The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death

Wretch Like Me

I pity people who’ve never been to Vegas. Who dismiss the city without setting foot on its carpeted sidewalks. I’ll forgive the sanctimony in the question “But what do you do there?” The obnoxious self-regard. Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals. As a foreigner, I make a point never to judge the cultural norms of my adopted country.

The pity remains, however. Frank Sinatra, the king of Rat Pack — era Vegas, once said, “I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.” The world is a disease you shake off in the desert. To delude yourself that you are a human being with thoughts and feelings, when your experience is but the shadow of truly living — it moves me to tears. Although I should note that in Anhedonian, the word tears means “to shrug in a distinctive ‘well, what are you gonna do?’ fashion,” and has nothing to do with lachrymal fluids produced by glands in the eye.

I recognized myself in the town the first time I laid eyes on it, during a cross-country trip the summer after college. My friend Darren had a gig writing for Let’s Go, the student-run series of travel guides. Let’s Go USA, Let’s Go Europe, Let’s Go North Korea (they always lost a few freshmen putting that one together). The previous year his beat had been New York City. We spent the summer eating fifty-cent hot dogs at Gray’s Papaya for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and “researching” dive bars like Downtown Beirut and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, which were beacons of pure, filthy truth in a city still years away from its Big Cleanup. This summer he was assigned the Southwest. The subways didn’t run that far out, but his roommate Dan had a car, a brown ’83 Toyota Tercel, and the idea was we’d hit the open road and split the writing duties and money three ways.

It was 1991. We’d just been diagnosed as “Generation X,” and certainly had all the symptoms, our designs and life plans as scrawny and undeveloped as our bodies. Sure, we had dreams. Dan had escaped college with a degree in visual arts, was a cartoonist en route to becoming an animator. Darren was an anthro major who’d turned to film, fancying himself a David Lynch — style auteur in those early days of the indie art-house wave. I considered myself a writer but hadn’t gotten much further than wearing black and smoking cigarettes. I wrote two five-page short stories, two five-page epics, to audition for my college’s creative writing workshops, and was turned down both times. I was crushed, but in retrospect it was perfect training for being a writer. You can keep “Write What You Know”—for a true apprenticeship, internalize the world’s indifference and accept rejection and failure into your very soul.

First thing, Dan hooked up our ride with new speakers. We didn’t have money or prospects, but we had our priorities straight. No, I couldn’t drive, those days being the template of my passengerness. That spring, on schedule, I swore I’d get my license so I could contribute my fair share, but no. Look, I know how to drive, I’m just not legal. I took driver’s ed, but never got around to taking the road test. Never mind that I passed the class on false pretenses. I shot up half a foot junior year and had weird growing pains, like an excruciating stinging in my neck if I turned my head too fast. So every time the instructor led me into busy Broadway traffic, or told me to merge onto the West Side Highway, I faked it. I’d turn my head a little to simulate checking my blind spot and hope for the best. Everyone has blind spots. The magnitude of my self-sabotage was such that I willfully ignored all of mine. If you don’t look, you can pretend nothing is gaining on you.

I promised to make it up to Dan and Darren by being a Faithful Navigator, wrestling with the Rand McNally and feeding the cassette deck with dub. Dub, Lee “Scratch” Perry, deep deep cuts off side six of Sandinista! — let these be indicators of the stoner underpinnings of our trip out West. As if our eccentric route were not enough. From New York down to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to visit a college pal. He took me to my first mall. Even then, I had a weakness for those prefab palaces. “I asked Andy why there were no security guards around,” I wrote in my notebook. “He told me I had a New Yorker’s mentality.”

Then hundreds of miles up to Chicago for a disappointing pilgrimage too complicated and inane to detail here. We bought two tiny replicas of the Sears Tower as consolation. Veered south, taking in the territory, cooking up plots. Inspiration: “discussing the plot of the movie Darren wants to write, about 7-Elevens that land in cornfields.” Down to New Orleans, where we slept in a frat house on mattresses still moldy and damp from the spring flood. One of Darren’s childhood friends belonged to the frat. His brothers wanted to know why he was “bringing niggers and Jews” into their chill-space. We sure were seeing a lot of America on this trip.

Then west to tackle our Let’s Go assignment proper. Bull’s horns and turquoise rocks. We wrote up the Grand Canyon, which almost rivaled our Great Trouble Ditch back home, where on the vernal equinox we burn offerings to Saint Gus, who drove the smiles out of Anhedonia with nothing more than an electric zither and a list of proof. Hit Lake Mead, which also summoned pleasant memories of another homeland monument, the Puddle of Sorrows, where we held Senior Prom.

Decided to keep driving so we could spend the night in Las Vegas, the camping thing not really taking. (“Hours of agony. Impossible to sleep. Bugs. A consistent feeling of itchiness.”) Miles and miles of black hills and winding roads and then at one crest it manifested, this smart white jellyfish flopping on the desert floor. We suited up in a cheap motel downtown. Anticipating all the sweaty, laundryless days and nights we’d spend in the Tercel, we’d hit Domsey’s, the famous Brooklyn thrift store, before we left NYC. We required proper gear for our Vegas debut. Dead men’s spats, ill-fitting acrylic slacks, and blazers with stiff fibers sticking out of the joints and seams. Roll up the sleeves of the sports jacket to find the brown stains from the previous owner’s track marks. We looked great.

The whole trip out I’d maintained that I wasn’t going to gamble. Gambling was a weakness of the ignorant masses, the suckers inhabiting the Great American Middle we’d just driven through. I was an intellectual, see, could quote Beckett on the topic of the abyss, had a college degree and everything. Humming a few bars of the Slacker National Anthem here. I had a nickel in my pocket, though. I can’t remember the name of our hotel, the place is long demolished to make room for the Fremont Street Experience. It wasn’t a proper casino, just a grim box with rooms upstairs, but the first floor had rows of low-stakes gambling apparatus to keep the reception desk company. On our way to check-in, we passed the geriatric zombies in tracksuits installed at the slots, empty coin buckets overturned on their oxygen tanks. These gray-skinned doomed tugged on the levers, blinked, tugged again. Blink. Tug. Blink.

Grisly. But I had a nickel. We were about to get our first glimpse of the hurly-burly of downtown Vegas. To stroll past Binion’s Horseshoe, in fact, where the twenty-second World Series of Poker had just wrapped up. Two hundred and fifteen people strong. The winner, Brad Daugherty, got a million bucks. Not that I knew that then. I was contemplating the nickel in my hand. Before we pushed open the glass doors, what the heck, I dropped it into a one-armed bandit and won two dollars.

In a dank utility room deep in the subbasements of my personality, a little man wiped his hands on his overalls and pulled the switch: More. Remembering it now, I hear a sizzling sound, like meat being thrown into a hot skillet. I didn’t do risk, generally. So I thought. But I see now I’d been testing the House Rules the last few years. I’d always been a goody-goody. Study hard, obey your parents, hut-hut-hut through the training exercises of Decent Society. Then in college, now that no one was around, I started to push the boundaries, a little more each semester. I was an empty seat in lecture halls, slept late in a depressive funk, handed in term papers later and later to see how much I could get away with before the House swatted me down.

Push it some more. We go to casinos to tell the everyday world that we will not submit. There are rules and codes and institutions, yes, but for a few hours in this temple of pure chaos, of random cards and inscrutable dice, we are in control of our fates. My little gambles were a way of pretending that no one was the boss of me. I didn’t have time for driving lessons before our trip because I was too busy cramming a semester of work into exam period. It had been touch and go whether I’d graduate, as I’d barely shown up for my final semester’s Religion course. The last thing I wanted to hear about was some sucker notion of the Divine. There’s a man in the sky who watches over everything you do, as all-seeing as the thousands of security cameras embedded in casino ceilings. So what? Nothing escapes his attention, and nothing will move him to intervene.

After a few phone calls, the administration released me into the world with a D-minus. What was it to them? My passive-aggressive rebellion against the system was meaningless. The House doesn’t care if you piss away your chances, are draining Loretta’s college fund, letting the plumber’s invoice slide until next month. Ruin yourself. The cameras above record it all, but you’re just another sap passing in the night.

The nickels poured into the basin, sweet music. If it worked once, it will work again.

We hit the street.

Before we left town, we bought dozens of tiny plastic slot machines from a trinket shop. Pink, red, lime green. They joined the Museum of Where We’d Been. Everybody’s a walking Museum of Where They’ve Been, but we decided to make it literal. We had serious epoxy. Each place we stopped, we picked up souvenirs and glued them to the hood of our jalopy. Two Sears Towers sticking up over the engine, a row of small turquoise stones on the roof just above the windshield, toy buffalo stampeding across the great brown plain over the engine. Bull’s horns from Arizona, in case we needed to gore someone at ramming speed, you never know, and four refrigerator magnets with Elvis’s face on the front grille, to repel ghosts. We dotted the hood with glue and stuck the slot machines on, to show everyone where we’d been, the polyethylene totems marking us as goofball heathens.

Weeks later, we were in Berkeley, sleeping on a friend’s floor. The friend was cat-sitting for a drug dealer, weed mostly. I didn’t approve of the drug dealer’s lifestyle choices — for vacation, he went camping. We wrote up our time in the land of Circus Circus and El Cortez, the cheap steaks and watered-down drinks. Let’s Go’s previous correspondent had been a prissy little shit, filling his/her copy with snobby asides. “But what do you do there?” He/she wrote:

Forget Hollywood images of Las Vegas glamour, the city at base is nothing but a desert Disneyland. As a small, small world of mild, middle-aged debauchery, Vegas simply replaces Minnie and Mickey with overbright, neon marquees, monolithic hotel/casinos, besequinned Zieg feldesque entertainers, quickly marrying them in rococo wedding chapels.

Percy, where are my smelling salts? What’s wrong with Disneyland? It brings joy to millions and tutors children about the corporate, overbranded world they’ve been born into. “It’s a Small World” is a delightful ditty, an ode to that quality of everyday existence by which the soul is crushed, diminished, made entirely small. No need to denigrate it. Better to worry about the lack of a clear antecedent for them in that last sentence. I would protect Vegas. How about:

The magic formula of mild, middle-aged debauchery — offer everything but the gambling cheaply, and if you gild it, they will come — was hit upon by Bugsy Siegel in the 1940s. Das Kapital is worshipped here, and sacrifices from all major credit cards are accepted.

Much more upbeat, although I apologize if some readers were tricked into thinking the city is dedicated to Karl Marx’s book. I think we were just trying to get fancy with “Capital.”

Some of the classic joints we wrote about are gone now, and we captured a time before Las Vegas made a science of demography, but most of the basic observations in our Let’s Go entry remain solid. In between games of Risk (board-game version), we cut up the previous year’s text, discarded what we disliked, and glued (more glue) what remained onto white paper alongside our revisions and additions. “But remember that casinos function on the basis of most tourists leaving considerably closer to the poverty line than when they arrived; don’t bring more than you’re prepared to lose cheerfully” became “But always remember: in the long run, chances are you’re going to lose money. Don’t bring more than you’re prepared to lose cheerfully.” No, casinos are not out to destroy you. The destroyed do not return to redeem reward-card perks and lose more money. No one forces doom upon you, folks. You need to seek it out.

We kept “Drinks in most casinos cost 75¢—$1, free to those who look like they’re playing,” but added “Look like you’re gambling; acting skills will stretch your wallet, but don’t forget to tip that cocktail waitress in the interesting get-up.” Out with the general tsk-tsking and upper-middle-class disdain, and in with “For best results, put on your favorite loud outfit, bust out the cigar and pinkie rings, and begin.” You have been granted a few days’ reprieve from who you are. Celebrate the gift of a place that allows you to be someone else for a time.

I don’t know who wrote that the Excalibur “has a medieval theme that will make you nostalgic for the Black Plague,” but it wasn’t me. Pretty sure.

California. Pretentious pseudo-intellectual or no, I was not immune to the Western dream of reinvention. All that cultural programming about the freedom of the frontier had stuck, even if I pictured myself more in the Day of the Locust version. The entire trip I thought I was going to stay in California. I had nothing to go back to. No job. No bed but my parents’ couch. No nice girlfriend waiting for me, or even a mean one. We smoked weed, played Risk, time passed. One day we got word there was going to be a riot in People’s Park, at 1:00 p.m. sharp. They scheduled riots there. It gave order to our lives.

We dropped one by one. Darren wigged out and caught a plane home. He still had his childhood room. Dan was going to drive back east in August, maybe get a Eurail pass that autumn and check out some fucking castles or whatever. I was out of money when Dan set off, and I asked if he had any room in the car, as the guy we’d been crashing with, the cat-sitter, was bailing out of California, too, and bringing all his stuff. After all, I was a good navigator. As luck would have it, they intended to stop off in Vegas on the way back.

No one laid a hand on the Museum when we were on the road. Odd, moonfaced kids — a motel owner’s brood — gawked at them when we stopped at night but dared not touch. A cop pulled us over for speeding in Massachusetts the last day of our return trip. “What’s all this?” We shrugged. What to say? He wrote us a ticket. The Museum lasted a few days in Cambridge before teenagers or disaffected housewives or whoever stripped everything. We’d made it home, and the spell had worn off.

We grew up. Our generational symptoms faded bit by bit. I got a job working for the book section of a newspaper. We ran fiction sometimes, mixed in with reviews. When the writing teacher who’d rejected my work in college submitted a story, I passed on it. Not out of revenge, it just wasn’t up to snuff. As in cards, it was business, not personal. I badgered one editor for an assignment, that assignment led to another, and somehow I was paying my bills freelancing. Played poker at Dan’s house every Sunday for a couple of years, and one day we picked up Hold’em. Dan got into computers and founded a visual-effects company, rendering CGI for movies such as Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, which Darren directed. We waited for cards, and then we played them.

And here I was, writing about Vegas again.

“This wasn’t here the last time I came,” I said.

“Yes, and look at it,” Jon said. “It is shit.”

My first night in town. Tumbling into the new CityCenter array, a virtual money sink, a highly evolved specimen of the Leisure Industrial Complex that seemed almost self-aware once you entered its nimbus, bristling with enchantments 24/7.

“Wow,” I said. The highway lifted and aimed us into the CityCenter’s black, glass heart. The dark buildings of the complex surrounded us, sheer residential towers and curvilinear hotels. Pure fury made concrete, shot through with rebar.

It was Jon’s car. He was the first person to take me to a casino, one of the AC Trumps, back in ’96. My college roommate, currently a kind of nightlife broker in Vegas, managing a stable of video DJs, and flitting around the city at night as “Director of Programming” for hot spots that sounded like an erotic tasting menu: Blush, Surrender, Encore. Showing me around and explaining the rules once more.

Jon worked under the handle “Shecky Green,” the latest incarnation of his ongoing character, Mr. Entertainment. Mr. Entertainment stepped onstage during Jon’s teens. After his stint as one half of white rap duo B.M.O.C., he launched the legendary music mag The Source (“The Magazine of Hip-Hop Music, Culture & Politics”) in his dorm room. I lived with him the following year. Long before I tangled with collection agencies, rooming with Shecky introduced me to answering-machine dread. You never knew when you might be pummeled by a string of cussing by Luther Campbell, frustrated over a mixed review of “We Want Some Pussy,” or his inability to think up interesting choruses.

After cashing out of The Source, Shecky cast himself in a series of entrepreneurial roles — publisher of a Gen-X Playboy, manager of a record label — before making bank with his bestselling Hip Hop Honeys DVDs, a single-minded hopscotch around the world in search of booty-enabled beauties: Hip Hop Honeys: Brazil Boom Boom, Hip Hop Honeys: Blazin’ Asians. Hip Hop Honeys: Las Vegas, natch. He even ventured in front of the camera as the on-air commentator for a late-night poker show called Hip Hop Hold’em, which ran for a while in 2006 when all sorts of poker shows weaseled themselves into America’s programming grids. Method Man and Ed Lover playing loose, quite a sight, and Shecky spieling on the sidelines. “The 8 has arrived, and Biz Markie makes a straight!” No matter the arena, nobody beats the Biz.

Shecky took me along as he made his nightly rounds of restaurants and clubs. First up: CityCenter. Despite its $9 billion price tag and 1.5 million square feet of space, the CityCenter (“Capital of the New World”) had not turned out to be the flaneur-friendly wonderland promised in the brochures. Shecky lived in one of the residential towers. I put my nose to the window: pretty tony from the outside. The recession derailed things, though. Busto sales, cascading foreclosures, squatters taking over the empty units. Gruesome machete fights in the laundry rooms over who’s next up on the driers, just like Brooklyn.

“They said it would look like Central Park,” Shecky said. “Look, those are the trees.” He gestured toward a lonesome half dozen slouching out of the cement. I didn’t see any street retail on our approach, no inviting boulevards, no place to wander except into the entrances of the casinos. But what casinos! They were the magnificent embodiment of scientifically derived LIC principles: gargantuan in scale, single-minded in execution. A pure expression of consumer will. The old days were gone, like the Dunes, the Sands, all the Rat Pack warrens imploded by dynamite charges, dust. In their places these beautiful monsters emerged from the rubble: the Bellagio, the Venetian.

And the Cosmopolitan. Shecky led me there, into this ebony monolith whose name was bolted in huge letters across the top floor, more fitting for a corporate headquarters than a hotel. I appreciated the honesty. The developers had hoped for a nice crop of condos, but after the downturn the soil was exhausted. Deutsche Bank took over, apartments became hotel rooms, and the first floor a hypermodern casino. In the Vegas war of gambling versus places for people to live, the money wins out, I imagine.

Windows were scarce, per standard casino style, the mammoth footprint of the building creating the illusion of a banquet room without walls. All you can eat — this is the Land of Fabled Buffets, after all — you walked on and on, never satiated. Trudging through the main floor of the Cosmo on a weekend night, you were one of tens of thousands of hungry souls. Addled. Cortexes popping. Prey to sundry appetites. What’s next? Where’s next? One of your party was sucked into an eddy of diversion over there and had to be rescued by texted coordinates: Let’s reconnoiter over by the Pai Gow or the chanteuse who’s just mounted the platform by the crystal stairs. Microentertainments popped up here and there like brief sun-showers, suddenly somebody’s singing on a tiny stage for a couple of old standards, and then they split. Poof, into nightlife vapor.

The Cosmopolitan’s nightclub was called Marquee, up on the terrace. It was quite splendid. Hotel clubs like Marquee had a dependable schedule of colada-soaked pool parties during the day, followed by quiet time for disco naps and “What’s up? Oh, nothing” calls home at dusk, and then another hard skid of partying until dawn. I wanted to stay, I wanted to live there. I’d scoop the hair-balls and condoms from the drains in the pool, whatever. Shecky did business. At every new venue he’d say, “I have to talk to this guy for a minute,” yelling so I could hear him above the electro music, and then confer with his opposite number at this establishment. Nodding, yes, yes.

Mr. Entertainment had found a home. Vegas hadn’t changed him — he had always been Vegas, now he was more so. Why shouldn’t an enterprising white guy from Philadelphia create a landmark rap magazine, assemble an empire of honeys, ringmaster the billion-dollar nightlife of a hungry city? Follow his dream. Not the American dream but the desert dream of finding your oasis in the wasteland. To everyone else it is a mirage, a trick of the eyes in the infernal heat. Until you lead them to it, and they taste the waters for themselves.

These were his people, dancing. Seventy-two hours in another city, to try on a new self, this table image. Since the disco was grafted onto a residential structure, access came by way of unadorned fire stairwells, which at peak traffic were inundated with wobbly bachelorettes on stilettos, Jager-blind groomsmen, and leather-skinned jetsetters creaking in crisp designer duds who passed each other up and down the stairs with a delirious urgency. A scene from the inferior American remake of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, or lost footage from The Towering Inferno. I still recognized myself here. Monster places for monster people. Like I said, I wanted to move in.

Speaking of Brazil. The Rio had been the home of the WSOP the past couple of years. Like a teenager rolling her eyes at her parents’ cornpone ways, the place rejected the architectural kitsch of old-school Vegas — the miniature cityscape of New York — New York, the Paris’s Eiffel Tower replication — to run the streets with the slab architecture of the new megacasinos. But really, what could the Rio have been shaped like? A twenty-story toucan? I’m sure they thought about it.

The lightly enforced Brazilian theme disappeared altogether once you got to the convention hall, where the World Series had been chugging along for six weeks with a host of lower-stakes Hold’em events, Seven Card Razz, and the like. The declivity of the Hall of Legends was festooned with huge banners featuring the blown-up faces of game greats — devilish Scotty Nguyen, a grim-looking Erick Lindgren, last year’s champ Jonathan Duhamel. Then it was into the rotunda, where you could buy snacks, beef jerky, and WSOP merch. Smack in the middle of the rotunda was a WSOP display, featuring a TV monitor that replayed last year’s Final Table on a loop day and night. When I tried to register the morning of my start, at 6:00 a.m. (I hadn’t been sleeping well, I had been sleeping quite poorly), the announcer’s voice echoed in the empty halls. Nobody there at that hour. Everybody’d seen it already anyway.

The afternoon of my arrival, the hallways brimmed with desperados, the Pavilion and Amazon Rooms awhir. I stepped into the Pavilion. The first thing I noticed — this was before the size of the room assaulted my brain — was the crickets. The chips clicked and clicked, thousands of players fiddled with their chips, stacking them, tossing them into the pot, scooping them up, dealers counting off All Ins, click click click. Cricket symphony.

There were more than two hundred tables, ten-seated, which meant they could shoehorn in a lot of runners. It was Day 1B, and the Main Event was under way in the Green Section, the Black Section, etc., while in one corner players ground through satellite games, still hoping to win a seat in the World Series. The buy-in was ten grand, but pay five-hundred-something bucks in a satellite, make it into the top of the field, and you won a ticket to the Big Game. So while Main Event players were washing out just beyond the velvet rope, these bruisers slugged it out for the opportunity. Some of them had been here for weeks. The clock was ticking. If they got bounced, there was time to enter another one, one more last chance. You can play as many as you like, satellite after satellite. Same principle as slot machines, just a lot slower.

The Amazon Room was smaller, around the corner past the vendors peddling poker primers and arcane table spectacles (“Hide Your Eyes”), the registration areas, and the Poker Kitchen, where you could grab a quick sub or a salad. I assume the name of the joint depended on the current occupants of the convention hall. “Hot Grub” for the entomologists’ annual get-together, and something appropriately farm-to-autopsy table for the forensic scientists.

The Amazon was where the ESPN cameras roosted. The network’s WSOP programming crept up every year to feed the aficionados. They were spitting out unprecedented coverage this year, on cable and multiple internet streams, so the room was exuberantly branded by the sports channel and the World Series’s main sponsor, Jack Link’s Beef Jerky. What, you don’t like beef jerky? You got your Peppered Beef Jerky, Teriyaki Beef Jerky, it’s a convenient source of protein in an easy-seal pouch. Young correspondents from the trades—Bluff Magazine and Card Player—scooted between the tables, here’s a status report on the big guns, can I snap a pic for the liveblog, something for the fans back home? Portly security guards shuffled between the velvet ropes. You’d almost think there was real money on the felt.

TV cameras snipered down on the two Feature Tables, which were situated apart from the regular sections, percolating under garish blue and crimson lights. On Day 1C Brad Garrett from Everybody Loves Raymond did his time at one. He was known for his poker acumen, striking a menacing glare from the cover of Bluff, which was blown up and perched on easels throughout the halls. Headline news: “Black Friday: The D.O.J. Shuts Down the Big 3,” referring to the online sites Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker, and PokerStars. Brad and his TV brother, Ray Romano, yukked it up while playing, their TV bond no act and still going strong these long years into undead syndication. We should be so lucky.

Celebrities of various wattage. Jason Alexander, staked by PokerStars, who were keeping up a brave front despite the Feds. Paul Pierce of the Celtics. The rapper Nelly, or so I was told, and Shannon Elizabeth, who was a celebrity, or so I was told. The poker luminaries in their firmament, the guys who wrote the books and cranked out the instructional videos, recognizable from the poker TV shows you may have watched at home or endured in a hotel bar. They were being overthrown, these kings. Was this the Main Event or the Deadliest Game? Doyle Brunson, a.k.a. Texas Dolly (after his collection of vintage Barbies, most of them still in the original packaging), da Godfather, went out two hours into Day 1A. Greg Raymer and Jerry Yang, two former world champions, hit the rails, and Matt Affleck, too. What are you going to do?

Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi, whose madcappery had livened last year’s TV coverage, was strafed to bits while crawling on his knees and elbows toward a straight draw. His farewell Saving Private Ryan tweet to his three brothers, who also played: “Officially out of the Main Event!! Sour start to the day!! Good Lucky my brothers!! Sorry left you guys behind!!” If they were going out, what chance a wretch like me? About 1,400 runners atomized by the time I played on Day 1D.

I railed for two days, watching, trying to get accustomed to the ebb and flow of the place. Listening to the crickets.

Reward cards and rejuvenating foot massages. Look for sawdust on the floors, and you will not find it. We were not at Binion’s Horseshoe, home of the inaugural World Series. Downtown Vegas, 1970, before TV rights, trade-marked merch, bleached teeth. Only forty-odd years ago, but let’s picture it in sepia, for kicks. There were seven bare-knuckle entrants, cronies of casino owner Benny Binion, and no official prize money. The players voted on the winner, Johnny Moss, who received an engraved silver cup. This year there were 6,856 entrants, and the top 10 percent got paid off, with the champion paying taxes on $8,715,638 in winnings.

Al Alvarez immortalized the early days of the spectacle in The Biggest Game in Town. That book, and James McManus’s Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion’s World Series of Poker, are lively, bravura accounts of the Main Event before Chris Moneymaker’s inspirational fable destroyed the old paradigm. Alvarez — a poet, editor, and essayist — attended the 1981 festivities, which had ticked up to a field of seventy-three warriors. The cowboys still reigned, charging through the sagebrush in a romantic fable of colorful personalities, savage talent, once-in-a-lifetime convergences. “Romance,” Alvarez writes, “because that’s how the poker pros saw themselves: as the last of the gunslingers, ready to showdown with any stranger who dared to take them on.” Pew pew.

Call me a dandy, sure, but Alvarez’s outlaws with their “Stetsons, embroidered shirts, and bolo ties” were no slackers in the sartorial department. Yosemite Sam and his rootin’-tootin’ glamour are deep in the chromosomes of the game, gunfight lingo permeating the vernacular. Chips are ammo, bullets a pair of Aces. A shootout is a tourney where you advance only when everyone else at your table is exterminated, and in a bounty you grabbed bonuses for cutting down certain players. Polish the chaps and saddle up, boys and girls.

Alvarez was an Englishman, a foreigner like me, chatting up poker legends like Johnny Moss and Doyle Brunson, as well as pseudonymous high rollers whose lunatic attitudes toward money were queasy evidence of the gambler mentality. Chapter by chapter, we traversed the gangplank to the original Showboat: “It was as if the old riverboat cardsharps had never been quite exorcised and now they were back again … reincarnated as gnarled, relentless good ol’ boys who knew how to turn on the charm but never gave a sucker an even break.”

The 1981 game was still run by the Binion family. A closed fraternity of hard-bitten pros and the well-heeled fish foolish enough to tangle with them. Before TV cameras and poker memoirs, The Biggest Game in Town was as close as most regular enthusiasts were ever going to come to the action. Lucky them: Alvarez’s portraiture was warmhearted and wry, the enthusiasm of a good pal who saves you a primo spot at the rail. He was a less unctuous version of Saul Rubinek in Unforgiven, the penny-dreadful scribe chronicling the lethal day-to-day of Little Bill and the Duck of Death, setting down high-noon showdowns for the audience safe at home, far from the frontier.

Like many humans, writers need money for food and travel. The New Yorker underwrote Alvarez’s trip to Vegas. McManus traveled out on Harper’s dime to chronicle the 2000 Main Event and the death of Ted Binion, son of Benny, who’d taken over operations at the Horseshoe. Positively Fifth Street toggled between McManus’s coverage of the Binion murder trial (narcotics, desert gangsters, the attendant autopsies), his tentative dips into Vegas strip-club culture (the Cheetahs of the subtitle), and his miraculous Main Event adventure.

McManus was a poet and fiction writer, but also an amateur poker player. Hells yeah, he was going to play a little while out West. Internet gaming was just a sparkle of code in some programmer’s eye, so McManus crammed the books (as you do) and pointed and clicked through rudimentary computer games, whose crappy graphics I can only imagine. Shudder. Once he arrived, he parleyed a $200 satellite into a seat at the Main Event. His passage was not without hardship (it’s stressful, dude) but the improbably badass conclusion was exhilarating — the Final Table, where he placed third and raked in almost a quarter of a million dollars. Holy megillah!

When the book version of his underdog story was published in 2003, it helped popularize the myth of the Rise of the Amateur. Chris Moneymaker’s Main Event coup that year, and the internet gaming that made it possible, detonated the World Series as if it were some faded Sinatra hangout hogging development space on the Strip. Moneymaker, a humble accountant, earned a trip to Vegas after wiring forty bucks for an online satellite. Here’s to new blood: He ended up winning the whole shebang, 2.5 million bucks, besting poker maestros and star-crossed chumps, sidestepping bad fortune all the while.

Quake and tremble before the terrible power of the “Moneymaker Effect.” The guys at home — Miller Lite wisping out of their pores and into the upholstery of their fave recliners, the latest arguments with the wife and the most recent workplace humiliations buzzing in their brains — said to themselves: “I can do that. I’m the best player in my weekly game, everyone says so.” The Moneymaker mythology was a version of a core gambling fantasy: I am different from those losers I see on the street every day, this time I will prove it has not been all for naught. I am a winner.

Various forces had intersected. In 1998, Rounders triggered Hold’em fever among the kids. They start playing when they’re sixteen, brains aswim with visions of Hollywood glory and Gretchen Mol’s boobs, and then nascent internet sites give them a chance to play tournaments night and day, fueled by microwave burritos and Red Bull. TV shows like World Poker Tour, which debuted in 2003, insert them elbow to elbow with poker heavyweights in all their kooky glory. The camera as rail-bird, sweating foul-mouthed Scotty Nguyen, cranky Phil Hellmuth. Shoot, this is a racket where severe personality deficits aren’t a hindrance for once. And might even help. If you’re half dead inside, for example.

The books, the divine primers — Harrington’s trilogy, and the thousand-plus pages of Brunson’s Super System—delivered Prometheus’s fire to the hoodied cavemen. When Moneymaker, account holder at PokerStars.com, one of them, wins his bracelet, we have entered a new age, when knuckle-dragging wretches can grab a seat at the table. In McManus’s 2000 game the field was 512. In Moneymaker’s game, 839. The next year, attendance tripled to 2,500 hopefuls. By 2006, 8,000 players showed up at the Rio — sharps, internet homunculi, Sarasota dentists, and hedge-fund dinks with $10K in disposable cash. America was in a cash bubble, and so was organized poker.

The Binion family sold off the casino and Harrah’s Entertainment picked up the rights to the WSOP in 2004. It’s big biz, like everything else in town. Walking the Rio floors, the machine hums, you can barely hear it. There is no such thing as a seedy underbelly when everybody’s on their back, airing out their bits. You smile indulgently at the minor vulgarities described by Alvarez — hookers making propositions in elevators, the imbecilic stage shows — as years of viral YouTube atrocities, C-listers’ sex tapes, and a million texted nudie shots have collapsed the travel time to the desert. Like Shecky Green, we are all a bit Vegas now, more comfortable exposing ourselves in all our weaknesses and appetites. Goodbye cowboy, hello middle-class schlub.

McManus covered a murder trial, the specters of drugs and organized crime circling his stories of the Main Event like tourists around the crab-claw tray at an all-you-can-eat. That kind of trouble, real trouble, permanent trouble, puts a dent in visitor-retention stats. The only crimes I witnessed during my stay this time were some ill-considered shirts and multiple counts of misdemeanor hairdos.

McManus’s deep run in the Main Event not only made him the Man among amateur players but likened him unto a god to amateur player-scribblers. Shoot, he earned his way into his seat. I had my entrance fee handed to me. (Assuming it showed up. We’ll get to that.) The shame.

I didn’t have illusions about being one of the November Nine. We live in an age in which sitcoms outnumber miracles, and perhaps that is what we deserve. The amateurs were thumping the fabled cowboys these days, but I was an amateur’s amateur. I didn’t want to go out first, and I wanted to make it to Day 3 at least. Day 3 had the sheen of respectability. I would not bring dishonor to my house — my friends, family, and poker game back home. To Coach. Day 3, then take it from there.

Despite my persistent terrors about being the first one to wash out, there were four starting days to the Main Event, so the first player flamed out while I was still brooding in my Brooklyn hermit shack. Twenty minutes into Day 1A, his KKs got smithereened by Aces. Aces, Aces. He stumbled out of the hall, ducking the media, this nameless, hapless schmuck, and into the neon desert-within-a-desert that is Las Vegas. Where presumably he lost some more money.

On the bright side, that didn’t mean I couldn’t be the first player to wash out on my starting day.

With less than twenty-four hours to go, I made another trip to registration. I’d tried to snag my table draw earlier, but they couldn’t find my check. As a writer, I was used to this. The silver-haired lady in the Cage remembered me from before and was quite helpful despite the lack of news.

“You’re wearing your hair down,” she said.

I like to mix it up. “Yeah. What do you think?”

“If you want to look like a badass, wear it back.”

“Okay, then.”

If the check didn’t appear, I was fucked. I was having trouble keeping track of affronts to my psyche, but I was used to that, too. I pinballed between the ballrooms, Amazon to Brasilia, Brasilia to Pavilion, Pavilion to Amazon. Mapping the castle, the system of unmarked doors, secret passageways. This one shoots me to the terrace where I can sweat out toxins in the brutal sun, that one is a wormhole to the Poker Kitchen and its Have-It-Your-Way Wraps. And this exit is most important: for here be the johns.

After six weeks, the run-up tourneys were finished. No helter-skelter sprinting from room to room to scoop up Player of the Year points. Can anyone catch up to Ben Lamb, this year’s leader? So young, Ben Lamb, such healthy skin, such psycho-killer eyes. Stray cats disappear in his hometown. Pass Lamb, bounce back after What Happened in Prague, that Cold Deck in Melbourne. The names like cities in spy novels where bad shit went down, it was Ivan’s trap all along, no need to elaborate.

Whatever 2–7 Triple Draw Lowball (Limit) is, it’s history, cashes added to a player’s lifetime winnings on the online ledgers. The three-day Seven Card Razz, with its $2,500 buy-in. And also the niche events, such as the Casino Employees game (congrats, Sean Drake!), the Seniors event (fifty-plus only, please), and the Ladies No-Limit Championship (Marsha Wolak, represent!). The specialty events were supposed to give subcommunities a time to shine, but it didn’t always work out. Last year, some bros dressed in drag and crashed the ladies’ event to protest “gender discrimination.” Rhinestone buckles, fringed vests, camisoles. Poker dudes: any excuse to wear something a little fancy.

The bracelets, for example, were snazzy as hell. Every sport has their trophy. What you get when you win. Stanley Cup. Super Bowl Ring. Here it’s bracelets. Fifty-seven of them handed out so far this year, sparkly numbers, with fifty-two diamonds embedded in buttery white-and-yellow gold. Walk up to the 7-Eleven counter to pay for your Snapple and pork rinds, they’ll know you’re a man of substance, maybe throw in some scratchers, gratis. I’m reminded of the Republic of Anhedonia’s Medal of Honor, the Pouch of Sighs. It’s a little sack of oiled leather, stuffed with twenty-five captured sighs, that hangs around your neck on a silk lanyard. They come up on eBay from time to time, if you’re interested.

The final remaining bracelet was the Big One.

Also starting on Day 1D was Matt Matros, whom I’d met eight years ago, when he was in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence. He supported himself on poker through grad school, carving out fiction during the day and wagering at night. His book The Making of a Poker Player: How an Ivy League Math Geek Learned to Play Championship Poker detailed his trip to glory.

We’d only talked briefly, but Matt reached out to me when I was Rio-bound and offered to give me some tips. You may wonder why I kept meeting writers on my journey, but my social circle is quite small these days. “Why are there so many crackheads in this crackhouse?” the crackhead asked. People like that are the only people here.

Not many people know that Anhedonians invented brunch. It makes sense now that you think about it, right? Because brunch is horrible. A weekend midday food engagement was a sacrament to my kind and made me feel at home in this alien place, even if it was “ethnic food” at an establishment called the All-American Bar and Grille. It was located in a Rio eddy, where the convention hall joined the raging waters of the casino.

Old hands at the WSOP avoided the place, Matt informed me. “We’re on such an absurd schedule out here,” he said. “Half the tournaments start at 5:00 p.m., and they go til 3:00 in the morning and then they start the next day at 3:00 p.m.” It messes with the digestion. “There’s basically two thousand people all trying to eat in these restaurants and they don’t hold two thousand people. So we get out of here, clear our heads, have a meal someplace we like. Nothing too heavy.”

Talk about proper nutrition, and I know you’re a veteran. I opened my marble notebook after apologizing for its cover, which the kid had decorated with bright-colored stickers and Cray-Pas during an impromptu “crafts project.” Did McManus write in gaily colored notebooks? Hells no. But the red, yellow, and blue dots were a constellation to steer by. I was far from home, but I’d find my way back to the kid.

The last two WSOPs had been good to Matt. The previous year, he’d won the $1,500 Limit Hold’em bracelet, and in the run-up to this year’s Main Event, he’d bagged the $2,500 Mixed Hold’em event (“Mixed” means alternating between Limit and No Limit, switching your brain back and forth). He pocketed $300,000 and was my Rio John McClane, creeping barefoot over glass with a machine gun, ho-ho-ho.

Not that you’d know it from Matt’s low-key demeanor. This is how I judge character: If you were a stranger, would I ask you to watch my bag while I hit the coffee-shop bathroom? Not that anyone would want to steal what’s in there. Breath mints. Misery beads. The matted, moth-eaten arm of a teddy bear, the final remains of my childhood companion Emilio Pepper, who taught me about love and loss. Nonetheless. I trusted Matt.

Underneath the wash of his brown hair, behind his rectangular glasses, his eyes give no indication of the multifarious calculations zipping ’round his brain. Matt had a sideline in poker coaching, which perhaps reinforced his patience with morons like me, but doubtless his composure had been perfected by years at the table. Everybody tilts, but he who tilts less, tilts best.

We chowed down. He dispensed betting tips, urged me to widen my range of starting hands, and swatted down my flurry of ignorant questions without a hint of exasperation. Like when I asked about his tribe, the Math Players.

“What’s a Math Player? Just like knowing the odds and—”

“No.”

“Okay.”

“So when I say a Math Player, I mean …” The Math Players took their cues from game theory, in search of the Platonic way to play each hand. They availed themselves of the road gambler’s arsenal of exploitation — bluffing, decoding tells, exploiting weak players’ mistakes — when it was easy, but their holy grail was optimum play.

Exploitive play asked, How can I take advantage of this situation? The optimum play of Math Players inquires, What is the correct play for this situation? Super-aggressive chest-thumping before the flop, like sociopathic raising and re-raising when all you have is 9–3 offsuit, will fatten your stack as long as you can scare people off. But eventually exploitative players will have to duel through the Flop, the Turn, and the River, and they’ll need a deeper tool kit. The Math Players insist that over time, sticking to a solid core strategy will maximize profits.

“It’s not just about calculating your chances of winning,” Matt told Card Player, “it’s about calculating the correct play based on what my opponent’s range of hands is, what he will do with those range of hands, how can I maximize the amount of chips I will make based on how he’s gonna play. And it’s very complicated.” Reason trumps intuition, that staple of Hollywood poker.

It was working out so far. Matt’s poker evolution tracked with many players his age, capturing Hold’em’s trajectory from niche variation to its current Rio-size madness. Preflop: He started playing at fifteen with his friends out on Long Island. He wanted to rebel, but driving doughnuts on the mean bio teacher’s lawn wasn’t his style. “An all-night poker game,” he wrote in his book, “seemed just illicit and interesting enough to be acceptable.” He played in his first casino at eighteen, courtesy of a family trip to Arizona, pocketing $500 from the slots. The gateway slots, I tells ya, they change a person.

The Flop: Three years later, Rounders was a vista of the exotic world of Hold’em. Underground card dens, Russian mobsters, and a hero who abandons the straight life to play in the World Series of Poker. That could be you up there. Matt’s dad gave him and his friends a three-page pamphlet of basic Hold’em strategy. Like many card-crazy kids his age, Matt dove into live tournaments, enrolled in night classes via the new technology. Computer programs such as the World Series of Poker Deluxe Casino Pack simulated a complete Vegas jaunt, from wheels down at McCarran International Airport to a virtual Binion’s. The game even included a Gambler’s Book Shop, where scholars could peruse digital excerpts from Brunson’s Super System. Then came the poker classics on old-fashioned paper, like Sklansky’s Theory of Poker. Matt got more out of it than I did.

The Turn: Matt swapped strategy on Precambrian online forums like rec.gambling.poker and, later, Twoplustwo.com, where Sklansky held court. PartyPoker.com and PokerStars.com were the hunting grounds for rubes. Televised poker, such as World Poker Tour, captured the Real Deal for pause and rewind.

And, finally, the River: He finished writing The Making of a Poker Player just before he leveraged a satellite to the Final Table of the WPT 2004 Championship, and took home $700,000. All postscripts should come so easily.

The Making of appeared in 2005, squeezed into crowded Games & Amusements sections in bookstores. The gold rush was on, and proliferating how-tos were picks and shovels, crucial gear. Cardoza Publishing, the home of Super System, had enjoyed a 1,000 percent increase in sales the two years prior. Two Plus Two went from selling 45,000 books a year to half a million. (Dropping a lot of numbers these last few pages, but poker’s a numbers game. How much, how many, baby.) Matt adjusted to the post-Moneymaker ecology of the game, and tech continued to provide an angle. He coached players over the phone, instant message, and e-mail, whatever your fancy. Narrated online training videos — wherein the Matt Himself mixed it up in computer tourneys while deconstructing his strategy in different hands. All downloadable to your handy mobile device, if you want.

Our digital existence, in fact, had made our meal possible. I’d sent up a flare to alert people on Twitter re: my Vegas plans. Matt responded: “If you want poker help … I can translate poker language into lit-speak.” Social media wasn’t usually my thing, as it had the word “social” in it, but I’d taken to the platform after a personal tragedy. I had a cat, the cat died, and now what I used to say to my cat all day, I tweeted. It helped that 140 characters was roughly my preferred limit when it came to human interaction.

There was rarely a misfit shortage at a poker table, given the more or less stable misfit percentages at any gathering of Americans, so I was not surprised that Twitter was big among their clan. I followed Coach’s list of poker notables, poker scholars, and sundry jackanapes. A disturbing field excursion into player anthropology for someone of my delicate sensibilities. Apart from the standard “here’s what I’m eating” updates, your poker feed kept your crew back home apprised of how you were faring, night and day, whether it’s a strafing run at the casino just over the county line or the Aussie Millions in Melbourne. “You are there!” Stack size, notes on the talent in the room, table temperament. They dispatched little digital carrier pigeons at the table after a tournament, on breaks, and even hand by hand.

Here’s a typical volley from Matros crony Robert Hwang, or Action Bob. It’s Day 2 at the spring WSOP gathering in Atlantic City:

Caesar’s main event. 120K playing 1200–2400.

135 players left. 174K for first.

After the first day, he’s up to $120,000 in chips. The blinds at this level are $1,200 for Small, $2,400 for Big. The field has been culled to 135, and the winner will make $174,000. Time stamp: 4:38 p.m. He’s been playing for a few hours. Then comes this at 6:10 p.m.:

Lost 110K pot QQ<.