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

From there I ran hot, nice cards emboldening me. Last-chancers were swallowed by behemoths. Ill-advised All Ins staggered away, sometimes saying goodbye and sometimes without a word, to hit the bar, to shower before the night out and salvage something from the last few hours of the trip. I had a scheme to disable a Robotron by asking him to calculate pi to the last digit, but he busted before I had a chance. I assembled a nice stack and came in third place. Up $175. The old white guy was second. The last few levels, he’d taken a shine to me, asking me to describe the board when the cards showed up fuzzy in his magnifying lenses. First place was the young dandy, who was now free to rest up before nighttime bottle service with his girlfriend at The Pool over at Harrah’s, or the Borgata’s MIXX. We were an unlikely Mod Squad, case cracked. I celebrated with some dumplings at P. F. Chang’s and caught a bus home.

God doesn’t play dice with the universe, but sometimes he plays just the tip. My win was beginner’s luck, that freaking bane of poker players everywhere. You welcome some newbie who thinks it “might be fun” to play, what larks, and they take down pot after pot. It’s a friendly game, or else you’d beat them senseless. I imagine it’s like when you toss a one-legged duck into a palenque (Mexican cockfighting arena) and the duck somehow pecks the shit out of all comers. Throws off the natural order.

A certain stinginess with myself, the biding thing, meant I had natural facility with drawn-out contests. There were nameless forces at work in a tourney, however, invisible energies I was just beginning to understand. I wasn’t good at asking for help. We go solo, my kinfolk and I, taking each day as an IKEA bookcase we build alone, sans instructions. The leftover pieces? We gobble them down, and sometimes it’s the only thing we eat all day.

But I was heading out into the desert, and I couldn’t do it alone.

The World Series of Poker. My intro to the world of high-stakes competition. I’d never been much of an athlete, due to a physical condition I’d had since birth (unathleticism). Perhaps if there were a sport centered around lying on your couch in a neurotic stupor all day, I’d take an interest. I attacked my training on three fronts:

MENTAL

PHYSICAL

EXISTENTIAL

MENTAL :Obviously, I had to improve my game. Like all wretches suddenly called up to the Big Time, I needed a Burgess Meredith, but good. One who wouldn’t scoff at the five-dollar buy-in of my usual game.

… Although in the end it was my monthly game that led me to my sensei. After stewing for weeks, I came out to my gang about my Vegas trip. They were excited for me, which expanded the field of my anxiety. It was one thing to bring shame upon myself. That was my occupation. But to let down the crew? Sending an emissary to the World Series was a hallowed home-game tradition. In Anchorage, St. Louis, and Boogie-down Boca, tribes of home players stuffed money in the kitty all year to subsidize a member’s entry to the Main Event. The rest maybe flying out for moral support, lap dances, a stint or two in the poker room between railing. My own crew wasn’t coming out west, but I’d have to account for myself on return.

Hannah, a recent addition to our writers game, told me about a friend who’d played in the WSOP. Maybe she was worth talking to?

And so, Coach. I met Helen Ellis in a restaurant off Union Square. We shook hands by the hostess station. Underneath her bob of black hair, Helen’s mischievous eyes sized me up as if I were a new addition to a cash game. Marking off boxes in a mental Rube/Not Rube quiz. Air of Vulnerability: Check. Whiff of Flop Sweat: Check.

The Alabama in her voice was strong. She’d made no effort to shed her Southern accent during her time in the city. I respected that, as I’d worked hard over the years to flatten my Anhedonian accent, which one linguist memorably described as “like a flock of geese getting beaten by tire irons.”

At cards, when asked what she does for a living, Helen says, “Housewife.” Like me, she had her mask. I had my half-dead mug, behind which … well, not much was going on, really. Dust Bunny Dance Party. But Helen’s hid her poker kung fu, and her deception was a collaboration. In a male-dominated game, where female players often affect an Annie Oakley tomboy thing to fit in, the housewife-player was an unlikely sight. “I get ma’amed a lot.” The dudes flirted and condescended, and then this prim creature in a black sweater and pearls walloped them. “A lot of people don’t think women will bluff,” Helen said. She was bluffing the moment she walked into the room.

Helen started playing in casinos on her twenty-first birthday. Her father met her in Vegas. At midnight he took her to the front of Caesars, with its soaring plaster temples and gargantuan toga’d figures, den of Roman kitsch. Up and down Las Vegas Boulevard, the huge casinos beckoned. “Sit down and look around,” Papa Ellis instructed. “This is the Center of the Universe.” Helen started playing in the Mississippi casinos close to her home in Tuscaloosa, and when we met she was hitting eight tournaments a year. Biloxi, AC. When it worked out, father and daughter met on the circuit. Husband Lex came, too. He plays a solid game, she said.

Later, I’d see her maintain an imperturbable poker face at the table, but that day Helen couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow when I divulged my usual stakes. She agreed to give me some crucial pointers. As we waited for our food, I told her about my Tropicana trip, my poker history. Started to say something about “the biding part of me” and its usefulness in tournaments, as “The Biding” was shaping up to be a new favorite in my personal mythology, edging out old standbys like “All This Misery Is Fuel” and “I Think I Would Have Made a Fine Astronaut, Probably.”

She was not impressed with my chump idea of the poker trenches. Why would she care about my penny-ante bull? She’d been to the WSOP, for chrissake.

“Sometimes you just run a table,” Helen told me, recounting last year’s trip, “and I was running every table I was at.” She still savored her nice streak in the WSOP Six Handed No-Limit Hold’em event, one of the run-up matches. The World Series of Poker culminates in the Main Event, but in the six weeks leading up to that big megillah, it is what its name implies, a gauntlet of dozens of matches that embody the ever-changing contemporary poker scene. No-Limit Draw Lowball, H.O.R.S.E., Seven Card Razz. Great players are multidisciplinary, but everyone has the little dances they like, their rumbas and funky chickens.

Apart from the money and whatever emotional fulfillment they project onto winning, the various childhood hurts and core sadnesses they briefly silence through victory, the big poker stars are angling for Player of the Year points. POY points quantify how well you do in the various WSOP events, accounting for the size of each field and the amount of the buy-in. Before the Main Event starts, Helen said, you “see players playing, like, two or three hands at once.” Events are running all the time, so if you make it to Day 2 of one match and want to enter Day 1 of another, you gotta do some light jogging between ballrooms, mucking in $2,500 Eight-Game Mix so you can catch the next hand of $3,000 No-Limit Hold’em Shootout down the hall.