The New Kings of Nonfiction

by Ira Glass

  I need to take a piss about now, but I hold it, and the poker gods deem fit to reward me. Fifteen hands go by in which I can do no wrong. I win six good-sized pots, three in a row toward the end, using check-raises, semi-bluffs, traps—the whole works. By midnight I have $4,900, almost half the chips on the table. The slender Pakistani guy, who’s named Hasan Habib, has roughly $2,700; a big, bearded guy named Tom Jacobs about $2,400.

  With the blinds at $400 and $800, Jacobs moves all-in on the third hand we play. Habib calls, turning over two sevens. (In heads-up action, when one player goes all-in usually both expose their hole cards since no more betting is possible.) When Jacobs flips over A-10, Habib becomes an 11 to 9 favorite, and I get to watch the do-or-die “race” from the sideline: J-J-3, followed by a trey, then a deuce. I’m down to one adversary. The only problem is that it’s Hasan Habib, who finished second last month at the World Poker Open no-limit event down in Tunica, Mississippi. And he now has me slightly outchipped.

  We fence for a half-dozen hands, neither of us willing to call preflop bets, before I discover a pair of queens peering back up between my thumbs. Betting first, I can try to trap Hasan by (1) merely calling his big blind, (2) putting in a modest raise, or (3) moving all-in, hoping that he (a) calls, and (b) doesn’t have aces or kings. I decide to try door number three. And he calls, then puts the frighteners on me by turning over K ♦ and . . . 10♦. When the board fails to improve either of our hands, the dealer yells, “Winner on table 64!” Yawning yet flabbergasted, I sit back and try to relax. Carol takes my name and address, then issues a printed receipt for $10,001, the last buck being the token entry fee. Event 25, it says, World Championship, 5/15/2000, and assigns me to Table 53, Seat 6. I’m in.

  Besides drawing record numbers of entries, the 2000 WSOP, I’ve discovered, has already produced a few of what might be called cultural achievements. The $1,500 seven-stud bracelet, along with the $135,975 first prize, went to Jerri Thomas, a forty-one-year-old from Cincinnati who had given birth only three months earlier. She and her husband, Harry, are now only the second married couple with a WSOP bracelet apiece. The following event, limit Omaha, was won by Ivo Donev, a former chess pro from Austria who’d spent the past two years reading Sklansky and McEvoy and practicing on Wilson software.

  A week ago, on May 4, Jennifer Harman won the no-limit deuce-to-seven event. Because of its steep degree of difficulty, the event drew only thirty entrants, but the deuce (in which the lowest hand wins) is the title poker professionals covet almost as much as the Big One. No satellites get played for it, so only by putting up $5,000 can the cockiest, best-bankrolled players compete. Harman is a blond, thirty-twoish, dog-crazy gamine who plays high-stakes lowball games every night with the likes of Brunson, Chip Reese, and Annie Duke, but she’d never played no-limit deuce. Neither had Duke, for that matter, but that didn’t faze either of them. They took a ten-minute lesson from Howard Lederer, Duke’s brother, and ten hours later Harman had the bracelet and $146,250. And then, on May 5, Phillip Ivey took home the Omaha bracelet, defeating Thomas “Amarillo Slim” Preston with a series of fifth-street miracles at the final table, coming back from a 5 to 1 chip deficit. In thirty years of World Series play, during which he’s won four bracelets, Slim had never lost at a final table. Playing out of Atlantic City, the twenty-three-year-old Ivey has been on the tournament circuit for less than six months but is now the only African American with a WSOP bracelet.

  The World Series of Poker (and tournament poker in general) was invented by Benny Binion in the spring of 1970. He simply invited a few of his high-rolling cronies to compete among themselves and then vote for the best all-around player; the winner, Johnny Moss, received a small trophy and whatever money he’d earned at the table. The current freeze-out structure, which continues until one player has all the chips, was instated in 1971, and Moss won again, this time taking home $30,000. The next year’s winner, Amarillo Slim, won $80,000, wrote a book, and went on the talk-show circuit, boosting the public’s interest in tournament poker. By the time Brunson became the second repeat champion in 1977, first prize had quadrupled to $340,000. It was up to $700,000 by 1988, the second year Johnny Chan won. From 1991 until last year, first prize was an even $1 million, with the number of entries and total prize money steadily climbing. Last year’s championship event drew 393 entries, with second place paying a record $768,625.

  Almost from the WSOP’s inception, the total prize money awarded has dwarfed the purses of Wimbledon, the Masters, and the Kentucky Derby. There are now twenty-four preliminary events. The buy-in to the Big One remains $10,000, but these days the majority of players gain entry by winning satellites or super-satellites, mini-tournaments designed to democratize the competition; they are also thought to be the most legitimate route in, since they reward poker skill instead of deep pockets, though the two often work hand in hand.

  T minus seventy minutes, and counting. After half an hour of lazy backstroke in the rooftop pool, I open my Cloutier and start cramming for my first big exam since I was an undergrad twenty-seven years ago. I’m reviewing all twelve of T.J.’s practice hands, poring over underlined phrases to see if I’ve absorbed the logic of his analyses. “Cardinal rule number one in no-limit hold’em is: If you limp with aces, you will never get broke with aces.” And this, on the luck factor: “You can set up all the plays in the world, you can play perfectly on a hand, and you can still lose. And there’s nothing that you can do about it.” The rest of his advice I’ve tried to reduce to four memorizable aphorisms.

  1. Don’t call big bets; fold or raise.

  2. Avoid trouble hands like K ♦ Q ♣, K ♥ J♣, or any ace with a kicker smaller than a king in the first four positions.

  3. Don’t always steal-raise in obvious bluffing positions (the small blind, the button), and play big hands (even A♦ A♣) slowly from them.

  4. Drawing hands are death.

  This last one means: Don’t risk your tournament life chasing big pairs with small ones or medium suited connectors, as is often correct in a limit game. You’d win a big pot if you filled your straight or flush, but aggressive no-limit players make you pay too high a price to draw against them. Mistakes in no-limit tend to be costlier by an order of magnitude, and the chips that you lose in a tournament can’t be replenished by digging into your pocket. Amen.

  Furious satellite action is still under way as I arrive in the tournament area just before noon, with the overflow crowd getting denser by the second. Judging from their faces, a few of these hombres have been playing all night. Dealers raise the betting levels every three minutes instead of every twenty, eliminating players tout de suite but reducing the caliber of poker to little better than all-in crapshoots. Railbirds are six or eight deep, clapping and whistling when their hombre survives, as four camera crews roam the aisles. One guy they’re focusing on is tournament director Bob Thompson, a silver-haired cowboy with a dulcet basso drawl. With his big jaw and narrow-eyed gaze, he effortlessly personifies the American West, Texas hold’em in particular. And that’s what we came here to play: cowboy poker. Thompson runs the floor with his son, Robert, and Tom Elias; his daughter, Cathi Wood, coordinates the administration. Her fact sheet says that if five hundred entrants sign up, nine players more than the usual thirty-six will be paid; first place will pay $1.5 million, second will pay almost $900,000, and all other payouts will escalate. Her father just announced that last year’s record of 393 has been shattered, then pointed to the line of new entrants with ten grand in their pocket still snaking three-players thick out the door. Clearly no cards will be in the air for a spell.

  In the meantime, Puggy Pearson, the 1973 champion, holds court in a gold-and-lemon silk Genghis Khan outfit, including a crown with tasseled earflaps to go with his broad smile, eponymous pug nose, and Abe Lincoln mustacheless beard. Elsewhere I see little black dresses, tuxedos, and a short, wild-eyed black guy in a cloth airman’s helmet hung with a dozen pink or yellow rabbit’s feet. The leading sartor
ial choice, though, is Poker Practical: baseball cap, sunglasses, sateen casino jacket. Among so many corn-fed middle-aged guys in goatees and Levi’s, Slim still looks clear-eyed and rangy at seventy-seven, bedecked in pressed khaki trousers, platinum belt buckle, mother-of-pearl buttons on his crisp cowboy shirt.

  However unlikely this sounds, the World Series of Poker has evolved from its good-old-boy roots into a stronghold of, yes, functional multiculturalism, proving, if nothing else, that there is such a thing. The field is an ecumenical crazy quilt of players from twenty-three countries on all six inhabited continents, among them Scotty Nguyen (the gold-bedecked 1998 champion) from Saigon, Hasan Habib from Karachi, and, from Pamplona, a Carlos Fuentes. Any all-name team would also have to include Tab Thiptinnakon, Jesus Ferguson, Exxon Feyznia, David Plastik, Chip Jett, Spring Cheong, Sam Grizzle, Lin Poon Wang, and Huckleberry Seed, the 1996 champion. Among toned jocks like Seed and Layne Flack and Daniel Negreanu we have equal numbers of the obese and the skeletal, plus plenty of folks who are youthful or ancient, wheelchair-bound or in dance shoes. Evangelical Christians are competing with Larry Flynt, CEOs and dot-com millionaires against call girls and poker dealers, gay men and lesbians, cowgirls and golfers and artists, black poker professionals and Jewish physicians, Jewish pros and black docs, at least one Aramaic scholar, and several Vietnamese boat people. All told our number is 512, breaking last year’s record by 119 and bringing the purse to a staggering $5.12 million.

  I fail to recognize any stars at my table, cause enough for slightly less pessimism. After showing our receipts, we each receive a stack of $10,000 in chips: one orange five-thousand, three white-and-royal-blue “dimes,” two black-and-yellow five-hundreds, and seven slate-colored “ones” topped by a dozen green “quarters.” The cards finally go in the air at 1:35, with the blinds at $25 and $50, no antes. Our dealer flicks out a card apiece to determine who starts on the button—and, with the sad-eyed king of spades, that would be moi. On the first hand, I look down and find A♣ 6♣. No less than five limp in front of me; i.e., they call the big blind by tossing $50 each into the pot, trying to get a cheap look at the flop. Not on moi’s watch! I make it $250 to go, get no callers, and, with $10,325, take the lead.

  Not for long, of course. I start playing far too impulsively, overriding my own blueprint by entering pots with small pairs, K ♥ J ♦, or 5♥ 4 ♥, getting smoked. Is someone else pushing my chips in or making my mouth say, “Let’s raise it”? The main person making me pay is an un-fearsome cowpoke five seats to my right. Wearing the same puzzled grin, he rakes in pot after pot. The worst hammering comes when I turn an overset of queens—make three queens on fourth street, that is, with no higher card on the board—and bet $2,000. Henrik calls. Even when I fail to improve on fifth street, I feel that six titties, or three queens, are worth another $2,000, a foolish amount at this stage. My logic is that if I could only get Henrik to call—I’d put him on two little pairs—I’d be back up to even: lesson learned, tabula rasa, ready to start playing solid. But not only does the little shit call me, he shows me a seven-high straight.

  By the first fifteen-minute break at 3:35 I’m down to $2,200 and change. I skulk up to my room and call my wife, Jennifer, in St. Louis. I give her the ball-crushing news, and she sighs. What I need is a kiss and a head rub, she says, but all she can provide is a suggestion to page through my brag book, the 4-by-6 photo album with pictures of our girls and my two other children. “Just keep it in your pocket and think about us.” It’s truly a sorry idea, but since I don’t have a better one I take the book with me downstairs. My goal all along has been to go to bed tonight still alive, and it looks like I’m not gonna make it. Yet I have absolutely zero reason to be surprised by this turn of events. Competing against inspired professionals, I’m not even heeding my pedigreed battle plan. Entering this event was an act of mind-bending hubris, so the only surprise is that I still have some chips to my name.

  As we’re sitting back down to the tables, word comes that Harman, Ivey, Seed, and Flack have already bitten the dust. So that’s something. But have I “beaten” these people? Not really, since we only have to take on eight players at a time. What I’ve done is outlast them. I should therefore be thrilled to be stroking my orange-free stack while Geraldo yucks it up for the cameras.

  The players I’m sitting with couldn’t care less. All they want is to eliminate me and one another. But not me! Because as soon as I put the brag book next to my chips and open it to the page on which Jennifer reads The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry, and The Big Hungry Bear to our daughter Beatrice, my pocket cards start to get better. I manage to steal a few blinds, then take down a decent-sized pot when two pairs hold up over kings. More important, I’ve persuaded myself at long last to fold all my trouble hands. With my new leather ass and my talismans, I manage to hang around until the nine o’clock dinner break, when I’ve scratched my way up to $16,450. I dash to my room, call Jennifer again in St. Louis, and brag. And she lets me.

  Back at the poker table, I grab myself by the collar and demand that I wait for big hands in all but the last three positions; and I listen. But escalating blinds and a stretch of cold cards grind my stack down to $13,825 by midnight. We’re still at Level 4, anteing $25 a hand with $100 and $200 blinds. Down to $11,700, I can’t wait forever for a hand. With the blinds at $200 to $400 and $50 antes, it’s costing me $1,050 a round just to sit here and fold all my rags. But finally, one off the button, I peek between my knuckles and discover J♥ J♦. Ooh la la. Raising to $1,000, I get three callers, and the flop comes K-J-8 rainbow. Even with the over-card (king) and all these damn callers, I bet $1,500. Seat seven folds, but the Japanese yuppie in seat eight makes it $3,000. Then the shaved head in one cold-calls both bets. Jesus Christ! It’s gonna cost me every last chip to keep playing this hand, and without the mortal nuts (at this point, a “set” of three kings) I’m petrified of set over set; even worse are the obvious straight draws. Yet if I don’t get my chips in with this hand, when am I going to? Never, I decide, as I call, then watch fourth street come a darling, a beautissimous, a sideways-infinity 8, providing my first full house of the day—in two days, actually. I nudge the rest of my chips ten inches forward. “All-in.” Japan meditates on his options for a minute, then folds, flashing two queens in disgust. Sayonara! Shaved Head, however, smooth-calls me. Since I’m all-in, no further betting is possible, so we both turn over our hole cards. His are 10♣ 9♣, not the cowboys or the other two eights, so it’s over: Any straight he might make will still lose to jacks full of eights—a full house. The pot comes to $36,900. Stacking it next to my brag book, I’d love nothing better than to trudge off to bed, but we still have fifty-two minutes left at Level 5. I order hot chocolate and sit tight, once folding pocket sevens from middle position even though no one had raised yet. Me solid!

  Bob Thompson calls a halt to our march at nine after two. Sheets are passed around with places to record our chip count. Mine comes to $35,325. Tom Elias recounts them, signs my sheet, stuffs chips and sheet into a Ziploc bag, staples it shut. Done. Still alive. It’s too late to call my wife, but my rush while it lasted—one hand!—has gladdened my heart as much as any sonnet or fuck or narcotic or shot glass of silver Patron, as much as any three of those things, though it still takes 150mg of Trazodone washed down by room-service Cabernet to finally fall off, I’m so wired. . . .

  Tuesday morning, after thirty-six laps in the pool, a fast shower, room-service oatmeal and OJ, all in the service of tuning my nerves, muscles, and glucose, I arrive back downstairs to the sunlit fact of my name on page one of the five-page, single-spaced leader board. Two hundred fourteen still have chips, and my $35,325 is good for thirty-eighth place. With par at $23,933, this puts me in pretty good shape, though Mehul Chaudhari, the leader, has me almost tripled with $92,500. My satellite rivals, Hasan and Tom, are in fifth and sixteenth, respectively. Rising star Kathy Liebert is seventh, T.J. nineteenth, Noel Furlong right above me in thirty-sixth. Bunched nea
r the middle are Hayden, Duke, Enright, and Erik Seidel, runner-up to Chan in 1988. All of these folks are my heroes.

  By the end of today we’ll have to lose 169 more of us, but every survivor will be guaranteed at least $15,000. Am I ready for this? Maybe not. My first big mistake is walking pocket kings, failing to protect them by raising in hopes of building a pot, then getting caught by a straight on the river. Exactly when, I have to wonder, did I become a person on whom everything is lost? This game is designed to blast draws from the battlefield, imbecile! Down to $28,000, I resolve, for the umpteenth time, to play solid poker—to stay out of pots until I find what Sklansky calls the Group 1 or 2 hands (aces or kings down through suited K-Q), then attack. For the next ninety minutes, it works. I also manage, from later positions, to slip into a few unraised pots with suited connectors, two of which turn into flushes. Bottom line? Ninety-eight grand. If I hadn’t wasted a call with A♦ 3♣ on the previous hand, I’d now have the magic one large.

  After dinner I get moved to seat two of a table with Hasan in seat one, J. J. Bortner in three, Kathy Liebert in four, Mickey Appleman in six, and Daniel Negreanu in eight. Scary, but also more fun. Bortner keeps a plastic baby rattler coiled atop her stacks that she’s quite fond of shoving toward the pot, snake and all. Appleman is one of the game’s veteran pros and melancholy philosophers. He used to work with alcoholics in Harlem, but he’s been on the pro-poker circuit for twenty-five years now. He’s wearing a white Massada baseball cap over his ash-blond Groucho Marx moptop, and losing. The goateed Negreanu is whippet thin under his Sharks jersey and www.ultimatebet.com hat. Fresh off a win at the U.S. Poker Championship, he’s brimming with humor and confidence. “Let’s be honest here,” he tells Hasan, after a flop comes off A♣ 7♠ 7♥. “You’ve got the seven. Why walk it?” As Hasan tries to keep a straight face, Daniel grabs a dozen orange chips, winds up like he’s getting ready to throw a left hook, and wings the chips into the pot, which he goes on to win with A♦ 10♣.