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

He and Marc Podell, the guy who continued to command our table into the late hours, recognized each other from “around”—life in the circuit badlands. He was supertight, a clam’s clam, this older gentleman. I couldn’t really see him around the curve of the table, and he rarely played a hand, so I only paid attention to him when he mixed it up. Which he finally did a couple of hours after dinner break. He went for it — shoved All In before the flop. Marc called him. AA versus KK. Marc had the two Aces. The man went poof, rabbit in a hat.

“That was sad,” I said. I don’t think “sad” is a poker term, but there it was. I’d barely spoken all day except to say, “Raise.” The Master of Illusion had been sitting so quietly for so long, mum, watching, waiting for precisely a hand like KK. KK — of course you’re going to go for it. And just like that, he was atomized, called up to the Big Stack in the Sky.

“I’ve seen him play before,” Marc said, grabbing the chips. “I knew he had something good.” But not good enough for Marc’s Aces. He casually mentioned that this day’s haul might be larger than his starting day in 2008, when he cashed in hundredth place. He ran over the rest of the table, it was our fault. Spend that money, work at your craft for years and years and finally make it to the Main Event: People were scared. What are you going to tell them at the water cooler if you go out the first day? Poker studs loathe “nits”—tight-playing schlubs who never mix it up, only betting monster hands. A nit is a lowly person, and here we were, a nit infestation. But I knew this, too: We were nits who wanted to be men.

I was definitely taking a grifter’s approach to my table image. This wasn’t the long con, though — I should have loosened up my betting once I saw I was playing with a bunch of Tentative Johnnys.

But I didn’t.

LEVEL 4: $27K

LEVEL 5: $23K

One improvement: mother hen-ing my blinds. I’d considered blinds and antes like income tax, what you have to pay to be a member of society. To fund pothole repair and corrupt, no-bid government contractors. But blinds are money. They are meaningful. They add up. Matt told me a lot of players nowadays preferred to use your number of Big Blinds in their actuarial tables of life expectancy, instead of M. After these crippling levels, I got it. There were two guys at Black 63 who were statues, except when targeting undefended Big Blinds. Swipers, after Dora the Explorer’s klepto nemesis. They preyed on blinds, scavenging to survive. When the latest swiper joined our table, he had a big stack of green chips, the ante chips. “That’s how you know,” Coach had told me.

I noticed the pattern. I was folding too easily when I was Big Blind and held shit cards in my hand. The swipers had pegged me as an easy mark. The swiper on Marc’s left — he kept farting or burping, from Marc’s wrinkled-nose rebukes — perked up when he was on the button. My BBs were easy pickings.

I finally started playing back at him, shooing flies away from my hamburger in a crappy diner. He stopped. Lesson: If you’re going to view blinds as taxes, be a Republican about them.

Level 5 was over. We bagged our chips in ziplocks, wrote our names on the plastic. It was 12:45 a.m. I was a lump of quivering human meat, but somehow I’d made it through Day 1 with $23K. Half the average stack. The next day, the blinds would escalate to $250 and $500, with $50 antes. I whipped out the abacus: I was at 19M. On my way upstairs, I bought a pouch of Jack Link’s Beef Jerky. No mere marketing ploy, the easy-seal bag really did lock in freshness.

I’d be back for Day 2B, if my own, personal daily Wave of Mutilation didn’t wash me away first.

I keep mentioning jerky. On that first Vegas trip in ’91, we stumbled on a wonderland.

It was a grubby spot on Fremont Street, just past the Four Queens and Binion’s, embedded in an outcropping of souvenir shops. The House of Jerky. I knew Slim Jims, those spicy straws of processed ears and snouts. This was something else entirely. We squinted in joyful bafflement before the rows of clear plastic pouches illed with knobs of dark, lean meat, seasoned and cured. Li’l baggie of desiccant at the bottom for freshness. The jerkys reminded me of Anhedonia’s ancient groves, specifically their tree bark, which we peel ’n’ eat in times of drought and on major holidays. We walked the aisles. The flavors were ordinary, yes. Pepper, teriyaki, barbecue. But the ark-ful of proteins was miraculous: beef, Alaskan salmon, buffalo, turkey, alligator, venison, ostrich.

The proprietor was a middle-aged Asian man named Dexter Choi. That one man’s singular vision could beget such bounty! It was America laid out before us, dangling on metal rods set into scuffed particle board. Complete with wide open spaces, for the store had a modest inventory. Dried fruit. Nuts. But mostly jerky.

Mr. Choi remained unmoved by our oh-snaps and holy-cows. The House of Jerky was kitsch to us, but we stood inside the man’s desert dream that day. You know there was a hater chorus when he shared his plans. “Forget about jerky, Dexter, study for the electrician’s licensing exam.” “Sure jerky is a low-calorie, high-sodium snack, Dexter, but when are you going to get your head out of the clouds?” “Look at these lips, Dexter — will your dried muscle-meat ever kiss you like I do?”

He endured. To build a House of Jerky is to triumph against the odds, to construct a nitrate-filled monument to possibility and individual perseverance. Dexter Choi was an outlaw. He faced down fate and flopped a full house.

Maybe things could have improved re: foot traffic, but I couldn’t help but be moved. From that day on, beef jerky was synonymous with freedom and savory pick-me-ups between meals. We bought a few bags of that sweet bark for our drive into Death Valley and continued on our journey.

How could I foresee that this cowboy snack would become a symbol of corporate poker, indeed the commercialization of all Las Vegas? Beef jerky was now the leathery, mass-produced face of modern poker. Meat snacks generated $1.4 billion a year in business, Jack Link’s a major player. Started in the 1880s by an immigrant named Chris Link, who served up smoked meats and sausages to Wisconsin pioneer folk, Jack Link’s was now the fastest-growing meat snack firm in the world, with a hundred different products sold in forty countries. “More than a century has passed,” the Our History page of their site announced, “but the Link family principles and traditions remain the same: hard work, integrity, and a commitment to earn consumer respect by delivering the best-tasting meat snacks in the world.”

Respect them I did. Since 2008, the company had been an official sponsor of the Main Event — the official name of the thing is “The World Series of Poker Presented by Jack Link’s Beef Jerky.” I had, in effect, been walking around in a big plastic bag ever since I stepped in the Rio. Explained the chronic suffocating feeling.

The company’s red and black logo mottled the ESPN studio in the Amazon Room, vivid on the clothing of sponsored players like cattle brands. Jack Link’s “Messin’ with Sasquatch” commercials were a mainstay of poker TV programming, featuring their mascot Sasquatch as he was humiliated by golfers, campers, and frat boys before putting a Big Foot up their asses. The mascot’s meaning? Despite the death of the frontier, and the stifling monotony of modern life, the Savage still walks among us. That, or Betty White was unavailable.