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

Combine poker lingo and textspeak and you’re deep in linguistic badlands. Check out this string of integers from Jon Eaton, a habitué of Coach’s list and of whom I knew little apart from his gnomic transmissions: Sb limp i chk t8hh in bb flop 7h9hx he bets 1k i r to 3.2 w 9 back he calls turn 4h chk chk riv offsuit 4 he chks i jam he calls n mucks . My first translation was pretty off: “All around is Sadness and Despair. Who will Save us, to Whom do we look for safety? There is No One.” Eaton’s tweet was actually the digest of a single hand playing out between the Small Blind and Big Blind. I think.

Daniel Negreanu was one of the few players with a Q rating, after all the poker shows, cameos in flicks like X-Men Origins: Wolverine , and charming-bachelor duty on Millionaire Matchmaker . He surveyed the ebb and flow of his stacks, but also invited his followers into the occasional post-epiphany glow: Happiness on a scale of 1-10, I’m about a 312 right now! Can’t get this silly grin off my face:-) Life is good … Mike Sexton, avuncular commentator on World Poker Tour , dropped knowledge: Stu Ungar once said to me, “Sexton, always remember this: All two aces are good for is to win a small pot or lose a big one.” Amen.

Others weighed in on lifestyle issues. Kevin Saul, one of Coach’s buddies, was a war correspondent. My dealer smells so bad now, I’m seriously tempted to pull my bottle of cologne out of my bag and spray it straight up n middle of tbl . And: Attn borgata poker, dood in red brooklyn spicers hoodie is too cool to wash his hands after pissing . “The chips is filthy.”

Before my arrival, I puzzled over his repeated references to the “hooker bar.” Was hooker slang for a high roller? Some rootin’-tootin’ tobacco-spittin’ super ace? Then one evening I sat down at a Rio bar next to a hooker and knew: This must be the place.

As the WSOP death march progressed, event by event, week by week, for every LOL I’m here 2 crush u tweet, there was a Busted out of the Main Event. Getting in my car and driving back to AZ . Middle of the night, hitting the blacktop in sadness, that’s messed up. I would’ve enjoyed a little more Vegas before splitting. Hot rock massage. A fucking mud treatment at least. Open the pores. But Matt keyed me into the pro mentality. “If you’re trying to win it,” he said, “it doesn’t really matter how many days you’re in it for. You’re trying to get as many chips as you can, and if you get knocked out in the first couple of hours, it’s really the same thing as getting knocked out on the third day, ’cause you didn’t make any money either way.”

Okay: Don’t worry about the war chants on social media, and concentrate on rallying my meager skills for tomorrow. Leave the five-dimensional poker thinking for my betters.

At the time, I didn’t know how my own Twitter feed would save me on Day 2.

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.