Then comes the Flop: three communal cards in the middle of the table. Sharing with strangers—we’ve moved from capitalism to communism. Flop, like you’ve parachuted into the war zone and landed in a strategic position, or the champs at air command have miscalculated again and dropped you smack in the enemy trenches. Everyone checks, bets, raises, or folds according to their present coordinates. Checking is ducking from artillery, like if I lie low maybe I won’t get hit and my lot will improve. Taking a second to see what’s going on.
Then comes the next communal card, the Turn, as in: Turn the corner to see the next obstacle fate has thrown in your path, three goddamned tourists walking shoulder to shoulder so you can’t progress, or a block party hosted by Everyone You Owe E-mail To. You have improved, or not. Finally we get to the last card, the River, and fortune’s drifts and eddies have borne you to a safe harbor, or you suddenly discover that pirates crept aboard a few rounds ago and you’re about to be robbed: Hold’em.
About Limit and No Limit: I have good card sense, I’m a pretty good player in my five-dollar buy-in game, in the way that a lot of people are good in low-stakes games. The size of the bets is capped, “limited,” so people hang around to the River waiting for a miracle, and why not, you can always buy in for another few bucks. Let’s say when you’re playing cheap at Mike’s on Saturday night, the maximum bet might be one buck—there will be no handing over the keys to the Prius. On a bad night you lose forty dollars, cheaper than the date nights you regularly schedule in the hope of “keeping things fresh,” cheaper than tromping off to one of the crappy 3-D movies, what with the price of popcorn going through the roof. Over five hours, you got your money’s worth. At the $1/$2 chump game I was playing at the Trop, the Small Blind was one dollar and the Big Blind was two dollars.
In No Limit, that’s where you get the ladies and gentlemen dropping their genitals on the table, declaring “All in!” You can bet your whole stash, it’s crazy. Exciting! Thrill of Gambling! That’s what they were playing one table over from me. Fewer Methy Mikes there, and no ladies, crimson hair or no. No Limit is what the boys play these days. The stakes are intensified, but if you bust out, you can still buy back in. In a home game, you can sometimes reach into your pocket and throw a dollar in, if the hand has gotten interesting and you want to keep playing. In a casino, you can only throw in the chips you already have in front of you. That’s the cap on your All In. But if you bust out, you can pad over to the ATM machine, pay a strip-club-worthy service charge, and get a new stack of chips.
In a tournament, if you go All In and lose, you’re out.
Tonight was a warm-up. Tomorrow I was playing in my first casino tournament. Ever since I’d taken this assignment, I’d been playing poorly, trying to apply the half-digested poker knowledge I’d gulleted down from books, crashing and burning. If I couldn’t maintain a decent level of play in a home game, how could I face the Big Boys in Vegas?
I hadn’t slept in weeks. I had to make something happen tonight, even at this crappy $1/$2 table, just for morale’s sake. The $1/$2 limit is the crummiest card game available in the modern casino. If it were street retail, it’d be a combo KFC–Taco Bell–Donate Blood Here. You can make a little money playing top hands, but you’ll rarely bluff everyone out because staying in until the Magical River is not expensive. In Vegas, I’d be playing with people who didn’t bother with these crap stakes.
Next to me, Big Mitch shuffled the top two chips of his disappearing stack. The money could have been so many things. A new propane tank for the grill, or an anniversary dinner with Pat at that new fusion place. Methy Mike ordered another Jack and Coke and tipped the waitress with a dollar chip and a “Thanks, darling.” Robotron could see right through our meat and straight into our poker souls, groaning as he announced, “I have to fold to your Ace-Queen.” (The goddamned Feds!) The Lady with the Crimson Hair fondled her chips, and I played tight and won eighty-one dollars. Chicken feed, but enough to cover the entrance fee for tomorrow’s tournament.
I toasted my success in A Dam Good Sports Bar upstairs in The Quarter, the casino’s dining concourse, meant to evoke Havana. The home of the original Trop, back in the day. It would do. The table next to me ordered 40s of Bud Light, which arrived on ice in buckets. Is that how they celebrated in Cuba’s gambling heyday? They toasted the night’s festivities, just a few sips away.
I had been here before, in American cities of a certain size, a bunch of gnawed wing bones before me. Drinking beer alone among flat-screens and dead eyes. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, because in the end, whatever goes down, whatever you get up to, your triumphs and transgressions, nobody actually understands what it means except for you. What did it mean to you in your secret heart to win that money or lose that money, to hold that person. To see them walk away. It is unshareable. No one to narc on you to the folks back home: The only narc here is you.
Because I was in AC, Vegas’s little cousin, the stakes—the highs and lows—were smaller scale. I wanted to tell someone, I won eighty-one bucks. But who cared about eighty-one bucks? Who’d care that I had just started a journey that would take me from my crappy New York apartment, a.k.a. the Our Lady of Perpetual Groaning, and out into the American desert, where I’d be bullied, bluffed, and tested by the best poker players in the world. As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. “Life is a journey, not a destination.” Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination.
The table next to me ordered another bucket of 40s. They had their expedition, and I had mine.
I returned to my room. I was going to hit the books again before the 11:00 a.m. starting time. My bed was impossibly stiff, as if all the years of bad luck in this place, the busted hopes and evaporated rent money, had been turned into cement, cut into slabs, and then wheeled down the carpeted hallways into the rooms. We slept atop our sarcophagi. I realized I hadn’t told anyone where I was going, some real hobo shit. My ex-wife and the kid were upstate, engaged in holiday-weekend goodness. Here I was acting as if I had nobody. One of the overlooked benefits of joint custody is that you’re going to go max thirty-six hours until someone discovers your decomposing body. “Anyone seen him? He was supposed to pick her up after school.”
I had people. I flashed to how happy my daughter was when I told her I won a hundred bucks in a game last summer. I’d driven down to AC with two pals, on the Manboob Express, and brought back one uncashed dollar chip to give her as a souvenir. “One hundred dollars!” Here’s a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it’s going to pay off later. She believed in me. I was her dad.
I was lucky.
I was gonna play in the Big Game and give it my best shot. It was not the National Series of Poker, it was the World Series of Poker, and I would represent my country, the Republic of Anhedonia. We have no borders, but the population teems. No one has deigned to write down our history, but we are an ancient land, founded during the original disappointments, when the first person met another person. I would do it for my countrymen, the shut-ins, the doom-struck, the morbid of temperament, for all those who walk through life with poker faces 24/7 because they never learned any other way. For the gamblers of every socioeconomic station, working class, middle class, upper class, broke-ass; for the sundry gamers twelve stories below, tossing chips into the darkness; for the internet wraiths maniacally clicking before their LCDs in ill-lit warrens in Akron, Boise, and Bhopal, who should really get out more; for all the amateurs who need this game as a sacred haven once a month, who seek the sanctuary of Draw and Stud, where there are never any wild cards and you can count on a good hand every once in a while. For Big Mitch and Methy Mike, Robotron and the Lady with the Crimson Hair, the ones who would kill to go to Vegas and will never make it there, my people all of them. Did I sound disdainful of them before? It was reco
gnition you heard. I contain multitudes, most of them flawed.
Plus, I’ve always wanted to wear sunglasses indoors.
In the spring of 2011, I received an e-mail from the editor of a new magazine. He asked if I wanted to write something about sports.
No, I said. I didn’t follow sports. Sure, now and then I mixed it up in a Who Had the Most Withholding Father contest with chums, but that’s as far as it went for me competitive sports–wise. More important, I was catching my breath after pulling out of a long skid. I had recently finished writing a novel about a city overrun by the living dead, and the plunge into autobiography had left me depleted. I’d barely gone out in months, devoting myself to meeting a moronic deadline I’d imposed in a spasm of optimism. Dating was a distraction, even the frequent-buyer card at my local coffee place was too much of a commitment. Now that I was done with the book, I was starting to feel human again. I wanted to rejoin society, do whatever it is that normal people do when they get together. Drink hormone-free, humanely slaughtered beer. Eat micro-chickens. Compare sadnesses, things of that sort.
The editor had heard that I liked poker—what if they sent me to cover the World Series of Poker?
No, I said. I did indeed like poker, and although there was no way he could know it, was very fond of Las Vegas. But ten days in the desert, in the middle of July? I chap easily. And again, I wanted to give myself a break. In the past year I had devoted myself to the novel and to figuring out the rules of solo parenthood. If I wasn’t writing, I was hitting the “Activities for Kids” sites in search of stuff for the kid and I to do on the weekends. It was a hard job, tracing a safe route through the minefield of face-painting, peanut-free caroling, and assorted pony bullshit that would get us safely to dinnertime and the organic hot dogs. A trip to Las Vegas would cut into our summer hang, which I’d come to idealize. It’s complicated, raising a kid who is half Anhedonian. There’s always the question of assimilation in this country: How much of your native culture do you keep, and how much do you give up? I wanted her to respect both sides of her heritage, so in the summer I’d teach her how to be a carefree American. We’d sip plus-size colas, watch TV on sunny days, be the lazy assholes the Founders intended.
Then the editor of the magazine asked, What if we staked you to play in the World Series and you wrote about that?
I had no choice. The only problem was that I had no casino tournament experience.
I’d been playing penny poker since college. College kids counting out chips into even stacks, opening a case of brew, busting out real-man cigars—these were the sacred props of manhood, and we were chronically low on proof. A couple of years later, in the ’90s, I had a weekly game. Inconceivable now: getting half a dozen people in the same room every Sunday night. We put in our measly five bucks. There was always someone who’d mined their couch or plundered their jar of laundry quarters, the twenty-something version of hocking your engagement ring.
We talked a lot about who we wanted to be, because we weren’t those people yet, and reinforcing one another’s delusions took the edge off. You humor my bat-shit novel idea, and I’ll nod thoughtfully at your insipid screenplay treatment, or plan for the paradigm-shifting CD-ROM game. Like I said, it was the ’90s. Dealer’s choice: Everyone got their turn to pick the game and expound upon the next harebrained scheme that would make us artists. The home game is always a refuge from the world. That ’90s game was an escape from our unrealized ambitions. We were true gamblers, laundry money or no, because we were sure that if we pulled it off, everything would be different. We were so busy bucking each other up that we barely noticed when someone introduced Hold’em into our mix of Seven Card Stud, Five Card Draw, and Anaconda.
A couple of years after that game trailed off, we started a Brooklyn writers game. A cliché, yes: more props. Monthly, ’cause who had the time now that we were actually writing books instead of just talking about it. The stakes stayed the same, though—five bucks, because we were writers. The game still a refuge, this time from the truth we’d discovered about fulfilling your dreams. We had done it, and we were still the same people. Nothing had changed.
There was a brief period, during my ’90s game, when I wanted to learn more about poker. I was sick of hanging around doomed hands like a dope, waiting to fill in my straight, hoping that the final down card in Seven Card Stud would paint in my flush. Slow learner that I am, I’d just outgrown pining over women who weren’t interested in me, and whenever I looked at a busted hand, it gave me a familiar pathetic feeling. Gamblers and the lovesick want to bend reality. But it’s never going to happen. If you woke the hell up, you’d understand that and stop chasing.
It occurred to me that I should research how often big hands popped up. Full houses and trips and what have you. Not the “odds” of them appearing, as that sounded too much like arithmetic. Just a loose idea of how often nice cards appeared in my hand. So on Sunday afternoons while the hangover matinee played on the TV, I squatted on the floor and dealt out Seven Card Stud for myself and three ghost players. I’d play my game, fill in the dummy hands, and see who’d win.
Did my yearnings pay off—did that Jack appear when I needed it, that scrawny pair bulk up into trips? Well. It wasn’t very scientific. Anybody who retained a little high-school math could arrive at the real odds more efficiently. And a couple of rounds for a couple of hours on a couple of Sundays was nothing compared to the weekend crash courses possible during the heyday of online play, when you’d hunker for hours, you got your mouse in one hand and a sporkful of kale salad in the other. But in my little way, I got an intuitive instruction on different hands. At the very least, I stopped chasing straights as much, and that, coupled with my poker mask, paid for some cab rides home Sunday night.
Most poker books include glossaries of poker terms and a list of hand rankings, regardless of the ability level of their target audience. That cardplayer optimism about the Big Score, the one that will Change It All, channeled into crossover dreams, even though nobody knows what the hell they’re talking about. In this chapter I’ll stop to define some poker lingo here and there, and will now commence with the requisite breakdown of hand rankings, even though I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.
For those who have never played, there are plenty of mnemonic devices for remembering the hand rankings, which is really a list of reverse frequency. Some of the tricks—“High pair in your holster, break out the prairie oysters!” and “Full House sends you All-In! Too bad we haven’t invented penicillin!”—date to the early frontier days of the game and haven’t aged well. It’s important to find the rhetorical system that works for you.
In explaining the game to a contemporary American audience, one should employ analogies appropriate to the culture. To start, when judging a five-card hand of random crap, the highest card determines its value. No trips, no straights, nothing but, say, a Jack or a King. You got zip. By an American standard of success you’ve totally botched it. Your worldly possessions—what you’ve been dealt—are nothing more than a cracked snow globe, a ball of twine, an unwrapped candy cane, the electronic keycard to a job you got fired from six years ago, and a thimble. In a showdown with the Lady with the Crimson Hair, she turns over the same first four items, but instead of a thimble, she has a signed head shot of Ben Vereen. You both have terrible hands, but in a war of who has the better crap, the Lady wins for possessing the highest value item: the Ben Vereen commemorative.
Whoever has the better stuff wins. Sound familiar, American lackeys of late-stage capitalism? After highest card comes one pair. You have one Queen, but your opponent has two Queens. Who wins? Imagine the Queens are gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles. DVD players for the kids, butt warmers, GPS voiced by Helen Mirren. Your family has one SUV, but Big Mitch next door has two of them. Who wins? Exactly. That’s the virtue of culturally appropriate mnemonics.
Next comes two pair. You have one pair of thermal socks. Ready to throw down with Old Man Winter, “To Build
a Fire”–style. Robotron over there has one pair of Miles Davis CDs and one pair of coupons for free Jazzercise lessons. He wins: two pair beats having one pair. Now let’s say you also have a pair of Golden Girls box sets, so that you both have two pair. The highest value pair determines who wins. In this case, Miles Davis takes it for Robotron. In a face-off between your possibly lifesaving footwear, plus the entire run of a series about the twilight years of four feisty gals, and your opponent’s late-period Miles and cardio-heavy Jazzercise, he has the nuts.
Three of a kind, or trips, is best illustrated by a quote from the inspiring story of a young immigrant’s pursuit of the American dream, Oliver Stone’s Scarface (1983): “In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, you get the women.” I know it’s a universal quote, speaking to all walks of life, as I’ve heard suburban white guys cite it without irony. Money, power, women: That’s three Aces in your hand right there. Certainly beats what you’re usually holding in your hand, boys.
As an Anhedonian, those analogies don’t speak to me. What do I see when I’m dealt a straight—five cards in a series, like 5-6-7-8-9, not all of the same suit? To my tribe, that’s five misfortunes in a row, but not the same brand of misfortune. Let’s say one afternoon, one after the other in sequence, you: forget the name of someone you’ve met several times; e-mail an important document late; require an emergency root canal; overcook the risotto; and pick an argument with your partner because you blame them for everything that happened today. That’s five misfortunes, but a mix of social, professional, and health-related misfortunes. They are “differently suited.”
A flush would be five misfortunes of the same kind, or suit. Social, for example. You forget the name of someone you’ve met several times, pick a fight with a loved one, disrespect a member of the service industry, accidentally cuss during the kid’s playdate, and fart loudly during the toast at your cousin’s wedding. Fan out these things before you, arrange them by type: They are all in the same family of social disaster, the same suit. Let’s say five spades, because you’re always digging yourself into a hole.