The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death

M

I keep mentioning jerky. On that first Vegas trip in ’91, we stumbled on a wonderland.

It was a grubby spot on Fremont Street, just past the Four Queens and Binion’s, embedded in an outcropping of souvenir shops. The House of Jerky. I knew Slim Jims, those spicy straws of processed ears and snouts. This was something else entirely. We squinted in joyful bafflement before the rows of clear plastic pouches illed with knobs of dark, lean meat, seasoned and cured. Li’l baggie of desiccant at the bottom for freshness. The jerkys reminded me of Anhedonia’s ancient groves, specifically their tree bark, which we peel ’n’ eat in times of drought and on major holidays. We walked the aisles. The flavors were ordinary, yes. Pepper, teriyaki, barbecue. But the ark-ful of proteins was miraculous: beef, Alaskan salmon, buffalo, turkey, alligator, venison, ostrich.

The proprietor was a middle-aged Asian man named Dexter Choi. That one man’s singular vision could beget such bounty! It was America laid out before us, dangling on metal rods set into scuffed particle board. Complete with wide open spaces, for the store had a modest inventory. Dried fruit. Nuts. But mostly jerky.

Mr. Choi remained unmoved by our oh-snaps and holy-cows. The House of Jerky was kitsch to us, but we stood inside the man’s desert dream that day. You know there was a hater chorus when he shared his plans. “Forget about jerky, Dexter, study for the electrician’s licensing exam.” “Sure jerky is a low-calorie, high-sodium snack, Dexter, but when are you going to get your head out of the clouds?” “Look at these lips, Dexter — will your dried muscle-meat ever kiss you like I do?”

He endured. To build a House of Jerky is to triumph against the odds, to construct a nitrate-filled monument to possibility and individual perseverance. Dexter Choi was an outlaw. He faced down fate and flopped a full house.

Maybe things could have improved re: foot traffic, but I couldn’t help but be moved. From that day on, beef jerky was synonymous with freedom and savory pick-me-ups between meals. We bought a few bags of that sweet bark for our drive into Death Valley and continued on our journey.

How could I foresee that this cowboy snack would become a symbol of corporate poker, indeed the commercialization of all Las Vegas? Beef jerky was now the leathery, mass-produced face of modern poker. Meat snacks generated $1.4 billion a year in business, Jack Link’s a major player. Started in the 1880s by an immigrant named Chris Link, who served up smoked meats and sausages to Wisconsin pioneer folk, Jack Link’s was now the fastest-growing meat snack firm in the world, with a hundred different products sold in forty countries. “More than a century has passed,” the Our History page of their site announced, “but the Link family principles and traditions remain the same: hard work, integrity, and a commitment to earn consumer respect by delivering the best-tasting meat snacks in the world.”

Respect them I did. Since 2008, the company had been an official sponsor of the Main Event — the official name of the thing is “The World Series of Poker Presented by Jack Link’s Beef Jerky.” I had, in effect, been walking around in a big plastic bag ever since I stepped in the Rio. Explained the chronic suffocating feeling.

The company’s red and black logo mottled the ESPN studio in the Amazon Room, vivid on the clothing of sponsored players like cattle brands. Jack Link’s “Messin’ with Sasquatch” commercials were a mainstay of poker TV programming, featuring their mascot Sasquatch as he was humiliated by golfers, campers, and frat boys before putting a Big Foot up their asses. The mascot’s meaning? Despite the death of the frontier, and the stifling monotony of modern life, the Savage still walks among us. That, or Betty White was unavailable.

Watch any of ESPN’s coverage and you’ll encounter “Jack Link’s Beef Jerky Wild Card Hand,” in which host Norman Chad tries to divine the contents of a hand through betting patterns. The “hole-card cam” was a clutch innovation behind poker’s populist boom, allowing viewers to see the players’ hands. Before we pierced that veil, televised poker was like watching a baseball game with an invisible ball — i.e., even more boring than watching regular baseball. The hole-card cam allowed for simultaneous commentary — just like real sports! The fans participated in the spectacle, second-guessing, pitting their own calculations against the pros’ moves. They learned. They got better. They started playing in the events they watched on TV.

Poker as million-dollar theater, hence the upgrade from Johnny Moss’s engraved silver cup to diamond-encrusted bracelets. I was implicated in this big-biz operation. Grantland, the magazine that sent me, was owned by ESPN. ESPN was owned by Disney. Which is why they had trouble finding my check. It was floating around the accounting office of Caesars, which was owned by Harrah’s, who owned the WSOP. At registration, I’d kept mentioning ESPN and Grantland as my benefactors, when the check was cut by Disney. We were all confused.

People asked if I’d be able to keep the money if I cashed at the WSOP. Yes — that had been made clear to me. I wasn’t getting paid for the article. My compensation was them paying my entrance fee. Haggle with a lowly freelancer over winnings? Peanuts to the parent corp. I was writing for an entity owned by the company that made millions and millions off WSOP coverage. My words were an advertisement, is one way of looking at it. Raise awareness of the game. Inspire some misfit kid to take up poker. Spread the gospel far and wide. Maybe they’d even hold a circuit game in Anhedonia one day. On the Eastern Coast, a popular vacation spot often free of corpses.

Grantland. ESPN. Disney. It was all in the family.

The House always wins.

It was cool to be at the Rio, to sit in ESPN’s studio after watching so much poker on TV, railing at home all those years. I was a fan. That’s why I was here. When I returned to the studio on Day 5—

Wait, he’s dilly-dallying in the stands on Day 5? Shouldn’t he be playing? Spoiler: I didn’t win the Main Event. You had suspicions, you say? For one thing, the subtitle of this book would be “The Amazing Life-Affirming Story of an Unremarkable Jerk Who Won the World Series of Poker!” instead of having the word “Death” in it. For another, do these sound like the words of a motherfucker who won a million goddamn dollars? You’d think I’d include peppier adjectives. If I’d won, you might not be reading this right now. I mean, I would’ve written this book, artistic imperative and all that, but not so soon. No, I’d still be sailing around the Caribbean on my yacht with some wretched hotties. The Lost Ones, first-round rejects from Hip Hop Honeys. Yeah, they look foxy in their drab, ill-fitting overalls, but the talent scouts always take a pass on account of their disquieting smiles and far-off stares. My kind of crowd. We chill on the aft futons, reel in marlin, shake the blender as we mix coladas. The skipper’s half in the bag but I don’t care, I’ll write the book when I get back.

But for those who want to hang on to hope, let’s say I was watching Day 5 of an unspecified WSOP, not necessarily 2011 (even though that’s when it was).

On Day 5 the TV room, the Amazon, was the last room left. The Main Event had been cut down to 378 players, so they were already packing up. The sad endgame atmosphere of conventions the world over. The 24/7 video display in the rotunda had been wheeled away, the bunting was half ripped down, the gigantic head shots of game legends rolled up until next year. The Pavilion was shut. I peeked in: In the vast, empty hall, union guys stacked the chairs and loaded them onto dollies. No more legions of would-be heroes and their spank-bank visions of poker glory. You were playing the Amazon Room, or you were busto.

Given the number of combatants, the Feature Table was distilled poker prowess. Like Allen Cunningham, five-time bracelet winner, who had stared me down for days from his gigantic head shot on the rotunda wall. Drowsy in person. Unimposing in his white checkered button-down. He was sharing close-ups with Jean-Robert Bellande and Daniel Negreanu, who’d wrangled their poker TV fame into slots on reality shows, Survivor and Millionaire Matchmaker, respectively. They were more than poker stars, they were TV stars and knew the business of being in front of the camera. Bellande ambled up to the Feature Table, looking slick, trailed by a skinny guy in a black suit: “Is everything all right?” Almost showtime, Mr. Bellande. Bellande asked for a chip count — where’s everybody stand before the next level starts? — and posed for a picture with a fan.

The railbirds chirped. Can I get an autograph, Kid Poker? I’d seen Negreanu emanating the last few days, providing wiseacre pull quotes to the press during their blog check-ins, chuckling through an at-table massage, his blond highlights glinting. Relaxed, chipper. He’d been through it all before, this imp. Between hands he and Bellande yukked it up about some Twitter incident, and belittled annoying tournament rules. The Powers That Be were always instituting new protocols, to curb the arms race of who can wear the most sponsored gear on-screen, to regulate table talk. Negreanu was affable, joshing with the table and the fans, but he’d started the day with half the average stack, and was now down to twenty Big Blinds. Then it was fifteen Big Blinds …

When the next level started—$6,000/$12,000 blinds, $2,000 antes — I was so programmed that I heard the TV announcer’s voice in my head, drowning out the live commentator’s. When I watched the broadcast months later, ESPN framed the episode as Kid Poker’s Last Stand, with heavy metal guitar to punctuate:

Player of the Year! [power chord!] Millions in Tournament winnings! [power chord!] Celebrity and stardom! [Kid Poker holds up wads of cash] Daniel Negreanu has accomplished everything in poker except his biggest and toughest goal — the Main Event! [Kid Poker storms away from a busted hand] Tonight it’s put up or shut up for Kid Poker and his dwindling stack. Will he continue to climb poker’s highest peak, or will he fall short once again?

Live, the end of his Main Event was less dramatic. More humble and human-size. The spectator area was just a couple of rows, but the dark cobalt lighting gave them false depth on TV. Friends of the high-performing amateur players at the Feature Table and fans of the big shots jostled for seats. Some of them were on the job. The Feature Table action was being livestreamed, with a thirty-minute delay. Which meant that anyone watching knew what players had held in this or that showdown a couple of hands back. And they could inform their pals. Sorry to break it to you, but she was bluffing with 5-10 offsuit. What kind of range forced that tall Swede to move All In? Your cronies relay information, texting, waving you over to the rails for a quick huddle, to help navigate course corrections. “Dude, he totally got inside your head thirty-one minutes ago.” The hole-card cam strikes again.

Negreanu had no choice but to shove when he got dealt a pair of 10s. Everyone mucked except Rupert Elder, a British pro, who turned over his A7. Elder kept mum, perhaps because he must have been sweltering in that white cable-knit sweater.

Negreanu jumped from his seat, punching the air. “We need a 10 and we’re good!” He whirled. “I wanna win this hand really bad! Really bad!” I didn’t know if he was addressing his supporters, who loudly rooted from the rails, or the viewers behind the camera feeds, or himself. Maybe he danced for the Poker Gods, as Maud of the Magic River checked the ledgers. Had he been naughty or nice?

The flop was 9-5-3—no help. “This World Series sucks! Every time I’m two to one, I lose!”

Elder said nothing. Negreanu remained the favorite. If there was a Poker God present, it was Tim Old Spice, keeping Elder fresh. The man didn’t flinch.

The turn gave Elder a pair of aces. It was no longer two to one.

“He has to catch a 10,” the live commentator said, “or he will be eliminated.”

“A 10!” Negreanu implored.

The River. It was not a 10. Kid Poker was out.

Bellande shook his head.

“How about a big round of applause for Mr. Daniel Negreanu!” Kid Poker patted Elder on the back with a “Good luck, bro,” submitted to a quick exit interview with Kara Scott. Then he was gone.

Which left Cunningham and Bellande as the seniors at the table. Bellande busted the next day in seventy-eighth place. Cunningham busted soon after in sixty-ninth place. They made some money. August rolls around, and it’s just another tournament.

Yosemite Sam and his posse had been deposed by young hotshots like Kid Poker, and now Kid Poker had to shake these even younger players off his pants leg. With more than ten million in poker winnings, that was a lot of pants leg, but there were a lot of kids, too. At the Final Table in 2011, the contenders were in their early-to-mid-twenties, except for Badih Bounahra, a forty-nine-year-old amateur who’d squeezed into the lifeboat. The winner was Pius Heinz, a twenty-two-year-old German player who’d started online and was introduced to the game by watching hole-card cams in the Main Event on TV. The last hole-card cam of the 2011 WSOP revealed cards that gave Pius $8 million.

You’ll never get a Final Table full of colorful cowboys again. Simple numbers. To make it to the November Nine, the cards need to run too well for you and too poorly for too many other people. Poker dexterity will rescue you from riptides that overwhelmed weak players and driftwood-hugging Robotrons, but you’d still need a surfeit of good fortune.

In a couple of days they’d dismantle the studio, Bubble Wrap the more expensive branding material. Drop it into crates with the rest of the equipment, as if it were a fresh batch of jerky, packed into handy resealable pouches for distribution across the land. Resume the game in November, to celebrate the nine players who endured.

I kept Dexter Choi’s business card in my wallet for ten years, until one day I got worried I might lose it. I took it out and never saw it again. On a Thanksgiving ’97 trip, I looked for the House of Jerky. It was gone. Pushed out to make room for the Fremont Street Experience, an electronic canopy that covers four blocks of downtown.

At night they turn off the casino marquees and the light show begins, eleven million LEDs blinking out tribute to Vegas history. One light for every bad beat and botched connection this evening, one light for that poker hero cut down, and another for that luckless conventioneer returning to her hotel room alone. Enough lights to spare some for a mad dreamer or two. The Dexter Chois of the world. No one can see what they see, until they build it. If their plans sound ridiculous, if they’ve overstepped their abilities and aimed too high, they are not the first in this town to do so.

Tourists foolish enough to be ensnared by the promos for this crummy light show look up for a few minutes, and then it’s over. They drift away. The night is young, the city endless, and there are so many more disappointments to savor before dawn.

I woke up Tuesday with low M, emotion-wise. I wasn’t concerned about my short stack, as I was strangely optimistic that I’d get a good run of cards on Day 2B. Now that I’d finished a day of play, I’d come out swinging. But I’d been hit with a powerful case of the local affliction, the symptoms of which consisted of repeatedly mumbling “What the fuck am I doing in Vegas?” until you worked yourself into a desperate froth. I think residents were immune, but tourists were particularly susceptible to this strain of existential Montezuma’s revenge.

Coach was up and at ’em on the East Coast. She direct-messaged a pep talk:

Bagged and tagged! Goal! While you are sleeping this morning, I’ll research the field. Today’s goal: rest and recuperate. Great job.

You’ve outlasted 2,324 players—3rd largest entry in live history. 1D is largest entry day ever. 4,540 remain — on 2B there will be less.

Chip average looks to be 45K, but don’t let this worry you. 23K is nearly an M of 20x pot. You have enough to play and cripple others.

Great 2B table draw! 6 seat with no notable players and no monster stacks. Table low stack 14K. 4 seats shorter than you. Big: 50K. Avg: 25.

Day 2, we’ll talk about ways to double up and who to go after. You are in fine shape. You’re alive!

We talked on the phone in the afternoon, a debrief on the rest of Day 1. I was still depressed by the Master of Illusion’s anticlimactic exit. To play for so long, pay ten grand, wait for the perfect hand, and then have your KK pulverized by a meteor from the deep cold of space: AA.

“You’re not going to see that hand again,” Coach told me. You saw that maybe once a tournament, and now I’d gotten it out of the way. She gave me homework, Dan Harrington, natch: Reread DH Vol 1 Pt 5 (betting) p. 198–213, 275–286. Vol 2 (zones) 133–155. Get ready to say, ‘All in.’

Call her if I needed anything else. Hit the books (yeah, I’d brought them cross-country with me), get some food, maybe I’d feel better. At 2:34 p.m., Coach sent me a message: “Dan Harrington just busted. Moment of silence, please.”

Great.

Coach’s breakdown of the situation alleviated any remaining stress over my game plan, and I was grateful. Her Southern accent and chipper delivery really sold it. My Vegas melancholy deepened throughout my day off, however. I missed my kid. I was sick of the Rio food. Christ, the All-American Bar and Grille — the flavor profiles of foreign lands had never agreed with me. I wanted to exist one single day on this miserable planet without having the thought, “I should really have the Caesar salad.” I should have called my college roommate Shecky — he’d tried to get in on a satellite but no go — to see if he wanted to hang, but I was embroiled in a full-on wallow.

The mere fact of Vegas, its necessity, was an indictment of our normal lives. If we needed this place — to transform into a high roller or a sexy swinger, to be someone else, a winner for once — then certainly the world beyond the desert was a small and mealy place indeed. We shuffled under fluorescent tubes in offices, steered the shopping carts through outlet malls and organic supermarkets while consulting a succession of moronic lists, and wearily collapsed on our beds at night with visions of the Big Score shimmering in our heads. There’s a leak in the attic again, the TV’s out of warranty, maybe we should get a tutor for Dylan, he’s a smart kid but doesn’t test well — and then there was Vegas. Vegas will heal us.

I didn’t want to be healed, but I knew there was something in the cards I needed. This was the assignment of a lifetime, right? It had never occurred to me that one day I’d play in the World Series of Poker. I was just a home-game scrub. But I loved them, I loved cards. I always had.

Memory is the past with volume control, turn it up, turn it down. Can I make out what I heard in the cards? The martial snap of an expertly shuffled deck, the sleek whisper of laminated paper jetting across the table. Crazy 8s and Spit and then Hearts in college. I was the Bruce Lee of Hearts, no joke, knew all the nerve clusters to paralyze your ass. I’d prowl around the dorm on becalmed afternoons, searching for Hearts players like the disheveled emissary of a ramshackle sect. Our holy text was composed of cut-up newsprint and down-market glossies, but we hit the streets anyway and hoped no one would notice. Everyone was busy studying or calling “their people” back home or whatever, except for me. Cards killed the hours. Then bridge, and then poker, the games that helped me unscramble the secret message: The next card, the next card is the one that will save me.

I slept poorly the night of 2A. I had played it safe the first day, stuck to the winners. I hadn’t gambled too much. Now I had to reconnect with that old faith, that when the next card turned over, I’d see my future there.

I thought I heard crickets.

There was some nice theater to the Ceremonial Unbagging of the Chips at the start of Day 2B. “Dealers, if a player is not present two minutes before start, remove their chips and place the bag on their seat.” I was at White 83, Seat 6, and per Coach’s assessment, I was still swimming in a tide pool with the guppy luckless and jelly-organism amateurs. No big stacks. Steven Garfinkle had told me that one of the great wonders of poker was that a normal Joe could sit down at a tournament table next to one of their idols. Which was true, it was a beautiful thing, like finding yourself playing [a sport] with [a famous player]. (I stopped following sports once Ty Cobb retired.) But I didn’t want to sit next to Jonathan Duhamel.

Country Time was my speed. Country Time, on my right, was a sober, elderly gentleman in a brown sweater, and I did not think he meant me harm. I did a little Alexander to chill me out, breathe in, breathe out, and checked the other stacks through my sunglasses.

Did I neglect to say I was wearing sunglasses? I hadn’t the nerve during my trial tourneys, as I felt like a douchebag, but the first time I stepped into the Pavilion I happened to be wearing them, and it felt good. I felt safe. They were nothing special, the ones I’d been wearing for years, but they’d filtered out some of my city’s more evil wavelengths many times. The visor in my suit of armor.

Perhaps it is also possible that I have not mentioned the rest of my battle gear. I wore a track jacket. A special track jacket. A few weeks before the Main Event, I set up a solicitation on one of the social media sites:

If you’ve seen the tournament on ESPN, you know that all the real players wear the names of sponsors on their sweatshirts and caps and T-shirts.

I want to blend in, so I am now accepting sponsors. There are two tiers of sponsorship.

In the Premium “God’s Chosen” Sponsorship Level, I will wear your name, enterprise, slogan, or credo on my shirt for $11.25. There are three slots open.

In the Hoi Polloi Sponsorship Level, you can purchase one of 1 °Commemorative Signature Bracelets. They will be green or orange in color, I haven’t decided which. On the outside, they will bear the slogan KEEP WINNING HANDS. This will “buck you up” when you need it, an imperative, a prayer, or simple statement of fact, depending. On the inner part of the bracelet, where no one can see, they will read STILL SAD INSIDE. This will remind you of the truth.

They will be sold for $4.95…

It has been pointed out that the cost of producing this merchandise will exceed the money raised. To which I say, I have never been good at math.

I got a few responses. I didn’t get my act together to order the bracelets before I left, but I got the duds. I went to a custom T-shirt joint in Dumbo and handed the designer the specs. I’d have to pay extra for a rush job. She double-checked my chicken-scratch, track jacket first.

“Republic of … Ann-hee—”

“Anhedonia,” I said.

“What are those?”

“Those are lightning bolts,” I said.

She told me to pick out a color for the T-shirt’s font, something to accent the brown fabric. I didn’t want to clash. Fuck that. She made two suggestions. I picked one.

“That’s ‘Vegas Gold,’ ” she said. “Maybe it’ll be good luck!”

I wanted diverse sponsors: a person, a business, and a slogan for the back. So I put “WSOP 2011” over the left breast in Space: 1999 letters, and my pal Nathan Englander’s name on the right sleeve — he was in my home game and had been a stalwart ally during Poker Quest. The NYC bookstore McNally Jackson anchored the left sleeve. The bookstore’s Twitter feed had offered up a slogan, something like “Crying on National TV Is My Tell,” but, uh, the name of the store was shorter so I went with that. The owner had given me some picture books for the kid one time, so it felt right.

Finally, on the back I put “My Other Hand Is Bullets,” in an old-timey Western font, which my friend Rob Spillman had suggested. I explained to the designer that “Bullets” was slang for a pair of pocket Aces. I didn’t want her to think I was going on a murder spree, or to a panel discussion. I already owned a “This Is More of a Statement Than a Question” T for panel discussions.

When I told Coach about the paraphernalia, she laughed but also suggested that maybe I hold off on wearing the TV shirt until I made it into the money. “It’s a bit snarky,” she declared. Players were going to target me anyway, because they’d catch on to my inexperience (gee, how?) and because I “didn’t look like the average poker player,” like a Big Mitch, one hand eternally patting his gut. No point in giving them another reason. Okay, in the money, sure. As it happened, the WSOP cracked down on logos this year, part of the fallout from the Feds’ assault on online poker sites. It reduced the sometimes absurd number of patches you saw on the TV shows, which made the grizzled players look like steamer trunks in a ’40s movie.

I was going to wear the jacket, though, a snazzy red number with the name of my homeland on the front and the aforementioned lightning bolts, lest anyone doubt where I was coming from.

Finally, I had my talisman. Our last day together, I asked the kid to give me a good-luck charm. I was going to be gone three weeks all told, the longest we’d ever been apart, and I started missing her even before I left. I’d make up the time when I got back, we had years and years ahead of us, but how can you make up moments? I was standing on the terrace outside the convention hall, baking in the merciless Vegas heat and trying to keep a steady signal on my cell, when she told me, “I saw a rainbow, Daddy!” The ex-wife and the kid were in upstate New York, and I knew it had rained because folks were complaining about it on my Twitter feed. Her first rainbow. It hadn’t occurred to me that a rainbow was one of the milestones. Unscrewing the training wheels, sure, but light refracted through water vapor? What she felt about it was the important thing. Light refracted through water vapor. Here I was dying in the desert. The kid. What else did I have but the kid?

That last day, I asked her to pick something out from her toys. “I’ll keep it on my table and it will give me good luck, and I’ll think of you whenever I look at it.” She deliberated, and chose a pink flip-flop. It was an inch and a half long, made of soft foam, and dangled from a key chain. It just appeared one day, probably from the bowels of a birthday party goodie bag — there was all sorts of weird little crap in those things, nestled among the Smarties and renegade Now & Laters. “Can you write something on it?” I asked. “Like ‘good luck’?”

She deliberated again, and wrote GO LUCK in a six-year-old’s penmanship on the sole of the flip-flop. We let the ink dry.

A pink flip-flop on a key chain. The first day I played, I kept it in my jacket pocket. I couldn’t bring myself to put it out there. It was definitely not cowboy, it was the very anti-Brunson made physical. On Day 2B, I pushed the charm up against my $23K. There was invisible stuff tied to the ring besides the pink flip-flop, too, all my psychic baggage on a string, limply rising to the ceiling of the Pavilion like a bouquet of faltering balloons. All right, Luck, I’m waiting.

Coach wanted me to double up before dinner to $46K. Despite my prediction that I’d unleash my crazy-psycho betting style in Level 6, the only quirks I added to my play were that new protectiveness toward my blinds (Peck at my blinds, will you, crow? I’ll show you!) and a more receptive ear to the siren call of pot odds (It only costs a little more to see the flop …).

Yes, Big Mitch, I know it’s kid’s stuff, but in my cheapo home game you didn’t consider these things because the stakes were so low. After the Main Event was over, I played some of the home-game poker that had been my usual fare for so many years. It was bananas. Like if you stuck ten squirrels in a cardboard box, shook it up, and then threw in a deck of acorn-scented Bicycle cards. (You will recall my squirrel antipathy.) Raising 2x the blind — what exactly did you mean by that bet, it was fucking gibberish! Six people seeing the flop? You can’t all have Aces. I had become a whining Robotron, trapped with bona fide humans.

At the World Series, of all places, I was finally comprehending the underlying principles I’d been studying, getting the barest glimpse of how they worked, their consequences and power. The deep magic. I had an inkling now of what Coach was saying when she said this place was heaven, what her father meant when he told her Vegas was the center of the universe. I felt it.

Too bad it just ended up costing me chips. Nothing panned out. Someone called me when I had QQ, but other than that I didn’t scratch up anything during Level 6. In fact, I lost a bunch. I was down to $14K. I was dying. The blinds were about to shoot up to $300/$600, with a $75 ante. The Wave of Mutilation was gathering force, and I was definitely drowning, not waving, as the poet put it. At the break, I sent a DM: 14.5K … Ten M. Okay, coach what do I do?

I received a short reply: Call me.

Out on the terrace with the smokers. You know how in the literature, once you share blood with a vampire, a psychic link is established whereby he or she can send visions and imperatives? That’s cigs, even years later. Anyhoo.

“Hey.”

It was the Farting/Burping Guy from Day 1D. He was running bad, $90K down to $50K. “I haven’t had a pair of Aces all day,” he said. He asked how I was doing.

I told him.

He shrugged and gave a grim smile. “You never know,” he said. I’d despised him the day before, touching my stuff, but now we were just two guys in the Main Event, hanging on. He was all right by me.

The 3G limped along. Everybody calling their buddies back home, their spouses, shrinks, giving updates. I couldn’t get a signal out. Twitter was dead. Given my low emotional bandwidth, I understood AT&T’s difficulties, but hell. Finally a bunch of lazy-ass electrons eked through and I got a stream of DMs:

Shove time. But you have time to wait for a decent hand. I’ll run it down for you.

Her next couple of DMs detailed starting combos I should go All In with, pairs, face cards, how to play them in different positions around the table. Under the gun, middle, the button.

You are in all-in shove mode. This is easy. You have one decision and plenty of time to wait for a decent spot.

Doubling up is key, but stealing 2,400 pots with all-in shoves is fine.

New goal: 25K by end of this round. Once you reach this, you can relax and play normal for a little while.

Double up time. One, two, three double-ups and you’re a contender. Go get ’em.

I tried to keep it straight. Was that a pair of 7s in early position, or only if there’s no raiser? AJ when, whatzit, huh? But Coach believed in me, I was going to do this. If I didn’t, I would cease to exist.

At the start of Level 7, I gathered myself. I recalled a steamy Brooklyn summer morning weeks ago, when my physical trainer Kim tried to straighten out the sad, gnarled bone-cloak I called my body. Get into your spine, she said.

Get into your spine.

Get Some Spine.

Patience and Position. I waited. I wasn’t the only one with water in his nose. Seat 9 had started out with a stack my size, and he mixed it up in Level 6. Now he was treading water and looking for his shot. He shoved his chips in — and the Wave of Mutilation took him under. Seat 3 was a young dude who’d been staying afloat by attacking blinds, some chips here, some chips there. He went All In, and was sucked down into the bleak fathoms. (You shouldn’t wear headphones when swimming, because you can’t hear when someone yells, “Shark!”) For my part, I got KQ offsuit early in the level … and didn’t go for it. It didn’t feel right, and surely a better hand was rising in the deck, about to bubble up from randomness and bail me out. Right?

It didn’t happen. Rags, rags, rags for an hour and a half. Instead of limiting my speech to the word “Raise,” now I said, “Can I have some change?” as I slid a $1,000 chip to Seat 5. The Wave of Mutilation washed away my stack, chip by inevitable chip, and I kept calculating and recalculating my M. Was now the time to freak out, shove with anything? Was I being passive, or waiting for my shot? Down to $6K. I wasn’t feeling that well. Then I saw them: pocket Aces. Rockets. The selfsame bullets on the T-shirt. I was going to take down this fucking pot.

I went All In … and won the blinds and the antes — i.e., bubkes. Bobbed up to $8K, but the swells were about to get much worse.

The announcer informed us there were three more hands until break. The floor managers broke tables on the edges of the White Section; they’d disperse my happy clan soon. I didn’t know if it was better to play with these guys or a fresh table. Who knew what kind of behemoth stacks roamed out there in the depths, beyond my little tide pool. I was going to make a move before Level 7 ended, no matter what. As I said, the poker-book advice can be hard to follow — the esoteric slang, the situations you have to experience firsthand in order to appreciate, the crappy writing. And then there was advice that made perfect sense, like: Before the end of the night, before a break or adjournment for dinner, you can grab a pot because people are distracted and want to split. This made sense to me, more than “suited connectors on the button can be a strong play,” because it was sneaky, and I came from a long line of secretive, sneaky bastards. We slinked down the block to steal a cab upstream, left two teaspoons of juice in the carton and put it back in the fridge, and pretended that we didn’t use up all the hot water. Sneaky.

I had three chances. It was a Wave of Mutilation: Surf it, motherfucker. My first two cards were no go. White 83 fidgeted as it contemplated the break. Next hand, I think I almost pushed my chips in, but declined. I wasn’t feeling it. Players from other tables squeezed out into the hallway. One more chance: K-8, offsuit. Half my table looked at their hands and mucked and departed to have a smoke or take a piss. I pushed — and the new guy in Seat 3, he did nothing at all. He sat. He was the Big Blind this hand, and he was a swiper, green chips in towers.

So the swiper’s BB was in the pot. What happens, you may ask, when the swiper becomes the swipee? Swiper scrutinized me and asked a question. I didn’t catch it, it was some poker nomenclature beyond my ken. I stared into the pot, then past the pot, through the felt, into the void. In general, I had realized, most of my table image was me pretending I was spending a typical afternoon in my crummy, divorced-guy apartment. Just hanging around with a faraway look. Tick tock. Finally he folded. Anticlimactic. It was some chips anyway. Up to $9.6K.

I DM’d Coach on the situation. You may be wondering what Helen was doing in between strategy sessions. She was thousands of miles away in her Upper East Side apartment, gathering intel on the game at her kitchen counter and doing home projects. “I was watching my Twitter feed,” she told me later, “and making sure you were not tweeting. Then when the levels started, I would run away. I was so nervous for you! I was listening to books on tape, scouring the floorboards. Cleaning the oven. Doing home projects.” She had made what she called her “M-sheet,” an index card listing how to bet at different, danger-zone M’s, the blind structure at each level. She kept the M-sheet in her pocket for quick consult during my breaks.

Under $8K, she wrote one word: Worry.

You’re ok, you’re ok. But you’ve got to double up and loosen even more. Here’s how:

Once again, she broke down the hands to play, and how.

Do it. Double up. Then double up again, damn it. #toughlove

I blipped out a message through AT&T’s “cellular network” and told her I hadn’t seen any of those hands, just Aces, so I was due.

Hell yes, you’re due. You are not going to bust out of Day 2. You are a shove machine.

You’ve outlasted 500 players (Matusow, Dunst, Greenstein) for a reason. Patience. I predict 3 double-ups b/f dinner. RUSH dang it!

I want to see you double up and then shove all-in before you’ve had time to stack your chips. I see it. Rush! Then swordfish.

GOGOGO! I am glued to this computer rooting for you with the blind structure and Ms in my apron pocket.

There you have it. No more negative thinking, despite its centrality in my day-to-day philosophy. I was a player, and I was in this game. I wasn’t depressed, I was curating despair. I wasn’t half dead, but half alive.

I reentered the Pavilion and waited for the color-up to finish, when they take out all the $25 chips and change them for $100s. Bye-bye chump change. Bye-bye chumps, too.

I started humming that song from Ocean’s Eleven. I know most classical music from the pop vehicle that introduced me to it, hence “That orgy song from A Clockwork Orange” or “That one where Bugs Bunny victimized the opera singer.” The aforementioned opera sequence from The Untouchables. The tune in question was “Clair de Lune,” a tender little number, and I did not mind humming it among the gamblers. If I whistled on the streets in New York, I could hum in the casinos of Las Vegas.

So, Debussy. “Moonshine.” It starts off slowly, and you lift with the current, this sort of warm levitating feeling. Then it picks up, cresting to a victorious apex, but it’s a curious kind of victory, for even as it approaches fulfillment, each triumphant note is undercut by evanescence, a hint of loss that is contrary to the apparent trajectory of the song, and at the same time its true destination. The eventual collapse of the idea of escape is the real heart of the tune, even as we float joyfully on its evasions. It contained both failure and reward at the same time, and it was okay.

In Ocean’s Eleven, the movie stars assemble before the Bellagio’s dancing waters, the casino’s nightly extravaganza of synchronized fountain jets. For the whole flick, the movie stars have been handsome, they have been clever and rude, but now they are quiet. They cannot speak. This was the big one. It was the big job, the heist of a lifetime, and somehow they’d pulled it off. Everything before this was half-assed practice. Everything after will be disappointing postscript. The movie stars stand there looking at the dancing waters, among strangers, the tourists and the squares, the ones who’d never know that a miracle just happened. But these guys knew, they had touched it, even if seconds from now it would change from what they did into what happened, become a story they’d rarely share. They’d tell it years from now because they felt safe with their companion, or because they were feeling down and couldn’t help themselves. The night is cool, the heart is sliding into nostalgia, and they say, “Did I ever tell you about the time I played in the World Series of Poker?” The awful knowledge that you did what you set out to do, and you would never, ever top it. It was gone the instant you put your hands on it. It was gambling.

The only heist I’d ever pulled was some Rififi-type shit to get the kid’s tooth from under her pillow and slip some Arby’s coupons in there. But I was calm, for a shove machine. This was the round where I’d make my stand. I arranged my chips into a tiny fort. I turned the pink foam flip-flop upside down so I could see what the kid wrote to me.

GO LUCK

(Don’t tell me you didn’t realize this was a sports movie, the only one I’ll ever star in. Maybe you, too, because we’re in this together, you and I. But keep in mind it’s a ’70s sports movie, and you know how those end.)

The blinds were $400/$800 with a $100 ante. I was at 4M, the Wave of Mutilation rising five seats down. The dealer shuffled and … I got cards. Two hands into Level 8, I got AK. Big Slick. Now we could begin.

I pretended to think about it, lying like a weatherman, and went All In. Everyone folded except for the swiper. Perhaps he suspected I’d run a game on him that last round before break, made him fold something promising. Here was a duel, unfolding before the table broke, it was a harpoon fight on a disintegrating chunk of ice in the polar seas, I’d seen this on TV. I intended to gut him, and I did. I turned over my AK, he showed his K-whatever, and I bled him on the Flop, and the Turn, and the River. I doubled up to $19K. You bet all your chips, the other guy or gal matches you, and if you win, you get all that plus the blinds and antes: double up. “Swiper, no swiping,” as Dora says.

They were about to break the table. The floor manager had our table draws, and he’d distribute them after this next hand. Country Time went All In. He’d done it a few times before, to mucks all around. This time, someone called him. I can’t remember what the flop was. All I know is that Country Time was out, and he drifted away.

The dealer was having some trouble sorting through Country Time’s stack. Seat 5 said, “I don’t know if he’s out.” Maybe Country Time had chips left.

“He’s still there,” someone said. Indeed Country Time was, well, taking his time in his departure. There are different types of players. Aggressive. Solid. But there was only one way to walk out of the room when you bust: Absent of dignity, full of shame.

“Should we get him?”

“Count it,” the floor manager said.

The dealer moved the chips around.

“Does he have anything left?”

“He’s walking slowly.”

“We can catch up to him.”

We looked over. We looked back at the chips.

“How much does he have?”

“Should we get him?”

No one moved.

“Count it again,” the floor manager said.

“He’s walking pretty slowly.”

Country Time exited the Pavilion. He had a single chip left, $1,000. One of the players asked what was going to happen to it. The floor manager said it would be placed at his seat at his new draw. He’d be swiftly blinded out. It was an unsettling image, the floor guy setting this anonymous chip on the next table and the chip just sitting there, being eroded into smaller chips, and evaporating. Never a face to put to the player formerly known as White 83, Seat 5. You know, Country Time.

The table broke. I liked them now, the gamblers. They were just people. They had intimidated me, but no more. They were better players, dexterous in their manipulation of the underlying principles, they had poker faces they toiled over, but they were just dumb morons like I was, mules walking on their gravel. They put on too much cologne or too little antiperspirant, uploaded stupid photos to Facebook, were riven by doubt and then fortified by an unexpected reversal, wiped ketchup from the corners of their mouths, these messy eaters. They were scared, like I was, of being wiped out, of losing all their chips in hexed confrontation. Mules like me. They carried tokens from home to remind them of what they had left behind, and placed these things next to their chips, and they prayed.

I joined Black 6, Seat 4. I didn’t say anything and got the same back. This was a real table, they were playing cards here: $100K stacks, whole edifices of $1,000 chips like I’d only seen on the tube. Seat 2 was the table leader, decked out like the Unabomber with his hoodie cinched around his face, mirrored lenses repelling others’ eyes. I was the second-shortest stack — the worse-off guy looked queasy. But I’d double up again before dinner, per Coach. I felt giddy, like my skin had become so thin that only the tiniest membrane separated me from the outside, my inner self from the pure poker atmosphere I moved in. I’d pulled one heist, and I’d do it again.

Two hands later, I looked down at a pair of 10s. Okay. Cool. The pot was $2,100. I was in early position. Hands — the ones attached to my wrists, not card hands — please do not tremble or shake. I said, “All In.” I was starting to like the sound of that. It was much better than, “Can I get some change?” Everybody folded except for Seat 2, Mr. Sinister, who called in a flash.

Damn. We turned our hands over: He had a pair of 3s. What the hell was that about? But that’s how he got to be big stack: He played aggro, and from the glum faces around me, it was paying off.

Neither of us made a set. I won with my 10s, and Mr. Sinister said, “That’s been happening to me all day.”

Doubled up. I was at $40K, thereabouts, 19M. Out of the danger zone. Level 7 had harrowed me as I waited to shove my chips in. The first half hour of Level 8 had wrung me out, but it was time to get out of what Coach called “small-stack mentality.” I no longer had to play like I was trying to escape the space station before it self-destructed, as the chirpy computer voice counted down my M. I knew what it was to be an animal. Time was, when I read about the Donner party or a plane going down in the Andes, I was sickened by tales of survivors eating the dead. Now I knew I’d be all “Pass the hot sauce?” on Day 4. But I was back. I wasn’t a fucking animal anymore.

It was an hour and fifteen minutes until dinner. I could do that. Then I got a pair of Aces.

On a rush. Cool. I wasn’t going to go All In, I thought, because I could play normal again. I bet $2,200, the table standard for this level. I was going to make some chips. There were mucks, and then the guy in Seat 7 raised me $8,000. I hadn’t seen his face yet. I saw his hands. I saw his chips. He had me matched. Should I go All In? I called his bet, and we saw the flop.

A Queen, an 8, and a 3. No straight, no flush. I was the first to act. He didn’t have pocket queens. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did. The gift of fear. I bet $10K. He’s going to fold, I thought. Instead, he went All In.

I said, “Okay.”

“You’re All In?” the dealer asked. You had to say it.

“Call.”

He had KK. I showed my hand. The table groaned. “I didn’t put him on Aces,” Mr. Sinister said, with a touch of confusion in his voice.

“I thought maybe he had Ace-Queen,” someone else said. They were already consoling Seat 7, down at the other end of the table. “Damn, dude.”

The next card was a Jack. For a second I thought, Is he going to get a straight? I was being silly, that was impossible. Three double ups before dinner, just like Coach told me. I had it. He needed two cards to save him, the remaining kings. I was 94 percent favorite to win. But you know how ’70s sports movies end.

He got his K.

I was out.

“Aww, man.

“Damn.”

“That’s a bad beat.”

“I didn’t think he had Aces,” Mr. Sinister repeated, like a fucking idiot. I was starting to think he wasn’t a poker maestro, just some guy who’d been getting some good cards, which happened from time to time.

Seat 7 was a portly twenty-something guy with an Australian accent. He came over and shook my hand. “You played that really well,” he said. “I didn’t think you had Aces.”

No, no one knew I had Aces. I could have gone All In before the flop, or after the flop. Then they would have known something was up. Not that he would have folded KK, but still. Betting aside, I think you and I know why they didn’t see Aces coming. Why I was unreadable, why they could only guess at my hand.

I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside.

The World Series of Poker’s official count of the nations represented at this year’s Main Event was ninety-eight. The number had always been off by one. Now the figure was correct. I grabbed my track jacket, jabbed the pink flip-flop in the pocket, and staggered out of the Pavilion. Absent of dignity, full of shame.

Like I said, after the heist, all that’s left is the disappointing postscript. Normal life. Coach was surprised that I was calling her in the middle of the level. “It’s dinner?” I told her the whole thing, what I could remember.

“He Rivered you! On the River!” I reviewed the betting — was there something I should have done differently? “There was no way he was getting away from Kings.” Just as I wasn’t going to get away from Aces. “There was no way you weren’t going to get all your money in that pot.” I still think about it, of course. But everybody has hands like that. The failures that stick.

Husband Lex had just gotten home from work. Coach gave the rundown. “I told him it was a good way to go out,” she told Lex. As in, better than being washed away by the Wave of Mutilation.

Lex spoke. “Lex just said, ‘That’s a terrible way to go out.’ ”

I carried out Coach’s last order. I finally got to the seafood place and ordered the swordfish. Búzios, it was called. The bartender asked how I was doing. I told him.

“Frankly,” I said, “it was pretty exhausting.”

“Yeah, these guys come in here, they say, ‘I just busted out.’ Then they go, ‘Thank God, it’s over.’ ”

Coach e-mailed me the next day to say she was heading to the Borgata w/Lex to play the 100k guarantee tourney. Before I left for Vegas, she’d told me that she was off gambling until September. After her disappointing visit in the early stages of the WSOP, she was taking a break. But being my coach, running scenarios, had put her back in the game. In the fall she pursued the circuit more intensely, even when Lex couldn’t make it. That was new. At that December Harrah’s event I described earlier, she met Matt. And Matt started coaching Coach.

“When you busted out,” she said, “I was horrified. But my first thought was, Good, now I can go to AC!” There’s a poker player for you.

I am not Will Smith. Or Michael Clarke Duncan. I cannot heal your limp, and even if I could, I wouldn’t. Just because. But I like to think I helped Coach out a little, like she’d helped me. Perhaps Doug Henning had rubbed off on me after all. Magic Doug Henning, who maybe had some Negro blood, I think. Have you seen his hair?

As for me, it was time to go back to Anhedonia. Since busting out, I’d felt my poker knowledge slipping away, “Flowers for Algernon”—style. That too-brief vision of the secret poker world losing resolution, dead pixels blooming. I had been changed, and I did not want to return to who I had been. I needed to hold on to it.

Stay with me, please.

So I did what one does in these situations. In the airport I stopped at Hudson News and bought a souvenir mug, a refrigerator magnet shaped like a flip-flop, and a bottle opener that said “Win Lose or Draw.” I’m the sentimental type.

I heard a song, they were playing it in the store, a slow piano tune. There was a TV screen on the wall above the T-shirts, and I saw they were running a loop of the Bellagio dancing water, shot from a helicopter at night, and the music was “Clair de Lune.” Courtesy of the Las Vegas Board of Tourism, I imagine.

“Clair” was a cheap date it turned out, the movie now part of the town’s mythology. I didn’t mind that my private notion had never been mine at all but a popular romance. I couldn’t own it. What would Johnny Moss, the first champion of the World Series of Poker, think of how his game had changed over the decades, as it transformed from an intimate competition among buddy-rivals into a multimillion-dollar international event, bigger than any single individual. If Johnny Moss walked into the Pavilion today and saw the thousands of players worrying their stacks, the tables upon tables of hopeful souls, heard the symphony of crickets, I think he’d say, Deal me in. It’s not mine, but it’s cards.

“Clair de Lune” in a Hudson News franchise was nice exit music from Vegas. It made me feel, how do I put this, good.

There’s always next year, right? What the heck, I’ll play the circuit, win some tournaments, and come back. Palm Beach. New Orleans. Tunica. Never heard of Tunica, and maybe that’s a good thing. Return to Vegas. Make it to Day 3 this time, make it into the money, it will all work out. Maybe I’ll win, and they’ll play the national anthem of the Republic of Anhedonia in the Pavilion. I’ll stand on the stage in my track jacket, which is now decked out in rhinestones and flapping Vegas Gold fringes, place my hand over my heart (it would take some time to find it), and the speakers in the great hall will broadcast my homeland’s song, loud and clear so that everyone can hear it: “NYUH-GUH-UH! UH-GUUHH! NYUH-UGH UGH OH GOD NO NOT AGAIN SSSIIIGGGHHH!”

Try again. It was a very Bad News Bears thing to say. Scrappy. Inspiring.

Actually, fuck it.

I learned a lot of things during my long, bizarre trip. About myself and the ways of the world. One, do not hope for change, or the possibility of transcending your everyday existence, because you will fail. Two, if people put their faith in you, you will let them down. And three, everything is a disaster. In short, nothing I hadn’t known since childhood, but sometimes you can forget these things when engulfed by a rogue swell of optimism, which happens, if infrequently.

There was a fourth item, but I’ll save it for the kid, for when she’s older.