Keller examined the messy pile of chips in front of the boy and said, "Now, whatever Jimmy Logan told you about playing poker, whatever you think you know from Hoyle, forget about it. We use the big boys' rules here, and rule number one: We play fair. Always keep your chips organized in front of you so everybody at the table knows how much you've got. Okay?"
"Sure." The kid began stacking the chips into neat stacks.
"And," Wendall said, "let's say a miracle happens and you start to win big and somebody can't see exactly how many chips you have. If they ask you, you tell them. Down to the last dollar. Got that?"
"Tell 'em, sure." The boy nodded.
They cut for the deal and Wendall won. He began shuffling with his fat fingers.
Keller gazed at the riffling cards in pleasure, thinking: There's nothing like poker, nothing like it in the world.
The game went back nearly two hundred years. It started as a Mississippi riverboat cheaters' game to replace three-card monte, which even the most gullible slickers quickly learned was just a scam to take their money. Poker, played back then with only the ten through the ace, seemed to give them more of a fighting chance. But it didn't, of course, not in the hands of expert sharks (the innocents might've been more reluctant to play if they'd known that the game's name probably came from the nineteenth-century slang for wallet, "poke," the emptying of which was the true object of play).
"Ante up," Wendall called. "The game is five-card draw."
There are dozens of variations of poker games. But in Keller's games, five-card draw--"closed poker" or "jackpot" were the official names--was what they played, high hand the winner. Over the years he'd played every kind of poker known to man--from California lowball draw (the most popular poker game west of the Rockies) to standard stud to Texas Hold 'Em. They were all interesting and exciting in their own ways but Keller liked basic jackpot best because there were no gimmicks, no arcane rules; it was you against the cards and the other players, like bare-knuckle boxing. Man to man.
In jackpot, players are dealt five cards and then have the option of exchanging up to three in hopes of bettering their hands. Good players, like Keller, had long ago memorized the odds of drawing certain combinations. Say he was dealt a pair of threes, a jack, a seven and a two. If he decided to keep the pair and the jack and draw substitutes for the other two, he'd have a one-in-five chance of getting another jack to make a two-pair hand. To draw the remaining threes in the deck--to make four of a kind--his chances dropped to one in 1,060. But if he chose to keep only the pair and draw three new cards, the odds of getting that four of a kind improved to 1 in 359. Knowing these numbers, and dozens more, were what separated amateur players from pros, and Keller made a very good living as a pro.
They tossed in the ante and Wendall began dealing.
Keller focused on Tony's strategy. He'd expected the kid to play recklessly but on the whole he was cautious and seemed to be getting a feel for the table and the players. A lot of teenagers would've been loud and obnoxious, Keller supposed, but the boy sat back quietly and just played cards.
Which wasn't to say he didn't need advice.
"Tony, don't play with your chips. Makes you look nervous."
"I wasn't playing with them. I--"
"And here's another rule--don't argue with the guys giving you rules. You're good. You got it in you to be a great player--but you gotta shut up and listen to the experts."
Lasky grumbled, "Listen to him, kid. He's the best. I figure I bought his friggin' Mercedes for him, all the money I lost here. And does he bring it into my shop to get the dings out? Hell, no . . . . Call you." He shoved chips forward.
"I don't get dings, Lasky. I'm a good driver. Just like I'm a good poker player . . . . Say hi to the ladies." Keller laid down three queens and took the $900 pot.
"Fuck me," Lasky snapped angrily.
"Now there's another rule," Keller said, nodding at the body-shop man then turning to Tony. "Never show emotion--losing or winning. It gives your opponent some information they can use against you."
"Excuse me for breaking the rules," Lasky muttered to Keller. "I meant to say fuck you."
Twenty minutes later Tony'd had a string of losses. On the next hand he looked at the five cards he'd been dealt and, when Stanton bet ten dollars, shook his head. He folded without drawing any cards and glumly toyed with the lid of his Starbucks cup.
Keller frowned. "Why'd you fold?"
"Losing streak."
Keller scoffed. "There's no such thing as a losing streak."
Wendall nodded, pushing the cards toward Tony to deal. The resident Mr. Wizard of poker said, "Remember that. Every hand of poker starts with a fresh shuffle so it's not like blackjack--there's no connection between hands. The laws of probability rule."
The boy nodded and, sure enough, played his way through Stanton's bluff to take a $850 pot.
"Hey, there you go," Keller said. "Good for you."
"So what? You in school, kid?" Lasky asked after a few lackluster hands.
"Two cards," the boy said to Keller, then dealing. He replied to Lasky, "Been in computer science at the community college for a year. But it's boring. I'm going to drop out."
"Computers?" Wendall asked, laughing derisively. "High-tech stocks? I'll take craps or roulette wheel any day. At least you know what the odds are."
"And what do you want to do for a living?" Keller asked.
"Play cards professionally."
"Three cards," Lasky muttered to Keller. Then to Tony he gave a gruff laugh. "Pro card playing? Nobody does that. Well, Keller does. But nobody else I know of." A glance at Stanton. "How 'bout you, Grandpa, you ever play pro?"
"Actually, the name's Larry. Two cards."
"No offense, Larry."
"And two cards for the dealer," Keller said.
The old man arranged his cards. "No, I never even thought about it." A nod at the pile of chips in front of him--he was just about even for the night. "I play all right but the odds're still against you. Anything serious I do with money? I make sure the odds're on my side."
Lasky sneered. "That's what makes you a man, for Christ's sake. Having the balls to play even if the odds're against you." A glance at Tony. "You look like you got balls. Do you?"
"You tell me," the boy asked and laid down two pair to win a $1,100 pot.
Lasky looked at him and snapped, "And fuck you too."
Keller said, "Think that means yes." Everyone at the table--except Lasky--laughed.
The play continued with a series of big pots, Lasky and Tony being the big winners. Finally Wendall was tapped out.
"Okay, that's it. I'm out of here. Gentlemen . . . been a pleasure playing with you." As always, he pulled a baseball cap on and ducked out the back door, looking hugely relieved he'd escaped without being arrested.
Keller's cell phone rang and he took the call. "Yeah? . . . Okay. You know where, right? . . . See you then." When he disconnected he lit a cigar and sat back, scanned the boy's chips. He said to Tony. "You played good tonight. But time for you to cash in."
"What? I'm just getting warmed up. It's only ten."
He nodded at his cell phone. "The big guns'll be here in twenty minutes. You're through for the night."
"Whatta you mean? I want to keep playing."
"This's the big time. Guys I know from Chicago."
"I'm playing fine. You said so yourself."
"You don't understand, Tony," Larry Stanton said, nodding at the chips. "The whites go up to ten bucks each. The yellows'll be two-fifty. You can't play with stakes like that."
"I've got . . ." He looked over his chips. " . . . almost forty thousand."
"And you could lose that in three, four hands."
"I'm not going to lose it."
"Oh, brother," Lasky said, rolling his eyes. "The voice of youth."
Keller said, "In my high-stakes game, everybody comes in with a hundred large."
"I can get it."
"This time o
f night?"
"I inherited some money a few years ago. I keep a lot of it in cash for playing. I've got it at home--just a couple miles from here."
"No," Stanton said. "It's not for you. It's a whole different game with that much money involved."
"Goddamn it, everybody's treating me like a child. You've seen me play. I'm good, right?"
Keller fell silent. He looked at the boy's defiant gaze and finally said, "You're back here in a half hour with a hundred G's, okay."
After the boy left, Keller announced a break until the Chicago contingent arrived. Lasky went to get a sandwich and Stanton and Keller wandered into the bar proper for a couple of beers.
Stanton sipped his Newcastle and said, "Kid's quite a player."
"Has potential," Keller said.
"So how bad you going to hook him? For his whole stake, the whole hundred thousand plus?"
"What's that?"
" 'Rule number one is we play fair'?" Stanton whispered sarcastically. "What the hell was that all about? You're setting him up. You've been spending most of the game--and half your money--catching his draws."
Keller smiled and blew a stream of cigar smoke toward the ceiling of the bar. The old guy was right. Keller'd been going all the way with losing hands just to see how Tony drew cards. And the reconnaissance had been very illuminating. The boy had his strengths but the one thing he lacked was knowledge of the odds of poker. He was drawing blind. Keller was no rocket scientist but he'd worked hard over the years to learn the mathematics of the game; Tony, on the other hand, might've been a computer guru, but he didn't have a clue what his chances were of drawing a flush or a full house or even a second pair. Combined with the boy's atrocious skills at bluffing, which Keller'd spotted immediately, his ignorance of the odds made him a sitting duck.
"You've also been sandbagging," Stanton said in disgust.
Score another one for Grandpa. He'd spotted that Keller had been passing on the bet and folding good hands on purpose--to build up Tony's confidence and to make him believe that Keller was a lousy bluffer.
"You're setting him up for a big hit."
Keller shrugged. "I tried to talk him into walking away."
"Bullshit," Stanton countered. "You take a kid like that and tell 'em to leave, what's their first reaction? To stay . . . . Come on, Keller, he hasn't got that kind of money to lose."
"He inherited a shitload of cash."
"So you invited him into the game as soon as you found that out?"
"No, as a matter of fact, he came to me. . . . You're just pissed 'cause he treats you like a has-been."
"You're taking advantage of him."
Keller shot back with: "Here's my real rule number one in poker: As long as you don't cheat you can do whatever you want to trick your opponents."
"You going to share that rule with Tony?" Stanton asked.
"I'm going to do better than that--I'm going to give him a firsthand demonstration. He wants to learn poker? Well, this'll be the best lesson he ever gets."
"You think breaking him and taking his tuition money's going to make him a better player?" Stanton asked.
"Yeah, I do. He doesn't want to be in school anyway."
"That's not the point. The point is you're an expert and he's a boy."
"He claims he's a man. And one of the things about being a man is getting knocked on your ass and learning from it."
"In penny ante, sure. But not a game like this."
"You have a problem with this, Grandpa?" Angry, Keller turned ominously toward him.
Stanton looked away and held up his hands. "Do what you want. It's your game. I'm just trying to be the voice of conscience."
"If you play by the rules you'll always have a clear conscience."
A voice called from the doorway, Lasky's. He said, "They're here."
Keller slapped Stanton on his bony shoulders. "Let's go win some money."
More cigar smoke was filling the back room. The source: Elliott Rothstein and Harry Piemonte, businessmen from the Windy City. Keller'd played with them several times previously but he didn't know much about them; the two men revealed as little about their personal lives as their faces shared what cards they held. They might've been organized crime capos or they might have been directors of a charity for orphans. All Keller knew was they were solid players, paid their losses without griping and won without lording it over the losers.
Both men wore dark suits and expensive, tailored white shirts. Rothstein had a diamond pinkie ring and Piemonte a heavy gold bracelet. Wedding bands encircled both of their left ring fingers. They now stripped off their suit jackets, sat down at the table and were making small talk with Stanton and Lasky when Tony returned. He sat down at his place and pulled the lid off his new Starbucks, nodding at Rothstein and Piemonte.
They frowned and looked at Keller. "Who's this?" Rothstein muttered.
"He's okay."
Piemonte frowned. "We got a rule, we don't play with kids."
Tony laughed and shoved his nerd glasses high on his nose. "You guys and your rules." He opened an envelope and dumped out cash. He counted out a large stack and put some back into his pocket. "Hundred large," he said to Stanton, who gave a dark look to Keller but began counting out chips for the boy.
The two new players looked at each other and silently decided to make an exception to their general rule about juveniles in poker games.
"Okay, the game is five-card draw," Keller said. "Minimum bet fifty, ante is twenty-five."
Piemonte won the cut and they began.
The hands were pretty even for the first hour, then Keller began pulling ahead slowly. Tony kept his head above water, the second winner--but only because, it seemed, the other players were getting bad hands; the boy was still hopeless when it came to calculating the odds of drawing. In a half-dozen instances he'd draw a single card and then fold--which meant he was trying for a straight or a flush, the odds of doing that were just 1 in 20. Either he should've discarded three cards, which gave him good odds of improving his hand, or gone with a heavy bluff after drawing a solo card, in which case he probably would've taken the pot a couple of times.
Confident that he'd nailed the boy's technique, Keller now began to lose intentionally when Tony seemed to have good cards--to boost his confidence. Soon the kid had doubled his money and had close to $200,000 in front of him.
Larry Stanton didn't seem happy with Keller's plan to take the boy but he didn't say anything and continued to play his cautious, old-man's game, slowly losing to the other players.
The voice of conscience . . .
As the night wore on, Lasky finally dropped out, having lost close to eighty thousand bucks. "Fuck, gotta raise the price for ding-pulling," he joked, heading for the door. He glanced at the duo from Chicago. "When you gentlemen leave, could you bang inta some parked cars on the way to the expressway?" A nod toward Keller. "An' if you wanta fuck up the front end of his Merc, I wouldn't mind one bit."
Piemonte smiled at this; Rothstein glanced up as if the body-shop man were speaking Japanese or Swahili and turned back to his cards to try to coax a winning hand out of them.
Grandpa too soon bailed. He still had stacks of chips left on the table--but another rule in poker was that a player can walk away at any time. He now cashed in and pushed his chair back glumly to sip coffee and to watch the remaining players.
Ten minutes later Rothstein lost his remaining stake to Tony in a tense, and long, round of betting.
"Damn," he spat out. "Tapped out. Never lost to a boy before--not like this."
Tony kept a straight face but there was a knowing look in his eye that said, And you didn't lose to one now--I'm not a boy.
The game continued for a half hour, with big pots trading hands.
Most poker games don't end with dramatic last hands. Usually players just run out of money or, like Grandpa, get cold feet and slip away with their tails between their legs.
But sometimes there are climactic momen
ts.
And that's what happened now.
Tony shuffled and then offered the cut to Keller, who divided the deck into thirds. The boy reassembled the cards and began dealing.
Piemonte gathered his and, like all good poker players, didn't move them (rearranging cards can telegraph a lot of information about your hand).
Keller picked up his and was pleased to see that he'd received a good one: two pairs--queens and sixes. A very winnable one in a game this size.
Tony gathered his five cards and examined them, not revealing any reaction. "Bet?" he asked Piemonte, who passed.
To open the betting in draw poker a player needs a pair of jacks or better. Passing meant that either Piemonte didn't have that good a hand or that he did but was sandbagging--choosing not to bet to make the other players believe he had weak cards.
Keller decided to take a chance. Even though he had the two pairs, and could open, he too passed, which would make Tony think his hand was poor.
A tense moment followed. If Tony didn't bet, they'd surrender their cards and start over; Keller would swallow a solid hand.
But Tony glanced at his own cards and bet ten thousand.
Keller's eyes flickered in concern, which a bluffer would do, but in his heart he was ecstatic. The hook was set.
"See you," Piemonte said, pushing his chips in.
So, Keller reflected, the man from Chicago'd probably been sandbagging too.
Keller, his face blank, pushed out the ten thousand, then another stack of chips. "See your ten and raise you twenty-five."
Tony saw the new bet and raised again. Piemonte hesitated but stayed with it and Keller matched Tony's new bet. As dealer, he now "burned" the top card on the deck--set it facedown in front of him. Then he turned to Piemonte. "How many?"
"Two."
Tony slipped him the two replacement cards from the top of the deck.
Keller's mind automatically began to calculate the odds. The chances of getting three of a kind in the initial deal were very low so it was likely that Piemonte had a pair and a "kicker," an unmatched card of a high rank, probably a face card. The odds of his two new cards giving him a powerful full house were only 1 in 119. And if, by chance, he had been dealt a rare three of a kind at first, the odds of his getting a pair, to make that full house, were still long: 1 in 15.
Filing this information away, Keller himself asked for one card, suggesting to the other players that he was going for either a full house or a straight or flush--or bluffing. He picked up the card and placed it in his deck. Keller's mouth remained motionless but his heart slammed in his chest when he saw he'd got a full house--and a good one, three queens.