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

And Power. That tower of chips you’ve made, looming over the rim of the table, is the physical manifestation of how much you can bully. A monument to your prowess, or the Poker Gods’ blessing this day. Big stacks eat little stacks like M&M’s. The other saps have arranged their stacks into houses of straw and sticks, and even the brick ones will not stand at your re-raise huffing and puffing. What threat is that little stack’s All In to someone who’d gathered a thousand times as many chips? I’d always marveled at the gravity-defying properties of those gigantic stacks. Aren’t they afraid of knocking them over? My anxiety-palsied hands would send them flying through space. But the first step to handling chip castles is accumulating a bunch of chips, hence my lack of practice.

So: Gather a big stack and people won’t want to tangle with your King Kong self. On the Simian Scale, I was more Bubbles the chimp, break-dancing for cigarette and gin money before Michael Jackson rescued him from the streets. Hanging on, overcautious. An early misstep set me brooding. I was Big Blind, with a 9 and a 7, differently suited. Crap, but my forced ante dragged me into the flop — where a pair of 7s gave me trips. Cool. But this young madman in middle position called with 8–7 offsuit (Why was he in? Why, why?) and took the pot with a full house. I lost half my stack. Shut me up for a while.

As it turned out, one aspect of my personality would help me in my odyssey: I was a bider. Temperamentally suited to hold out for good cards, well accustomed to waiting. We Anhedonians have adapted to long periods between good news. Our national animal is the hope camel. We have no national bird. All the birds are dead.

Hyper-aggressive play — taking any two starting hands and rigging some MacGyver-type hand-winning apparatus out of them — was beyond me this early in my training. But in a tournament, you can go hours without decent opening cards. Even an aggressive player only plays four hands out of ten. Everyone, from these weekend plodders in the Trop Poker Room to the seasoned players I’d play with in Las Vegas, had to learn to suffer a rough table, a short stack, some weird hex your next-door neighbor put on you for playing polka music too loud. You bide. Pray. Try to keep cool. Eventually the cards will come. The biding, spider part of me thrived in tournaments.

But biding only gets you so far in poker. Just partway through my strategy manual, and I was already becoming aware of different phases in the game. In the coming weeks, I’d watch the tournaments disintegrate. Forty-eight, thirty-two, sixteen players left. A stickler will shout “Hank! You gonna break this table?” and Hank the floor manager takes a gander. We get chip racks, rack ’em up, and move to our new station. The tables broke and we hopped to the next one as if scampering across splintering ice floes. A broken table exiled opponents to the other side of the room, and then another returned them. Or didn’t. They prospered in that new land, or withered, and the story of their table journey merged with mine to create this afternoon’s epic. When tables drop to five or six players, the manager reassigns players to maintain distribution, because the game changes depending on how many people are seated. Like, flopping a high pair isn’t that great when you’re ten-handed — there are too many people who might have better cards. But it ain’t bad against six players, and heads up against one player, it’s awesome.

At the Final Table, there’s nothing left to break. Last man standing.

WORST DAY OF THE YEAR :The day you bust out of the World Series of Poker.

I made it to my tournament’s Final Table with a minuscule stack. Not that “Final Table” meant much when there were only two tables to begin with. The Methy Mikes were reunited, sweeping their long stringy hair out of their faces between hands. They’d taken damage, too. Also present: two fellows who didn’t fit the demographic of my first table. One was a young Middle Eastern man in his early twenties, dressed in stylish, slim-cut clothes, who mixed it up affably, knocking down hands. He was no Robotron, or if he had been at one time, he’d gotten some back-alley doctor to remove his implants. His girlfriend dragged over a chair and sat behind him sipping a cocktail. She didn’t mind waiting, and ignored the guy on her boyfriend’s right who kept hitting on her. When the Lothario busted out, they chuckled.

The other castaway was an elderly white man who bent over his chips, squinting through a magnifying attachment that barnacled on his thick specs like a jeweler’s loupe. He pondered before acting, as if reviewing a lifetime of hands and confrontations, or fighting off a nap. Sometimes you have to accept a casino trip for what it really is: an opportunity to see old people. There were a lot of old people in poker rooms, genially buying in for a couple of hands before the Early Bird Special. I prefer to believe they were gambling with discretionary funds, enjoying their twilight years after a lifetime of careful saving, and not pissing away their Social Security. If I were an octogenarian looking for love, I’d hit the casinos, no question. The dating pool is quite deep.

The atmosphere at the Final Table was different. Never fast-moving, today’s game decelerated even more. Previously aggressive opponents tempered their play. Something was going on, but I couldn’t see it. I’d leave the Tropicana with clues, courtesy of the Methy Mikes. They’d complained all day, first about the paltry turnout (“I bet Caesars is hopping”), and then about how long the game was taking. Only eighteen people, but we dragged on. Maybe the slow levels were cutting into their cockfight prep time, Hercules always requiring a good menthol rub before a bout.

“Waiting for him to push,” said one, sourly.

He kept at it. After a few hands, I realized he was talking about me. The dismissive gesture in my direction tipped me off. I hadn’t been glared at with such hate by two people since couples therapy. Unfortunately, I had no idea what “pushing” meant.

The next day I’d google it: going All In. But why did he care that I wasn’t shoving? Because I had no choice at that point. The Big Blind was $3,000, and I had $9,000. I could survive three rounds. But wait — the Small Blind was $1,500, so I didn’t even have that long ($1,500 + $3,000 means it cost $4,500 to play one round, or half my stack of $9,000). Not enough to slow-play or wait for a premium hand. To value bet, not that I knew what value betting was. All I could do was push my cards into the middle and hope that the Hungry Hippos had worse cards. Pushin’. I should have started pushing levels ago, before I got into this deplorable situation. Methy Mike was trying to wrap things up, and there I was sitting like a chump, waiting for a bus that wasn’t going to come.

I wanted to say, “Look, I’m on a journey here,” but that had never worked except that one time in T.G.I. Friday’s and all it got me was a half-off coupon for jalapeño poppers. Methy, I wasn’t happy with my paltry chips, either. I was shocked that I’d survived this far. Tremor in my hands whenever I reached for my stack. I petted the notebook in my pocket for comfort, as if I could absorb my instructions through fabric. Which might appear onanistic to the other players and throw them off their game.

So it felt good when I pushed, ignorance aside, and took my critic out with a flush. Cock-a-doodle-doo, motherfucker. I think it was a flush. My notes say, “gamey tooth, itchy eyeballs, heart palpitations, necrotic finger, incipient flatulence.” Five of the same suit.