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

Enough people had busted that the floor managers started breaking up tables, rerouting players on the outskirts of the room to the empty seats at the center. Day 1D was a contracting, dying star. We gathered our chips and dispersed into the void. I saw Savage every once in a while during the following levels. We waved. The next time I spoke to the Guy in the Teal Hoodie, it was at the end of Day 6. I said hi, weirdly eager and proud that one of the fellows from the first table was still around.

“I remember you,” he said, with a mellow drawl. “You were in Seat 9. You were a good player.”

Too kind. “How are you doing? Still in?”

“I’m chip leader,” he said. “I have 12.8 million.” His name was Ryan Lenaghan, an online player who had discovered he liked casino play. He finished in eighteenth place.

My second table was Black 63, Seat 10. I have been invited to someone’s house for Thanksgiving and arrived with my sweet potato pie in the aftermath of a big argument. What happened here? There’s carnage everywhere. Two young guys would nurse $12K for the rest of the night, sober play that was a reversal of whatever had decimated them. Yeah, something big went down before I got there. Daddy’s drinking again, Gabby got her nethers pierced.

No one seemed to like the loud Aussie in Seat 4. He’d raked some pots and when he left for cigarette breaks, everybody made fun of him. He looked like the cow-faced droog from A Clockwork Orange , completing the effect with a weird hat his shag peeked out of. The table captain was named Marc Podell. He was a fellow New Yorker in his early forties, and he made a steady accumulation for the rest of the day. He was getting cards — he had no problem showing us why the other guy should have folded — but he was also outplaying us. Half the time he was getting a rubdown (he knew the masseuse from Main Events past, they set up appointments by text), and the other half he was calling the raiser and showing the better hand. The Aussie was the other big stack at the table, and Marc tried to goad him into going on tilt. It worked.

“How many chips do you have?” I started hearing that a lot more, this locker-room check: Who has the bigger dick? It was posturing, but also a serious consideration of how many chips this would cost you if it went south. I got more JJs and played them, a pair here and there. It was a tight table. No one wanted to go home on the first day.

Some players sell “pieces” of themselves, where if you pay a percentage of their entrance fee, you get a cut of the winnings. If any. Whole online trading exchanges were devoted to this human capital. I wasn’t too keen on buying and selling people — legacy of slavery and whatnot — and this lot struck me as guys who were gambling with their own money. I never saw a four-bet or five-bet. I was playing tight, too, and should have started running a bluff here and there now that I’d “established a solid image at the table,” as they say in the books. But I held back. Establishing table image is like when you stab the leader of the Aryan Assholes in the neck with a fork your first day in prison: telling ’em how you do it back home.

I was still stuck in playing good cards well, don’t get all crazy mode. I began running with my interpretation of Matt’s reads, mixed in with some tidbits from The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. Coach had told me to read it, after she’d heard about it on Oprah .

The Gift of Fear wasn’t a poker book but a self-helper about identifying encounters that might escalate into violence. How do you know when someone is out to harm you? Use your animal intuition, developed by millions of years of evolution. Confronting a possible full house wasn’t the same thing as being followed down a deserted street at night, but Coach had discovered poker applications: “When it comes to the game, your first instinct is usually right.” Danger! Danger! Was it counterintuitive to apply lessons from a women’s self-defense book to the World Series of Poker? Yes. But if modernity has taught us anything, it’s that you don’t fuck with Oprah.

Breathe in, hold it, breathe out. I made it to dinner, per Coach’s order. Three levels. Her other order? “Go to the seafood place. Get the swordfish.”

The line was too big, so I got some cruddy sandwich and ate at the Sports Book. I called Coach to debrief, told her about Matt Savage and the sleepy play at my first table.

“They’re calling that section ‘Mellow Yellow,’ ” Helen said, chuckling. She’d sworn off tournament news after her less-than-satisfying WSOP visit weeks ago. But now she was hunkered over her poker feed, reading players’ tweets from the tables, checking out the competition: She had a player in the game.

Her order for Levels 4 and 5 was simple. Get Bagged and Tagged — crawl to the end of the day, write my name on a plastic bag, and drop my chips inside for safekeeping until Day 2B. It almost seemed possible. This horror show ran seven days. Early on, you wanted to stay cool and keep out of expensive confrontations, but you also needed to feed the stack. The stack is hungry .

One of the players in my cheapo home game was Nathan, whose friend Steven Garfinkle was in town for the WSOP. A professor of ancient history at Western Washington University, Steven called himself a “committed amateur,” as opposed to a pro, although plenty of pros wouldn’t mind a tenth-place finish in the World Series, which is how far he made it in 2007. Yes, he’d fed his stack that year. “You can’t win it the first day,” Steven told me. But, he added, “You can’t fold your way into money.” You gotta play.

His stay was being comped by the Aria, one of the new Cosmo-style dreadnoughts moored in the CityCenter complex. The Aria was more than twenty stories tall, a fortification dwarfing the old standbys of the Strip in the manner of the other upstarts. (“These young players ,” says Circus Circus, “they do it differently.”) On the casino floor, tiny lights blinked in the walls, I walked on silvered floors, and techno music summoned me to this or that pleasure zone around the next bend. A real Logan’s Run building — outside the walls, my world was ruined, the Library of Congress half buried in sand.

Inside Aria, however, everything was swell, except for the recent outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, which lent a “Masque of the Red Death” air to the proceedings. On the night of 1C, I tagged along for dinner at Jean Georges. Comped! I asked Steven what a good goal for the first day was.

A good day is tripling, he told me, but hitting the room’s average is okay, too. There comes a point in the event, Steven said, when “The Big Blind is someone who was here.” Day 6 started with a $30K Big Blind, which was how many chips you got for your buy-in. Thirty thousand to start off the hand, it represented a human soul who had looked at their table draw the first day and said, I feel lucky. Just like you had. And then there is a point, he continued, “when the ante is someone who was here.” This was all that remained of a person, their buy-in, and the Final Table rolled them in their hands and tossed them to the felt. Like gods. Coach had said that her World Series time was “heaven,” and here it was: the big pot as afterlife, containing the spirits of the eliminated players.

Take, for example, the tall, thin man in Seat 2, who arrived at Black 63 from a broken table. He had long dark hair and wire frames with light blue lenses. Throw in the black clothes, and if he declared that his job title was “Master of Illusions,” taught Criss Angel all he knew, I’d have believed him.