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

Terrence, for his part, had been concentrating on his new mixed-martial-arts career. You know, Brazilian jujitsu, Muay Thai boxing, Western boxing and wrestling, things of that sort. The dude was cut. That mind-body problem I attempted to solve in my sessions with Kim Albano? Terrence had found the answer. As he explained in the PokerListings.com webvid about his course correction: “Even though it’s maybe physically unhealthy to take a lot of blows to the face, it’s in a way very spiritually healthy, and it really teaches you a lot about yourself.”

Life! What Inscrutable Card Shall Ye Throw Next Upon the Soft Felt of Our Days? Six weeks plus six weeks plus six weeks: a section of your life lived in Vegas. Weeks that accumulated into a year under the accursed fried-chicken-joint heat lamp that is the desert sun. It aged you. The boys were getting on, some of them were even in their late thirties. “I’m routinely the oldest player at the tables,” Matt said.

“We were the youngest, now we’re the oldest,” Kenny affirmed. Robotrons to the left of me, Robotrons to the right.

The check arrived and they made a deck for credit-card roulette. How it worked was you shuffled the cards, pulled one out, and its owner picked up the entire tab. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Matt said. I didn’t. Lose this one, it’s okay, we’re all friends here, it evens out over time. Over these six weeks. Or the next time they play in AC or at Foxwoods. Next year’s WSOP. If they came back. It’s not like it used to be.

Then it was back to work. The next level of Event 16 awaited. I said goodbye to the Math Players on the floor of the Rio, at the head of the corridor that led to the convention hall. The other runners streaming past us back to the tables. One of my dinner companions invited me on a strip-club excursion. I demurred, spoiled by the erotic revues of Anhedonia, where the performers remain fully clothed but get emotionally naked, delivering monologues about their top-shelf disappointments, and times when they were almost happy. Hard to enjoy American-style strip clubs after that. Once you go bleak, you never go back.

The cards were in the air again. Thirty-seven minutes into Level 6, I checked on Coach.

There was an empty seat.

We all go out sooner or later.

I was back in NYC when Event 16 finally ended two days later. Hitting refresh-refresh on PokerNews.com, grabbing livestream bits on my phone while I walked down the street.

“Matt Matros is a Yale graduate. He’s working on a novel,” said Announcer #1.

“He’s also a very sweet guy,” said Announcer #2.

Matt was still in, ensconced at the Final Table when I got on the subway. When I emerged at street level, he’d won his third bracelet and half a million dollars. “It’s beyond incredible, it’s ridiculous,” he told PokerNews correspondent Kristy Arnett, who interviewed him at his winning seat.

“You sound very humble, but come on,” Kristy said. “Three years in a row. You’re one of three people to ever do it in the last thirty years. Obviously, you’re doing something right.”

“I’m not saying I don’t play well — I do. But I’ve been incredibly lucky these last three years at the Rio.” He paused. “And my dad wants everyone to know my name is pronounced MAYTROSE.”

Foundations. Master the foundations, and let us proceed from there.

Another jump: six months later. December 2012, Atlantic City. You with me? I drove down with Matt to sample circuit season. The six weeks of the World Series are one season, and the circuit tournaments, Poker Tour pit stops, and assorted megacasino events are another. Maybe you stick to the East Coast, or the Deep South, or never stray east of the Rockies, but you’re on the hunt nine months of the year, whether you’re a guru pocketing Player Points and big cashes, or a first-timer just learning the ways of the Noble Hustle.

It was raining on the trip down, the sky depleted of color. Matt was wrung out as well. After snagging that bracelet in last summer’s WSOP, he was only hitting two or three fall events, a handful in the spring. Cutting back. He’d had a nice run, as usual. Since he started playing big tournaments, there’d only been two occasions when he was down for the year. Still tired, though. “I’m not tired about poker concepts and new ideas and discussing poker with other really good players,” he said. “I still enjoy that aspect of it.” But parking your butt in brick-and-mortar tournaments when you know what everyone’s going to do before they do it? When there’s only ten minutes every two hours when you’re using your brain? It’s dull, man. “I always wanted to try professional poker for a little while. I didn’t think I was still going to be doing this when I was thirty-five. This is not supposed to have worked out as well as it has.”

He’d rather be home with his wife, Ivy, instead of dragging his ass up and down the northeast corridor again. Rather write, work on his novel. He’d been knocking out his monthly column for Card Player magazine. Sample topics: “Think the Unthinkable, Do the Unthinkable: What Makes Great Players Great?” and “America’s Love of Bluffing.” Also on the agenda: agitating for the return of online poker in Washington Post op-eds. The only time I saw Matt get tilty was when he talked about the criminalization of his cherished cards.

Online poker excised the dull parts. Everyone had bad runs when they lost twenty tournaments in a row. “Tournament poker is high variance, as we say.” You’re up, down, and the number of bodies in a large tourney meant you weren’t going to cash every time. No matter how good you were. But play thirty tournaments online a day, and those bad patches were truncated instead of stretching over a tortuous year.

The Illegal Gambling Business Act “was enacted in 1970 to crack down on organized crime,” he wrote in the Post . “It was never intended to prevent ordinary people from playing poker.” Unlike, say, craps, poker is a game of skill, he argued. A constant assessment of risk versus reward. Like Wall Street. If it were as random as roulette, good players wouldn’t make more money than bad players over time. But they do.

Fighting the government was hard work — the Anhedonian Embassy had been disputing $60K in jaywalking tickets for years, cultural misunderstandings and whatnot.

“Our government disdains a risk-reward game that millions of Americans play,” Matt wrote, “then bails out Wall Street sharks who bet unfathomable sums. I can only conclude that this contradictory stance has little to do with the skills required for each pursuit. No, for some reason, lawmakers just don’t like poker.”

Not that online lacked regrettable qualities. Collusion: How do you know that faceless users Bustanut69 and Lickylicky aren’t scheming with each other on the phone, or sitting in each other’s laps? That was an example of user misbehavior. On the other side of the screen, the moderators of Ultimate Bet abused their sys-op privileges to peek at players’ hands and go pirating. “It was completely obvious they were a bunch of crooks,” Matt said, “and anyone who played there was out of their minds.”

Ultimate Bet faded, and Full Tilt Poker emerged with their own brand of mercurial ethics. They’d permit users to hit tourneys before their funds cleared and wager with cash they didn’t have. With credit cards. Some of the money was vapor. Vapor or no, it circulated. Affiliate programs rewarded those who brought new fish to the site. More money spreading around. It didn’t help matters that Full Tilt neglected to keep a firewall between the company’s operating funds and players’ money. The biggest rake in history. How did the owners spend this big pile of cash? The usual story: fancy cars, fancier women, beef jerky.