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

Watch any of ESPN’s coverage and you’ll encounter “Jack Link’s Beef Jerky Wild Card Hand,” in which host Norman Chad tries to divine the contents of a hand through betting patterns. The “hole-card cam” was a clutch innovation behind poker’s populist boom, allowing viewers to see the players’ hands. Before we pierced that veil, televised poker was like watching a baseball game with an invisible ball — i.e., even more boring than watching regular baseball. The hole-card cam allowed for simultaneous commentary — just like real sports! The fans participated in the spectacle, second-guessing, pitting their own calculations against the pros’ moves. They learned. They got better. They started playing in the events they watched on TV.

Poker as million-dollar theater, hence the upgrade from Johnny Moss’s engraved silver cup to diamond-encrusted bracelets. I was implicated in this big-biz operation. Grantland , the magazine that sent me, was owned by ESPN. ESPN was owned by Disney. Which is why they had trouble finding my check. It was floating around the accounting office of Caesars, which was owned by Harrah’s, who owned the WSOP. At registration, I’d kept mentioning ESPN and Grantland as my benefactors, when the check was cut by Disney. We were all confused.

People asked if I’d be able to keep the money if I cashed at the WSOP. Yes — that had been made clear to me. I wasn’t getting paid for the article. My compensation was them paying my entrance fee. Haggle with a lowly freelancer over winnings? Peanuts to the parent corp. I was writing for an entity owned by the company that made millions and millions off WSOP coverage. My words were an advertisement, is one way of looking at it. Raise awareness of the game. Inspire some misfit kid to take up poker. Spread the gospel far and wide. Maybe they’d even hold a circuit game in Anhedonia one day. On the Eastern Coast, a popular vacation spot often free of corpses.

Grantland . ESPN. Disney. It was all in the family.

The House always wins.

It was cool to be at the Rio, to sit in ESPN’s studio after watching so much poker on TV, railing at home all those years. I was a fan. That’s why I was here. When I returned to the studio on Day 5—

Wait, he’s dilly-dallying in the stands on Day 5? Shouldn’t he be playing? Spoiler: I didn’t win the Main Event. You had suspicions, you say? For one thing, the subtitle of this book would be “The Amazing Life-Affirming Story of an Unremarkable Jerk Who Won the World Series of Poker!” instead of having the word “Death” in it. For another, do these sound like the words of a motherfucker who won a million goddamn dollars? You’d think I’d include peppier adjectives. If I’d won, you might not be reading this right now. I mean, I would’ve written this book, artistic imperative and all that, but not so soon. No, I’d still be sailing around the Caribbean on my yacht with some wretched hotties. The Lost Ones, first-round rejects from Hip Hop Honeys . Yeah, they look foxy in their drab, ill-fitting overalls, but the talent scouts always take a pass on account of their disquieting smiles and far-off stares. My kind of crowd. We chill on the aft futons, reel in marlin, shake the blender as we mix coladas. The skipper’s half in the bag but I don’t care, I’ll write the book when I get back.

But for those who want to hang on to hope, let’s say I was watching Day 5 of an unspecified WSOP, not necessarily 2011 (even though that’s when it was).

On Day 5 the TV room, the Amazon, was the last room left. The Main Event had been cut down to 378 players, so they were already packing up. The sad endgame atmosphere of conventions the world over. The 24/7 video display in the rotunda had been wheeled away, the bunting was half ripped down, the gigantic head shots of game legends rolled up until next year. The Pavilion was shut. I peeked in: In the vast, empty hall, union guys stacked the chairs and loaded them onto dollies. No more legions of would-be heroes and their spank-bank visions of poker glory. You were playing the Amazon Room, or you were busto.

Given the number of combatants, the Feature Table was distilled poker prowess. Like Allen Cunningham, five-time bracelet winner, who had stared me down for days from his gigantic head shot on the rotunda wall. Drowsy in person. Unimposing in his white checkered button-down. He was sharing close-ups with Jean-Robert Bellande and Daniel Negreanu, who’d wrangled their poker TV fame into slots on reality shows, Survivor and Millionaire Matchmaker , respectively. They were more than poker stars, they were TV stars and knew the business of being in front of the camera. Bellande ambled up to the Feature Table, looking slick, trailed by a skinny guy in a black suit: “Is everything all right?” Almost showtime, Mr. Bellande. Bellande asked for a chip count — where’s everybody stand before the next level starts? — and posed for a picture with a fan.

The railbirds chirped. Can I get an autograph, Kid Poker? I’d seen Negreanu emanating the last few days, providing wiseacre pull quotes to the press during their blog check-ins, chuckling through an at-table massage, his blond highlights glinting. Relaxed, chipper. He’d been through it all before, this imp. Between hands he and Bellande yukked it up about some Twitter incident, and belittled annoying tournament rules. The Powers That Be were always instituting new protocols, to curb the arms race of who can wear the most sponsored gear on-screen, to regulate table talk. Negreanu was affable, joshing with the table and the fans, but he’d started the day with half the average stack, and was now down to twenty Big Blinds. Then it was fifteen Big Blinds …

When the next level started—$6,000/$12,000 blinds, $2,000 antes — I was so programmed that I heard the TV announcer’s voice in my head, drowning out the live commentator’s. When I watched the broadcast months later, ESPN framed the episode as Kid Poker’s Last Stand, with heavy metal guitar to punctuate:

Player of the Year! [power chord!] Millions in Tournament winnings! [power chord!] Celebrity and stardom! [Kid Poker holds up wads of cash] Daniel Negreanu has accomplished everything in poker except his biggest and toughest goal — the Main Event! [Kid Poker storms away from a busted hand] Tonight it’s put up or shut up for Kid Poker and his dwindling stack. Will he continue to climb poker’s highest peak, or will he fall short once again?

Live, the end of his Main Event was less dramatic. More humble and human-size. The spectator area was just a couple of rows, but the dark cobalt lighting gave them false depth on TV. Friends of the high-performing amateur players at the Feature Table and fans of the big shots jostled for seats. Some of them were on the job. The Feature Table action was being livestreamed, with a thirty-minute delay. Which meant that anyone watching knew what players had held in this or that showdown a couple of hands back. And they could inform their pals. Sorry to break it to you, but she was bluffing with 5-10 offsuit. What kind of range forced that tall Swede to move All In? Your cronies relay information, texting, waving you over to the rails for a quick huddle, to help navigate course corrections. “Dude, he totally got inside your head thirty-one minutes ago.” The hole-card cam strikes again.

Negreanu had no choice but to shove when he got dealt a pair of 10s. Everyone mucked except Rupert Elder, a British pro, who turned over his A7. Elder kept mum, perhaps because he must have been sweltering in that white cable-knit sweater.

Negreanu jumped from his seat, punching the air. “We need a 10 and we’re good!” He whirled. “I wanna win this hand really bad! Really bad!” I didn’t know if he was addressing his supporters, who loudly rooted from the rails, or the viewers behind the camera feeds, or himself. Maybe he danced for the Poker Gods, as Maud of the Magic River checked the ledgers. Had he been naughty or nice?