The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death

Making the Nature Scene

In the spring of 2011, I received an e-mail from the editor of a new magazine. He asked if I wanted to write something about sports.

No, I said. I didn’t follow sports. Sure, now and then I mixed it up in a Who Had the Most Withholding Father contest with chums, but that’s as far as it went for me competitive sports — wise. More important, I was catching my breath after pulling out of a long skid. I had recently finished writing a novel about a city overrun by the living dead, and the plunge into autobiography had left me depleted. I’d barely gone out in months, devoting myself to meeting a moronic deadline I’d imposed in a spasm of optimism. Dating was a distraction, even the frequent-buyer card at my local coffee place was too much of a commitment. Now that I was done with the book, I was starting to feel human again. I wanted to rejoin society, do whatever it is that normal people do when they get together. Drink hormone-free, humanely slaughtered beer. Eat micro-chickens. Compare sadnesses, things of that sort.

The editor had heard that I liked poker — what if they sent me to cover the World Series of Poker?

No, I said. I did indeed like poker, and although there was no way he could know it, was very fond of Las Vegas. But ten days in the desert, in the middle of July? I chap easily. And again, I wanted to give myself a break. In the past year I had devoted myself to the novel and to figuring out the rules of solo parenthood. If I wasn’t writing, I was hitting the “Activities for Kids” sites in search of stuff for the kid and I to do on the weekends. It was a hard job, tracing a safe route through the minefield of face-painting, peanut-free caroling, and assorted pony bullshit that would get us safely to dinnertime and the organic hot dogs. A trip to Las Vegas would cut into our summer hang, which I’d come to idealize. It’s complicated, raising a kid who is half Anhedonian. There’s always the question of assimilation in this country: How much of your native culture do you keep, and how much do you give up? I wanted her to respect both sides of her heritage, so in the summer I’d teach her how to be a carefree American. We’d sip plus-size colas, watch TV on sunny days, be the lazy assholes the Founders intended.

Then the editor of the magazine asked, What if we staked you to play in the World Series and you wrote about that?

I had no choice. The only problem was that I had no casino tournament experience.

I’d been playing penny poker since college. College kids counting out chips into even stacks, opening a case of brew, busting out real-man cigars — these were the sacred props of manhood, and we were chronically low on proof. A couple of years later, in the ’90s, I had a weekly game. Inconceivable now: getting half a dozen people in the same room every Sunday night. We put in our measly five bucks. There was always someone who’d mined their couch or plundered their jar of laundry quarters, the twenty-something version of hocking your engagement ring.

We talked a lot about who we wanted to be, because we weren’t those people yet, and reinforcing one another’s delusions took the edge off. You humor my bat-shit novel idea, and I’ll nod thoughtfully at your insipid screenplay treatment, or plan for the paradigm-shifting CD-ROM game. Like I said, it was the ’90s. Dealer’s choice: Everyone got their turn to pick the game and expound upon the next harebrained scheme that would make us artists. The home game is always a refuge from the world. That ’90s game was an escape from our unrealized ambitions. We were true gamblers, laundry money or no, because we were sure that if we pulled it off, everything would be different. We were so busy bucking each other up that we barely noticed when someone introduced Hold’em into our mix of Seven Card Stud, Five Card Draw, and Anaconda.

A couple of years after that game trailed off, we started a Brooklyn writers game. A cliché, yes: more props. Monthly, ’cause who had the time now that we were actually writing books instead of just talking about it. The stakes stayed the same, though — five bucks, because we were writers. The game still a refuge, this time from the truth we’d discovered about fulfilling your dreams. We had done it, and we were still the same people. Nothing had changed.

There was a brief period, during my ’90s game, when I wanted to learn more about poker. I was sick of hanging around doomed hands like a dope, waiting to fill in my straight, hoping that the final down card in Seven Card Stud would paint in my flush. Slow learner that I am, I’d just outgrown pining over women who weren’t interested in me, and whenever I looked at a busted hand, it gave me a familiar pathetic feeling. Gamblers and the lovesick want to bend reality. But it’s never going to happen. If you woke the hell up, you’d understand that and stop chasing.

It occurred to me that I should research how often big hands popped up. Full houses and trips and what have you. Not the “odds” of them appearing, as that sounded too much like arithmetic. Just a loose idea of how often nice cards appeared in my hand. So on Sunday afternoons while the hangover matinee played on the TV, I squatted on the floor and dealt out Seven Card Stud for myself and three ghost players. I’d play my game, fill in the dummy hands, and see who’d win.

Did my yearnings pay off — did that Jack appear when I needed it, that scrawny pair bulk up into trips? Well. It wasn’t very scientific. Anybody who retained a little high-school math could arrive at the real odds more efficiently. And a couple of rounds for a couple of hours on a couple of Sundays was nothing compared to the weekend crash courses possible during the heyday of online play, when you’d hunker for hours, you got your mouse in one hand and a sporkful of kale salad in the other. But in my little way, I got an intuitive instruction on different hands. At the very least, I stopped chasing straights as much, and that, coupled with my poker mask, paid for some cab rides home Sunday night.

Most poker books include glossaries of poker terms and a list of hand rankings, regardless of the ability level of their target audience. That cardplayer optimism about the Big Score, the one that will Change It All, channeled into crossover dreams, even though nobody knows what the hell they’re talking about. In this chapter I’ll stop to define some poker lingo here and there, and will now commence with the requisite breakdown of hand rankings, even though I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.

For those who have never played, there are plenty of mnemonic devices for remembering the hand rankings, which is really a list of reverse frequency. Some of the tricks—“High pair in your holster, break out the prairie oysters!” and “Full House sends you All-In! Too bad we haven’t invented penicillin!”—date to the early frontier days of the game and haven’t aged well. It’s important to find the rhetorical system that works for you.

In explaining the game to a contemporary American audience, one should employ analogies appropriate to the culture. To start, when judging a five-card hand of random crap, the highest card determines its value. No trips, no straights, nothing but, say, a Jack or a King. You got zip. By an American standard of success you’ve totally botched it. Your worldly possessions — what you’ve been dealt — are nothing more than a cracked snow globe, a ball of twine, an unwrapped candy cane, the electronic keycard to a job you got fired from six years ago, and a thimble. In a showdown with the Lady with the Crimson Hair, she turns over the same first four items, but instead of a thimble, she has a signed head shot of Ben Vereen. You both have terrible hands, but in a war of who has the better crap, the Lady wins for possessing the highest value item: the Ben Vereen commemorative.

Whoever has the better stuff wins. Sound familiar, American lackeys of late-stage capitalism? After highest card comes one pair. You have one Queen, but your opponent has two Queens. Who wins? Imagine the Queens are gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles. DVD players for the kids, butt warmers, GPS voiced by Helen Mirren. Your family has one SUV, but Big Mitch next door has two of them. Who wins? Exactly. That’s the virtue of culturally appropriate mnemonics.

Next comes two pair. You have one pair of thermal socks. Ready to throw down with Old Man Winter, “To Build a Fire”—style. Robotron over there has one pair of Miles Davis CDs and one pair of coupons for free Jazzercise lessons. He wins: two pair beats having one pair. Now let’s say you also have a pair of Golden Girls box sets, so that you both have two pair. The highest value pair determines who wins. In this case, Miles Davis takes it for Robotron. In a face-off between your possibly lifesaving footwear, plus the entire run of a series about the twilight years of four feisty gals, and your opponent’s late-period Miles and cardio-heavy Jazzercise, he has the nuts.

Three of a kind, or trips, is best illustrated by a quote from the inspiring story of a young immigrant’s pursuit of the American dream, Oliver Stone’s Scarface (1983): “In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, you get the women.” I know it’s a universal quote, speaking to all walks of life, as I’ve heard suburban white guys cite it without irony. Money, power, women: That’s three Aces in your hand right there. Certainly beats what you’re usually holding in your hand, boys.

As an Anhedonian, those analogies don’t speak to me. What do I see when I’m dealt a straight—five cards in a series, like 5-6-7-8-9, not all of the same suit? To my tribe, that’s five misfortunes in a row, but not the same brand of misfortune. Let’s say one afternoon, one after the other in sequence, you: forget the name of someone you’ve met several times; e-mail an important document late; require an emergency root canal; overcook the risotto; and pick an argument with your partner because you blame them for everything that happened today. That’s five misfortunes, but a mix of social, professional, and health-related misfortunes. They are “differently suited.”

A flush would be five misfortunes of the same kind, or suit. Social, for example. You forget the name of someone you’ve met several times, pick a fight with a loved one, disrespect a member of the service industry, accidentally cuss during the kid’s playdate, and fart loudly during the toast at your cousin’s wedding. Fan out these things before you, arrange them by type: They are all in the same family of social disaster, the same suit. Let’s say five spades, because you’re always digging yourself into a hole.

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 losses 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, starred 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.

So: Gather a big stack and people won’t want to tangle with your King Kong self. On the Simian Scale, I was more Bubbles the chimp, break-dancing for cigarette and gin money before Michael Jackson rescued him from the streets. Hanging on, overcautious. An early misstep set me brooding. I was Big Blind, with a 9 and a 7, differently suited. Crap, but my forced ante dragged me into the flop — where a pair of 7s gave me trips. Cool. But this young madman in middle position called with 8–7 offsuit (Why was he in? Why, why?) and took the pot with a full house. I lost half my stack. Shut me up for a while.

As it turned out, one aspect of my personality would help me in my odyssey: I was a bider. Temperamentally suited to hold out for good cards, well accustomed to waiting. We Anhedonians have adapted to long periods between good news. Our national animal is the hope camel. We have no national bird. All the birds are dead.

Hyper-aggressive play — taking any two starting hands and rigging some MacGyver-type hand-winning apparatus out of them — was beyond me this early in my training. But in a tournament, you can go hours without decent opening cards. Even an aggressive player only plays four hands out of ten. Everyone, from these weekend plodders in the Trop Poker Room to the seasoned players I’d play with in Las Vegas, had to learn to suffer a rough table, a short stack, some weird hex your next-door neighbor put on you for playing polka music too loud. You bide. Pray. Try to keep cool. Eventually the cards will come. The biding, spider part of me thrived in tournaments.

But biding only gets you so far in poker. Just partway through my strategy manual, and I was already becoming aware of different phases in the game. In the coming weeks, I’d watch the tournaments disintegrate. Forty-eight, thirty-two, sixteen players left. A stickler will shout “Hank! You gonna break this table?” and Hank the floor manager takes a gander. We get chip racks, rack ’em up, and move to our new station. The tables broke and we hopped to the next one as if scampering across splintering ice floes. A broken table exiled opponents to the other side of the room, and then another returned them. Or didn’t. They prospered in that new land, or withered, and the story of their table journey merged with mine to create this afternoon’s epic. When tables drop to five or six players, the manager reassigns players to maintain distribution, because the game changes depending on how many people are seated. Like, flopping a high pair isn’t that great when you’re ten-handed — there are too many people who might have better cards. But it ain’t bad against six players, and heads up against one player, it’s awesome.

At the Final Table, there’s nothing left to break. Last man standing.

WORST DAY OF THE YEAR: The day you bust out of the World Series of Poker.

I made it to my tournament’s Final Table with a minuscule stack. Not that “Final Table” meant much when there were only two tables to begin with. The Methy Mikes were reunited, sweeping their long stringy hair out of their faces between hands. They’d taken damage, too. Also present: two fellows who didn’t fit the demographic of my first table. One was a young Middle Eastern man in his early twenties, dressed in stylish, slim-cut clothes, who mixed it up affably, knocking down hands. He was no Robotron, or if he had been at one time, he’d gotten some back-alley doctor to remove his implants. His girlfriend dragged over a chair and sat behind him sipping a cocktail. She didn’t mind waiting, and ignored the guy on her boyfriend’s right who kept hitting on her. When the Lothario busted out, they chuckled.

The other castaway was an elderly white man who bent over his chips, squinting through a magnifying attachment that barnacled on his thick specs like a jeweler’s loupe. He pondered before acting, as if reviewing a lifetime of hands and confrontations, or fighting off a nap. Sometimes you have to accept a casino trip for what it really is: an opportunity to see old people. There were a lot of old people in poker rooms, genially buying in for a couple of hands before the Early Bird Special. I prefer to believe they were gambling with discretionary funds, enjoying their twilight years after a lifetime of careful saving, and not pissing away their Social Security. If I were an octogenarian looking for love, I’d hit the casinos, no question. The dating pool is quite deep.

The atmosphere at the Final Table was different. Never fast-moving, today’s game decelerated even more. Previously aggressive opponents tempered their play. Something was going on, but I couldn’t see it. I’d leave the Tropicana with clues, courtesy of the Methy Mikes. They’d complained all day, first about the paltry turnout (“I bet Caesars is hopping”), and then about how long the game was taking. Only eighteen people, but we dragged on. Maybe the slow levels were cutting into their cockfight prep time, Hercules always requiring a good menthol rub before a bout.

“Waiting for him to push,” said one, sourly.

He kept at it. After a few hands, I realized he was talking about me. The dismissive gesture in my direction tipped me off. I hadn’t been glared at with such hate by two people since couples therapy. Unfortunately, I had no idea what “pushing” meant.

The next day I’d google it: going All In. But why did he care that I wasn’t shoving? Because I had no choice at that point. The Big Blind was $3,000, and I had $9,000. I could survive three rounds. But wait — the Small Blind was $1,500, so I didn’t even have that long ($1,500 + $3,000 means it cost $4,500 to play one round, or half my stack of $9,000). Not enough to slow-play or wait for a premium hand. To value bet, not that I knew what value betting was. All I could do was push my cards into the middle and hope that the Hungry Hippos had worse cards. Pushin’. I should have started pushing levels ago, before I got into this deplorable situation. Methy Mike was trying to wrap things up, and there I was sitting like a chump, waiting for a bus that wasn’t going to come.

I wanted to say, “Look, I’m on a journey here,” but that had never worked except that one time in T.G.I. Friday’s and all it got me was a half-off coupon for jalapeño poppers. Methy, I wasn’t happy with my paltry chips, either. I was shocked that I’d survived this far. Tremor in my hands whenever I reached for my stack. I petted the notebook in my pocket for comfort, as if I could absorb my instructions through fabric. Which might appear onanistic to the other players and throw them off their game.

So it felt good when I pushed, ignorance aside, and took my critic out with a flush. Cock-a-doodle-doo, motherfucker. I think it was a flush. My notes say, “gamey tooth, itchy eyeballs, heart palpitations, necrotic finger, incipient flatulence.” Five of the same suit.

From there I ran hot, nice cards emboldening me. Last-chancers were swallowed by behemoths. Ill-advised All Ins staggered away, sometimes saying goodbye and sometimes without a word, to hit the bar, to shower before the night out and salvage something from the last few hours of the trip. I had a scheme to disable a Robotron by asking him to calculate pi to the last digit, but he busted before I had a chance. I assembled a nice stack and came in third place. Up $175. The old white guy was second. The last few levels, he’d taken a shine to me, asking me to describe the board when the cards showed up fuzzy in his magnifying lenses. First place was the young dandy, who was now free to rest up before nighttime bottle service with his girlfriend at The Pool over at Harrah’s, or the Borgata’s MIXX. We were an unlikely Mod Squad, case cracked. I celebrated with some dumplings at P. F. Chang’s and caught a bus home.

God doesn’t play dice with the universe, but sometimes he plays just the tip. My win was beginner’s luck, that freaking bane of poker players everywhere. You welcome some newbie who thinks it “might be fun” to play, what larks, and they take down pot after pot. It’s a friendly game, or else you’d beat them senseless. I imagine it’s like when you toss a one-legged duck into a palenque (Mexican cockfighting arena) and the duck somehow pecks the shit out of all comers. Throws off the natural order.

A certain stinginess with myself, the biding thing, meant I had natural facility with drawn-out contests. There were nameless forces at work in a tourney, however, invisible energies I was just beginning to understand. I wasn’t good at asking for help. We go solo, my kinfolk and I, taking each day as an IKEA bookcase we build alone, sans instructions. The leftover pieces? We gobble them down, and sometimes it’s the only thing we eat all day.

But I was heading out into the desert, and I couldn’t do it alone.