The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death

How Are You Going to Break It to Cujo?

In a corner of the Pavilion, the last-chance dance continued. The Noble Hustle, behind velvet ropes. Since September there had been Moneymaker-worthy satellites to transport you to the Main Event, underwritten by online sites and hosted by official WSOP circuit events in Biloxi, Council Bluffs, all over. Your local casino sponsors ’em, to lure you in for some ancillary losses. Even on Day 1C, there was still time for these hoboes to hop on the freight before it pulled away. Grind. Fail. Grind better. No way to know which one of these last-chancers I’d play with tomorrow. They were in the scrum, working.

Next year, June 2012, I came back to Vegas to see where it all began. You’ll permit me a little time travel, buddy, this far into our journey. I’m not such a disagreeable companion, am I? Changing the cassettes, drawing my finger across the map to see we’re headed in the right direction. By now I’m that old friend of yours, your fuckup friend, the one you love dearly and need desperately because he makes you feel better about your own disasters. Stick around for the usual denouement.

By the time the WSOP returned, I hadn’t played a tournament in a year, for reasons that will become obvious. But I came back anyway, to watch Coach battle her way into the Big Game.

I bumped into her and her hubby, Lex, at check-in. Turned out we were on the same flight. They were giddy. According to real-time poker blogs and Twitter, twenty-seven-year-old Amanda Musumeci had smashed ’n’ grabbed her way to the Final Table of Event 9, No-Limit Hold’em Re-Entry. Team Murder in effect. What’s Team Murder? “Team Murder is this crew out of New Jersey,” Coach explained. Okay. If Musumeci took it, she’d be the first woman to win a bracelet since Vanessa Selbst’s 2008 win.

Musumeci eventually placed second, but it was a positive development. It had been seventeen years since a woman made it to the Final Table. The game was overdue.

In a few months, Selbst would become the top-earning female poker player of all time, with more than seven mil in earnings. “Tough as a Denny’s porterhouse,” as World Poker Tour host Mike Sexton put it. She first got her hands dirty online, where, according to James McManus’s estimation, women make up 30 percent of the players. As opposed to the brick-and-mortar World Series, where that number was 5 percent.

Gender parity in poker is a joke. Walk into any card room, cue up any poker telecast, and the only place where you’ll find a majority of women is on World Poker Tour, thanks to the show’s Royal Flush Girls. Hey there, Brittany, Danielle, and Tugba! The girls are “event ambassadors” wafting past the camera between hands. In bikinis by the pool, and waving to the folk at home during a pleasant gondola ride down Venetian canals. Venice, Copenhagen, Prague — dude, that’s why they call it the World Poker Tour. It’s nice to have a job that lets you travel a lot and meet interesting people. With the addition of the Royal Flush Girls Social Media Bar, you can catch the girls in the background of the studio, perched on stools, small-talking with lucky members of the audience. “Bring your A game, fellas,” Sexton advised.

Helen and Lex’s excitement over Musumeci’s run was in addition to the standard going-to-Vegas euphoria. They’d given themselves a week to come up with the Main Event money, whether it was from satellites, a couple of Deep Stacks, or robust cashes in $1,500-tier games. You need cash, and that ever-dwindling currency that always falls through a hole in your pocket: Time. Across the WSOP’s six-week run, players cashed in their personal days and one-week’s paid in search of the Big Score. “You’ll have to go to trial without me — here’s my PowerPoint on ‘Why the Death Penalty Is Bad.’ ” Missing Junior’s Li’l Pelé Soccer Championship and Aunt May’s fiftieth wedding anniversary.

If the cards behave? These plucky souls will have to come back in July, take an unpaid week, fake their kidnapping or the paperwork for glue-sniffing rehab. Shoot, they’ll quit their jobs when they Final Table, anyway, all that money. This is not to minimize the tortured negotiations with significant others over another poker trip. With pets. How are you going to break it to Cujo? That Chihuahua has a lot of heart, but these absences take a toll.

None of that for Coach. Her partnership was pokerpositive. They made a nice picture at the tables, Helen and Lex, rebuking the “I tuck my T-shirt into my jeans without a belt” crowd with her decorous ensembles and his fitted sports jackets and dress shirts. Table image: Nick and Nora, not Bud and Wheezie. Lex was taking a furlough from his day job as a writer and editor of business news. Said job which had added benefits: Lex served on his company’s Diversity Committee and the annual Unity: Journalists for Diversity conference was in Vegas this August. They had a legit, societally acceptable excuse to come back, whether they cashed or not.

This trip they were beginning with a three-day event, Six Handed Hold’em. “The game that started it all,” as Helen put it, referring to her Phil Ivey — James Akenhead match two years prior. Maybe it’s lucky.

At starting time, Coach was cozy at Bronze 61, Brasilia Room. It was the first time I’d seen her play. She wore a black dress with a white collar, pearl bracelet on her wrist. Legs crossed, vivid red nail polish glinting. Her fingers lightly brushed the table, as if she were in a canoe, her hand dipping lazily in the current. If this was her housewife costume, this day she was hosting a dinner party for some swell couples from the planned community, the roast cooling on the rack. If you check out the director’s cut of Rocky this is exactly what Burgess Meredith wears when he gives his “A Bum’s a Bum” speech in the deleted “Perfect Ham Sandwich” scene.

She patted the red purse in her lap: Let’s go. When the cards flew, her table waited on one player, some hotshot who was tearing up shit in another event in the next ballroom. Or just some guy filling his Velcro pockets with protein bars and Pepto tablets at the sundries shop down the hall. At present, her adversaries were two young guys plugged into devices, one of the Ubiquitous Loquacious Middle-Aged White Guys, and a tattooed man with a sinister air. Yeah, I know your mom has a tattoo of Simon Le Bon on her back, but this was something else, a rather impressive wrist-to-shoulder ornamentation, “sleeves” they’re called. Which seems a misnomer because generally one of the main things I look for in sleeves is remove-functionability.

Familiar types from my training missions at first glance. But no, their postures were more controlled, their expressions more rigid, their movements less slack. Versions of people I’d been playing against, impurities removed. The higher stakes, the cleansing fires of these hallowed WSOP halls, had burned away the weak stuff. What was still familiar: They could outplay me.

Let’s patrol. Sixteen hundred runners entered Event 16, spread out among the convention hall. In other parts of the ballrooms, earlier matches wound down to the final, inevitable All Ins. Over in the Amazon, for example, it was Day 3, Level 70 of the $10K Heads-Up game, ESPN capturing one of the final tables for posterity. In the Pavilion, PokerNews.com streamed Day 2 of the $1,500 Limit Hold’em event, beguiling some thirteen-year-old in Punxsutawney with visions of future bracelet glory.

Early in the series, the population was sparse, the Main Event mob yet to curl into a fist. This locomotive was slow to accelerate. Fewer concessions hawking away in the corridors. The “misting station” on the terrace, which cooled the flesh from the desert’s heat, was devoid of basking enthusiasts. The terrace: I loved it for its respite from the intense poker frequencies inside the convention hall. Even if the heat shriveled me like a piece of charqui, or jerky. (Charqui, “cut into strips and dried,” from the Spanish, and the Incans, who dehydrated llama meat in the sun to preserve it.) A nice sprint through the misting-station jets sets you right.

The iPad population was up this year, however. In the Pavilion I caught one character squinting at an action scroller between hands, Beats by Dre headphones beeping in his ears. The Pavilion was where Lex was installed. Relaxed but alert in his dapper sports coat, some color in his angular face from his time at VooDoo Beach. Helen enjoyed a nice spa treatment before a big game; Lex didn’t mind catching some rays at the Rio pool.

I tried to find Matt, but he was fathom deep at a table far from the velvet rope. I could just see him when his neighbor leaned back. Matt looked a bit flushed in his sweatshirt. Earbuds screwed in, concentrating on whatever holographic poker abstraction he projected into the air above the felt.

Then I was compelled to the satellite grottos, the Sit-n-Go’s. Sit-n-Go’s were not, as I had mistakenly thought, adult diapers for poker players, so they don’t have to leave the table. Who wants to miss getting dealt aces? They’re actually one-table, ten-player tournaments. Which explained a lot, like that time that floor manager kept shouting, “The Sit-n-Go is full! No more room in the Sit-n-Go!”

At our first meeting the year before, Coach had instructed me to hit some Sit-n-Go’s during my AC training. But time was tight and I never did, concentrating on longer, protracted tournaments instead. When I told Matt at our lunch that I might warm up for Day 1D with a few, he shook his head. Why bother at that point? It was a different game than what I’d be playing in the Main Event. Different rhythms, different goals. It was too late.

Now I was fixated. See, something wonderful had happened the day before. In the cab to the Rio, Coach and Lex asked me if I was going to play. Naw, just take notes. Grateful to be a passenger again, after last year’s ordeal. But an hour after I dropped off my bags, I was leching outside the Sit-n-Go’s. Bunch of other pervs flitting around in anticipation, too. I wanted to play. Just one game.

The floor guy shuffled cards with different table stakes—125, 175, 200 smackers. Employing their idiosyncratic gambling spider-sense, the hopefuls registered for stakes that possessed the aura of good fortune. I recognized that feeling I first got in roller rinks and at high-school parties/shame cauldrons, where I’m going to dance but the song isn’t right. I need the right one, some beat-box/synth concoction devised by weirdos. This one is too slow. This one is too corny — and then Prince comes on. I laced up and skated to a $125 table. After a few rotations, I saw it was the cheapest.

The order of business was simple: ten seats, ten players, winner takes all. I was rusty, but after an hour of “Do I cut the green wire or the red wire?” it was down to me and an older white guy. He was in a rush: Want to chop? Split the take? We shook hands.

I was up $490, and my old friend down in the utility room flipped the switch: More. The rest of the night I told myself I was done. The next morning, too. But how was I supposed to kill some time while Coach and Lex ran through their levels? I was almost done reading I Wish I’d Never Had You: The Best of “The Family Circus.”

The word More, and also this bat-shit incantation over crazy-clown music: Gonna do it, take ’em down, grab the pot, win it all. Summon the waitress for a BAVERGE: self-delusion, neat. Gonna do it. I’m a fucking Sit-n-Go Master, I shoulda been playing these tables all along. My lucky number was $125. I played those stakes again. Lost. Back on the dance floor. Played $175—I won $490 at a $125 game, so if I win a $175 table, I’d pocket that much more. Take ’em down. It’ll make up for that $125 I just lost. Plus, I’m still ahead from that one win, so the game I just lost doesn’t really count. That’s a natural dip. Up, down, that’s how it goes, don’t sweat it. Grab the pot. Those crazy clowns are really going nuts on that xylophone! Lost another $175. Cool. Still ahead. I’m not the only one doing this nutty tango, with this frenetic monologue running in my head. There’s that scruffy Robotron with the backpack, and that woman in the baggy hoodie who nods at me when I play with her again, we’re pals now. Oh — she’s out again. She hit another Sit-n-Go the next table over. Win it all. I lose $175. Again $175. Again $175.

Stop.

This is insane. Feels great.

I should probably see how Coach is doing.

Whistling the Cold Deck Blues. Whittled down to $1,200 in chips, Perma-Sleeves on her left using simple gravity to suck chips to his person.

At break, Coach was vexed. Shaking her head. She told me about the pink note card she kept in her red purse for consultation in the bathroom: a list of dos and don’ts, her strategies and weaknesses set down by typewriter keys. Old-school. “And I just did that!” she said, referring to some unspecified prohibition. “It’s a tough table. I can go All In, but it’s going to be expensive.”

Gosh. If I had Magic Negro hands, I could touch her chips, multiply them in a flurry of sparks. But I didn’t have Magic Negro hands. Just hand hands.

“I’ve been in tougher spots,” she said.

Across the afternoon and a succession of table breaks, Matt had drifted farther and farther from the rails. I got a glimpse of him grinding. We arranged dinner by text. Him and some Math Players, at Martorano’s in the Rio.

Some of his pals were partaking of the Six Handed downstairs, others taking a day off. Picking their shots, sticking to their lucky games. Appetizers before the main course. Today I fancied myself some sort of Sit-n-Go monster because of one chopped pot — well, imagine how you feel toward a game after taking home hundreds of thousands of dollars. Matt’s posse returned to the WSOP salivating over this year’s $10K H.O.R.S.E. or the $5K Limit outing, predisposed by previous outcomes. This shirt got me laid last time, it’s sure to work again.

The Math Players had all cashed in the WSOP, in the Main Event or its preamble. Some, like Matt, had bracelets back home in the wall safe after winning events. Bill Chen, co-author with Jerrod Ankenman of the dense, next-level treatise The Mathematics of Poker, won the Six Handed in 2006, and bagged the $3K Limit Hold’em event the same year. He was sitting with Mike Fong in Martorano’s when I introduced myself as Matt’s friend.

Mike looked at Bill. “Isn’t it pronounced, MAYTROSE?”

Bill nodded. Yes, I’d been saying Matt’s name wrong. Their game philosophy emphasized solid foundations: Why start dinner with a faulty premise?

Mike wasn’t playing today. Chillaxing at Math House. Profiled in a 2010 ESPN article called “The Smartest House in Vegas,” Math House was their HQ when they convened for the six weeks of the World Series. Swimming pool and a hot tub if the right rental popped up. Which made this the Smartest Table at an Overpriced Italian Restaurant in Vegas, but for my presence, which dragged the IQ level down to your average tailgate in the parking lot of an Albuquerque roller-derby match after an all-day whippit party. Which are fun, just not overflowing with the gifted.

“WSOP is summer camp for internet dorks,” they told ESPN. Math House’s first incarnation was a room at the Rio in 2005. Six weeks in a hotel gets pricey. That math I could get my head around, as I spend a lot of time figuring out what I’d do if I had to go on the lam after witnessing a mob hit, or to flee intimacy. Then the boys scoped out joints with enough bedrooms to hold their gang: Matt, Bill, Mike, and the others who joined us for dinner, Terrence Chan, Matt Hawrilenko, and Kenny Shei. They had encountered one another’s screen names on theory-heavy boards like rec.gambling.poker, and got chummy in real-life casinos, drawn together by common card philosophy.

They lived all over the country, supporting themselves on poker or brain-busting jobs with titles like “strategic arbitrage.” The annual hangout allowed them to catch up, trade strategy, escape the gastronomical perils of the Strip, and engage in that holy ritual of poker players: the Replay.

The Replay. Everyone did it. Home players shouting back to the table when they got up for another beer, know-it-alls haranguing strangers in a casino cash game, pros kicking back between wars. What would you have done? How would you have played it?

The Replay wants to know, What if I hadn’t stepped on that butterfly? The one you crushed when you went back in time and then when you returned to the future everything had changed into something horrible. George Bush is in his fourth term, Diet New Coke the number-one pop in the land, and someone has invented “untethered telephones,” entirely cordless, so people can just call you up whenever they want, to talk about whatever stupid shit pops into their heads. Some butterfly!

A million alternate realities branch off from that botched play, but with the Replay you can correct the mistake and set history straight. Find the world where you survive to the next level, pump up the old blood sugar at dinner break, and go on a tear to win the National Championship. What if you’d bet the pot in Barcelona, mucked in Tahoe, shoved in Choctaw, had never stepped on that bug? Un-step on that little bastard and you finally get what you deserve: ESPN zooms in on your harem as they cheerlead from the rails of the Final Table; Jack Link’s retains you as a celeb spokesman in a series of post-ironic commercials; and a dozen bracelets spin on the special custom-made glass display in the master bedroom. Look: You’re putt-putting down the marble hallways of your McMansion on a limited-edition Ferrari-branded Segway, about to add another bracelet to the trove.

Lay your failures on the slab, let’s gather around to check out the entrance wounds. The Replay cannot exist without an audience so you put it to the learned assembled: What do you do? Scientific, but sometimes this review resembled the probe of a tongue on a rotten tooth, or a neurotic’s resurrection of primal hurts. I can remember a few botched hands — in between bites, Matt and his crew mulled over missteps from years back. That Deep Stack at the Bellagio in ’09, Day 2 of the ’06 WPT Championship. Supervillains they battle from time to time at this or that Million Dollar Game — how do you defeat his heat vision, her force field?

I tried to keep up.

“Do you call? I don’t know.”

“I lasted one level today.”

“I lasted one hand yesterday.”

“How’d you go out on Jacks?”

“He makes it a thousand — now what do you do?”

“What did he look like?”

“Fortyish white guy, nondescript.”

Perfect disguise!

“From a value standpoint, you can fold to the—”

“Are you getting much of this?” Matt asked.

“Not at all.”

I would never understand the game the way they did, no matter how much I studied and hit the tables. The part of the brain these guys used for cards, I used to keep meticulous account of my regrets. So many to sort and catalogue. Like when I meant to DVR the final episode of that reality show The Last Time I Was Happy, where contestants are interviewed on their deathbeds about the titular moment, the “winner” being the person with the longest dry spell. The hockey game ran late, and it only taped the first twenty minutes. I never found out who won. And that time upstate when I stumbled on an antique store where everything looked as if it had been left out in the rain. I like to buy furniture that reminds me of myself, I don’t know. The store had a vintage nineteenth-century posture harness for sale, the kind with the mother-of-pearl adjustment knobs and leather braces, and I was sure it would straighten me out despite the condemnations of the so-called medical establishment. I went back the next day and it was gone. Never hesitate when it comes to nineteenth-century posture harnesses. And when I left for the World Series of Poker without hugging the kid one more time. That was a big one. These things add up.

That’s why I had so much trouble storing all the new poker lore from books and conversations and time at the tables: no room. Given the choice between tracking real-life bad beats and poker-table bad beats, poker jockeys pick the more lucrative endeavor. They don’t give gold bracelets for regrets.

In America.

There was one moment of intersection, when the topic of hate-watching came up. “Why do you watch TV shows — and keep watching them — if you don’t like them?” Terrence asked.

Simple: Some days, all you have is gazing upon horror, and the small comfort of being surprised that it is not yours.

Middle of summer, but you could hear the leaves rustling. There was a hint of autumn as they reminisced. The specter of death, and not just from the cholesterol grenades coming out of the kitchen. The Math Players were cutting back on the poker, moving on. Mike was starting a new computer business in Cambridge. Matt Matros missed his wife, plus he had a novel to bake. He didn’t stay the full six weeks anymore. Matt Hawrilenko would announce his retirement after this WSOP, sucked up by the Great Whale of grad school, before which so many were but drifting plankton.

Terrence, for his part, had been concentrating on his new mixed-martial-arts career. You know, Brazilian jujitsu, Muay Thai boxing, Western boxing and wrestling, things of that sort. The dude was cut. That mind-body problem I attempted to solve in my sessions with Kim Albano? Terrence had found the answer. As he explained in the PokerListings.com webvid about his course correction: “Even though it’s maybe physically unhealthy to take a lot of blows to the face, it’s in a way very spiritually healthy, and it really teaches you a lot about yourself.”

Life! What Inscrutable Card Shall Ye Throw Next Upon the Soft Felt of Our Days? Six weeks plus six weeks plus six weeks: a section of your life lived in Vegas. Weeks that accumulated into a year under the accursed fried-chicken-joint heat lamp that is the desert sun. It aged you. The boys were getting on, some of them were even in their late thirties. “I’m routinely the oldest player at the tables,” Matt said.

“We were the youngest, now we’re the oldest,” Kenny affirmed. Robotrons to the left of me, Robotrons to the right.

The check arrived and they made a deck for credit-card roulette. How it worked was you shuffled the cards, pulled one out, and its owner picked up the entire tab. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Matt said. I didn’t. Lose this one, it’s okay, we’re all friends here, it evens out over time. Over these six weeks. Or the next time they play in AC or at Foxwoods. Next year’s WSOP. If they came back. It’s not like it used to be.

Then it was back to work. The next level of Event 16 awaited. I said goodbye to the Math Players on the floor of the Rio, at the head of the corridor that led to the convention hall. The other runners streaming past us back to the tables. One of my dinner companions invited me on a strip-club excursion. I demurred, spoiled by the erotic revues of Anhedonia, where the performers remain fully clothed but get emotionally naked, delivering monologues about their top-shelf disappointments, and times when they were almost happy. Hard to enjoy American-style strip clubs after that. Once you go bleak, you never go back.

The cards were in the air again. Thirty-seven minutes into Level 6, I checked on Coach.

There was an empty seat.

We all go out sooner or later.

I was back in NYC when Event 16 finally ended two days later. Hitting refresh-refresh on PokerNews.com, grabbing livestream bits on my phone while I walked down the street.

“Matt Matros is a Yale graduate. He’s working on a novel,” said Announcer #1.

“He’s also a very sweet guy,” said Announcer #2.

Matt was still in, ensconced at the Final Table when I got on the subway. When I emerged at street level, he’d won his third bracelet and half a million dollars. “It’s beyond incredible, it’s ridiculous,” he told PokerNews correspondent Kristy Arnett, who interviewed him at his winning seat.

“You sound very humble, but come on,” Kristy said. “Three years in a row. You’re one of three people to ever do it in the last thirty years. Obviously, you’re doing something right.”

“I’m not saying I don’t play well — I do. But I’ve been incredibly lucky these last three years at the Rio.” He paused. “And my dad wants everyone to know my name is pronounced MAYTROSE.”

Foundations. Master the foundations, and let us proceed from there.

Another jump: six months later. December 2012, Atlantic City. You with me? I drove down with Matt to sample circuit season. The six weeks of the World Series are one season, and the circuit tournaments, Poker Tour pit stops, and assorted megacasino events are another. Maybe you stick to the East Coast, or the Deep South, or never stray east of the Rockies, but you’re on the hunt nine months of the year, whether you’re a guru pocketing Player Points and big cashes, or a first-timer just learning the ways of the Noble Hustle.

It was raining on the trip down, the sky depleted of color. Matt was wrung out as well. After snagging that bracelet in last summer’s WSOP, he was only hitting two or three fall events, a handful in the spring. Cutting back. He’d had a nice run, as usual. Since he started playing big tournaments, there’d only been two occasions when he was down for the year. Still tired, though. “I’m not tired about poker concepts and new ideas and discussing poker with other really good players,” he said. “I still enjoy that aspect of it.” But parking your butt in brick-and-mortar tournaments when you know what everyone’s going to do before they do it? When there’s only ten minutes every two hours when you’re using your brain? It’s dull, man. “I always wanted to try professional poker for a little while. I didn’t think I was still going to be doing this when I was thirty-five. This is not supposed to have worked out as well as it has.”

He’d rather be home with his wife, Ivy, instead of dragging his ass up and down the northeast corridor again. Rather write, work on his novel. He’d been knocking out his monthly column for Card Player magazine. Sample topics: “Think the Unthinkable, Do the Unthinkable: What Makes Great Players Great?” and “America’s Love of Bluffing.” Also on the agenda: agitating for the return of online poker in Washington Post op-eds. The only time I saw Matt get tilty was when he talked about the criminalization of his cherished cards.

Online poker excised the dull parts. Everyone had bad runs when they lost twenty tournaments in a row. “Tournament poker is high variance, as we say.” You’re up, down, and the number of bodies in a large tourney meant you weren’t going to cash every time. No matter how good you were. But play thirty tournaments online a day, and those bad patches were truncated instead of stretching over a tortuous year.

The Illegal Gambling Business Act “was enacted in 1970 to crack down on organized crime,” he wrote in the Post. “It was never intended to prevent ordinary people from playing poker.” Unlike, say, craps, poker is a game of skill, he argued. A constant assessment of risk versus reward. Like Wall Street. If it were as random as roulette, good players wouldn’t make more money than bad players over time. But they do.

Fighting the government was hard work — the Anhedonian Embassy had been disputing $60K in jaywalking tickets for years, cultural misunderstandings and whatnot.

“Our government disdains a risk-reward game that millions of Americans play,” Matt wrote, “then bails out Wall Street sharks who bet unfathomable sums. I can only conclude that this contradictory stance has little to do with the skills required for each pursuit. No, for some reason, lawmakers just don’t like poker.”

Not that online lacked regrettable qualities. Collusion: How do you know that faceless users Bustanut69 and Lickylicky aren’t scheming with each other on the phone, or sitting in each other’s laps? That was an example of user misbehavior. On the other side of the screen, the moderators of Ultimate Bet abused their sys-op privileges to peek at players’ hands and go pirating. “It was completely obvious they were a bunch of crooks,” Matt said, “and anyone who played there was out of their minds.”

Ultimate Bet faded, and Full Tilt Poker emerged with their own brand of mercurial ethics. They’d permit users to hit tourneys before their funds cleared and wager with cash they didn’t have. With credit cards. Some of the money was vapor. Vapor or no, it circulated. Affiliate programs rewarded those who brought new fish to the site. More money spreading around. It didn’t help matters that Full Tilt neglected to keep a firewall between the company’s operating funds and players’ money. The biggest rake in history. How did the owners spend this big pile of cash? The usual story: fancy cars, fancier women, beef jerky.

Then came Black Friday. The Feds put the kibosh on all online operations but saved their choice indictments for Full Tilt. According to the government, the company — fronted by some of the biggest names in poker, the dudes who had inspired most of these online players to take up the game in the first place — had defrauded its users out of $300 million. “Sorry, your account has been frozen.” Matt knew people who’d had 70 or 80 percent of their bankroll tied up in the electronic ether — gone. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Paper millionaires, teenagers who’d never had a bank account in their life, reset to zero. Middle-aged guys grinding sixty hours a week, supporting their families on the fifty grand they eked out each year, were suddenly without jobs. That’s how they paid their mortgages, with a full house here and river bluff there.

The national recession had caught up to organized poker. There was dark talk about suicides. Rumors. No one really wanted to talk about it. Eighteen months after Black Friday, a lot of that money was still in the hands of the government, who wanted to get paid first before they tackled the matter of reimbursements.

Adapt or die. Just as the cowboys had to readjust to the young gunslingers and their new loose-aggressive poker or hang up their holsters, the Robos needed to learn to handle brick-and-mortar casinos. As we drove to AC, Matt’s disquisition on the State of Poker Today darkened the already overcast sky.

This Harrah’s circuit event was eleven days long, with twelve big-ticket games and assorted remora Mega Satellites and Turbo Mega Satellites. The biggie this weekend was the $1,600 buy-in Main Event. Some six hundred regional players hopping on buses, driving down, getting a ride with Mom. The prize pool just shy of a million dollars.

Helen and Lex were there, too. Friday night they were playing a $200 Mega Satellite to chute into Saturday’s biggie. As usual, the top 10 percent of the satelliters got a ticket to next day’s event. Months earlier, Coach and her hubby had failed to make it into the WSOP Main Event. Now, in winter, the carousel had started up again. Like the thousands of poker legions across the world, they hoped to be in Vegas when the music stopped.

Okay — I’d been spoiled by the show-biz accoutrements of the Main Event. The TV cameras, the B-list celebs, the Poker Kitchen. Harrah’s Atlantic City WSOP stage was your typical meeting space in a mid-price hotel, windowless and dingy. Today it’s poker. Next week it’ll be a Chia Pet regional sales conference, a franchise meeting for Bespoke Snuggies, or an all-day Just Be Yourself self-actualization seminar, for which the doors will probably be chained shut until you sign up for the pricey Steps 1-12 workbooks. Bonus if you bring a friend, like Full Tilt.

The Final Table of Event 7, No Limit Hold’em, unfolded on a tiny area cordoned by scuffed brass rails. For Just Be Yourself, that’s where participants will beat each other with foam bats while screaming “Can you hear me now, Mommy!” but the action now was droopy-lidded. The long slog. I plopped down in the modest audience seats while the satty players queued up to register. They were young and scruffy, day bags slung over their shoulders. They might be crashing overnight and playing tomorrow — or heading home in an hour. It had been a long time since I’d been in the presence of non-Vegas players. These guys, I recognized them by their groans.

After a crappy meal downstairs, Helen and Lex grabbed their table draws. Slim food picking on this side of Harrah’s, but they had enough fuel to get them to midnight. If they didn’t bust.

As usual, they classed up the joint. Lex joined his table in a smart charcoal jacket and blue oxford. Coach opted for posh-ninja mode, black sweater and black pants. Only the moonlight glinting off her red fingernails would give her away, as she garroted mofos amid the mounting levels. Like the fanny-packed, beer-gutted others filling the tables, Coach and her husband wanted to place at the top of the satellite and keep the 1,600 bucks for Event 10 in their pockets. Would they fork it over if they didn’t make it tonight? The eternal calculus of the Noble Hustle, where bankroll meets the reality of how the cards are running. I watched one hopeful pad around in a daze after being flushed out of the 5:00 p.m. Mega. He walked to the doors, walked back. Still time to enter the 7:00 p.m. satellite. “Do I want to do this again?” he said aloud.

He hiked his bag on his shoulder and reenlisted.

I caught up with Matt in a Bobby Flay joint over in the Borgata, where we dined with Action Bob and Lana O’Brien. Bob was the star of the three-act tweet-play I related earlier. He lived in nearby Barnegat, New Jersey, with his wife and kids. Typical modern dad. When his family sleeps, he’ll come to the plush Borgata Poker Room and play $40/$80 Limit, rising early every weekend to fleece the “tired, drunk, angry” who have been playing all night and are trying to get even. “It’s worth getting up at five,” he said with a grin. Play in the morning, he can hang out with the fam in the afternoon.

Lana was a young colleague of Matt’s from CardRunners.com, the poker academy. Currently Matt’s apprentice and trying to step up her game, although time was running out. She was pregnant with her second kid and starting to show. Maternity leave from Hold’em loomed. If the online sites were up, she could telecommute, but …

Lobster and Crispy Squid Salad. Amid the Flaying, Matt, Lana, and Action Bob partook of the Replay. Dug into the archives, recalling a multitude of crime-scene variables — position, stack size, the opponent’s preferred range of hands. Crucial points of personal history — was that before said supervillain stopped drinking, or where they were still an ogre at the table? The action sequences of their poker movie, on slow-mo to admire the F/X work. The supporting cast had taken their marks last month at the Fall Open, and would return to deliver their lines next month at the Winter Open. Character actors too colorful to be out of work long.

How did they keep track of it all? Those old battles.

Action Bob shrugged. “You get used to it.” He checked his watch. He had to leave the table for a few minutes, to call home but also for face time at his $40/$80. Dinner break, yeah, but he had to pop in for two hands so he didn’t lose his seat. His kids gotta eat, too.

Wild Mushroom Mashed Potatoes with Truffle Oil, Spice-Rubbed Rib Eye. A nice steak before they played tomorrow at Harrah’s. No satellites for them. The numbers didn’t work out. Why spend ten hours grinding when the 1,600-buck entry fee is just the price of doing business? A satellite for a $10K tourney was doable, in a time-money calculation. Not that they’d do it, but at $10K the numbers started to make sense. Sometimes you force down a Southwestern Chicken Wrap, next time it’s steak. Bankroll is all.

Plus, satties are boring, they all agreed. You’re angling to get into the top ten, not money. You play differently, the way you adjust for Six Handed versus a ten-seat game. “Fold, fold, fold, fold,” Lana said, and wait for a good shot.

Better to eat a nice meal, rest up, and hope for a good table. “Last year, my opening table was the best I ever had,” Action Bob said. Wistful.

“They were good players?” Must be exciting, entering into combat with your peers. A worthy challenge.

“He means, great meaning bad,” Matt said. Like when Run-D.M.C. says, “Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good.” May the Poker Gods gift us some terrible players, some real bozos, so we can make some money.

Lana wasn’t entering Event 10 on Saturday, but the Ladies Event that ran at the same time. She was down to play some cards. Eager and full of cheer. Since training with Matt, she’d achieved a new level in her play. “Whenever you can get up and play poker, it’s a great day.”

“I used to be like her,” Matt said.

Back at Harrah’s, 10:30 p.m. The satellite had dwindled to two tables, eighty-five gladiators culled to eighteen. And there were Helen and Lex, still in it. Sitting next to each other. Married couples were rare in poker. But here they were, might as well have been sitting on the couch back home, thanks to the accident of table breakage. It was adorable, but I didn’t tell them that until the break. I didn’t want to mess up their camouflage.

Coach was up to $38K, and Lex hanging on at $15K. Shove time for the man, once he picked his opening.

“Will you take Lex out if you have to?” I asked.

“Definitely,” Coach said.

Lex smiled. “Ask us later about the Kings versus Aces story.”

The game had decelerated, this close to the bubble. Bubble Boy, where art thou? Fold, fold, fold, fold. If Coach and Lex outlasted the next clutch of players, they were in tomorrow’s $1,600 game. They ran alternative scenarios, like everyone else in the third-floor ballroom. If Lex busted, there was an 11:00 a.m. Turbo game, and if he cashed there, he could make the second, 7:00 p.m. start of Event 10. If that didn’t work out …

Coach, for her part, might fork over for the Main if she crapped out tonight. The Ladies Event was cheaper, but the idea incensed her. “That’s sexist!” she said. “I’m upset. They assume or whatever that women will not be in the Main Event — why else would they schedule it at the same time?” Yep, if the Mega didn’t pan out, she’d pay her way in. She was still up for the year, cashes-wise. The price of doing business.

Lex busted out a few seats from the bubble, at fourteen.

He hit Replay and nodded to himself. “I think that was the right move.” He joined me on the rails. To Turbo or not to Turbo?

Eighteen to fourteen to twelve seats. Almost there. At midnight Coach was up to $70K, battling.

I was tired. And I didn’t belong. These people were scientists. I departed to play $2/$4 No Fold’em Hold’em downstairs with my people: the Methy Mikes, the shivering elderly, and the drunken fifty-somethings in town for AC shenanigans. Back with poker’s hoi polloi, with our tepid raises and sloppy calls. Adele sang “Rolling in the Deep” and CeeLo crooned “Fuck You,” just as they had during my Vegas WSOP jaunt a year and a half ago. The same pop songs still circulating, the communal soundtrack of a life half lived. It was safe down there with the dopes.

Outside Harrah’s the next morning, a brief scene:

Sedans and town cars double-parked, the valet is scurrying around trying to sort it out. A quartet of weekending sixty-somethings, three men and one woman, mill around a white Honda. It’s unclear if they are arriving or departing. We know why everyone comes here, but we all leave under different circumstances.

“C’mon, I want to gamble,” says the man at the center of the tussle. Unsteady on his feet but full of energy. Bristling.

“You can’t stand up,” says one of his companions.

“C’mon,” the belligerent old dude says. He gets one foot in the backseat of the Honda and then reconsiders. His companions have their hands on him.

“You’ll fall again.”

“C’MON. I WANT TO GAMBLE. GET A WHEELCHAIR!”

They continue to try and pack him in the car. The woman paces back and forth, a spouse unsure what her role is in this fight. Intervene or no, what are the repercussions? After all these years the same dilemma.

“C’MON! GET A WHEELCHAIR!”

I’d seen a lot of gambling in the last year and a half. Exciting gambling. Foolhardy gambling. Gambling as an art form. What this old dude enacted was fodder for the pamphlets and PSAs the casinos give you as they happily hand over chips. Another great gambling truth. But I’ll leave that for other correspondents.

Later. Saturday afternoon, the kickoff of Harrah’s Main Event. Lex was playing his Turbo. I found Matt, cheerful in his crimson zippy, and wished him luck. He was more upbeat than he’d been on the ride down, perhaps revitalized by his night playing Open Face Chinese Poker in an amigo’s comped hotel room. It was a new game, the new cool hot rod among the gambling set, and it was his first time kicking the tires. Matt may have been burned out and preoccupied, but he perked up when he explained the rules. “You get dealt thirteen cards and you have to set your hand in such a way that your worst hand is a three-card hand in the front, then your second-best hand is a five-card hand in the middle, and then your best hand is a five-card hand in the back …” I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. But I was glad to see he still loved cards, despite his late uneasiness with success.

I cruised between the tables and discovered Action Bob ready for battle, with his Gigantor cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, sunglasses, and earbuds. He waved, grinning. Across from him sat Coach in a turquoise blouse with gold flower petals. Just another Saturday afternoon of cards with some of the neighbors on Oak Street.

I don’t know if their table was bad meaning bad or bad meaning good, but the cards snapped and the gamblers hunkered, the million-dollar winners and the diligent grinders, the jowly veterans and the pimply first-timers. Any one of them could win it all, and no one deserved it more than anyone else.

Let’s leave them there, as they wait for the next hand, the one that will change it all. I have a game to return to myself.

What do you say we see what happened that one time I went to Vegas?