The Poker Project (playing and writing about poker in the U.S.)
04-06-2017
, 12:32 PM
04-10-2017
, 06:33 PM
Quote:
This thread is one the first that I remember reading on 2+2, not sure if you guys have familiarity with it or not. Apologies if you do. I realize this isn't in book form but this write-up is always one of the first things that jump to my mind when someone asks for some narrative covering the WSOP Main Event.
A few others come to mind:
Nate Meyvis's 2011 trip report (on 2p2) is enjoyable
Andrew Brokos published a series of E-books, The Thinking Poker Diaries, that offers a year-by-year walkthrough of his ME experiences. Nice mix of stories and strategy
Part of Scansion's epic writeups (mentioned previously itt) include his ME experiences.
Maybe I'll include my own recap after this summer...thinking about playing this year
04-27-2017
, 11:43 AM
Quote:
Surprised I never mentioned this to you, but I was reminded of it while in DC. If you haven't read Hoop Roots by John Edgar Wideman, you may enjoy it. A bit self-indulgent, but his love of the game and his conflicted relationship with academia (and, ultimately, with the game in the need to recognize there were significant limits to how far it could take him) may appeal.
Also, to the reviewers' comments you received: on the one hand, sure, yeah, a broader appeal would be a good witch. On the other, you have to trust that if you find little nooks and crannies of interest, other people will as well.
But I say that having been asked often wait, what is that bit doing in there? so take with a grain of salt.
Also, to the reviewers' comments you received: on the one hand, sure, yeah, a broader appeal would be a good witch. On the other, you have to trust that if you find little nooks and crannies of interest, other people will as well.
But I say that having been asked often wait, what is that bit doing in there? so take with a grain of salt.
Self-indulgent musings about academia? I wouldn't know anything about that!
04-27-2017
, 11:50 AM
What About Bob?
The Library
2011
Bob,
Prof. Coyote suggested I email you about putting together a basketball game with Stanley Fish, who is the Campbell lecturer this year and will be in town Tues-Thurs of this week (event info attached).
I know this is very last minute, but are you possibly available/interested in putting together a basketball game Wednesday or Thursday afternoon? Stanley Fish has lunch events both days but sometime between 1pm and 4pm would work.
Let me know!
Stephanie
Development & Communications Coordinator
School of Humanities, Dean’s Office
Trudging up the stairwell inside Fondren Library, I kicked open the door to the fifth floor. It was Sunday—not that days of the week mattered—and I was in a ****ty mood. There was never any doubt that Stanley Fish was a scary-smart academic superstar. But a competent basketball player at seventy-two? Really?
Yes. Really. Fish had more than held his own in three-on-three pickup with grad students fifty years his junior. After the game he offered a candid, if grim, view of old age. “You have to stay in motion,” he told us. “Because when you stop, you’re finished.”
It was a peculiar humiliation to be sore from boxing out a septuagenarian geezer. Of course, competitive pickup basketball was, in the grand scheme, a minor annoyance. The bigger problem was my dissertation, which was going nowhere.
A few years earlier, after successfully completing my third-year comprehensive exams on modernist American fiction, I went home for the summer and started reading the Russians “for fun.” Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev, Bulgakov—it was all very good ****. Discovering the Russians was, as Hemingway had said, like having a great treasure given to you. Maybe it would lead somewhere.
I returned in the fall filled with ideas and inspiration. ****ing around on JSTOR one afternoon, I stumbled onto a tantalizing assertion by a comparative literature scholar. “It is surprising,” she wrote, “that there are virtually no scholarly evaluations of Dostoevsky’s impact on southern writers as a group.” A ridiculous idea burrowed into my brain: I’ll write an evaluation.
Knowing nothing about the subject, I submitted a prospectus. It was accepted. So here I was: hundreds of hours later (or was it thousands?), my initial enthusiasm had been tempered by reality. Putting aside problems that I couldn’t control (What can a Yankee know about the South? What can an American know about Russia?), there was simply too much to read, too much to know. With each tome, with every footnote, I was becoming the person I despised: a pedant who cared less about literature than the arcane critical disputes surrounding it. I stubbornly continued anyway, like the stranded lifeboat victim who, spotting a growing leak, keeps bailing out his boat.
My life shrank into a tedious routine: library, gym, sleep. Sleep, gym, library. Having used poker as an escape to cope with the stress of school, I found it ironic that no one wanted to talk about the “addiction” of graduate school. To me it was no less addictive, no less unhealthy. Most of my peers had dropped out of the program, checked into therapy, or been bullied—intellectually and, in one case, sexually—by their advisors. One f my friends had recently been forced out of the religious studies department after eight years of toil. Eight years, and nothing to show for it—except for stress-related hernias that would require surgery.
My own advisor was supportive, maternal, and, when it came to offering useful feedback of my project, utterly worthless. Not that I could be upset. I had asked for her guidance, after all, preferring uncritical support to an overbearing or indifferent academic superstar.
I walked along the fifth-floor stacks that I knew by heart: rows and rows of books, creaky chairs lining the walls, the same quiet, meek Mexican cleaning ladies. I grabbed a handful of books on the usual subjects—Dostoevsky, Bakhtin on Dostoevsky, Joseph Frank on Bakhtin on Dostoevsky—and limped back downstairs to a fourth-floor office that I shared with other ABDs. It was empty. Like the two remaining survivors from my cohort, Amelia and Andy, I was on a solitary journey: marooned in the library, consumed by books, lost in thoughts about a project that would never matter, that no one, not even my own advisor, would ever read.
I was doomed.
***
“What are you doing! Get your head off that keyboard.” Amelia ruffled my hair as she walked past me to her own work station.
“Let me pout in peace,” I said.
“Your fault for reading the Russians!” Plucking Material Cultures in Victorian England: 1850-1900 from the shelf, she inserted a pair of headphones and returned to work.
I scanned my own stack of teetering tomes and grabbed the fourth volume of Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky. The cover photograph stared back at me—Fyodor’s sallow face, his brooding eyes, that scraggly Russian beard. He had been through a lot.
In 1849, after after being convicted of sedition for being part of a revolutionary cell dedicated to the liberation of the serfs and freedom of the press, Dostoevsky and his fellow conspirators were marched out to Semyonov Square, where, they were told, they would face death by firing squad. In fact, the tsar staged a mock execution, and Dostoevsky was sent to prison camp in Siberia. His epileptic seizures began there; they came mostly once or twice a month for the rest of his life. Ten years later, after four years in prison and five in mandatory military service, Dostoevsky returned home to St. Petersburg, long forgotten by the Russian literati that had once hailed him as a promising young writer, and wrote Notes from the Dead House.
In 1867, after being harassed for money by petulant in-laws and threatened by creditors with imprisonment, Dostoevsky fled to Europe with his wife, Anna, in search of peace and rest. He found neither. His financial problems worsened—in part because of his disastrous gambling sprees—and his epileptic fits intensified. Worst of all, they lost their first child, three-month-old Sofya, when she caught a chill during an afternoon walk in Vevey, Switzerland. Far from home, on the move, and wracked by financial pressures, ill health, and the loss of his beloved daughter, Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot.
In 1877, Dostoevsky announced to his readers of A Writer’s Diary, the monthly column to which he regularly contributed, that he was suspending publication in order to focus on a novel about the Russian family. The topic of the family, especially the relationship between fathers and sons, had preoccupied Dostoevsky his entire life: when he was seventeen his father was murdered, probably by his peasants. Just as he began writing, Dostoevsky’s youngest son, three-year old Alyosha, died from what was most likely an epileptic seizure. Inconsolable with grief, Dostoevsky blamed himself for Alyosha’s death because he believed that his child’s disease was hereditary. Rather than abandoning his novel, Dostoevsky created through art the child that he had lost in life, and wrote The Brothers Karamazov.
It was hardly surprising, peering at the photo in my office, that suffering was written into Dostoevsky’s face. But not only suffering—perseverance, too, and a message: Enough bitching, Bob. Get to work.
It was settled, then. Somehow I would find a way out. I had come too ****ing far—from regurgitating New Historicism to boxing out Stanley Fish to writing about Hobbits. That, at the moment, was exactly how I felt: like Frodo Baggins inside the mines of Moria, after a mountain of boulders blocks the entrance. There was no turning back. The only way out was through.
The Library
2011
Bob,
Prof. Coyote suggested I email you about putting together a basketball game with Stanley Fish, who is the Campbell lecturer this year and will be in town Tues-Thurs of this week (event info attached).
I know this is very last minute, but are you possibly available/interested in putting together a basketball game Wednesday or Thursday afternoon? Stanley Fish has lunch events both days but sometime between 1pm and 4pm would work.
Let me know!
Stephanie
Development & Communications Coordinator
School of Humanities, Dean’s Office
Trudging up the stairwell inside Fondren Library, I kicked open the door to the fifth floor. It was Sunday—not that days of the week mattered—and I was in a ****ty mood. There was never any doubt that Stanley Fish was a scary-smart academic superstar. But a competent basketball player at seventy-two? Really?
Yes. Really. Fish had more than held his own in three-on-three pickup with grad students fifty years his junior. After the game he offered a candid, if grim, view of old age. “You have to stay in motion,” he told us. “Because when you stop, you’re finished.”
It was a peculiar humiliation to be sore from boxing out a septuagenarian geezer. Of course, competitive pickup basketball was, in the grand scheme, a minor annoyance. The bigger problem was my dissertation, which was going nowhere.
A few years earlier, after successfully completing my third-year comprehensive exams on modernist American fiction, I went home for the summer and started reading the Russians “for fun.” Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev, Bulgakov—it was all very good ****. Discovering the Russians was, as Hemingway had said, like having a great treasure given to you. Maybe it would lead somewhere.
I returned in the fall filled with ideas and inspiration. ****ing around on JSTOR one afternoon, I stumbled onto a tantalizing assertion by a comparative literature scholar. “It is surprising,” she wrote, “that there are virtually no scholarly evaluations of Dostoevsky’s impact on southern writers as a group.” A ridiculous idea burrowed into my brain: I’ll write an evaluation.
Knowing nothing about the subject, I submitted a prospectus. It was accepted. So here I was: hundreds of hours later (or was it thousands?), my initial enthusiasm had been tempered by reality. Putting aside problems that I couldn’t control (What can a Yankee know about the South? What can an American know about Russia?), there was simply too much to read, too much to know. With each tome, with every footnote, I was becoming the person I despised: a pedant who cared less about literature than the arcane critical disputes surrounding it. I stubbornly continued anyway, like the stranded lifeboat victim who, spotting a growing leak, keeps bailing out his boat.
My life shrank into a tedious routine: library, gym, sleep. Sleep, gym, library. Having used poker as an escape to cope with the stress of school, I found it ironic that no one wanted to talk about the “addiction” of graduate school. To me it was no less addictive, no less unhealthy. Most of my peers had dropped out of the program, checked into therapy, or been bullied—intellectually and, in one case, sexually—by their advisors. One f my friends had recently been forced out of the religious studies department after eight years of toil. Eight years, and nothing to show for it—except for stress-related hernias that would require surgery.
My own advisor was supportive, maternal, and, when it came to offering useful feedback of my project, utterly worthless. Not that I could be upset. I had asked for her guidance, after all, preferring uncritical support to an overbearing or indifferent academic superstar.
I walked along the fifth-floor stacks that I knew by heart: rows and rows of books, creaky chairs lining the walls, the same quiet, meek Mexican cleaning ladies. I grabbed a handful of books on the usual subjects—Dostoevsky, Bakhtin on Dostoevsky, Joseph Frank on Bakhtin on Dostoevsky—and limped back downstairs to a fourth-floor office that I shared with other ABDs. It was empty. Like the two remaining survivors from my cohort, Amelia and Andy, I was on a solitary journey: marooned in the library, consumed by books, lost in thoughts about a project that would never matter, that no one, not even my own advisor, would ever read.
I was doomed.
***
“What are you doing! Get your head off that keyboard.” Amelia ruffled my hair as she walked past me to her own work station.
“Let me pout in peace,” I said.
“Your fault for reading the Russians!” Plucking Material Cultures in Victorian England: 1850-1900 from the shelf, she inserted a pair of headphones and returned to work.
I scanned my own stack of teetering tomes and grabbed the fourth volume of Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky. The cover photograph stared back at me—Fyodor’s sallow face, his brooding eyes, that scraggly Russian beard. He had been through a lot.
In 1849, after after being convicted of sedition for being part of a revolutionary cell dedicated to the liberation of the serfs and freedom of the press, Dostoevsky and his fellow conspirators were marched out to Semyonov Square, where, they were told, they would face death by firing squad. In fact, the tsar staged a mock execution, and Dostoevsky was sent to prison camp in Siberia. His epileptic seizures began there; they came mostly once or twice a month for the rest of his life. Ten years later, after four years in prison and five in mandatory military service, Dostoevsky returned home to St. Petersburg, long forgotten by the Russian literati that had once hailed him as a promising young writer, and wrote Notes from the Dead House.
In 1867, after being harassed for money by petulant in-laws and threatened by creditors with imprisonment, Dostoevsky fled to Europe with his wife, Anna, in search of peace and rest. He found neither. His financial problems worsened—in part because of his disastrous gambling sprees—and his epileptic fits intensified. Worst of all, they lost their first child, three-month-old Sofya, when she caught a chill during an afternoon walk in Vevey, Switzerland. Far from home, on the move, and wracked by financial pressures, ill health, and the loss of his beloved daughter, Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot.
In 1877, Dostoevsky announced to his readers of A Writer’s Diary, the monthly column to which he regularly contributed, that he was suspending publication in order to focus on a novel about the Russian family. The topic of the family, especially the relationship between fathers and sons, had preoccupied Dostoevsky his entire life: when he was seventeen his father was murdered, probably by his peasants. Just as he began writing, Dostoevsky’s youngest son, three-year old Alyosha, died from what was most likely an epileptic seizure. Inconsolable with grief, Dostoevsky blamed himself for Alyosha’s death because he believed that his child’s disease was hereditary. Rather than abandoning his novel, Dostoevsky created through art the child that he had lost in life, and wrote The Brothers Karamazov.
It was hardly surprising, peering at the photo in my office, that suffering was written into Dostoevsky’s face. But not only suffering—perseverance, too, and a message: Enough bitching, Bob. Get to work.
It was settled, then. Somehow I would find a way out. I had come too ****ing far—from regurgitating New Historicism to boxing out Stanley Fish to writing about Hobbits. That, at the moment, was exactly how I felt: like Frodo Baggins inside the mines of Moria, after a mountain of boulders blocks the entrance. There was no turning back. The only way out was through.
Last edited by bob_124; 04-27-2017 at 11:58 AM.
04-30-2017
, 11:15 AM
April Results, May Goals
April Goals
[95] Play 100 hours
[20] Study 30 hours
[25] Write 30 hours
ho hum, just observing 10K pots at 2/5, K2cc calls river shove on K
T
86
3
and is good.
I got a chance to hit Harrah's Cherokee for a weekend, grinded hard, railed a few friends who went deep in the main. Very nice property if you happen to be roaming the North Carolina wilderness.
donkament grinders
friendly pony
napping pony
evil tree
view from Mount Rogers
May Goals
[ ] play 150 hours
[ ] study 15 hours
[ ] write 15 hours
The Nola Circuit event is May 11-21, if you happen to be in town hit me up!
April Goals
[95] Play 100 hours
[20] Study 30 hours
[25] Write 30 hours
ho hum, just observing 10K pots at 2/5, K2cc calls river shove on K
T863 and is good. I got a chance to hit Harrah's Cherokee for a weekend, grinded hard, railed a few friends who went deep in the main. Very nice property if you happen to be roaming the North Carolina wilderness.
donkament grinders
Spoiler:
friendly pony
Spoiler:
napping pony
Spoiler:
evil tree
Spoiler:
view from Mount Rogers
Spoiler:
May Goals
[ ] play 150 hours
[ ] study 15 hours
[ ] write 15 hours
The Nola Circuit event is May 11-21, if you happen to be in town hit me up!
05-05-2017
, 11:08 AM
What about Bob?
Clive’s
2012
Hey fellas,
So I’m gone for about a month or so but I wanted to let you know about a good poker game that runs about 15-20 miles outside of Houston. I figure it might save you a trip to Lake Charles. It’s a 1/2 no limit game on Wednesdays, min buyin 100 and basically an uncapped max buyin. And I think that Clive, the guy who runs it, has games almost every day (right out of his house lol!). I’ve only been there twice but I think both of you would enjoy playing and wouldn’t have trouble beating the game.
I hope you guys have a great summer! Send any bad beat stories my way,
Bob
I parked my silver Honda Accord outside a squat house with closed blinds. The house was more or less identical to the others in this humdrum Houston suburb, but I knew it immediately from the cars that competed for space in the driveway and along the sidewalk.
Three years, and I was back at Clive’s.
I had first visited this Houston home game in the mid-2000s, thanks to the recommendation of a friend who was a regular there. What separated this game from the handful of other underground rooms I’d visited—most of them inside sparse apartments or strip malls—was its host. Clive, as I remember him, was a thin man with curly graying hair and the darting, intelligent eyes of a rounder (or, as he liked to tell us, a backgammon pro). Friendly and often obsequious, he chatted with me about school and what I was up to “on the other side of town.” Sometimes, when I’d buy in for a few bills, he’d toss me a few extra redbirds. “To gamble with,” he’d say.
The game did bring the gamble-gamble. Deep stacks, multiway pots, straddles and restraddles and blind raises. Lord knows how much money was raked off the table—I didn’t ask, and didn’t want to know—but the game was still profitable: players were that bad.
Through the years I had invited a few grad school buddies who, unlike me, were chomping at the bit for LOLive poker. They drove out to the suburbs, played in this gambly game, and formed opinions on its host (was he generous? sleazy? shrewd? pitiful?). Friends who had never been to Clive’s asked me about Clive. Eventually Clive became “Clive’s”: a running joke, a punch line, an invitation—to an unclean, poorly-lighted place where, seven days a week, Houstonian misfits could take solace in cards.
I stayed away for years. Then Black Friday hit; school was over; I had more free time. I found myself texting Clive’s number one Friday evening, half-hoping that he wouldn’t answer, half-wondering if his plucky home game was still surviving. There were no guarantees. Houston, the biggest city in the state that had birthed Texas hold ‘em out of its freedom-luvin’ womb, also loved illegal gambling raids.
On this Friday night, though, my inquiring text received a prompt reply: where u been LOL cmon over! And so I did.
Rap-rap on the sturdy front door. No answer, but I could hear faint chatter and clacking chips through the walls. I turned the handle, went inside, and was greeted by suffocating smoke. ****. I blinked away the burning, looked around, and recognized the front room that was partitioned down the middle: on the right an empty poker table, an old desktop computer, a whiteboard with dates, names, and CliveDollars scrawled in green marker. Lasagna, potato salad, and snacks rested on the counter. On the left, next to a pile of outdated electronics, seven stoic men sat around a second table, smoking and playing poker. A few of them regarded me with the bored blank faces of sleepy livestock.
I only recognized one person: a lean, bespectacled man with gray hair stretched into a stringy ponytail. Springing from his seat, he shook my hand with the force of a dear old friend and cried out, “Glad you could make it!”
How was I? How was school? How much was I behind? (I was fine, school was finished, I would play three hundred behind). Clive scurried around the corner into the living room, where his wife chain-smoked on a faded couch alongside two yipping Pomeranians, and returned with a plastic rack of chips, which he showily counted and recounted for me. “Here you are, sir,” he said proudly.
After counting and recounting them myself, I told Clive that he was fifteen short. Disbelief washed over his haggard face. He flung his arms up, said “So it is!” and scurried back into the living room for those three missing redbirds.
I took the eight seat, squeezing beside a tatted Texan and a beefy Mexican who both nursed piddling stacks. One-twenty there, eighty there, one-sixty there...odd. There was barely any money on the table. Where was Yusef, the gas station owner who’d fed this game for years? Where was Cindy, the stocky nurse who couldn’t fold ace-jack unless you surgically removed her right hand? Where was Cord, the aspiring WSOP Circuit grinder?
“Where’s Mak?” Clive asked.
“Busy. Very busy,” I said.
“Can we call him ‘Dr.’ yet?” He cackled.
“Not yet.”
Everyone, it seemed, was gone—except for Clive. He chatted ceaselessly about the election, astrophysics, other home games (none of which rivaled his own), backgammon, this and that. I made some conversation but mostly, wrapping a tan hoodie around my mouth, focused on breathing through my nose. The beefy Mexican got stacked and waddled away, Clive shifted from host to player to keep the game afloat, we switched to half hold ‘em and half PLO. Whenever I folded on the river or lost at showdown, he’d say, as if defending my play, “You are a tournament player, sir.” Years ago I had chopped Clive’s biggest tournament—extra tables had been installed, on that Sunday afternoon, outside by the empty inground pool—so I would forever be "a tournament player.”
Another hour passed, I counted my stack: down fifty. Seemed about right.
“Racking up already, Bob?” Clive asked me with a sly grin.
I searched for a snappy comeback, but all I could see were the same tired grinders, the same yipping Pomeranians, the same lukewarm lasagna, the same smoky sheen suffusing the scene—like a grainy home video stuck on repeat—and all I could muster was, “Yeah.”
Clive’s
2012
Hey fellas,
So I’m gone for about a month or so but I wanted to let you know about a good poker game that runs about 15-20 miles outside of Houston. I figure it might save you a trip to Lake Charles. It’s a 1/2 no limit game on Wednesdays, min buyin 100 and basically an uncapped max buyin. And I think that Clive, the guy who runs it, has games almost every day (right out of his house lol!). I’ve only been there twice but I think both of you would enjoy playing and wouldn’t have trouble beating the game.
I hope you guys have a great summer! Send any bad beat stories my way,
Bob
I parked my silver Honda Accord outside a squat house with closed blinds. The house was more or less identical to the others in this humdrum Houston suburb, but I knew it immediately from the cars that competed for space in the driveway and along the sidewalk.
Three years, and I was back at Clive’s.
I had first visited this Houston home game in the mid-2000s, thanks to the recommendation of a friend who was a regular there. What separated this game from the handful of other underground rooms I’d visited—most of them inside sparse apartments or strip malls—was its host. Clive, as I remember him, was a thin man with curly graying hair and the darting, intelligent eyes of a rounder (or, as he liked to tell us, a backgammon pro). Friendly and often obsequious, he chatted with me about school and what I was up to “on the other side of town.” Sometimes, when I’d buy in for a few bills, he’d toss me a few extra redbirds. “To gamble with,” he’d say.
The game did bring the gamble-gamble. Deep stacks, multiway pots, straddles and restraddles and blind raises. Lord knows how much money was raked off the table—I didn’t ask, and didn’t want to know—but the game was still profitable: players were that bad.
Through the years I had invited a few grad school buddies who, unlike me, were chomping at the bit for LOLive poker. They drove out to the suburbs, played in this gambly game, and formed opinions on its host (was he generous? sleazy? shrewd? pitiful?). Friends who had never been to Clive’s asked me about Clive. Eventually Clive became “Clive’s”: a running joke, a punch line, an invitation—to an unclean, poorly-lighted place where, seven days a week, Houstonian misfits could take solace in cards.
I stayed away for years. Then Black Friday hit; school was over; I had more free time. I found myself texting Clive’s number one Friday evening, half-hoping that he wouldn’t answer, half-wondering if his plucky home game was still surviving. There were no guarantees. Houston, the biggest city in the state that had birthed Texas hold ‘em out of its freedom-luvin’ womb, also loved illegal gambling raids.
On this Friday night, though, my inquiring text received a prompt reply: where u been LOL cmon over! And so I did.
Rap-rap on the sturdy front door. No answer, but I could hear faint chatter and clacking chips through the walls. I turned the handle, went inside, and was greeted by suffocating smoke. ****. I blinked away the burning, looked around, and recognized the front room that was partitioned down the middle: on the right an empty poker table, an old desktop computer, a whiteboard with dates, names, and CliveDollars scrawled in green marker. Lasagna, potato salad, and snacks rested on the counter. On the left, next to a pile of outdated electronics, seven stoic men sat around a second table, smoking and playing poker. A few of them regarded me with the bored blank faces of sleepy livestock.
I only recognized one person: a lean, bespectacled man with gray hair stretched into a stringy ponytail. Springing from his seat, he shook my hand with the force of a dear old friend and cried out, “Glad you could make it!”
How was I? How was school? How much was I behind? (I was fine, school was finished, I would play three hundred behind). Clive scurried around the corner into the living room, where his wife chain-smoked on a faded couch alongside two yipping Pomeranians, and returned with a plastic rack of chips, which he showily counted and recounted for me. “Here you are, sir,” he said proudly.
After counting and recounting them myself, I told Clive that he was fifteen short. Disbelief washed over his haggard face. He flung his arms up, said “So it is!” and scurried back into the living room for those three missing redbirds.
I took the eight seat, squeezing beside a tatted Texan and a beefy Mexican who both nursed piddling stacks. One-twenty there, eighty there, one-sixty there...odd. There was barely any money on the table. Where was Yusef, the gas station owner who’d fed this game for years? Where was Cindy, the stocky nurse who couldn’t fold ace-jack unless you surgically removed her right hand? Where was Cord, the aspiring WSOP Circuit grinder?
“Where’s Mak?” Clive asked.
“Busy. Very busy,” I said.
“Can we call him ‘Dr.’ yet?” He cackled.
“Not yet.”
Everyone, it seemed, was gone—except for Clive. He chatted ceaselessly about the election, astrophysics, other home games (none of which rivaled his own), backgammon, this and that. I made some conversation but mostly, wrapping a tan hoodie around my mouth, focused on breathing through my nose. The beefy Mexican got stacked and waddled away, Clive shifted from host to player to keep the game afloat, we switched to half hold ‘em and half PLO. Whenever I folded on the river or lost at showdown, he’d say, as if defending my play, “You are a tournament player, sir.” Years ago I had chopped Clive’s biggest tournament—extra tables had been installed, on that Sunday afternoon, outside by the empty inground pool—so I would forever be "a tournament player.”
Another hour passed, I counted my stack: down fifty. Seemed about right.
“Racking up already, Bob?” Clive asked me with a sly grin.
I searched for a snappy comeback, but all I could see were the same tired grinders, the same yipping Pomeranians, the same lukewarm lasagna, the same smoky sheen suffusing the scene—like a grainy home video stuck on repeat—and all I could muster was, “Yeah.”
Last edited by bob_124; 05-05-2017 at 11:15 AM.
05-05-2017
, 11:38 AM
05-05-2017
, 11:50 AM
Nice text, love the descriptions. I also have been checking out "The Big Gamble" on a regular basis, thx for sharing bob 
05-07-2017
, 11:53 AM
S-town, Lincoln in the Bardo
"Across the seven hours of Reed’s production, we are told a story in which we all can understand each other, talk to each other, and hear each other: we can unite in admiration for John B., for the genius that was born to Mary Grace, for his voice, and for the power of storytelling. We can hear his voice and be united in our appreciation for his existence. Is this what we need now? Does it tell us our time? Does it bring us together? Does it help us understand what it means to have Donald Trump as president, and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions as the most powerful cop in the land? Or is it simply a nostalgic exercise in anachronism, like a perfectly restored antique? Is it something we value because it does something, or because it feels old and authentic?"
—Aaron Bady, "Airbrushing S-town"
S-town, Brian Reed's self-described "audio nonfiction novel," is definitely worth a listen. It's compelling and problematic and wonderfully crafted.
On the other hand, I failed to finish George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo. I've always admired Saunders, but the book fixates so much on suffering and death—especially on Willie, Abe's son who died at 11 of typhoid fever—that it didn't seem like the best way to wind down my day after inhabiting the Harradise abyss. I may return to it in the future, though, b/c of its narrative structure: a chorus of ghostly voices speaks the book into existence. I've never seen anything quite like it.
Thanks Pure! Hope things are good in Vegas.
Thanks Dubn! Glad you've been enjoying the big gamble, i'm planning to do one piece a month for the foreseeable future.
Sorry bout your Raps. Lehhbrons gonna Lehhbron!
I can only imagine. I propose you save those stories for your memoir But it Was Suited! Winning at Poker, Soccer, and Life.
"Across the seven hours of Reed’s production, we are told a story in which we all can understand each other, talk to each other, and hear each other: we can unite in admiration for John B., for the genius that was born to Mary Grace, for his voice, and for the power of storytelling. We can hear his voice and be united in our appreciation for his existence. Is this what we need now? Does it tell us our time? Does it bring us together? Does it help us understand what it means to have Donald Trump as president, and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions as the most powerful cop in the land? Or is it simply a nostalgic exercise in anachronism, like a perfectly restored antique? Is it something we value because it does something, or because it feels old and authentic?"
—Aaron Bady, "Airbrushing S-town"
S-town, Brian Reed's self-described "audio nonfiction novel," is definitely worth a listen. It's compelling and problematic and wonderfully crafted.
On the other hand, I failed to finish George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo. I've always admired Saunders, but the book fixates so much on suffering and death—especially on Willie, Abe's son who died at 11 of typhoid fever—that it didn't seem like the best way to wind down my day after inhabiting the Harradise abyss. I may return to it in the future, though, b/c of its narrative structure: a chorus of ghostly voices speaks the book into existence. I've never seen anything quite like it.
Sorry bout your Raps. Lehhbrons gonna Lehhbron!
05-14-2017
, 11:08 AM
What About Bob?
New Orleans
2013
“The world’s not just a stage. It’s a casino, and our lives are games of chance.”
—Michael Lewis
The blow struck me from behind, heavy and surprising and sharp, like a jolt of electricity. I rose from my bicycle and I suddenly was airborne, flying headlong down St. Charles Avenue without a helmet.
I slammed into the street and grinded to a halt. All of the pain was in my left arm. My stuff had scattered like shrapnel—flip-flops, sunglasses, books, a bike with a smushed rear wheel.
The driver stumbled out of a large black truck. His eyes, flashing out of an ashen face, widened with the terrible knowledge that you can’t just blindside bikers from behind, that lawsuits were reserved for such negligence, that he was in some very deep ****. Maybe that’s why, when he tiptoed closer, he asked if I’d take some money.
Money was the last thing on my mind. My left leg was sweaty and streaked with blood. Could I walk? I was staying at a friend’s condo a few blocks away. Was his bike salvageable? I was late for a conference call. Could I still make the meeting?
All of these haphazard questions faded in the growing agony of my left elbow. I didn't want to move. A couple jogged from the streetcar path, coaxed me to my feet—I could walk!—and helped me to a Wendy’s wheelchair ramp, where I stretched my legs on the cool concrete and admired the blue cloudless sky. It was a lovely afternoon. My body, thrown so lightly through the air, was heavy now, sleepy. It would be nice to curl up for a minute, let my strength come back, take a quick nap.
When I woke up, an EMT and a policeman peppered me with questions. Yes, I told them, I felt lightheaded. No, I hadn’t caught the truck’s license plate number. Yes, I would go to the hospital. An ambulance drove me to the emergency room. After hours of tests, waiting, and more tests, a stern-faced doctor hurried into my room and lectured me. If I had been struck at an angle, or sailed into a telephone pole, or landed on my helmetless head—things could have been much worse than a broken arm. “You were lucky,” she said. “Now get some rest.”
**
The streetcar creaked into motion, carrying me past the same Wendy’s where I'd been clobbered two days earlier. My left arm was in a sling. As we rattled our way downtown, I thought about health and disease, social medicine, and the doctor-patient relationship—all titles of textbook chapters that I was supposed to discuss with three Houston colleagues. I had missed that conference call. Now it was time to go home and get back to work.
Well, it was almost time. First I would play poker.
I had been in New Orleans here for most of June, exploring the city and playing cards in the evening. Getting here was easy. Toss clothes and books in a bag, ride the Megabus from Houston to New Orleans, take the streetcar into the Lower Garden District. It was a far better option than Clive’s, and I rarely felt like driving to Lake Charles. Comparing cardrooms missed the point of coming here, of course. The best thing about New Orleans wasn’t poker; it was New Orleans.
To be fair, the poker was also pretty good. There was always plenty of action, fascinating people, and a rich history that stretched back to the early 1800s. The twenty-card French game poque became poker, thanks to casual American pronunciation of the French original, sometime between 1820 and 1825, and exploded in New Orleans and along the Mississippi. Since then Louisiana has had a lengthy romance with chance, sometimes banning gambling, sometimes tolerating it. From 1990 to 1992, the state legalized a statewide lottery; fifteen riverboat casinos; video poker machines in bars, restaurants, and highway truck stops; and a land casino that promised to be inject revenue into a tourist-dependent town.
Licensing, building, and launching a downtown casino hadn’t been easy. There were battles between gaming titans Caesars and Bally’s, between real-estate moguls Steve Wynn and Christopher Hemmeter (and, briefly, Donald Trump), between gambling-loving governor Edwin Edwards and anti-casino critics. There were soaring costs. And there were delays—lots of delays. But the casino’s eventual joint owners, Harrah’s Entertainment and a group of ten New Orleans businessmen known as the Jazzville Ten, gamely pressed on. “The Guinness Book of World Records called me this morning,” Wendell Gauthier, one of the Ten, said in November 1992. “We made it. We’re the project that has overcome more hurdles and more difficulties than any other project in the history of the world.” In a full-page newspaper ad, the company issued a bold guarantee: Harrah’s New Orleans is Here to Stay. Bet on It.
The streetcar let me off on Canal Street. To the south near the river, a gaudy purple Harrah’s sign glimmered at dusk. To me it was fitting. In a city perched precariously on the Mississippi, where residents celebrated the ephemeral nature of life and easy livin,' it was hardly surprising that you could amble into Dreamland and forget, for a while, the problems of this city and the world.
Laissez le bon temps rouler. Right?
Hauling a duffel bag on my good shoulder, I labored up the steps to Harrah’s and hesitated outside the entrance. My arm ached. I was sore, tired, and behind on work. And yet I would play poker before I caught the 11 p.m. Megabus back to Houston. Why?
There was the simple answer: because I wanted to. A weak-ass reason, for sure. But what could I say? Poker was a seductive, brutal intellectual sport. Play long enough and the game seeps into your skin, burrows into your brain, cultivates a kind of demented empathy: you step into someone’s shoes not for compassion or affiliation, but to exploit—to take their money. And the site of these exchanges, the casino, is a place where things are unreal by design; where time itself shrinks and stretches, consuming whole hours or days; and where, sitting in a cardroom with strangers, every part of your being—how you look, talk, dress, act—can and will be used against you.
I removed my sling and limped inside.
New Orleans
2013
“The world’s not just a stage. It’s a casino, and our lives are games of chance.”
—Michael Lewis
The blow struck me from behind, heavy and surprising and sharp, like a jolt of electricity. I rose from my bicycle and I suddenly was airborne, flying headlong down St. Charles Avenue without a helmet.
I slammed into the street and grinded to a halt. All of the pain was in my left arm. My stuff had scattered like shrapnel—flip-flops, sunglasses, books, a bike with a smushed rear wheel.
The driver stumbled out of a large black truck. His eyes, flashing out of an ashen face, widened with the terrible knowledge that you can’t just blindside bikers from behind, that lawsuits were reserved for such negligence, that he was in some very deep ****. Maybe that’s why, when he tiptoed closer, he asked if I’d take some money.
Money was the last thing on my mind. My left leg was sweaty and streaked with blood. Could I walk? I was staying at a friend’s condo a few blocks away. Was his bike salvageable? I was late for a conference call. Could I still make the meeting?
All of these haphazard questions faded in the growing agony of my left elbow. I didn't want to move. A couple jogged from the streetcar path, coaxed me to my feet—I could walk!—and helped me to a Wendy’s wheelchair ramp, where I stretched my legs on the cool concrete and admired the blue cloudless sky. It was a lovely afternoon. My body, thrown so lightly through the air, was heavy now, sleepy. It would be nice to curl up for a minute, let my strength come back, take a quick nap.
When I woke up, an EMT and a policeman peppered me with questions. Yes, I told them, I felt lightheaded. No, I hadn’t caught the truck’s license plate number. Yes, I would go to the hospital. An ambulance drove me to the emergency room. After hours of tests, waiting, and more tests, a stern-faced doctor hurried into my room and lectured me. If I had been struck at an angle, or sailed into a telephone pole, or landed on my helmetless head—things could have been much worse than a broken arm. “You were lucky,” she said. “Now get some rest.”
**
The streetcar creaked into motion, carrying me past the same Wendy’s where I'd been clobbered two days earlier. My left arm was in a sling. As we rattled our way downtown, I thought about health and disease, social medicine, and the doctor-patient relationship—all titles of textbook chapters that I was supposed to discuss with three Houston colleagues. I had missed that conference call. Now it was time to go home and get back to work.
Well, it was almost time. First I would play poker.
I had been in New Orleans here for most of June, exploring the city and playing cards in the evening. Getting here was easy. Toss clothes and books in a bag, ride the Megabus from Houston to New Orleans, take the streetcar into the Lower Garden District. It was a far better option than Clive’s, and I rarely felt like driving to Lake Charles. Comparing cardrooms missed the point of coming here, of course. The best thing about New Orleans wasn’t poker; it was New Orleans.
To be fair, the poker was also pretty good. There was always plenty of action, fascinating people, and a rich history that stretched back to the early 1800s. The twenty-card French game poque became poker, thanks to casual American pronunciation of the French original, sometime between 1820 and 1825, and exploded in New Orleans and along the Mississippi. Since then Louisiana has had a lengthy romance with chance, sometimes banning gambling, sometimes tolerating it. From 1990 to 1992, the state legalized a statewide lottery; fifteen riverboat casinos; video poker machines in bars, restaurants, and highway truck stops; and a land casino that promised to be inject revenue into a tourist-dependent town.
Licensing, building, and launching a downtown casino hadn’t been easy. There were battles between gaming titans Caesars and Bally’s, between real-estate moguls Steve Wynn and Christopher Hemmeter (and, briefly, Donald Trump), between gambling-loving governor Edwin Edwards and anti-casino critics. There were soaring costs. And there were delays—lots of delays. But the casino’s eventual joint owners, Harrah’s Entertainment and a group of ten New Orleans businessmen known as the Jazzville Ten, gamely pressed on. “The Guinness Book of World Records called me this morning,” Wendell Gauthier, one of the Ten, said in November 1992. “We made it. We’re the project that has overcome more hurdles and more difficulties than any other project in the history of the world.” In a full-page newspaper ad, the company issued a bold guarantee: Harrah’s New Orleans is Here to Stay. Bet on It.
The streetcar let me off on Canal Street. To the south near the river, a gaudy purple Harrah’s sign glimmered at dusk. To me it was fitting. In a city perched precariously on the Mississippi, where residents celebrated the ephemeral nature of life and easy livin,' it was hardly surprising that you could amble into Dreamland and forget, for a while, the problems of this city and the world.
Laissez le bon temps rouler. Right?
Hauling a duffel bag on my good shoulder, I labored up the steps to Harrah’s and hesitated outside the entrance. My arm ached. I was sore, tired, and behind on work. And yet I would play poker before I caught the 11 p.m. Megabus back to Houston. Why?
There was the simple answer: because I wanted to. A weak-ass reason, for sure. But what could I say? Poker was a seductive, brutal intellectual sport. Play long enough and the game seeps into your skin, burrows into your brain, cultivates a kind of demented empathy: you step into someone’s shoes not for compassion or affiliation, but to exploit—to take their money. And the site of these exchanges, the casino, is a place where things are unreal by design; where time itself shrinks and stretches, consuming whole hours or days; and where, sitting in a cardroom with strangers, every part of your being—how you look, talk, dress, act—can and will be used against you.
I removed my sling and limped inside.
Last edited by bob_124; 05-14-2017 at 11:21 AM.
05-15-2017
, 11:12 AM
What About Bob?
New Orleans, II: Harradise
2013
“It is in these small life-worlds, with all their arcane symbols and skills, that the professional poker player tests his inventive adaptiveness at every moment. This barely explored world is a fertile field for the ethnographer, who himself is put to the test; for in order to learn the rules of the game, he too must plan, play, dream, and take his chances.”
—David Hayano, Poker Faces
I hustle past acres of singing slots, through the stale stink of secondhand smoke, below ceilings painted in every shade of purple, trimmed in violet and gold, slathered with neon and pink. There’s a whole world inside these walls, but I’m single-minded. Two minutes and I’m at the poker room.
The room’s twenty tables are crammed with players, mostly men, who hunch over their chips like watchdogs. Pop music mingles with the hum of a hundred voices: a dealer calling out a vacancy at table ten, the hoot of a bad beat, spiteful laughter and convivial curses. But the most noticeable sound, as I walk past the Lucky Dogs stand to the check-in desk, are the chip-whispers: tossed chips, shuffled chips, spilled chips, stacked chips, fingers flicking and cutting and counting and balancing, chips rubbing, sliding, clicking. Everyone is here. Couples killing time. Nerds flirting with numbers. Bros obsessed with competition. Housewives hooked on risk. Widowers hungry for conversation. Tourists waddle to their seats, their pants sagging like overladen donkeys, and feed games that will run all night, the late evenings blurring into early mornings when fresh players, sipping coffee and scanning iPhones, join stubborn bleary-eyed gamblers.
The floorman greets me by name—I’ve earned that much, having played most nights this month—and sends me to a Texas hold ‘em table. Dodging waitresses and chip runners, I reach the cashier’s cage in the corner and slide forward three hundreds. A hundred dollars is a lot of money. It can pay rent and buy food. But here it’s a single bill. In chips it’s one hundred whites, twenty reds, four greens, one black. It has hazy value.
The cashier slides me a plastic rack of reds and says, “Good luck.”
The walk to my table is all nerves, like an athlete’s walk from the locker room to the field. I imagine tall stacks of chips. Good cards could come. Anything is possible. Settling into my seat, I recognize half of the other nine faces, all lit up already with drinks and the flow of the cards.
I arrange my chips into a three-columned triangle and wait for a hand.
The dealer taps a green button, a fresh deck rises to the tabletop, cards skim across the purple baize. She deals in turn until we each have two face-down and oversees a round of betting. A wrinkled lady slides two whites across the betting line, a chipper kid flicks in four reds. He wears thick black glasses and a blue flat-brimmed hat that shouts DESTIN.
“Twenty to play,” says the dealer.
Squeezing apart my two cards, I fold nine-deuce and follow the action, which loops clockwise in a series of folds, bets, and calls. A bald man with a tanned, serene face calls and smiles at Destin. “Eighteen more, Miss Nikki,” the dealer says. Miss Nikki’s veiny arm trembles as she exchanges two whites for four reds.
“Three players to the flop,” says the dealer. She spreads three communal cards face-up in the middle of the table—an ace, six, two, all diamonds—and oversees another betting round. Destin bets, the others fold, and the dealer pushes him the small pot of reds and whites. He tips her a white and adds the rest to his stack, pecking at his pile with flickering fingers.
The dealer taps the green button, a fresh deck rises to the tabletop, cards skim across the purple baize. Barely glancing at his cards, Destin tosses in four reds.
“Twenty to play.”
I fold king-four and glance to my right. Everything about Destin is quick and efficient, like a jovial bird. He worries me. Destin’s gaze settles on the smiling man whose seat faces the dealer. “Don and I play a lot together,” he tells me quietly. “He thinks I’m crazy, but he is the crazy one. When he runs good”—Destin somberly shakes his head—“he hurts people.”
It doesn’t take long for me to realize that, thanks to Don, I’m in a very good poker game. Twice he loses everything, marches to the ATM, and returns with five crisp hundreds and a smile. I’m dealt cards that work well together, the eight-nine of spades, the king-jack of hearts, two queens with their beautiful haughty faces. Suddenly I’m up a few hundred.
A man draped in black moves to our game from another table. He looks like a beleaguered Harry Connick Jr. “You found a good one, Tony!” Destin says. “That’s why I’m here,” Tony says. He asks for a seat change, inserts a pair of headphones, and wraps a hood around his haggard face. Within minutes, after a flurry of bets and raises, Don and Tony get all-in, creating a two-thousand-dollar pot. Their eyes dart from each other to a queen and two sixes.
“Got a six?” Tony asks.
“No,” Don says. “Better!”
Springing from his seat, he proudly shows two queens for a full house. Tony nods grimly and rebuys for a grand. “Bad day at the office,” he mutters.
Destin turns to me. “See what I’m saying? Don hurts people.”
**
The sound is faint at first, then it grows into notes clear and unmistakeable—oh when the Saints! go marching in!—that pierce the room and float above a faux saloon balcony to the starry purple ceiling. A brass band of ten black men bops past the blackjack tables, the Poker Bar, and the Lucky Dogs stand, celebrating with a jovial crowd in tow.
At our table, no one cares. I study Destin’s enthusiasm, Don’s serenity, Miss Nikki’s confusion, Tony’s exhaustion. Poker cultivated brief but intense relationships with these strangers. We presented versions of ourselves by how we talked, how we dressed, how we handled and stacked chips; we engaged at a respectable distance, the same distance as on a first date or among distant relatives. I often wondered if it was possible to know them in some deeper sense, to get beyond the convenient fiction that these people were merely stick figures, hollow repositories of cash, walking ATMs whose lives had no value beyond their money. I was a New Yorker living in Houston who, for the last month, had been seduced by this city and the card game that New Orleans invented. How had these others arrived here?
Across the table, Tony’s haggard grimace is barely visible underneath a tattered black hoodie; his gnarled hands riffle a stack of blacks. Last week we’d parked our bikes on Poydras Street and, walking inside Harrah’s together, chatted about the gambles of downtown traffic and relentless thieves (stolen bikes: we were tied, two-two). Inside this strange seductive space, inside his so-called “office,” Tony grinded out a living. What was that like? As an outsider to this room and the full-time grind, I could only guess. But I knew, at the very least, that all of us were here for different reasons. For some the money was everything. For others only the game mattered, the touch of felt beneath the hand, the stacking of chips, the eyes gleaming, flashing, narrowing. Poker was all in the eyes somehow, in calculated deceit and naïve hope: each mind bending reality, embracing dream logic, clinging to the fantasy of that final miracle card.
A fresh deck rises to the tabletop, cards skim across the purple baize.
Ace-three of spades. I feel the pang of possibility and toss in five reds with my good arm. Don flashes me a small, still smile and calls.
“Your turn,” Destin says softly.
The dealer spreads an ace, three, and five of different suits across the table. Don calls my bet and waits for the next card: the seven of clubs. I bet again, pushing forward a teetering column of reds. “One-twenty-five to call,” the dealer says to Don.
Don’s smile vanishes. He doesn’t move for a whole minute. Then, in one slow, smooth motion, he pushes his whole stack forward with both burly arms. “Player all-in,” the dealer says to me. “Three sixty-five to call.”
My arm throbs. This is weird. For the last few hours, Don had been playing passively. He liked to call, to see more cards. An aggressive all-in raise seemed out of character—which, to me, meant one of two things. One: my two-pair was crushed by a better hand. Two: he’s trying some wild bluff. Put another way, I was in a dark alley armed with a knife, but my assailant had a gun. And I had to decide whether the gun was real or a toy.
I study the board. Ace, three, five, seven of different suits, with one card to come—if I call. Can he have four-six? Four-deuce? I replay the hand, count the pot, weigh risk against reward. I imagine how Don sees me: lanky, scruffy blond hair and beard, tan hoodie. I wonder if he notices the bruise on my temple or how I wince when I move my left arm. Do I look weak? The answer must be somewhere. I study Don for a long time. Motionless and mute, arms crossed, staring at nothing, he looks like some stern Buddha.
I close my eyes. The gibberish of the machines, the chip-clicking, the jabbering at nearby tables—none of it registers. Coherent thought is gone. All that’s left is intuition. Trusting the voice telling you to call or fold, fold or call, your decision a reminder of who you are.
When I open my eyes, everyone is staring at me expectantly. With effort, I surrender my cards to the dealer and someone cries out, to Don, “Show the bluff!” He leans over the heaping mound of chips—his chips—and teases us with his two concealed cards. Suddenly he flips them face-up.
Jack of hearts, five of spades. A bluff. The table erupts in a cacophony of hoots and groans. Don jiggles with belly laughter. “Nice hand!” he says.
“Nice hand,” I say. My face is hot.
**
In ten minutes Don loses everything. He rebuys for five hundred, the bills making a flip-flip-flip sound as he counts and recounts them. He loses that five, rebuys, and doubles up. I can’t tell if he’s happier winning or losing. Observers hover near our table and chat in hushed tones, marveling at the action, each new pot somehow bigger than the last. The winner swings between Don and Destin, back and forth. Suddenly they get all-in. A massive mound of reds, greens, and blacks clump on the table. Don bets his last three hundred and Destin instantly calls, showing an unbeatable flush.
“Nice hand!” Don roars. He saunters to the ATM.
“You’ve been voted off the island, sir,” Tony says wearily. Destin smiles, doesn’t respond—he’s going nowhere, of course—and constructs sturdy chip-towers, smoothing and tightening them like a skilled architect, a few purple five-hundred-dollar chips crowning the tops. I scan his stack with irritation. This kid must be ahead, what, four grand in three hours?
****. It’s ten-thirty.
Flip-flip-flip. Don waves five bills in the air. He might as well hand that money to one of us and save time. Who is this guy? Where does he get his cash? Obviously I have no clue. The only certainty is that, with Don doling out chips like Halloween candy, leaving now would be dumb. It would be outright irresponsible. But what else can I do?
The answer punches me in the gut. Play until the next Megabus leaves at seven.
I squirm in my seat. My arm feels like a wet log. Am I really going to sit here for eight more hours? To gamble money that I can’t afford to lose? Until it’s five in the morning and I’m listening to droning vacuum cleaners with a bunch of miserable grinders? I heave a sigh, resign myself to reality, tell myself to get up.
A fresh deck rises to the tabletop. One card taps my fingertips, then another, each tap a reminder that good cards could come. Anything is possible.
King of hearts, ten of spades. There are plenty of worse starting hands. I want to play. I will play. Then again—I glance at the row of hungry faces on my left—maybe I should fold, cut my losses, catch that goddamn bus back to Houston.
Get up. Get up. Get up.
The dealer regards me with an outstretched hand, palm up, indicating that it’s my turn. I’m wasting time.
Glaring at the dealer, I fling a handful of reds into the pot.
“Raise.”
New Orleans, II: Harradise
2013
“It is in these small life-worlds, with all their arcane symbols and skills, that the professional poker player tests his inventive adaptiveness at every moment. This barely explored world is a fertile field for the ethnographer, who himself is put to the test; for in order to learn the rules of the game, he too must plan, play, dream, and take his chances.”
—David Hayano, Poker Faces
I hustle past acres of singing slots, through the stale stink of secondhand smoke, below ceilings painted in every shade of purple, trimmed in violet and gold, slathered with neon and pink. There’s a whole world inside these walls, but I’m single-minded. Two minutes and I’m at the poker room.
The room’s twenty tables are crammed with players, mostly men, who hunch over their chips like watchdogs. Pop music mingles with the hum of a hundred voices: a dealer calling out a vacancy at table ten, the hoot of a bad beat, spiteful laughter and convivial curses. But the most noticeable sound, as I walk past the Lucky Dogs stand to the check-in desk, are the chip-whispers: tossed chips, shuffled chips, spilled chips, stacked chips, fingers flicking and cutting and counting and balancing, chips rubbing, sliding, clicking. Everyone is here. Couples killing time. Nerds flirting with numbers. Bros obsessed with competition. Housewives hooked on risk. Widowers hungry for conversation. Tourists waddle to their seats, their pants sagging like overladen donkeys, and feed games that will run all night, the late evenings blurring into early mornings when fresh players, sipping coffee and scanning iPhones, join stubborn bleary-eyed gamblers.
The floorman greets me by name—I’ve earned that much, having played most nights this month—and sends me to a Texas hold ‘em table. Dodging waitresses and chip runners, I reach the cashier’s cage in the corner and slide forward three hundreds. A hundred dollars is a lot of money. It can pay rent and buy food. But here it’s a single bill. In chips it’s one hundred whites, twenty reds, four greens, one black. It has hazy value.
The cashier slides me a plastic rack of reds and says, “Good luck.”
The walk to my table is all nerves, like an athlete’s walk from the locker room to the field. I imagine tall stacks of chips. Good cards could come. Anything is possible. Settling into my seat, I recognize half of the other nine faces, all lit up already with drinks and the flow of the cards.
I arrange my chips into a three-columned triangle and wait for a hand.
The dealer taps a green button, a fresh deck rises to the tabletop, cards skim across the purple baize. She deals in turn until we each have two face-down and oversees a round of betting. A wrinkled lady slides two whites across the betting line, a chipper kid flicks in four reds. He wears thick black glasses and a blue flat-brimmed hat that shouts DESTIN.
“Twenty to play,” says the dealer.
Squeezing apart my two cards, I fold nine-deuce and follow the action, which loops clockwise in a series of folds, bets, and calls. A bald man with a tanned, serene face calls and smiles at Destin. “Eighteen more, Miss Nikki,” the dealer says. Miss Nikki’s veiny arm trembles as she exchanges two whites for four reds.
“Three players to the flop,” says the dealer. She spreads three communal cards face-up in the middle of the table—an ace, six, two, all diamonds—and oversees another betting round. Destin bets, the others fold, and the dealer pushes him the small pot of reds and whites. He tips her a white and adds the rest to his stack, pecking at his pile with flickering fingers.
The dealer taps the green button, a fresh deck rises to the tabletop, cards skim across the purple baize. Barely glancing at his cards, Destin tosses in four reds.
“Twenty to play.”
I fold king-four and glance to my right. Everything about Destin is quick and efficient, like a jovial bird. He worries me. Destin’s gaze settles on the smiling man whose seat faces the dealer. “Don and I play a lot together,” he tells me quietly. “He thinks I’m crazy, but he is the crazy one. When he runs good”—Destin somberly shakes his head—“he hurts people.”
It doesn’t take long for me to realize that, thanks to Don, I’m in a very good poker game. Twice he loses everything, marches to the ATM, and returns with five crisp hundreds and a smile. I’m dealt cards that work well together, the eight-nine of spades, the king-jack of hearts, two queens with their beautiful haughty faces. Suddenly I’m up a few hundred.
A man draped in black moves to our game from another table. He looks like a beleaguered Harry Connick Jr. “You found a good one, Tony!” Destin says. “That’s why I’m here,” Tony says. He asks for a seat change, inserts a pair of headphones, and wraps a hood around his haggard face. Within minutes, after a flurry of bets and raises, Don and Tony get all-in, creating a two-thousand-dollar pot. Their eyes dart from each other to a queen and two sixes.
“Got a six?” Tony asks.
“No,” Don says. “Better!”
Springing from his seat, he proudly shows two queens for a full house. Tony nods grimly and rebuys for a grand. “Bad day at the office,” he mutters.
Destin turns to me. “See what I’m saying? Don hurts people.”
**
The sound is faint at first, then it grows into notes clear and unmistakeable—oh when the Saints! go marching in!—that pierce the room and float above a faux saloon balcony to the starry purple ceiling. A brass band of ten black men bops past the blackjack tables, the Poker Bar, and the Lucky Dogs stand, celebrating with a jovial crowd in tow.
At our table, no one cares. I study Destin’s enthusiasm, Don’s serenity, Miss Nikki’s confusion, Tony’s exhaustion. Poker cultivated brief but intense relationships with these strangers. We presented versions of ourselves by how we talked, how we dressed, how we handled and stacked chips; we engaged at a respectable distance, the same distance as on a first date or among distant relatives. I often wondered if it was possible to know them in some deeper sense, to get beyond the convenient fiction that these people were merely stick figures, hollow repositories of cash, walking ATMs whose lives had no value beyond their money. I was a New Yorker living in Houston who, for the last month, had been seduced by this city and the card game that New Orleans invented. How had these others arrived here?
Across the table, Tony’s haggard grimace is barely visible underneath a tattered black hoodie; his gnarled hands riffle a stack of blacks. Last week we’d parked our bikes on Poydras Street and, walking inside Harrah’s together, chatted about the gambles of downtown traffic and relentless thieves (stolen bikes: we were tied, two-two). Inside this strange seductive space, inside his so-called “office,” Tony grinded out a living. What was that like? As an outsider to this room and the full-time grind, I could only guess. But I knew, at the very least, that all of us were here for different reasons. For some the money was everything. For others only the game mattered, the touch of felt beneath the hand, the stacking of chips, the eyes gleaming, flashing, narrowing. Poker was all in the eyes somehow, in calculated deceit and naïve hope: each mind bending reality, embracing dream logic, clinging to the fantasy of that final miracle card.
A fresh deck rises to the tabletop, cards skim across the purple baize.
Ace-three of spades. I feel the pang of possibility and toss in five reds with my good arm. Don flashes me a small, still smile and calls.
“Your turn,” Destin says softly.
The dealer spreads an ace, three, and five of different suits across the table. Don calls my bet and waits for the next card: the seven of clubs. I bet again, pushing forward a teetering column of reds. “One-twenty-five to call,” the dealer says to Don.
Don’s smile vanishes. He doesn’t move for a whole minute. Then, in one slow, smooth motion, he pushes his whole stack forward with both burly arms. “Player all-in,” the dealer says to me. “Three sixty-five to call.”
My arm throbs. This is weird. For the last few hours, Don had been playing passively. He liked to call, to see more cards. An aggressive all-in raise seemed out of character—which, to me, meant one of two things. One: my two-pair was crushed by a better hand. Two: he’s trying some wild bluff. Put another way, I was in a dark alley armed with a knife, but my assailant had a gun. And I had to decide whether the gun was real or a toy.
I study the board. Ace, three, five, seven of different suits, with one card to come—if I call. Can he have four-six? Four-deuce? I replay the hand, count the pot, weigh risk against reward. I imagine how Don sees me: lanky, scruffy blond hair and beard, tan hoodie. I wonder if he notices the bruise on my temple or how I wince when I move my left arm. Do I look weak? The answer must be somewhere. I study Don for a long time. Motionless and mute, arms crossed, staring at nothing, he looks like some stern Buddha.
I close my eyes. The gibberish of the machines, the chip-clicking, the jabbering at nearby tables—none of it registers. Coherent thought is gone. All that’s left is intuition. Trusting the voice telling you to call or fold, fold or call, your decision a reminder of who you are.
When I open my eyes, everyone is staring at me expectantly. With effort, I surrender my cards to the dealer and someone cries out, to Don, “Show the bluff!” He leans over the heaping mound of chips—his chips—and teases us with his two concealed cards. Suddenly he flips them face-up.
Jack of hearts, five of spades. A bluff. The table erupts in a cacophony of hoots and groans. Don jiggles with belly laughter. “Nice hand!” he says.
“Nice hand,” I say. My face is hot.
**
In ten minutes Don loses everything. He rebuys for five hundred, the bills making a flip-flip-flip sound as he counts and recounts them. He loses that five, rebuys, and doubles up. I can’t tell if he’s happier winning or losing. Observers hover near our table and chat in hushed tones, marveling at the action, each new pot somehow bigger than the last. The winner swings between Don and Destin, back and forth. Suddenly they get all-in. A massive mound of reds, greens, and blacks clump on the table. Don bets his last three hundred and Destin instantly calls, showing an unbeatable flush.
“Nice hand!” Don roars. He saunters to the ATM.
“You’ve been voted off the island, sir,” Tony says wearily. Destin smiles, doesn’t respond—he’s going nowhere, of course—and constructs sturdy chip-towers, smoothing and tightening them like a skilled architect, a few purple five-hundred-dollar chips crowning the tops. I scan his stack with irritation. This kid must be ahead, what, four grand in three hours?
****. It’s ten-thirty.
Flip-flip-flip. Don waves five bills in the air. He might as well hand that money to one of us and save time. Who is this guy? Where does he get his cash? Obviously I have no clue. The only certainty is that, with Don doling out chips like Halloween candy, leaving now would be dumb. It would be outright irresponsible. But what else can I do?
The answer punches me in the gut. Play until the next Megabus leaves at seven.
I squirm in my seat. My arm feels like a wet log. Am I really going to sit here for eight more hours? To gamble money that I can’t afford to lose? Until it’s five in the morning and I’m listening to droning vacuum cleaners with a bunch of miserable grinders? I heave a sigh, resign myself to reality, tell myself to get up.
A fresh deck rises to the tabletop. One card taps my fingertips, then another, each tap a reminder that good cards could come. Anything is possible.
King of hearts, ten of spades. There are plenty of worse starting hands. I want to play. I will play. Then again—I glance at the row of hungry faces on my left—maybe I should fold, cut my losses, catch that goddamn bus back to Houston.
Get up. Get up. Get up.
The dealer regards me with an outstretched hand, palm up, indicating that it’s my turn. I’m wasting time.
Glaring at the dealer, I fling a handful of reds into the pot.
“Raise.”
05-15-2017
, 03:07 PM