Colson Whitehead - The Noble Hustle - Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death

I see.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BAVERGES! the cocktail waitresses called.

HARRINGTON! I responded.

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

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