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

Phil Hellmuth, superplayer from the Silver Age, and “Playmate Holly Madison” started the tourney with, “Shuffle up and deal!” The cricket orchestra started up. I wouldn’t have minded “Shuffle through your mistakes and tremble!” but tradition is tradition.

The blinds were $50 and $100. One of the young players at my table, the Guy in the Teal Hoodie, started off energetically. He had the demeanor of a college altrock DJ or someone building cybernetic organisms in the garage, and took down pots with quiet efficiency. Was he one of the young players Matt had warned me about the day before?

I’d asked Matt if he’d seen any “new moves” this year, the latest gizmos, which was very silly because I barely knew the old moves, whether we were talking Hold’em or the Cabbage Patch.

“These young players ,” he said, “they’re four-betting with nothing. Five-betting.” He said young players the way World War II grunts used to say Hun bastards . The Big Blind is considered the first bet, a raise on that is the second bet, and a re-raise on top of that is a three-bet. Pretty normal stuff before the flop, the first three communal cards. In his Little Books of Poker , Phil Gordon repeatedly warned, “Beware the Fourth Bet — it means Aces.” Lemme tell you, son, in my day, four-betting used to mean something. Nowadays, these young players were four-betting, five-betting helter-skelter, who knew what these crazy kids had in their hands, they could be raising with shit, rags, 7–2. The preflop four-bet was a relatively new weapon in the arsenal, but that didn’t mean I had to back down when I had decent cards. Matt told me to trust my instincts. “If you have a good read on someone, five-bet them. If they’re bluffing, they’ll fold.” Okay! I told him I was going to play tight, try to make it to Day 3, not misplay my premium hands …

“Do you want to do that,” Matt asked, “play it safe?” I was here to write an article, but was that all there was to it? “I think you’ll be most satisfied,” he said, “if at some point, you suddenly have a read on someone: ‘This guy doesn’t have anything’ or ‘This guy has something.’ One way or another, you’re going to have a read, and you’re going to do something that you didn’t expect you were going to do before, right or wrong.” Something new in your game expressing itself. “Obviously it’s better if you’re right, but even if you’re wrong, it can be really satisfying to just have a read, a feeling, and go with it. Your gut.”

I could play it safe, or I could really play . Matt was asking me, Why are you here? It was the Vegas question, namely: What the fuck are you doing in Vegas? As usual in this town, whether you gambled away the mortgage money, fucked a stranger, or went to see Carrot Top, you answered in your actions.

There were three empty seats. Brighton Beach eventually sat on my left. He was an intense, twenty-something dude with a strong cut-off-your-feet-and-mail-them-to-your-fiancée vibe. Eventually Seat 8 showed up. The dealer looked at his ID and said, “Oh, shit!”

One thing you do not want to hear is a dealer say “Oh, shit!” when a player joins your table. He was wearing a red World Poker Tour jacket with … was that his name embroidered on the left breast? This motherfucker was so bad, he had a goddamned monogrammed World Poker Tour jacket! Floor managers and players from other tables moseyed over to say hello. He was on my right, and if he went crazy with six-betting or nine-betting or who knew what, I could make a quick muck. Horrified, nonetheless.

I had enough chips to withstand some hits, power in the forward deflectors. We started with $30K, 300 Big Blinds. Plenty of M. “It’s all about M,” Coach had told me during our initial training session, and it was one of the first things I came to understand, slowly, the hard way, during my AC runs, the secret narrative as I passed through levels. M is how much life you have in you, how much you can take. To calculate M, you add the Big Blind, the Small Blind, and all the antes you have to pay into the pot each round, and the sum is how much it costs to play one orbit ’round the table. M, for Paul Magriel, who first articulated it, but also M for the Wave of Mutilation.

Above 20M, twenty rounds, you can play your fancy-move poker. But once you dip below that, your spirit is draining away each round, and you have to start playing more aggressively, play a wider range of cards, swipe some blinds, so that you are not erased from existence. Existence, because this is life we’re talking about here, how much can you take before you break. Dear reader, I hope you’re operating at a big M most of the time, I really do. Things are easier that way. But then sometimes things go wrong — you lose your job, get some sort of health issue named after a foreigner, the kid won’t say why he doesn’t want you at the wedding, and the angry voices in your head are now using Auto-Tune. You take a tumble in a thousand ways, big and small: This the Wave of Mutilation, gobbling up your reality. Replay the hand — is there something you could have done differently to keep things the way they were, something you should have said to keep them from walking away? It doesn’t matter, the dealer’s shuffling again. You dwindle to 6M and 3M and 2M and you can’t pay the rent next month, nobody’s returning your e-mails. Things are desperate. This is death. You don’t know how you’re going to survive. And the truth is, you’re not going to. Next level, the blinds will go up, and up, and up.

That’s M.

Seat 7 never showed and was blinded away until a floor manager removed the remnants of the stack. What came up for him or her to blow the $10K entrance fee? I hoped they were tied up in a dungeon somewhere. Not a serial-killer dungeon but one of the tony thousand-bucks-an-hour variety you can find only in Vegas, and they were having a pleasant time at the lashes.

Coach gave me a simple order for the first three levels: “Make it to dinner.” You can sort players into dependable categories. Tight is conservative. Loose plays a lot of hands. Loose-Aggressive plays a lot of hands, plays a lot of shit, but will bully you with betting. At the first table, I played something that might be called Tight-Incompetent. I folded out of turn, tried to bet 2.5x the BB, per the table custom, but misidentified the chips and put in less than 2x, which was a no-no. I made each mistake only once (for a change; see Dating Failures of, in my index for contrary indicators) but I’d marked myself as the weak player. At Yellow 163, I got my nicest run of cards, QQ, JJ, flopped an Ace-high flush, but there wasn’t a lot of action. I wasn’t down, but I wasn’t fattening my stack.

I heard the cries from the other tables as All Ins began and people busted out. I saw my first right before the end of Level 1, when Brighton Beach, who was down to $10K, shoved. He was getting a massage. I’d seen someone on Coach’s poker feed say that hubris is the short stack ordering a massage. Did I mention the masseuses? There were teams of them, ladies in white polos hoisting their cushions, rubbing lotion into hairy necks. Brighton Beach shoved his stack into the pot, and a minute later he was out. I wondered if his rubdown would be prorated. Everybody shook their heads and checked out their own stack. Chill wind as the Grim Reaper strolled past. Anyone could be next.

Level 1 ended. The line for the men’s was a bit long, as Coach had warned. The smokers beat it out to the patio. I hadn’t seen that many smokers in years. As I hustled back to my room, I googled the dude in the World Poker Tour jacket. He was Matt Savage, proselytizer for the New Poker. I’d been following his Twitter feed for weeks — as a director of pro tournaments and commentator on the TV show, he answered questions about rules and regulations. He wasn’t Godzilla, but I was still glad to be downwind from his betting. In my room, I wrote some notes, reviewed my tip sheets, and made it back in time for Level 2. Breathe in, breathe out.