The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death

Every Ante Is a Soul

Like my first sexual experience, my time at the World Series of Poker didn’t last long … is how I would’ve started this section if I’d been eliminated the first day. But I wasn’t. Suck it, Entropy. We have an appointment, my old friend, but not today.

I was up at 5:00 a.m. We have a saying back home: “Wake up in the grip of terror, things will get worse before they get better.” (It is also the title of one of our most beloved children’s books.) Scratch the wake-up call, which is no way to start the day, wherever you come from. Why so cold and distant, hotel robot voice? “This is your 6:00 a.m. wake-up call.” What’s wrong with “Go get ’em, Tiger!” or “You look sexy when you sleep”?

Dig if you will a picture: Sunday at noon. I was finally able to register after the accountants found my check. My table draw was Yellow 163, Seat 9. Pavilion. When I returned half an hour before start time, the room was mostly full, the players warily clocking their tables, approaching, backing off, like guests at a reception waiting for the signal to dig into the canapés. No one wanted to be the first to go out, and no one even wanted to be the first to sit down.

The announcer bid us to join the dealers, who had been at their stations, bow-tied and patient. Terse greetings all around. “Hey.” “How’s it going?” Mostly fifty-something white guys, with two youngsters in Seats 5 and 6. Yes, the young guys owned the game now — the past couple of winners have been under thirty. Some of them probably even did yoga.

They played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I stood out of politeness. One does not often hear the national anthem of the Republic of Anhedonia at a sporting event. The so-called “lyrics” consist mostly of grunts, half-muttered curses, and long, drawn-out sighs, depending on the particular sufferings you’re cultivating that day. Still, it never fails to lift the spirit, however faintly, we agree on this if nothing else.

You don’t want to see our flag, trust me.

Phil Hellmuth, superplayer from the Silver Age, and “Playmate Holly Madison” started the tourney with, “Shuffle up and deal!” The cricket orchestra started up. I wouldn’t have minded “Shuffle through your mistakes and tremble!” but tradition is tradition.

The blinds were $50 and $100. One of the young players at my table, the Guy in the Teal Hoodie, started off energetically. He had the demeanor of a college altrock DJ or someone building cybernetic organisms in the garage, and took down pots with quiet efficiency. Was he one of the young players Matt had warned me about the day before?

I’d asked Matt if he’d seen any “new moves” this year, the latest gizmos, which was very silly because I barely knew the old moves, whether we were talking Hold’em or the Cabbage Patch.

“These young players,” he said, “they’re four-betting with nothing. Five-betting.” He said young players the way World War II grunts used to say Hun bastards. The Big Blind is considered the first bet, a raise on that is the second bet, and a re-raise on top of that is a three-bet. Pretty normal stuff before the flop, the first three communal cards. In his Little Books of Poker, Phil Gordon repeatedly warned, “Beware the Fourth Bet — it means Aces.” Lemme tell you, son, in my day, four-betting used to mean something. Nowadays, these young players were four-betting, five-betting helter-skelter, who knew what these crazy kids had in their hands, they could be raising with shit, rags, 7–2. The preflop four-bet was a relatively new weapon in the arsenal, but that didn’t mean I had to back down when I had decent cards. Matt told me to trust my instincts. “If you have a good read on someone, five-bet them. If they’re bluffing, they’ll fold.” Okay! I told him I was going to play tight, try to make it to Day 3, not misplay my premium hands …

“Do you want to do that,” Matt asked, “play it safe?” I was here to write an article, but was that all there was to it? “I think you’ll be most satisfied,” he said, “if at some point, you suddenly have a read on someone: ‘This guy doesn’t have anything’ or ‘This guy has something.’ One way or another, you’re going to have a read, and you’re going to do something that you didn’t expect you were going to do before, right or wrong.” Something new in your game expressing itself. “Obviously it’s better if you’re right, but even if you’re wrong, it can be really satisfying to just have a read, a feeling, and go with it. Your gut.”

I could play it safe, or I could really play. Matt was asking me, Why are you here? It was the Vegas question, namely: What the fuck are you doing in Vegas? As usual in this town, whether you gambled away the mortgage money, fucked a stranger, or went to see Carrot Top, you answered in your actions.

There were three empty seats. Brighton Beach eventually sat on my left. He was an intense, twenty-something dude with a strong cut-off-your-feet-and-mail-them-to-your-fiancée vibe. Eventually Seat 8 showed up. The dealer looked at his ID and said, “Oh, shit!”

One thing you do not want to hear is a dealer say “Oh, shit!” when a player joins your table. He was wearing a red World Poker Tour jacket with … was that his name embroidered on the left breast? This motherfucker was so bad, he had a goddamned monogrammed World Poker Tour jacket! Floor managers and players from other tables moseyed over to say hello. He was on my right, and if he went crazy with six-betting or nine-betting or who knew what, I could make a quick muck. Horrified, nonetheless.

I had enough chips to withstand some hits, power in the forward deflectors. We started with $30K, 300 Big Blinds. Plenty of M. “It’s all about M,” Coach had told me during our initial training session, and it was one of the first things I came to understand, slowly, the hard way, during my AC runs, the secret narrative as I passed through levels. M is how much life you have in you, how much you can take. To calculate M, you add the Big Blind, the Small Blind, and all the antes you have to pay into the pot each round, and the sum is how much it costs to play one orbit ’round the table. M, for Paul Magriel, who first articulated it, but also M for the Wave of Mutilation.

Above 20M, twenty rounds, you can play your fancy-move poker. But once you dip below that, your spirit is draining away each round, and you have to start playing more aggressively, play a wider range of cards, swipe some blinds, so that you are not erased from existence. Existence, because this is life we’re talking about here, how much can you take before you break. Dear reader, I hope you’re operating at a big M most of the time, I really do. Things are easier that way. But then sometimes things go wrong — you lose your job, get some sort of health issue named after a foreigner, the kid won’t say why he doesn’t want you at the wedding, and the angry voices in your head are now using Auto-Tune. You take a tumble in a thousand ways, big and small: This the Wave of Mutilation, gobbling up your reality. Replay the hand — is there something you could have done differently to keep things the way they were, something you should have said to keep them from walking away? It doesn’t matter, the dealer’s shuffling again. You dwindle to 6M and 3M and 2M and you can’t pay the rent next month, nobody’s returning your e-mails. Things are desperate. This is death. You don’t know how you’re going to survive. And the truth is, you’re not going to. Next level, the blinds will go up, and up, and up.

That’s M.

Seat 7 never showed and was blinded away until a floor manager removed the remnants of the stack. What came up for him or her to blow the $10K entrance fee? I hoped they were tied up in a dungeon somewhere. Not a serial-killer dungeon but one of the tony thousand-bucks-an-hour variety you can find only in Vegas, and they were having a pleasant time at the lashes.

Coach gave me a simple order for the first three levels: “Make it to dinner.” You can sort players into dependable categories. Tight is conservative. Loose plays a lot of hands. Loose-Aggressive plays a lot of hands, plays a lot of shit, but will bully you with betting. At the first table, I played something that might be called Tight-Incompetent. I folded out of turn, tried to bet 2.5x the BB, per the table custom, but misidentified the chips and put in less than 2x, which was a no-no. I made each mistake only once (for a change; see Dating Failures of, in my index for contrary indicators) but I’d marked myself as the weak player. At Yellow 163, I got my nicest run of cards, QQ, JJ, flopped an Ace-high flush, but there wasn’t a lot of action. I wasn’t down, but I wasn’t fattening my stack.

I heard the cries from the other tables as All Ins began and people busted out. I saw my first right before the end of Level 1, when Brighton Beach, who was down to $10K, shoved. He was getting a massage. I’d seen someone on Coach’s poker feed say that hubris is the short stack ordering a massage. Did I mention the masseuses? There were teams of them, ladies in white polos hoisting their cushions, rubbing lotion into hairy necks. Brighton Beach shoved his stack into the pot, and a minute later he was out. I wondered if his rubdown would be prorated. Everybody shook their heads and checked out their own stack. Chill wind as the Grim Reaper strolled past. Anyone could be next.

Level 1 ended. The line for the men’s was a bit long, as Coach had warned. The smokers beat it out to the patio. I hadn’t seen that many smokers in years. As I hustled back to my room, I googled the dude in the World Poker Tour jacket. He was Matt Savage, proselytizer for the New Poker. I’d been following his Twitter feed for weeks — as a director of pro tournaments and commentator on the TV show, he answered questions about rules and regulations. He wasn’t Godzilla, but I was still glad to be downwind from his betting. In my room, I wrote some notes, reviewed my tip sheets, and made it back in time for Level 2. Breathe in, breathe out.

Enough people had busted that the floor managers started breaking up tables, rerouting players on the outskirts of the room to the empty seats at the center. Day 1D was a contracting, dying star. We gathered our chips and dispersed into the void. I saw Savage every once in a while during the following levels. We waved. The next time I spoke to the Guy in the Teal Hoodie, it was at the end of Day 6. I said hi, weirdly eager and proud that one of the fellows from the first table was still around.

“I remember you,” he said, with a mellow drawl. “You were in Seat 9. You were a good player.”

Too kind. “How are you doing? Still in?”

“I’m chip leader,” he said. “I have 12.8 million.” His name was Ryan Lenaghan, an online player who had discovered he liked casino play. He finished in eighteenth place.

My second table was Black 63, Seat 10. I have been invited to someone’s house for Thanksgiving and arrived with my sweet potato pie in the aftermath of a big argument. What happened here? There’s carnage everywhere. Two young guys would nurse $12K for the rest of the night, sober play that was a reversal of whatever had decimated them. Yeah, something big went down before I got there. Daddy’s drinking again, Gabby got her nethers pierced.

No one seemed to like the loud Aussie in Seat 4. He’d raked some pots and when he left for cigarette breaks, everybody made fun of him. He looked like the cow-faced droog from A Clockwork Orange, completing the effect with a weird hat his shag peeked out of. The table captain was named Marc Podell. He was a fellow New Yorker in his early forties, and he made a steady accumulation for the rest of the day. He was getting cards — he had no problem showing us why the other guy should have folded — but he was also outplaying us. Half the time he was getting a rubdown (he knew the masseuse from Main Events past, they set up appointments by text), and the other half he was calling the raiser and showing the better hand. The Aussie was the other big stack at the table, and Marc tried to goad him into going on tilt. It worked.

“How many chips do you have?” I started hearing that a lot more, this locker-room check: Who has the bigger dick? It was posturing, but also a serious consideration of how many chips this would cost you if it went south. I got more JJs and played them, a pair here and there. It was a tight table. No one wanted to go home on the first day.

Some players sell “pieces” of themselves, where if you pay a percentage of their entrance fee, you get a cut of the winnings. If any. Whole online trading exchanges were devoted to this human capital. I wasn’t too keen on buying and selling people — legacy of slavery and whatnot — and this lot struck me as guys who were gambling with their own money. I never saw a four-bet or five-bet. I was playing tight, too, and should have started running a bluff here and there now that I’d “established a solid image at the table,” as they say in the books. But I held back. Establishing table image is like when you stab the leader of the Aryan Assholes in the neck with a fork your first day in prison: telling ’em how you do it back home.

I was still stuck in playing good cards well, don’t get all crazy mode. I began running with my interpretation of Matt’s reads, mixed in with some tidbits from The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. Coach had told me to read it, after she’d heard about it on Oprah.

The Gift of Fear wasn’t a poker book but a self-helper about identifying encounters that might escalate into violence. How do you know when someone is out to harm you? Use your animal intuition, developed by millions of years of evolution. Confronting a possible full house wasn’t the same thing as being followed down a deserted street at night, but Coach had discovered poker applications: “When it comes to the game, your first instinct is usually right.” Danger! Danger! Was it counterintuitive to apply lessons from a women’s self-defense book to the World Series of Poker? Yes. But if modernity has taught us anything, it’s that you don’t fuck with Oprah.

Breathe in, hold it, breathe out. I made it to dinner, per Coach’s order. Three levels. Her other order? “Go to the seafood place. Get the swordfish.”

The line was too big, so I got some cruddy sandwich and ate at the Sports Book. I called Coach to debrief, told her about Matt Savage and the sleepy play at my first table.

“They’re calling that section ‘Mellow Yellow,’ ” Helen said, chuckling. She’d sworn off tournament news after her less-than-satisfying WSOP visit weeks ago. But now she was hunkered over her poker feed, reading players’ tweets from the tables, checking out the competition: She had a player in the game.

Her order for Levels 4 and 5 was simple. Get Bagged and Tagged — crawl to the end of the day, write my name on a plastic bag, and drop my chips inside for safekeeping until Day 2B. It almost seemed possible. This horror show ran seven days. Early on, you wanted to stay cool and keep out of expensive confrontations, but you also needed to feed the stack. The stack is hungry.

One of the players in my cheapo home game was Nathan, whose friend Steven Garfinkle was in town for the WSOP. A professor of ancient history at Western Washington University, Steven called himself a “committed amateur,” as opposed to a pro, although plenty of pros wouldn’t mind a tenth-place finish in the World Series, which is how far he made it in 2007. Yes, he’d fed his stack that year. “You can’t win it the first day,” Steven told me. But, he added, “You can’t fold your way into money.” You gotta play.

His stay was being comped by the Aria, one of the new Cosmo-style dreadnoughts moored in the CityCenter complex. The Aria was more than twenty stories tall, a fortification dwarfing the old standbys of the Strip in the manner of the other upstarts. (“These young players,” says Circus Circus, “they do it differently.”) On the casino floor, tiny lights blinked in the walls, I walked on silvered floors, and techno music summoned me to this or that pleasure zone around the next bend. A real Logan’s Run building — outside the walls, my world was ruined, the Library of Congress half buried in sand.

Inside Aria, however, everything was swell, except for the recent outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, which lent a “Masque of the Red Death” air to the proceedings. On the night of 1C, I tagged along for dinner at Jean Georges. Comped! I asked Steven what a good goal for the first day was.

A good day is tripling, he told me, but hitting the room’s average is okay, too. There comes a point in the event, Steven said, when “The Big Blind is someone who was here.” Day 6 started with a $30K Big Blind, which was how many chips you got for your buy-in. Thirty thousand to start off the hand, it represented a human soul who had looked at their table draw the first day and said, I feel lucky. Just like you had. And then there is a point, he continued, “when the ante is someone who was here.” This was all that remained of a person, their buy-in, and the Final Table rolled them in their hands and tossed them to the felt. Like gods. Coach had said that her World Series time was “heaven,” and here it was: the big pot as afterlife, containing the spirits of the eliminated players.

Take, for example, the tall, thin man in Seat 2, who arrived at Black 63 from a broken table. He had long dark hair and wire frames with light blue lenses. Throw in the black clothes, and if he declared that his job title was “Master of Illusions,” taught Criss Angel all he knew, I’d have believed him.

He and Marc Podell, the guy who continued to command our table into the late hours, recognized each other from “around”—life in the circuit badlands. He was supertight, a clam’s clam, this older gentleman. I couldn’t really see him around the curve of the table, and he rarely played a hand, so I only paid attention to him when he mixed it up. Which he finally did a couple of hours after dinner break. He went for it — shoved All In before the flop. Marc called him. AA versus KK. Marc had the two Aces. The man went poof, rabbit in a hat.

“That was sad,” I said. I don’t think “sad” is a poker term, but there it was. I’d barely spoken all day except to say, “Raise.” The Master of Illusion had been sitting so quietly for so long, mum, watching, waiting for precisely a hand like KK. KK — of course you’re going to go for it. And just like that, he was atomized, called up to the Big Stack in the Sky.

“I’ve seen him play before,” Marc said, grabbing the chips. “I knew he had something good.” But not good enough for Marc’s Aces. He casually mentioned that this day’s haul might be larger than his starting day in 2008, when he cashed in hundredth place. He ran over the rest of the table, it was our fault. Spend that money, work at your craft for years and years and finally make it to the Main Event: People were scared. What are you going to tell them at the water cooler if you go out the first day? Poker studs loathe “nits”—tight-playing schlubs who never mix it up, only betting monster hands. A nit is a lowly person, and here we were, a nit infestation. But I knew this, too: We were nits who wanted to be men.

I was definitely taking a grifter’s approach to my table image. This wasn’t the long con, though — I should have loosened up my betting once I saw I was playing with a bunch of Tentative Johnnys.

But I didn’t.

LEVEL 4: $27K

LEVEL 5: $23K

One improvement: mother hen-ing my blinds. I’d considered blinds and antes like income tax, what you have to pay to be a member of society. To fund pothole repair and corrupt, no-bid government contractors. But blinds are money. They are meaningful. They add up. Matt told me a lot of players nowadays preferred to use your number of Big Blinds in their actuarial tables of life expectancy, instead of M. After these crippling levels, I got it. There were two guys at Black 63 who were statues, except when targeting undefended Big Blinds. Swipers, after Dora the Explorer’s klepto nemesis. They preyed on blinds, scavenging to survive. When the latest swiper joined our table, he had a big stack of green chips, the ante chips. “That’s how you know,” Coach had told me.

I noticed the pattern. I was folding too easily when I was Big Blind and held shit cards in my hand. The swipers had pegged me as an easy mark. The swiper on Marc’s left — he kept farting or burping, from Marc’s wrinkled-nose rebukes — perked up when he was on the button. My BBs were easy pickings.

I finally started playing back at him, shooing flies away from my hamburger in a crappy diner. He stopped. Lesson: If you’re going to view blinds as taxes, be a Republican about them.

Level 5 was over. We bagged our chips in ziplocks, wrote our names on the plastic. It was 12:45 a.m. I was a lump of quivering human meat, but somehow I’d made it through Day 1 with $23K. Half the average stack. The next day, the blinds would escalate to $250 and $500, with $50 antes. I whipped out the abacus: I was at 19M. On my way upstairs, I bought a pouch of Jack Link’s Beef Jerky. No mere marketing ploy, the easy-seal bag really did lock in freshness.

I’d be back for Day 2B, if my own, personal daily Wave of Mutilation didn’t wash me away first.