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

The flop was 9-5-3—no help. “This World Series sucks! Every time I’m two to one, I lose!”

Elder said nothing. Negreanu remained the favorite. If there was a Poker God present, it was Tim Old Spice, keeping Elder fresh. The man didn’t flinch.

The turn gave Elder a pair of aces. It was no longer two to one.

“He has to catch a 10,” the live commentator said, “or he will be eliminated.”

“A 10!” Negreanu implored.

The River. It was not a 10. Kid Poker was out.

Bellande shook his head.

“How about a big round of applause for Mr. Daniel Negreanu!” Kid Poker patted Elder on the back with a “Good luck, bro,” submitted to a quick exit interview with Kara Scott. Then he was gone.

Which left Cunningham and Bellande as the seniors at the table. Bellande busted the next day in seventy-eighth place. Cunningham busted soon after in sixty-ninth place. They made some money. August rolls around, and it’s just another tournament.

Yosemite Sam and his posse had been deposed by young hotshots like Kid Poker, and now Kid Poker had to shake these even younger players off his pants leg. With more than ten million in poker winnings, that was a lot of pants leg, but there were a lot of kids, too. At the Final Table in 2011, the contenders were in their early-to-mid-twenties, except for Badih Bounahra, a forty-nine-year-old amateur who’d squeezed into the lifeboat. The winner was Pius Heinz, a twenty-two-year-old German player who’d started online and was introduced to the game by watching hole-card cams in the Main Event on TV. The last hole-card cam of the 2011 WSOP revealed cards that gave Pius $8 million.

You’ll never get a Final Table full of colorful cowboys again. Simple numbers. To make it to the November Nine, the cards need to run too well for you and too poorly for too many other people. Poker dexterity will rescue you from riptides that overwhelmed weak players and driftwood-hugging Robotrons, but you’d still need a surfeit of good fortune.

In a couple of days they’d dismantle the studio, Bubble Wrap the more expensive branding material. Drop it into crates with the rest of the equipment, as if it were a fresh batch of jerky, packed into handy resealable pouches for distribution across the land. Resume the game in November, to celebrate the nine players who endured.

I kept Dexter Choi’s business card in my wallet for ten years, until one day I got worried I might lose it. I took it out and never saw it again. On a Thanksgiving ’97 trip, I looked for the House of Jerky. It was gone. Pushed out to make room for the Fremont Street Experience, an electronic canopy that covers four blocks of downtown.

At night they turn off the casino marquees and the light show begins, eleven million LEDs blinking out tribute to Vegas history. One light for every bad beat and botched connection this evening, one light for that poker hero cut down, and another for that luckless conventioneer returning to her hotel room alone. Enough lights to spare some for a mad dreamer or two. The Dexter Chois of the world. No one can see what they see, until they build it. If their plans sound ridiculous, if they’ve overstepped their abilities and aimed too high, they are not the first in this town to do so.

Tourists foolish enough to be ensnared by the promos for this crummy light show look up for a few minutes, and then it’s over. They drift away. The night is young, the city endless, and there are so many more disappointments to savor before dawn.

I woke up Tuesday with low M, emotion-wise. I wasn’t concerned about my short stack, as I was strangely optimistic that I’d get a good run of cards on Day 2B. Now that I’d finished a day of play, I’d come out swinging. But I’d been hit with a powerful case of the local affliction, the symptoms of which consisted of repeatedly mumbling “What the fuck am I doing in Vegas?” until you worked yourself into a desperate froth. I think residents were immune, but tourists were particularly susceptible to this strain of existential Montezuma’s revenge.

Coach was up and at ’em on the East Coast. She direct-messaged a pep talk:

Bagged and tagged! Goal! While you are sleeping this morning, I’ll research the field. Today’s goal: rest and recuperate. Great job .

You’ve outlasted 2,324 players—3rd largest entry in live history. 1D is largest entry day ever. 4,540 remain — on 2B there will be less .

Chip average looks to be 45K, but don’t let this worry you. 23K is nearly an M of 20x pot. You have enough to play and cripple others .

Great 2B table draw! 6 seat with no notable players and no monster stacks. Table low stack 14K. 4 seats shorter than you. Big: 50K. Avg: 25 .

Day 2, we’ll talk about ways to double up and who to go after. You are in fine shape. You’re alive!

We talked on the phone in the afternoon, a debrief on the rest of Day 1. I was still depressed by the Master of Illusion’s anticlimactic exit. To play for so long, pay ten grand, wait for the perfect hand, and then have your KK pulverized by a meteor from the deep cold of space: AA.

“You’re not going to see that hand again,” Coach told me. You saw that maybe once a tournament, and now I’d gotten it out of the way. She gave me homework, Dan Harrington, natch: Reread DH Vol 1 Pt 5 (betting) p. 198–213, 275–286. Vol 2 (zones) 133–155. Get ready to say, ‘All in.’

Call her if I needed anything else. Hit the books (yeah, I’d brought them cross-country with me), get some food, maybe I’d feel better. At 2:34 p.m., Coach sent me a message: “Dan Harrington just busted. Moment of silence, please.”

Great.

Coach’s breakdown of the situation alleviated any remaining stress over my game plan, and I was grateful. Her Southern accent and chipper delivery really sold it. My Vegas melancholy deepened throughout my day off, however. I missed my kid. I was sick of the Rio food. Christ, the All-American Bar and Grille — the flavor profiles of foreign lands had never agreed with me. I wanted to exist one single day on this miserable planet without having the thought, “I should really have the Caesar salad.” I should have called my college roommate Shecky — he’d tried to get in on a satellite but no go — to see if he wanted to hang, but I was embroiled in a full-on wallow.

The mere fact of Vegas, its necessity, was an indictment of our normal lives. If we needed this place — to transform into a high roller or a sexy swinger, to be someone else, a winner for once — then certainly the world beyond the desert was a small and mealy place indeed. We shuffled under fluorescent tubes in offices, steered the shopping carts through outlet malls and organic supermarkets while consulting a succession of moronic lists, and wearily collapsed on our beds at night with visions of the Big Score shimmering in our heads. There’s a leak in the attic again, the TV’s out of warranty, maybe we should get a tutor for Dylan, he’s a smart kid but doesn’t test well — and then there was Vegas. Vegas will heal us.

I didn’t want to be healed, but I knew there was something in the cards I needed. This was the assignment of a lifetime, right? It had never occurred to me that one day I’d play in the World Series of Poker. I was just a home-game scrub. But I loved them, I loved cards. I always had.

Memory is the past with volume control, turn it up, turn it down. Can I make out what I heard in the cards? The martial snap of an expertly shuffled deck, the sleek whisper of laminated paper jetting across the table. Crazy 8s and Spit and then Hearts in college. I was the Bruce Lee of Hearts, no joke, knew all the nerve clusters to paralyze your ass. I’d prowl around the dorm on becalmed afternoons, searching for Hearts players like the disheveled emissary of a ramshackle sect. Our holy text was composed of cut-up newsprint and down-market glossies, but we hit the streets anyway and hoped no one would notice. Everyone was busy studying or calling “their people” back home or whatever, except for me. Cards killed the hours. Then bridge, and then poker, the games that helped me unscramble the secret message: The next card, the next card is the one that will save me.