Time you have left. At the final WSOP table in 2010, the chip leader had $65 million in chips. What is that in Time? Empires rise and fall in that interval. That’s glacier time, Ice Age time, knuckle-dragger into Neanderthal time.

  And Power. That tower of chips you’ve made, looming over the rim of the table, is the physical manifestation of how much you can bully. A monument to your prowess, or the Poker Gods’ blessing this day. Big stacks eat little stacks like M&M’s. The other saps have arranged their stacks into houses of straw and sticks, and even the brick ones will not stand at your re-raise huffing and puffing. What threat is that little stack’s All In to someone who’d gathered a thousand times as many chips? I’d always marveled at the gravity-defying properties of those gigantic stacks. Aren’t they afraid of knocking them over? My anxiety-palsied hands would send them flying through space. But the first step to handling chip castles is accumulating a bunch of chips, hence my lack of practice.