The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death

The Poker Chips Is Filth

The World Series of Poker. My intro to the world of high-stakes competition. I’d never been much of an athlete, due to a physical condition I’d had since birth (unathleticism). Perhaps if there were a sport centered around lying on your couch in a neurotic stupor all day, I’d take an interest. I attacked my training on three fronts:

MENTAL

PHYSICAL

EXISTENTIAL

MENTAL: Obviously, I had to improve my game. Like all wretches suddenly called up to the Big Time, I needed a Burgess Meredith, but good. One who wouldn’t scoff at the five-dollar buy-in of my usual game.

… Although in the end it was my monthly game that led me to my sensei. After stewing for weeks, I came out to my gang about my Vegas trip. They were excited for me, which expanded the field of my anxiety. It was one thing to bring shame upon myself. That was my occupation. But to let down the crew? Sending an emissary to the World Series was a hallowed home-game tradition. In Anchorage, St. Louis, and Boogie-down Boca, tribes of home players stuffed money in the kitty all year to subsidize a member’s entry to the Main Event. The rest maybe flying out for moral support, lap dances, a stint or two in the poker room between railing. My own crew wasn’t coming out west, but I’d have to account for myself on return.

Hannah, a recent addition to our writers game, told me about a friend who’d played in the WSOP. Maybe she was worth talking to?

And so, Coach. I met Helen Ellis in a restaurant off Union Square. We shook hands by the hostess station. Underneath her bob of black hair, Helen’s mischievous eyes sized me up as if I were a new addition to a cash game. Marking off boxes in a mental Rube/Not Rube quiz. Air of Vulnerability: Check. Whiff of Flop Sweat: Check.

The Alabama in her voice was strong. She’d made no effort to shed her Southern accent during her time in the city. I respected that, as I’d worked hard over the years to flatten my Anhedonian accent, which one linguist memorably described as “like a flock of geese getting beaten by tire irons.”

At cards, when asked what she does for a living, Helen says, “Housewife.” Like me, she had her mask. I had my half-dead mug, behind which … well, not much was going on, really. Dust Bunny Dance Party. But Helen’s hid her poker kung fu, and her deception was a collaboration. In a male-dominated game, where female players often affect an Annie Oakley tomboy thing to fit in, the housewife-player was an unlikely sight. “I get ma’amed a lot.” The dudes flirted and condescended, and then this prim creature in a black sweater and pearls walloped them. “A lot of people don’t think women will bluff,” Helen said. She was bluffing the moment she walked into the room.

Helen started playing in casinos on her twenty-first birthday. Her father met her in Vegas. At midnight he took her to the front of Caesars, with its soaring plaster temples and gargantuan toga’d figures, den of Roman kitsch. Up and down Las Vegas Boulevard, the huge casinos beckoned. “Sit down and look around,” Papa Ellis instructed. “This is the Center of the Universe.” Helen started playing in the Mississippi casinos close to her home in Tuscaloosa, and when we met she was hitting eight tournaments a year. Biloxi, AC. When it worked out, father and daughter met on the circuit. Husband Lex came, too. He plays a solid game, she said.

Later, I’d see her maintain an imperturbable poker face at the table, but that day Helen couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow when I divulged my usual stakes. She agreed to give me some crucial pointers. As we waited for our food, I told her about my Tropicana trip, my poker history. Started to say something about “the biding part of me” and its usefulness in tournaments, as “The Biding” was shaping up to be a new favorite in my personal mythology, edging out old standbys like “All This Misery Is Fuel” and “I Think I Would Have Made a Fine Astronaut, Probably.”

She was not impressed with my chump idea of the poker trenches. Why would she care about my penny-ante bull? She’d been to the WSOP, for chrissake.

“Sometimes you just run a table,” Helen told me, recounting last year’s trip, “and I was running every table I was at.” She still savored her nice streak in the WSOP Six Handed No-Limit Hold’em event, one of the run-up matches. The World Series of Poker culminates in the Main Event, but in the six weeks leading up to that big megillah, it is what its name implies, a gauntlet of dozens of matches that embody the ever-changing contemporary poker scene. No-Limit Draw Lowball, H.O.R.S.E., Seven Card Razz. Great players are multidisciplinary, but everyone has the little dances they like, their rumbas and funky chickens.

Apart from the money and whatever emotional fulfillment they project onto winning, the various childhood hurts and core sadnesses they briefly silence through victory, the big poker stars are angling for Player of the Year points. POY points quantify how well you do in the various WSOP events, accounting for the size of each field and the amount of the buy-in. Before the Main Event starts, Helen said, you “see players playing, like, two or three hands at once.” Events are running all the time, so if you make it to Day 2 of one match and want to enter Day 1 of another, you gotta do some light jogging between ballrooms, mucking in $2,500 Eight-Game Mix so you can catch the next hand of $3,000 No-Limit Hold’em Shootout down the hall.

Helen said she liked “Six Handed.” I had no idea what the hell she was talking about. I nodded and chewed. In 2010 Helen made it through the first day of the $5,000 Six Handed No-Limit. When she got her draw for Day 2, the Powers that Be seated her at a Feature Table with the big guns. Feature as in TV cameras. They played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and Helen looked for her seat. “Where is Table 116? There’s 114, there’s 118, where is it? Oh, it’s the Feature Table up on the platform with all the press, all the lights, and all that shit.”

Husband Lex snapped a picture of her playing against poker superstars Phil Ivey and James Akenhead. Ivey was one of the few big-time African American pros — actually, the only one I could name. For years now, I’d rooted for him on TV, whenever he popped up on the poker shows my DVR scooped from the deep a.m. darkness. Cool and inscrutable, he was our black heavyweight, our Leon Sphinx. Hadn’t heard of Akenhead. Turned out he was a British player, a young gun who’d made it to the Final Table in 2009. He came in ninth place, and pocketed a million dollars for his exertions.

“It’s, as they call it, the Table of Death.” She survived the cameras. She knocked Akenhead out of the game, and once Ivey busted, too, they broke the table. Show over. The next time Helen was in Vegas, she passed Akenhead in the hallways of the Rio. “It’s like if you had dinner with Obama. You would remember him, but he might not remember you.”

Helen came in forty-second place, winning twelve grand. It was her first pilgrimage to the World Series after stepping up her presence on the professional poker circuit the last few years. Poker and housewifery aside, she was also a writer. She left Tuscaloosa to come to New York to study fiction writing at NYU. I picked up her second book, The Turning, thinking it might provide insight into her poker persona. It’s about a teenage girl in NYC who discovers she has the power to turn into a cat, indeed belongs to a larger, secret community of people who can turn into cats. There was a gesture toward the poker subculture in that premise, and some riffing on transformation into one’s true self, the inner becoming the outer. Your daytime life is one reality, and at night, at a poker table, say, you become someone else. Someone with claws.

“I’ve been playing since I was twenty-one,” she said. “And I still have to gather my courage to go and sit down and be there. I like it because you can be anyone you want to be. I can be extremely aggressive. I can be very brave. I can behave in a way that I don’t normally behave. Other than writing, it’s the only place where I can lose time.”

There’s more poker in her first book, Eating the Cheshire Cat. It follows three young Southern girls who are also in the midst of violent transformation, this time into brutal adulthood. One climactic scene occurs at a poker play-off held at a sorority reunion. The middle-aged former Delta Delta Deltas are all set up for a nice afternoon of Seven Card Stud, unaware that Nicole Hicks, a next-generation Tri Delt, has penciled in her psychotic break for that afternoon. Her butcher knife comes down and “Within a split second, Mrs. Hicks lost her daughter, her nerve, and two-thirds of her right index finger … The blood pooled and lifted the Queen of Spades from the table. It slid to the edge, then fell, face first, splat on the beige, velvet-soft, steam-cleaned carpet.”

As in most of the poker tales that overwhelmed me during my training, there was a lesson there, but it would take some time for me to decipher it. For now, I went with: You better listen to Coach.

Helen was the perfect teacher, hipping me to the right books (Dan Harrington and Phil Gordon), dispensing the Poker Truths so that they finally penetrated my brain (“This is your mantra: Patience and Position”), and sharing basic tips about daily survival in Las Vegas’s Rio Hotel, home to the WSOP since 2005. “Stay on the Ipanema side — the rooms are better.” Following an afternoon at the tables, I was supposed to hit the seafood joint just outside the corridor to the convention hall. “Make a reservation,” she instructed, in the same tone she used for “Watch out for A-x in middle position.”

Those first weeks, when I was trying to supe up my game, she told me about where to play in AC. “The Borgata and Caesars. Yes, the Taj is in Rounders, but it is a dump.” More important, she kept me from freaking out at the enormity of the task ahead. “You should play some Sit-n-Go’s while you’re in Atlantic City. You can’t win a tournament if you can’t win a Sit-n-Go.” I nodded. I pretended to know what a Sit-n-Go was, mustering the same facial expression I used when someone said, “We ended up having a good time” or “Then we fell in love.” I mentioned the Robotrons, who saw the flop with anything, pocket lint and paper clips. “I love these young players,” she laughed. “Give ’em enough rope. Call their craziness when you have a monster.”

She’d teach me things. About poker. About life. It’d be like one of those racial harmony movies I never go to see, like The Blind Side, where a Southern white lady instructs a weirdo black guy in how to use a fork. Broken barriers. Montage sequences. Golden Globes. But instead of forking up food, I’d be forking up poker knowledge. The way I understood it, from trailers and Oscar telecast montages, the black person teaches the white person something in return. I had no idea what that would be.

EXERCISE: Get a Poker Handle. The Old Masters of poker, they had truly awe-inspiring nicknames: Amarillo Slim, Sailor Roberts, Pippi Longstocking. So I got to brainstorming.

The Slouch: I slouched. Rocket Racer: after the Spider-Man nemesis/ally from the ’70s, a black guy on a rocket-powered skateboard. It was a multivalent moniker, alluding to my melanin count, my transportation issues, and “rocket” was slang for pocket Aces. “A pair of Aces, you better get ready to race if you want to take the pot from me,” he informed the empty room. Five-Dollar Colson: referring, for once, not to my home-game buy-in but to what I’d charge for most acts if I ever started hooking. I sell myself short a lot. Finally, I went with the Unsubscribe Kid. I liked the implied negation of things other humans might enjoy. Now all I had to do was get someone to ask me what my poker nickname was.

Pity the poor pilgrim who gets on a Greyhound bus and hears “Everybody’s Talkin’ ” come over the speakers. You are the Midnight Cowboy, extricating yourself painfully from your past, or you are Ratso Rizzo, expiring in the back row, wheezing and unsaved. But I found my seat, settled in with the day trippers, day workers, and hollow-eyed freaks, and got into the new rhythm of my days. “I can’t see their faces / only the shadows of their eyes.”

It went like this: I’d drop off the kid at school, hop on the subway to the Port Authority, and catch a bus to AC. Then I’d gamble gamble gamble, catch a midnight bus back to the city, sleep all day, and pick up the kid from school the next afternoon. I’d make dinner, put her to bed, read Harrington, take her to school, and start over again.

Over the years, my half-dead face had kept drop-off patter to a minimum, but occasionally I’d share a few words with the other parents on the way into the Lower School.

“Can’t believe the school year’s almost over.”

“They grow up so fast.”

“Off to work?”

“Actually, I’m going to Atlantic City to gamble.”

I see.

Was there a corresponding decrease in playdates? Sorry, little one. Flushed down to the social sub-sewers with Disgraced Embezzler Dad and Grifter Mom. They were scarce now, those two, at the First-Grade Parents Pot Luck, so I couldn’t even swap exile anecdotes with them.

I ran around AC. The all-you-can-eat buffet was central to the American Gambling Experience, allowing you to block your arteries while unstopping your bank account. I applied a philosophy of generous sampling to my casino tours, zipping across downtown in taxis to try the shrimp cocktail at the Borgata, the prime rib that is Caesars, saving a corner on my plate for the pigs in a blanket that characterized the Showboat.

I never lasted long at the Borgata, the biggest and swankiest joint in town, constructed according to prevailing Vegas theories of the megacasino. Leisure Industrial Complex all the way. Just as the cozy old casinos of Frank and Dean were razed to make room for colossal gambling pleasure domes, so was AC being reconfigured for the current needs of the LIC. You can only cram so many buildings on the boardwalk. How are you going to fit that Euro-style spa, TV chefs’ small-plate eateries, the vast dance-floor killing fields demanded by international hero-DJs? Hence the twin, shimmering gold towers of the Borgata. Located in the marina area, explaining the establishment’s name, which is Esperanto for “built on a swamp.”

Coach was right. The ’Gata had the most popular poker room in town, having assumed the mantle from the Trump Taj. The Taj was the home of Hold’em during the late-’90s surge in the game’s popularity. The final showdown in the Matt Damon poker vehicle Rounders propped up its reputation for a time. Nowadays, online poker forums warned of muggings, shady clientele, and shadier doings. Which wouldn’t happen at the Borgata — one whiff of the bewitching aromas from Bobby Flay’s grill, and even the most larcenous soul is scared straight by the tang of nouveau Tex-Mex flavor profiles.

On a typical Borgata jaunt, I entered a late-morning tournament, got bounced by noon, and then did a divining-rod thing with my phone to find a signal so I could figure out where to hit next. I’d hear Coach’s voice whenever I did this: “Keep that in your pocket.” People slouch at the tables, earbudded, listening to whatever, a hundredsong loop of various covers of Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler,” from Liza Minnelli’s New Wave — inflected version to Lou Reed’s unreleased, oddly affecting acoustic demo. No distractions, she said. It took a lot of willpower. I feel about my phone the way horror-movie ventriloquists feel about their dummies: It’s smarter than me, better than me, and I will kill anyone who comes between us.

I only conferred with my little buddy between levels, checking advice on poker sites: when do you throw out a probe bet, how much do you bet on the button? I subscribed to the Poker Atlas’s Twitter feed, which had the city’s tourney schedule on constant scroll. Tackle the 1:00 p.m. Bally’s $55 tourney, Harrah’s 1:15 p.m. start for $100, or Caesars’ 1:15 p.m. dealio, also a hundred bucks? I didn’t have intel on which poker rooms were dead or barely twitching. Sometimes there weren’t enough players for a game, and I’d hike it back to the marina for a mid-afternoon shift at Harrah’s. Sometimes something big was going down, like the World Poker Tour, and there’d be no one to deal because all the dealers were moonlighting across town. These miscalculations cut into my shrinking practice time, already too tight. Where to next, where to next?

EXERCISE: Manage tells. Table image is the one-man show you tour through town after town. Every poker player has a shtick, is Hal Holbrook doing Mark Twain Tonight! across Podunks. You have heard of the famous “tells”—the behavioral clues that put you onto someone’s hand, such as squeezing out armpit farts or crooning “Touch Me in the Morning” when they hit their gutshot straight. I didn’t have time to become a master reader of tells, between keeping track of inflection points, calculating rough pot odds, and riffling through my mental catalogue of new poker knowledge. But I could manage my own tells, come up with some fake ones to psyche people out. If I shared them here, you’d know my secrets, but here’s a freebie: Reenacting the chest-buster scene from Alien means I’m on a draw.

There was one establishment in AC that always had a game going. It was never recommended by players I met. Indeed they invariably guffawed at the mention. But the mighty Showboat was always there for me, like a dependable neighborhood bodega. It had what I needed.

My first Showboat experience came after I’d been turned away from a totally dead Caesars card room, which I’d rushed to after getting the boot from a Borgata tourney. The Caesars floor guy told me there weren’t going to be enough players. I came down to AC for this? My flop days were adding up, and when I did play, I busted early. I got into a taxi to the bus station … and almost made it there before I told the cabbie to turn around. Time to try the Showboat.

If the Borgata served up the contemporary luxury-resort experience, the Showboat specialized in the more particular fetish of nostalgia. The name harkened to the glorious heyday of riverboat gambling, you know, with those steam-powered boats with the big paddlewheels, where ladies with parasols promenaded on deck and men pulled out their watch fobs to see if they had time for “a little game of chance.” Pioneers of the casino captive-audience thing. I gather proximity to water was too tempting for despondent gamblers, which led to the rise of the landlocked, more suicide-proof gambling house. The cheap stakes of nickel slots en route to the exit can talk a body off the ledge.

From this antebellum home square, the Showboat hopscotched in and out of decades. The ’50s-themed Johnny Rockets burger joint reminded boomers of sock hops, roller-skating waitstaff, the first backseat gropings. The House of Blues served up rootsy sentimentality, reminiscences of swell nights in blues franchises in New Orleans, Houston, San Diego. (Remember those two sloppy German matrons? Too bad we had to get up early the next day for the ConAgra convention.) Yes, Big Mitch, there was a time before second mortgages and leaky roofs and Kaitlyn crashing the car for the second time. The piped-in Nirvana and Pixies — now officially oldies bands — welcomed middle-aged, Gen-X lumps like me. The sights and sounds of bygone days told us that anything was still possible, the way the snap of a dealer cutting cards and the maddening chimes of loose slots assured us we could be winners. That sure, gambling sound of promise.

The Showboat Poker Room was compact but busy, and I’d usually last a few hours among the sad-sack tourists and young, sharp-eyed local talent.

BAVERGES! the cocktail waitresses called.

HARRINGTON! I responded.

His head hovered on the covers of volumes I, II, III like a rheumy-eyed Oz. Eyes peering beneath a green Red Sox cap, observing, judging, as if to ask, “What, actually, are you rooting for on the flop?” and “Why don’t you make a standard continuation bet of about half the pot, and see what happens?” Do you have enough outs? Are you discouraging action pre-flop?

Who was this Hold’em sage, this Hoyle-bred Socrates? His name was Dan Harrington and in the early part of the twenty-first century, he published his ridiculously influential, multivolume Harrington on Hold ’em: Expert Strategy for No-Limit Tournaments. Every discipline has its master texts. Harrington’s books are to boom-era poker players what Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is to mealy-mouthed I-bankers (“All warfare is based on deception”), as essential as Speak, Butter is to artisanal emulsion-makers (“To churn is to live”).

Harrington was almost sixty years old when he wrote the first volume. He’d won two WSOP bracelets, cashed millions of dollars, and made it to Main Event Final Table two years in a row, the first player to do so. And possibly the last — the game was undergoing a fundamental shift. Chris Moneymaker’s legendary win in the 2003 Main Event had summoned the amateurs to Vegas, transforming the game in the manner that trimming fat from muscle meat and curing it in the sun turns animal flesh into delicious jerky. Online sites like PokerStars and Ultimate Bet were virtual poker universities, matriculating thousands. The new kids needed passwords to authorize bank transfers, and they needed textbooks. Harrington on Hold ’em codified conventional wisdom, elucidated the inner-circle concepts, and helped create a common tournament slang of squeeze plays, inflection points, and M.

Coach gave me Harrington homework, and I made slow but incremental progress through his strategies for satellites, internet tourneys, and brick-and-mortar showdowns. His words yielded new interpretations over time, like a really neat poem or a divorce settlement. I keyed into the rhythms of the game, the phases within phases. There is an early, middle, and late temperament to each tournament, and inside that, an early, middle, and late temperament to each hand. Harrington hipped innocents like me to the late-stage tourney mind-set and late-hand strategies, giving names to that which I understood only on a subconscious level.

Like: Why had play tightened up, slowed down in that first Tropicana tournament? Because even in that shorthanded game, we had approached the Great Membrane of the Bubble. The top 10 percent of players inside the Bubble get a share of the winnings. Everyone wants in after playing for so long, so they get conservative. No one wants to be the “Bubble Boy,” the last schnook who gets close and walks away with nothing. Methy Mike had wanted me, and my hanging-by-my-fingertips stack, to hurry and vamoose so the endgame could start.

Usually the prose in poker books is as ugly and utilitarian as their layouts. The Harringtons, while not skimping on the lingo, were furnished with an easy-going inclusive voice. And plenty of work problems. He dropped a bunch of science, then slowed things with study hands that he broke down step by step. “Do you fold, call, or raise?” “What now?” “You should limp into this pot with 3 callers ahead of you in this scenario,” he’d instruct — and then go on to describe what happens if you ignored his advice. The annotated blunders were especially helpful. I discovered that whenever I bet horrendously or busted out, it was because I’d strayed from his teachings. I was the very dumbshit he described!

But like I said, everyone had read the same book. You knew what they were up to and vice versa. After Doyle Brunson self-published his massive poker bible, Super System, in 1978, he lamented giving away his secrets. In the old days, “The top players would let the inferior players round up the money; then they would beat them. The hometown champions would break their local games, then come out [to Vegas] and be broken by us.” Then they read Brunson’s book of spells and started to beat the pros. “If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t write that book.”

As the Main Event neared, I binge-watched a bunch of WSOP games from that spring. There was Harrington, pushing away from the table, busted, given a Viking funeral from the on-air commentators. The kids resumed play without him. They had their diplomas.

And they were making new discoveries.

EXERCISE: Preserve my “essence.” Like heavyweights who refrain from sexual activity prior to a big bout in order to channel and convert that energy into violence, I, too, would safeguard my “essence.” The mind-body harmony thing. Then it was brought to my attention that preserving one’s “essence” meant no self-abuse. Once again, I had failed myself without even knowing it. Just as I had made a judgment call that I didn’t have time to become a maestro in playing suited connectors in middle position, I’d have to forgo this segment of my regimen. Stamp this part of my training REVISED.

The dealer tossed the cards around the table. Was there something I was supposed to remember? Right: Patience and Position. I had the first P down, what with the biding, etc., and over the years my day job had strengthened my natural talent in that area. In novel-writing, biding is everything. How will I drag my mutilated body over the finish line, hundreds of pages later? You practice a slow parceling out of self to survive the swamp of self-doubt, to tolerate the juvenile delinquent sentences who keep acting out. Waiting years for a scofflaw eleven-word sentence to shape up into an upstanding ten-word sentence: This is the essence of Patience.

And what did Coach mean by Position? You are at a poker table. Social dynamics and probabilities change according to how many people you are up against and where you’re sitting. Why was Helen’s Six Handed game different, why did Heads-Up require its own branch of study? Seriously, there are Heads-Up experts — they have their own NBC-TV show and armbands.

Well, imagine you are alone in a room. The lights are down low, you’ve got some scented candles going. Soothing New Age tunes, nothing too druid-chanty, seep out of the hi-fi to gently massage your cerebral cortex. Feel good? Are you the best, most special person in the room right now? Yes. That’s the gift of being alone.

Then a bozo in a CAT Diesel Power cap barges in. What’s the chance that you are the best, most special person in the room now? Fifty-fifty. If you both were dealt two cards, those would be your odds of holding the winning hand.

Now imagine ten people are in the room. It’s cramped. You’re elbow to elbow, aerosolized dandruff floats in the air, and the candle’s lavender scent is complicated by BO tones, with a tuna sandwich finish. What are the chances you’re the best, most special person in the room? If you were handed cards, you might expect to be crowned one time out of ten.

People, as ever, are the problem. The more people there are, the tougher you have it. Just by sitting next to you, they fuck you up, as if life were nothing more than a bus ride to hell (which it is). But what if you moved to another seat? Changed position? Your seat is everything. It can give you room to relax, to contemplate your next move. Or it might instigate your unraveling.

Sometimes you act first. Sometimes last. If you have a small pair and you’re under the gun, as they say, how do you know what to bet? Nine intruders are going to act after you, and your big raise might be a mistake. It’d be so nice to wait and see what they were going to do, to kick back and enjoy the scenery before committing. The lady in late position has that luxury of time and space. If four crazies jump in, raising and re-raising and bebop-ping all over the place, she can politely fold and watch the carnage.

Different hands are more or less playable depending on whether you’re the first, middle, or late to act. You’ll always play a pair of Aces, but when you’re sitting in late position with deuces while Mothra and Godzilla are stomping Tokyo? Hide in the subway tunnels with the other terrified citizens and wait for the sounds of carnage to stop. Pick your fights like you pick your nose: with complete awareness of where you are.

Why was Six Handed different, and why did Helen like it? If you ask me, it’s because I’m only competing with five people to be the best, most special person in the room. The more learned among us would say that Six Handed is a different beast because there’s more action. Mercenaries like war because they like to scrap it up, and they get paid. More hands per hour at a smaller table, the orbits spinning and spinning, and weaker holdings, like one pair or two pair, become more playable due to less competition. Heads-Up, even more so. Pure combat.

“I’m terrible at the Final Table when it’s Heads-Up,” I complained to Coach at the end of our first meeting. Dealing one-on-one with another person, in primal communication, it fed my psychological defects. My shrink thought this was a suitable line of inquiry, and perhaps we’d get to it once we dealt with all that other crap.

“You won’t be playing Heads-Up,” Helen said. In the WSOP, like all tournaments, when people get knocked out the guys on the floor fill the seats with other players, but once the Main Event is reduced to nine guys, they adjourn until November. To maximize TV ratings. In the unlikely event al-Qaeda gunned down everyone in the tournament except for me and a Robotron, I’d have plenty of time to learn about proper Heads-Up play.

The study problems in Phil Gordon’s books gave me grief, I told her. “Phil Gordon’s always like, ‘I was at this table playing 8–6 offsuit’—”

“Forget that. You’re too you to play that way. Play your game.”

I was too me. Precisely.

EXERCISE: Floss. It’s difficult not to think about decay in a casino. How all our hopes and dreams are but insubstantial creatures, prey to chance and human frailty. The winnowing of hope, the evanescence of desire. Those horror-show pants we bought that one time. One can’t help but contemplate decay when confronted with such a constant parade of monstrous dentition in casinoland. That’s what I got for playing the cheapo games, but still, take care of yourselves, people.

I threw myself into my training. My game was improving, even if I had yet to repeat the success of my first tournament. It was nice to have a diversion from how I usually spent my days, which was basically me attempting to quantify, to the highest degree of accuracy, the true magnitude of my failures — their mass, volume, and specific gravity. It passed the time in the absence of hobbies. Sure, I worked on my nagging sense of incompleteness a lot, when I had a spare moment, but that was more of a calling than a hobby.

On to the second area of training, PHYSICAL:

The vessel of my body — this fragile sack of blood, “essence” (see above), and melancholy humors — had to get up to competition-grade performance. I’d long aspired to the laid-back lifestyle of exhibits at Madame Tussaud’s. There are cool perks. You don’t have to move around that much or waste energy on fake smiles, and every now and then someone shows up to give you a good dusting. Over time I had indeed become the wax-dummy version of myself, but that wouldn’t cut it at the Main Event.

Throughout the ages, much has been written about the interrelatedness of the mind and the body. Suburban moms who lift Volkswagens off pinned toddlers, for example. I’d be a fool to ignore the holistic reality. In Vegas, I’d be lifting metaphorical Kias and Hyundais left and right.

To the outside observer, it seems like poker involves a lot of reclining in chairs, but you’re still burning fuel. “Lex and I lost five pounds!” Helen informed me, referring to their last trip. The Main Event at the World Series of Poker ran seven days, each one a twelve-hour series of jungle engagements. You had to be vigilant. You grab a bite when you can, the caloric intake going to power your game, your all-important table image, the mask of your poker identity: alternately representing strength and weakness, riding herd over tells, manufacturing ersatz tells, placing bait for traps, stealing and thieving blinds. Picking up chips. Putting down chips. It adds up.

Could someone gimme a hand in my new self-improvement scheme? Up until now, my idea of “making a new start” was not importing my bookmarks to a new browser. My torpor had stretch marks.

Finally I got a recommendation from an old girlfriend who’d become a physical trainer. I think she and I are in agreement that we were a crappy couple, both of us subprime dating quality, even by the low, low standards of early-’90s High Slackitude. It had been a terrible relationship, but I was grateful, for it prepared me for terrible relationships to come, so that I would not be surprised. The Matrix sequels, for example. In later years, she became a physical trainer and left the state. She was very helpful and gave me a local name: Kim Albano.

Kim was a licensed physical trainer and patient soul. A Long Island native, she moved to the city in ’99 and entered the biz because she simply loves inspiring people to be healthy. She called her practice “Conscious Intermodel Fitness,” specializing in posture and core strengthening, Vinyasa yoga with a little Iyengar thrown in. Alexander Technique. I had been given yoga mats over the years as gifts, but the phrase “loose-fitting clothing” had always confounded me, conjuring visions of tunics or otherwise Jawa-type vestments, neither of which I owned. I ultimately opted for dad-style cargo shorts, whose multiple pockets I increasingly relied on to spare me the indignity of carrying a fanny pack or man bag.

I met Kim at a space she sometimes used on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. She’d offered me a group lesson in Prospect Park with some of her regulars. Too public, I thought. I preferred to work out like I eat beef jerky: making vulgar grunting noises sans witnesses. Needless to say, I was a tad let down when the storefront studio allowed passersby to observe my lesson. Another exhibit in the bizarre sideshow that is a New York street. Per usual.

I described my assignment before we met, and she was amenable. “I have to become a Living Poker Weapon in six weeks,” I said.

“You mentioned ‘Rocky-style’ in your e-mail,” she said.

“This might be a bit conceptual.”

Kim did my intake, quizzing me about my exercise history (mere vapor), ailments (psychosomatic in the main), and hydration regimen (“You have to keep drinking water”). Was I under stress? I had just finished a book, I explained, so I was less stressed than I had been. Any injuries she should be aware of? The only big thing was this formidable crick in my neck, which had only lately disappeared. My magnificent ergonomic chair, the steadfast galleon I had sailed through books and books, had finally sprung a leak. After ten years, the webbing of the seat had given way, so I stuffed a throw pillow in there when I had to work. I sat in there half sunk, arms grotesquely angled, and over the weeks a stupendous crick took up residence around my left shoulder blade. The pain was exacerbated by my habit of crawling to the living-room couch when I had insomnia. The 5:00 a.m. traffic reports on the bleary, early-bird news shows often returned me to sleep — in my aforementioned license-less state, the reports of blocked interstates and impenetrable bridges were a lulling white noise to me, abstractions stripped of meaning. I was sleeping on the couch so much it was as if I were married again. “But it’s mostly gone away,” I told Kim.

I described an average day at the tournament, the importance of keeping your shit together as you trudged through bad beats and dead cards, resisting the lure of going “on tilt”—a species of berserker rage that destroyed one’s game play. She taught me how to sit. She taught me how to breathe according to the basic principles of the nineteenth-century health guru F. M. Alexander, and reintroduced me to my neglected spine, which I had long treated as a kind of hat rack for my sundry, shabby articles of self.

We ran through elementary yoga poses — cat, cow, downward dog. I mentioned that we got twenty-minute breaks every two hours. What could I do to stay loose and limber? She said, “Cat, cow, downward dog.” I said, “I can’t do that in a casino.” My table image would suffer. We proceeded. I liked the sitting and the breathing, the glancing moments of “proprioception.”

“Bring it into you,” she said, “make it yours, and then you can bring it into your poker.”

As I walked out into the glare and early-summer heat of Fourth Avenue, I felt a peculiar sense of well-being, which I quickly banished by sheer force of will, as I didn’t want to ruin my streak. Assimilating this knowledge would take time, but I felt that soon I would be a lean, mean sitting machine.

EXERCISE: Sunglasses. Like most people, I’d spent my whole life looking for a socially acceptable situation in which I could wear sunglasses indoors, and here it was. They made for good TV, most definitely, the sunglasses guys and their imposing, unreadable faces, their lenses reflecting back your own dumb face. Mirrored, wraparound, robin’s-egg-tinted. Sunglass Hut did not stock what I required. I needed the exactly just-so pair, some sort of Vulcan smithy-god to forge them in the very bowels of the earth, a set of glowing, molten intimidation shades in a scene drawn by Walt Simonson. Well, I tried, but despite my efforts I couldn’t bring myself to wear sunglasses during my practice runs. The social taboos were too strong, or my inner douche-bag monitor set too high, I dunno. I’d have to make do with my naturally half-dead mug.

Playing cards, making friends. Before one break, the elderly gent next to me told me, “You’re a good player.”

“Thanks.”

What had he seen in his life? A world war, a cold war. Dude walks on the moon, and another invents the internet. After the civil rights movement, the arrival of the first black president, perhaps the early twenty-first-century wonder that is a poker table in a hypermodern casino, and my presence there, reminded him of how much the world had changed in his lifetime.

“But you know what?” he added.

“What?”

“You talk too much!” Cackling.

I kept my mouth shut, it was true. Poker was the perfect game for me, as I didn’t have to speak. It was like Disneyland for hermits. I had found the place where I could go out among the humans, elbow to elbow for hours, and not say a fucking word. It brought me back to the old days, when I first started to write, and I’d spend whole days shut up in my apartment and the only thing I’d say to another living being was “… and a pack of Winston Lights.”

Quite a few things about poker reminded me of the writing life. Like, you sat on your ass all day. That was a huge one. Big plus. And we were all making up stories, weaving narratives. Pros will talk about “the story you’re telling with your hand.” A hand possesses a narrative arc with a setup, rising action, denouement. Each time you throw money into the pot you’re telling a story, from the opening call to the River re-reraise. As Saint Harrington put it, “A player is nothing more than the sum of his betting patterns.” After years of experience, you recognize plots: He must have trips, and that guy’s representing a flush by raising the pot on that third heart. You must fake out their reads, misdirect through the red herring of a half-pot bet or a bluff, spinning a story through hours of tells, betting patterns, your poker persona. Until the endgame, when the psychology of the characters catches up with everybody. Always on the lookout for that M. Night Shyamalan twist at the end when you discover you were dead the whole time.

The day-to-day horror of writing gave me a notion of tournament time. Writing novels is tedious. When will this book be finished, when will it reveal its bright and shining true self? It takes freakin’ years. At the poker table, you’re only playing a fraction of the hands, waiting, ever waiting for your shot. If you keep your wits, can keep from flying apart while those around you are self-destructing, devouring each other, you’re halfway there. The poseurs yakety-yaking about the Fitzgeraldian flourishes of their latest novella, the puffed-up middle-managers droning on about how they knew you had 10s — they never make it to the Final Table. Let them flame out while you develop a new relationship to time, and they drift away from the table.

Poker players and writers are always inside the game and also outside the game observing it. When I whipped out my notebook, no one blinked. I could have been recording bad beats, misplayed hands, or assembling a dossier on other players. No one cared what I scribbled. Like when you write a book.

EXERCISE: Purify the spirit. I had to improve my diet in Vegas, start eating a proper breakfast in order to make it through each day’s marathon. “Do you eat meat?” Helen asked. I did. “Good.” It was a long time to the dinner break, and that’s when some players start drinking, and drinking led to errors. No more ruining my body with noxious substances, poisoning my mind with various toxins. I was doing well with the cigarettes, had been off them for nine months, although it helped that the disappointment of not having a post-dinner cigarette, or a just-stepped-outside cigarette, or a just-woke-up cigarette was dwarfed by the newer, state-of-the-art disappointments the world threw my way. I was saved by scale.

Why stop with cigarettes? I could renounce more things, like (1) cut back on my microbrews and (2) most reality television. Get behind me, master brewers of Brooklyn, Portland, and Chapel Hill, you hipster hopsters and your newfangled brands of incipient, yuppified alcoholism. My reality-TV purge—America’s Got Schlubs, Keep Trying to Outwit Death You Stupid Monkeys—meant everything save the competitive weight-loss shows, whose contestants, I recognized, were on a parallel journey to my own. The Biggest Loser: exactly so. My failures possessed a weight, I carried them around, and before poker I sought the proper instrument of their measure. These reality-TV pilgrims had already learned how to calculate their weakness, for its substance possessed an actual mass determinable before a live TV audience. Those shows made me more teary than Pixar movies, the unalloyed pleasure these guys and gals displayed over their new mastery of self, the erasure of decades of daily, mounting mistakes. Just look at the pants they used to wear. This one guy lost a hundred and fifty pounds and said, “I was carrying another man around.” They had found themselves: It had been hiding in their skins all this time, waiting. That better, biding self. I could do it. More fiber, for starters.

Coming back at night was the worst of it. I’d briefly glory over some incremental improvement in my play, then remember I hadn’t won any money since my first Trop excursion. So much for aptitude. I was like a piece of meat, hacked from a carcass and heavily spice-rubbed, but still waiting to be smoked. Waiting to become what it was meant to be: a tough, cured, beautiful strand of jerky.

Weeks passed, but my Word-A-Day Calendar was stuck on “motherfucker.” At the end of my AC working day, I’d hit the bus terminal, with its wee-hour convocation of squalor. The buses didn’t run as frequently at night — it was easier to get in than out. Roach Motel. Drunks, drug-addled denizens, and Those with Nowhere to Go shambled about, trapped in the depot. When the bus finally arrived, the ride back was quiet and dark, the powered-down Port Authority a maze of metal gates and closed-off corridors. The terminal was too sprawling and impossible to police otherwise. Rotten Old New York, the Ratso Rizzo New York was still here. I didn’t know what I was doing there. Anyone present at that hour was a clump of hair stuck in the American drain. I just wanted to get home and catch some sleep before I saw the kid.

Then I ran out of time. Met with Coach for a final huddle. She’d just returned from the early stage of the WSOP, that land of abundant Omaha Hi-Low and H.O.R.S.E., Six Handed. Trying to scrape up a stake for the Main Event.

“It was heaven. Heaven!” Pure joy in her voice at the thought of it. Although Helen cashed deep in the $1,500 No-Limit event, she didn’t win enough to pay her way into the Big Game. She was off gambling until September. “I had an agreement with myself,” she said. “That’s how we tell ourselves we’re not addicts.” Whatever works, I say. Since she’d returned east, she’d been too bummed to follow WSOP news. I tried to give her an update, what I had gleaned from her Twitter list of players to follow, but I was pretty useless.

Coach gave me another poker seminar, and I scribbled bullet points. She briefed me on some new moves she hadn’t seen before — people in Vegas were breaking out their next-level shit all over the place. After listening to her talk of stealing blinds and short-stack mentality, I was freaking out. Told her so. She shared a new mantra she’d come up with for this last WSOP trip: “It’s okay to be scared, but don’t play scared.” When you’re scared, that means you’re paying attention. Don’t let it destroy you.

I recalled the time my father abandoned me in the Dismal Forest in Northern Anhedonia when I was eight. He blindfolded me, put a crossbow in my hands, and said, “Don’t come back until you take down a twelve-point buck for supper.” Was I scared? Sure. But I did what he asked of me, and over the years I’d successfully convinced myself that I was a better man for it. (Never lost my hatred of squirrels, however, the devious little fuckers.) Fear situates you in the moment. Focuses you. I knew that.

“You’re gonna be targeted no matter what, ’cause you’re very pretty. You do not look like the typical player.”

Pretty?

“You know, you got the threads. I have never seen that at the poker table.”

No, I did not look like the average player — i.e., I was not a paunchy middle-aged white guy. Dreads and threads. No apologies. I’m a dandy. When it came to raising the kid, my ex-wife and I split duties according to our strengths. She did morals and ethics. I did clothes. When I took this assignment I had no idea that my plumage was going to be held against me. First my deplorable lack of tournament acumen, now this.

As a woman, an “other” at this Iron John weenie roast, Coach knew what she was talking about. “I have the same situation where you look different,” she said. “They’re not going to give you credit, and they’re going to come after you, and you have to wait for situations to take advantage of that.”

So, watch out, Little Lord Fauntleroy, with your prancing and cavorting. On to other practical matters. Have a big breakfast. She was not a germophobe, she assured me, but she advised against getting a burger or whatever delivered to the table, as people do. “If that fell on the floor, I would probably eat it. But the poker chips is filth. It’s filthy.” She didn’t have to tell me. I end every excursion outside my front door with a Purell rubdown. Nook and cranny, baby. “That’s why I enjoy a banana or Snicker’s bar,” Coach confided. “Because it has its own wrapper, and you just hold the wrapper.”

And perhaps most important of all: Potty Rules. At break, you got hundreds of dudes stampeding to take a piss at the same time. The queues for the women’s were no biggie — the one perk of low female participation — but the men’s was ludicrous. Duck out during the levels to use the john, or else “you’ll be spending your break time in line.” Plus, I added to myself, it would give me more time to survey my anxieties between play.

I wrote it all down, feeling like a jerk. Staked to play in the Main Event, here I was picking the brain of someone so obviously in love with the game — the rushes, the science, the sheer dynamism of it — and she isn’t going to be there. She’d dipped into the circuit for nine months, flown out for the WSOP, but hadn’t made it into the Big Game.

Per the racial-harmony movie script, I was supposed to give something back. What kind of Magic Negro was I? Sheesh. I had, as a child, thought Doug Henning to be a “cool dresser” and “kind of a badass,” but digging an eccentric magician’s clothes sense and metaphysical je ne sais quoi was not enough to make you Will Smith or Michael Clarke Duncan in an Oscar-bait film, melanin aside. I should have been delivering homilies, sucking out sickness by laying on my healing hands, helping some catatonic little white kid come out of his shell, whatever the fuck, and all I could do was take notes.

I was playing for Methy Mike and Big Mitch and the other home-game slobs, but of course I was also playing for Helen now. I recorded her wisdom and pledged to play according to the teachings of my sensei, and try not to mess it up too much.

“Get into your spine,” Kim said. “Get into your body.” I was getting into my spine, I was getting into my body. Per instructions, I imagined a string that traveled through my head into my spinal column, and that the rest of my body dangled off it: the Marionette, they called it. “I want you to feel supported, and unsupported.” It was easy to relate to being a puppet, under the sway of some malevolent and capricious puppet master: This was already a close approximation of my relationship with my deity. In Kim’s studio — as the fan almost covered the noise from the playground across the street and the ambulance hustling by — I pictured myself floating through the Rio Casino in Las Vegas, past the rows and rows of the barking slots and the creatures who clawed their hands through big, white chum buckets of coins, deep breath in, past the crowd huddled around the craps table as they cheered on some lucky devil’s rush, deep breath out, past the cheapo blackjack tables and the high-stakes blackjack tables and the cordoned-off rooms of the super high rollers, which were always empty save for the eerily patient dealer, and into the Pavilion, the chamber as large as a football field where the tournament unfolded, the numbers and color codes hanging from the ceiling on wires, where my first seat of the tourney awaited my rebuilt posture. Shuffle up and deal.

“Did you get what you wanted out of it?” Kim asked. It was our last training session. Yes, I had. I could use this. Nowadays, whenever I watched James Bond fly across the world to Shanghai to karate chop a mad genius, I couldn’t help but think, “But what about the jet lag? Isn’t he pooped out from the jet lag?” Under Kim’s tutelage, I felt younger, de-harrowed, as if time were reversing itself. Even my gray hair had disappeared. Or so I thought. My ex-wife and I had owned white-haired cats, and it turned out I’d only washed the remnants of their hair out of my dreadlocks.

“I bet you have a good poker face,” Kim said. “You’re hard to read. Most people, you can tell if they’re having an easy time or if something is painful. With you, you can’t really tell—”

“My blank face—”

“It’s hard to tell.”

There it was again. For years and years, people had told me I had a good poker face. When they heard I was going to play cards at a friend’s on Friday night, or I ran into them on the subway while carrying my suitcase of monogrammed chips, which was a gift from a college buddy after I was a groomsman in his wedding, they’d say: “I bet you have a good poker face.” They don’t know a set of trips from a royal flush, but they know this fact. What they’re really saying is: You are a soulless monster whose fright mask is incapable of capturing normal human expressions. You are a throwback to a Neanderthal state of raw, uncomplicated emotions, or a harbinger of our cold, passionless future, but either way, I don’t know what’s going on in your head.

Perhaps I am projecting.

Nonetheless, we have now definitely waded into the waters of training area numero three, EXISTENTIAL:

I can’t help it if I understand that everything tends to ruin. Over our heads, Skylab is eternally falling down, I can see it all, the debris raining without cessation. I was a skinny guy, but I was morbidly obese with doom. By disposition, I was keyed into the entropic part of gambling, which says that, eventually, you will lose it all. The House always wins. Even for the most talented players, the cards fail for weeks or months or years, the beats are the baddest of the bad, you are blinded out of existence. Remember how I mentioned the blinds and how they escalate at intervals? If you don’t keep ahead of them by doubling up your stack, they’ll eliminate you. This is what I knew now: They are a Wave of Mutilation. You survive one wave of a Big Blind, then the half-size one of the Small Blind, diminished, and then the next wave starts gathering force down-table. I was in tune with decay, I had it down. What I needed to do was get in touch with decay’s opposing force, whatever that thing is that gets us out of bed each day and keeps us a few steps ahead of the wave: the hope of some good cards next hand.

For the citizens of the Republic of Anhedonia, luck is merely the temporary state of outrunning your impending disasters. But sometimes my countrymen and I have to look beyond our native truths and pray. Even a temporary respite from the usual level of soul-snuffing drudgery is a blessing. Luck would have to do. You need skill in poker, but you also need the puppet master to be in a good mood every once in a while. I didn’t have much skill, but I’d prepared the best I could. I suppose I could have run simulations of previous World Series on the holodeck, but I didn’t have a holodeck, at least one I want to talk about. Luck would have to carry me where my training failed.

I packed. Arranged my affairs. Was there anyone I’d forgotten to disappoint before I took off? It’d be a while before I returned, and I didn’t want to leave them hanging. On the morning of Friday, July 8, I hopped a plane to Vegas to play in the Main Event. Like one of my beautiful losers, I would step on the scale before a live studio audience and we’d all see how much bad stuff I had shed.