And Power. That tower of chips you’ve made, looming over the rim of the table, is the physical manifestation of how much you can bully. A monument to your prowess, or the Poker Gods’ blessing this day. Big stacks eat little stacks like M&M’s. The other saps have arranged their stacks into houses of straw and sticks, and even the brick ones will not stand at your re-raise huffing and puffing. What threat is that little stack’s All In to someone who’d gathered a thousand times as many chips? I’d always marveled at the gravity-defying properties of those gigantic stacks. Aren’t they afraid of knocking them over? My anxiety-palsied hands would send them flying through space. But the first step to handling chip castles is accumulating a bunch of chips, hence my lack of practice.
So: Gather a big stack and people won’t want to tangle with your King Kong self. On the Simian Scale, I was more Bubbles the chimp, break-dancing for cigarette and gin money before Michael Jackson rescued him from the streets. Hanging on, overcautious. An early misstep set me brooding. I was Big Blind, with a 9 and a 7, differently suited. Crap, but my forced ante dragged me into the flop—where a pair of 7s gave me trips. Cool. But this young madman in middle position called with 8-7 offsuit (Why was he in? Why, why?) and took the pot with a full house. I lost half my stack. Shut me up for a while.
As it turned out, one aspect of my personality would help me in my odyssey: I was a bider. Temperamentally suited to hold out for good cards, well accustomed to waiting. We Anhedonians have adapted to long periods between good news. Our national animal is the hope camel. We have no national bird. All the birds are dead.
Hyper-aggressive play—taking any two starting hands and rigging some MacGyver-type hand-winning apparatus out of them—was beyond me this early in my training. But in a tournament, you can go hours without decent opening cards. Even an aggressive player only plays four hands out of ten. Everyone, from these weekend plodders in the Trop Poker Room to the seasoned players I’d play with in Las Vegas, had to learn to suffer a rough table, a short stack, some weird hex your next-door neighbor put on you for playing polka music too loud. You bide. Pray. Try to keep cool. Eventually the cards will come. The biding, spider part of me thrived in tournaments.
But biding only gets you so far in poker. Just partway through my strategy manual, and I was already becoming aware of different phases in the game. In the coming weeks, I’d watch the tournaments disintegrate. Forty-eight, thirty-two, sixteen players left. A stickler will shout “Hank! You gonna break this table?” and Hank the floor manager takes a gander. We get chip racks, rack ’em up, and move to our new station. The tables broke and we hopped to the next one as if scampering across splintering ice floes. A broken table exiled opponents to the other side of the room, and then another returned them. Or didn’t. They prospered in that new land, or withered, and the story of their table journey merged with mine to create this afternoon’s epic. When tables drop to five or six players, the manager reassigns players to maintain distribution, because the game changes depending on how many people are seated. Like, flopping a high pair isn’t that great when you’re ten-handed—there are too many people who might have better cards. But it ain’t bad against six players, and heads up against one player, it’s awesome.
At the Final Table, there’s nothing left to break. Last man standing.
WORST DAY OF THE YEAR: The day you bust out of the World Series of Poker.
I made it to my tournament’s Final Table with a minuscule stack. Not that “Final Table” meant much when there were only two tables to begin with. The Methy Mikes were reunited, sweeping their long stringy hair out of their faces between hands. They’d taken damage, too. Also present: two fellows who didn’t fit the demographic of my first table. One was a young Middle Eastern man in his early twenties, dressed in stylish, slim-cut clothes, who mixed it up affably, knocking down hands. He was no Robotron, or if he had been at one time, he’d gotten some back-alley doctor to remove his implants. His girlfriend dragged over a chair and sat behind him sipping a cocktail. She didn’t mind waiting, and ignored the guy on her boyfriend’s right who kept hitting on her. When the Lothario busted out, they chuckled.
The other castaway was an elderly white man who bent over his chips, squinting through a magnifying attachment that barnacled on his thick specs like a jeweler’s loupe. He pondered before acting, as if reviewing a lifetime of hands and confrontations, or fighting off a nap. Sometimes you have to accept a casino trip for what it really is: an opportunity to see old people. There were a lot of old people in poker rooms, genially buying in for a couple of hands before the Early Bird Special. I prefer to believe they were gambling with discretionary funds, enjoying their twilight years after a lifetime of careful saving, and not pissing away their Social Security. If I were an octogenarian looking for love, I’d hit the casinos, no question. The dating pool is quite deep.
The atmosphere at the Final Table was different. Never fast-moving, today’s game decelerated even more. Previously aggressive opponents tempered their play. Something was going on, but I couldn’t see it. I’d leave the Tropicana with clues, courtesy of the Methy Mikes. They’d complained all day, first about the paltry turnout (“I bet Caesars is hopping”), and then about how long the game was taking. Only eighteen people, but we dragged on. Maybe the slow levels were cutting into their cockfight prep time, Hercules always requiring a good menthol rub before a bout.
“Waiting for him to push,” said one, sourly.
He kept at it. After a few hands, I realized he was talking about me. The dismissive gesture in my direction tipped me off. I hadn’t been glared at with such hate by two people since couples therapy. Unfortunately, I had no idea what “pushing” meant.
The next day I’d google it: going All In. But why did he care that I wasn’t shoving? Because I had no choice at that point. The Big Blind was $3,000, and I had $9,000. I could survive three rounds. But wait—the Small Blind was $1,500, so I didn’t even have that long ($1,500 + $3,000 means it cost $4,500 to play one round, or half my stack of $9,000). Not enough to slow-play or wait for a premium hand. To value bet, not that I knew what value betting was. All I could do was push my cards into the middle and hope that the Hungry Hippos had worse cards. Pushin’. I should have started pushing levels ago, before I got into this deplorable situation. Methy Mike was trying to wrap things up, and there I was sitting like a chump, waiting for a bus that wasn’t going to come.
I wanted to say, “Look, I’m on a journey here,” but that had never worked except that one time in T.G.I. Friday’s and all it got me was a half-off coupon for jalapeño poppers. Methy, I wasn’t happy with my paltry chips, either. I was shocked that I’d survived this far. Tremor in my hands whenever I reached for my stack. I petted the notebook in my pocket for comfort, as if I could absorb my instructions through fabric. Which might appear onanistic to the other players and throw them off their game.
So it felt good when I pushed, ignorance aside, and took my critic out with a flush. Cock-a-doodle-doo, motherfucker. I think it was a flush. My notes say, “gamey tooth, itchy eyeballs, heart palpitations, necrotic finger, incipient flatulence.” Five of the same suit.
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.
Helen said she liked “Six Handed.” I had no idea what the hell she was talking about. I nodded and chewed. In 2010 Helen made it through the first day of the $5,000 Six Handed No-Limit. When she got her draw for Day 2, the Powers that Be seated her at a Feature Table with the big guns. Feature as in TV cameras. They played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and Helen looked for her seat. “Where is Table 116? There’s 114, there’s 118, where is it? Oh, it’s the Feature Table up on the platform with all the press, all the lights, and all that shit.”
Husband Lex snapped a picture of her playing against poker superstars Phil Ivey and James Akenhead. Ivey was one of the few big-time African American pros—actually, the only one I could name. For years now, I’d rooted for him on TV, whenever he popped up on the poker shows my DVR scooped from the deep a.m. darkness. Cool and inscrutable, he was our black heavyweight, our Leon Sphinx. Hadn’t heard of Akenhead. Turned out he was a British player, a young gun who’d made it to the Final Table in 2009. He came in ninth place, and pocketed a million dollars for his exertions.
“It’s, as they call it, the Table of Death.” She survived the cameras. She knocked Akenhead out of the game, and once Ivey busted, too, they broke the table. Show over. The next time Helen was in Vegas, she passed Akenhead in the hallways of the Rio. “It’s like if you had dinner with Obama. You would remember him, but he might not remember you.”
Helen came in forty-second place, winning twelve grand. It was her first pilgrimage to the World Series after stepping up her presence on the professional poker circuit the last few years. Poker and housewifery aside, she was also a writer. She left Tuscaloosa to come to New York to study fiction writing at NYU. I picked up her second book, The Turning, thinking it might provide insight into her poker persona. It’s about a teenage girl in NYC who discovers she has the power to turn into a cat, indeed belongs to
a larger, secret community of people who can turn into cats. There was a gesture toward the poker subculture in that premise, and some riffing on transformation into one’s true self, the inner becoming the outer. Your daytime life is one reality, and at night, at a poker table, say, you become someone else. Someone with claws.
“I’ve been playing since I was twenty-one,” she said. “And I still have to gather my courage to go and sit down and be there. I like it because you can be anyone you want to be. I can be extremely aggressive. I can be very brave. I can behave in a way that I don’t normally behave. Other than writing, it’s the only place where I can lose time.”
There’s more poker in her first book, Eating the Cheshire Cat. It follows three young Southern girls who are also in the midst of violent transformation, this time into brutal adulthood. One climactic scene occurs at a poker play-off held at a sorority reunion. The middle-aged former Delta Delta Deltas are all set up for a nice afternoon of Seven Card Stud, unaware that Nicole Hicks, a next-generation Tri Delt, has penciled in her psychotic break for that afternoon. Her butcher knife comes down and “Within a split second, Mrs. Hicks lost her daughter, her nerve, and two-thirds of her right index finger … The blood pooled and lifted the Queen of Spades from the table. It slid to the edge, then fell, face first, splat on the beige, velvet-soft, steam-cleaned carpet.”
As in most of the poker tales that overwhelmed me during my training, there was a lesson there, but it would take some time for me to decipher it. For now, I went with: You better listen to Coach.
Helen was the perfect teacher, hipping me to the right books (Dan Harrington and Phil Gordon), dispensing the Poker Truths so that they finally penetrated my brain (“This is your mantra: Patience and Position”), and sharing basic tips about daily survival in Las Vegas’s Rio Hotel, home to the WSOP since 2005. “Stay on the Ipanema side—the rooms are better.” Following an afternoon at the tables, I was supposed to hit the seafood joint just outside the corridor to the convention hall. “Make a reservation,” she instructed, in the same tone she used for “Watch out for A-x in middle position.”