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

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.