The Noble Hustle

by Colson Whitehead

  Those first weeks, when I was trying to supe up my game, she told me about where to play in AC. “The Borgata and Caesars. Yes, the Taj is in Rounders, but it is a dump.” More important, she kept me from freaking out at the enormity of the task ahead. “You should play some Sit-n-Go’s while you’re in Atlantic City. You can’t win a tournament if you can’t win a Sit-n-Go.” I nodded. I pretended to know what a Sit-n-Go was, mustering the same facial expression I used when someone said, “We ended up having a good time” or “Then we fell in love.” I mentioned the Robotrons, who saw the flop with anything, pocket lint and paper clips. “I love these young players,” she laughed. “Give ’em enough rope. Call their craziness when you have a monster.”

  She’d teach me things. About poker. About life. It’d be like one of those racial harmony movies I never go to see, like The Blind Side, where a Southern white lady instructs a weirdo black guy in how to use a fork. Broken barriers. Montage sequences. Golden Globes. But instead of forking up food, I’d be forking up poker knowledge. The way I understood it, from trailers and Oscar telecast montages, the black person teaches the white person something in return. I had no idea what that would be.

  EXERCISE: Get a Poker Handle. The Old Masters of poker, they had truly awe-inspiring nicknames: Amarillo Slim, Sailor Roberts, Pippi Longstocking. So I got to brainstorming.

  The Slouch: I slouched. Rocket Racer: after the Spider-Man nemesis/ally from the ’70s, a black guy on a rocket-powered skateboard. It was a multivalent moniker, alluding to my melanin count, my transportation issues, and “rocket” was slang for pocket Aces. “A pair of Aces, you better get ready to race if you want to take the pot from me,” he informed the empty room. Five-Dollar Colson: referring, for once, not to my home-game buy-in but to what I’d charge for most acts if I ever started hooking. I sell myself short a lot. Finally, I went with the Unsubscribe Kid. I liked the implied negation of things other humans might enjoy. Now all I had to do was get someone to ask me what my poker nickname was.

  Pity the poor pilgrim who gets on a Greyhound bus and hears “Everybody’s Talkin’ ” come over the speakers. You are the Midnight Cowboy, extricating yourself painfully from your past, or you are Ratso Rizzo, expiring in the back row, wheezing and unsaved. But I found my seat, settled in with the day trippers, day workers, and hollow-eyed freaks, and got into the new rhythm of my days. “I can’t see their faces / only the shadows of their eyes.”

  It went like this: I’d drop off the kid at school, hop on the subway to the Port Authority, and catch a bus to AC. Then I’d gamble gamble gamble, catch a midnight bus back to the city, sleep all day, and pick up the kid from school the next afternoon. I’d make dinner, put her to bed, read Harrington, take her to school, and start over again.

  Over the years, my half-dead face had kept drop-off patter to a minimum, but occasionally I’d share a few words with the other parents on the way into the Lower School.

  “Can’t believe the school year’s almost over.”

  “They grow up so fast.”

  “Off to work?”

  “Actually, I’m going to Atlantic City to gamble.”

  I see.

  Was there a corresponding decrease in playdates? Sorry, little one. Flushed down to the social sub-sewers with Disgraced Embezzler Dad and Grifter Mom. They were scarce now, those two, at the First-Grade Parents Pot Luck, so I couldn’t even swap exile anecdotes with them.

  I ran around AC. The all-you-can-eat buffet was central to the American Gambling Experience, allowing you to block your arteries while unstopping your bank account. I applied a philosophy of generous sampling to my casino tours, zipping across downtown in taxis to try the shrimp cocktail at the Borgata, the prime rib that is Caesars, saving a corner on my plate for the pigs in a blanket that characterized the Showboat.

  I never lasted long at the Borgata, the biggest and swankiest joint in town, constructed according to prevailing Vegas theories of the megacasino. Leisure Industrial Complex all the way. Just as the cozy old casinos of Frank and Dean were razed to make room for colossal gambling pleasure domes, so was AC being reconfigured for the current needs of the LIC. You can only cram so many buildings on the boardwalk. How are you going to fit that Euro-style spa, TV chefs’ small-plate eateries, the vast dance-floor killing fields demanded by international hero-DJs? Hence the twin, shimmering gold towers of the Borgata. Located in the marina area, explaining the establishment’s name, which is Esperanto for “built on a swamp.”

  Coach was right. The ’Gata had the most popular poker room in town, having assumed the mantle from the Trump Taj. The Taj was the home of Hold’em during the late-’90s surge in the game’s popularity. The final showdown in the Matt Damon poker vehicle Rounders propped up its reputation for a time. Nowadays, online poker forums warned of muggings, shady clientele, and shadier doings. Which wouldn’t happen at the Borgata—one whiff of the bewitching aromas from Bobby Flay’s grill, and even the most larcenous soul is scared straight by the tang of nouveau Tex-Mex flavor profiles.

  On a typical Borgata jaunt, I entered a late-morning tournament, got bounced by noon, and then did a divining-rod thing with my phone to find a signal so I could figure out where to hit next. I’d hear Coach’s voice whenever I did this: “Keep that in your pocket.” People slouch at the tables, earbudded, listening to whatever, a hundredsong loop of various covers of Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler,” from Liza Minnelli’s New Wave–inflected version to Lou Reed’s unreleased, oddly affecting acoustic demo. No distractions, she said. It took a lot of willpower. I feel about my phone the way horror-movie ventriloquists feel about their dummies: It’s smarter than me, better than me, and I will kill anyone who comes between us.

  I only conferred with my little buddy between levels, checking advice on poker sites: when do you throw out a probe bet, how much do you bet on the button? I subscribed to the Poker Atlas’s Twitter feed, which had the city’s tourney schedule on constant scroll. Tackle the 1:00 p.m. Bally’s $55 tourney, Harrah’s 1:15 p.m. start for $100, or Caesars’ 1:15 p.m. dealio, also a hundred bucks? I didn’t have intel on which poker rooms were dead or barely twitching. Sometimes there weren’t enough players for a game, and I’d hike it back to the marina for a mid-afternoon shift at Harrah’s. Sometimes something big was going down, like the World Poker Tour, and there’d be no one to deal because all the dealers were moonlighting across town. These miscalculations cut into my shrinking practice time, already too tight. Where to next, where to next?

  EXERCISE: Manage tells. Table image is the one-man show you tour through town after town. Every poker player has a shtick, is Hal Holbrook doing Mark Twain Tonight! across Podunks. You have heard of the famous “tells”—the behavioral clues that put you onto someone’s hand, such as squeezing out armpit farts or crooning “Touch Me in the Morning” when they hit their gutshot straight. I didn’t have time to become a master reader of tells, between keeping track of inflection points, calculating rough pot odds, and riffling through my mental catalogue of new poker knowledge. But I could manage my own tells, come up with some fake ones to psyche people out. If I shared them here, you’d know my secrets, but here’s a freebie: Reenacting the chest-buster scene from Alien means I’m on a draw.

  There was one establishment in AC that always had a game going. It was never recommended by players I met. Indeed they invariably guffawed at the mention. But the mighty Showboat was always there for me, like a dependable neighborhood bodega. It had what I needed.

  My first Showboat experience came after I’d been turned away from a totally dead Caesars card room, which I’d rushed to after getting the boot from a Borgata tourney. The Caesars floor guy told me there weren’t going to be enough players. I came down to AC for this? My flop days were adding up, and when I did play, I busted early. I got into a taxi to the bus station … and almost made it there before I told the cabbie to turn around. Time to try the Showboat.

  If the Borgata served up the contemporary luxury-resort experie
nce, the Showboat specialized in the more particular fetish of nostalgia. The name harkened to the glorious heyday of riverboat gambling, you know, with those steam-powered boats with the big paddlewheels, where ladies with parasols promenaded on deck and men pulled out their watch fobs to see if they had time for “a little game of chance.” Pioneers of the casino captive-audience thing. I gather proximity to water was too tempting for despondent gamblers, which led to the rise of the landlocked, more suicide-proof gambling house. The cheap stakes of nickel slots en route to the exit can talk a body off the ledge.

  From this antebellum home square, the Showboat hopscotched in and out of decades. The ’50s-themed Johnny Rockets burger joint reminded boomers of sock hops, roller-skating waitstaff, the first backseat gropings. The House of Blues served up rootsy sentimentality, reminiscences of swell nights in blues franchises in New Orleans, Houston, San Diego. (Remember those two sloppy German matrons? Too bad we had to get up early the next day for the ConAgra convention.) Yes, Big Mitch, there was a time before second mortgages and leaky roofs and Kaitlyn crashing the car for the second time. The piped-in Nirvana and Pixies—now officially oldies bands—welcomed middle-aged, Gen-X lumps like me. The sights and sounds of bygone days told us that anything was still possible, the way the snap of a dealer cutting cards and the maddening chimes of loose slots assured us we could be winners. That sure, gambling sound of promise.

  The Showboat Poker Room was compact but busy, and I’d usually last a few hours among the sad-sack tourists and young, sharp-eyed local talent.

  BAVERGES! the cocktail waitresses called.

  HARRINGTON! I responded.

  His head hovered on the covers of volumes I, II, III like a rheumy-eyed Oz. Eyes peering beneath a green Red Sox cap, observing, judging, as if to ask, “What, actually, are you rooting for on the flop?” and “Why don’t you make a standard continuation bet of about half the pot, and see what happens?” Do you have enough outs? Are you discouraging action pre-flop?

  Who was this Hold’em sage, this Hoyle-bred Socrates? His name was Dan Harrington and in the early part of the twenty-first century, he published his ridiculously influential, multivolume Harrington on Hold ’em: Expert Strategy for No-Limit Tournaments. Every discipline has its master texts. Harrington’s books are to boom-era poker players what Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is to mealy-mouthed I-bankers (“All warfare is based on deception”), as essential as Speak, Butter is to artisanal emulsion-makers (“To churn is to live”).

  Harrington was almost sixty years old when he wrote the first volume. He’d won two WSOP bracelets, cashed millions of dollars, and made it to Main Event Final Table two years in a row, the first player to do so. And possibly the last—the game was undergoing a fundamental shift. Chris Moneymaker’s legendary win in the 2003 Main Event had summoned the amateurs to Vegas, transforming the game in the manner that trimming fat from muscle meat and curing it in the sun turns animal flesh into delicious jerky. Online sites like PokerStars and Ultimate Bet were virtual poker universities, matriculating thousands. The new kids needed passwords to authorize bank transfers, and they needed textbooks. Harrington on Hold ’em codified conventional wisdom, elucidated the inner-circle concepts, and helped create a common tournament slang of squeeze plays, inflection points, and M.

  Coach gave me Harrington homework, and I made slow but incremental progress through his strategies for satellites, internet tourneys, and brick-and-mortar showdowns. His words yielded new interpretations over time, like a really neat poem or a divorce settlement. I keyed into the rhythms of the game, the phases within phases. There is an early, middle, and late temperament to each tournament, and inside that, an early, middle, and late temperament to each hand. Harrington hipped innocents like me to the late-stage tourney mind-set and late-hand strategies, giving names to that which I understood only on a subconscious level.

  Like: Why had play tightened up, slowed down in that first Tropicana tournament? Because even in that shorthanded game, we had approached the Great Membrane of the Bubble. The top 10 percent of players inside the Bubble get a share of the winnings. Everyone wants in after playing for so long, so they get conservative. No one wants to be the “Bubble Boy,” the last schnook who gets close and walks away with nothing. Methy Mike had wanted me, and my hanging-by-my-fingertips stack, to hurry and vamoose so the endgame could start.

  Usually the prose in poker books is as ugly and utilitarian as their layouts. The Harringtons, while not skimping on the lingo, were furnished with an easy-going inclusive voice. And plenty of work problems. He dropped a bunch of science, then slowed things with study hands that he broke down step by step. “Do you fold, call, or raise?” “What now?” “You should limp into this pot with 3 callers ahead of you in this scenario,” he’d instruct—and then go on to describe what happens if you ignored his advice. The annotated blunders were especially helpful. I discovered that whenever I bet horrendously or busted out, it was because I’d strayed from his teachings. I was the very dumbshit he described!

  But like I said, everyone had read the same book. You knew what they were up to and vice versa. After Doyle Brunson self-published his massive poker bible, Super System, in 1978, he lamented giving away his secrets. In the old days, “The top players would let the inferior players round up the money; then they would beat them. The hometown champions would break their local games, then come out [to Vegas] and be broken by us.” Then they read Brunson’s book of spells and started to beat the pros. “If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t write that book.”

  As the Main Event neared, I binge-watched a bunch of WSOP games from that spring. There was Harrington, pushing away from the table, busted, given a Viking funeral from the on-air commentators. The kids resumed play without him. They had their diplomas.

  And they were making new discoveries.

  EXERCISE: Preserve my “essence.” Like heavyweights who refrain from sexual activity prior to a big bout in order to channel and convert that energy into violence, I, too, would safeguard my “essence.” The mind-body harmony thing. Then it was brought to my attention that preserving one’s “essence” meant no self-abuse. Once again, I had failed myself without even knowing it. Just as I had made a judgment call that I didn’t have time to become a maestro in playing suited connectors in middle position, I’d have to forgo this segment of my regimen. Stamp this part of my training REVISED.

  The dealer tossed the cards around the table. Was there something I was supposed to remember? Right: Patience and Position. I had the first P down, what with the biding, etc., and over the years my day job had strengthened my natural talent in that area. In novel-writing, biding is everything. How will I drag my mutilated body over the finish line, hundreds of pages later? You practice a slow parceling out of self to survive the swamp of self-doubt, to tolerate the juvenile delinquent sentences who keep acting out. Waiting years for a scofflaw eleven-word sentence to shape up into an upstanding ten-word sentence: This is the essence of Patience.

  And what did Coach mean by Position? You are at a poker table. Social dynamics and probabilities change according to how many people you are up against and where you’re sitting. Why was Helen’s Six Handed game different, why did Heads-Up require its own branch of study? Seriously, there are Heads-Up experts—they have their own NBC-TV show and armbands.

  Well, imagine you are alone in a room. The lights are down low, you’ve got some scented candles going. Soothing New Age tunes, nothing too druid-chanty, seep out of the hi-fi to gently massage your cerebral cortex. Feel good? Are you the best, most special person in the room right now? Yes. That’s the gift of being alone.

  Then a bozo in a CAT Diesel Power cap barges in. What’s the chance that you are the best, most special person in the room now? Fifty-fifty. If you both were dealt two cards, those would be your odds of holding the winning hand.

  Now imagine ten people are in the room. It’s cramped. You’re elbow to elbow, aerosolized dandruff floats in the air, and the candle’s
lavender scent is complicated by BO tones, with a tuna sandwich finish. What are the chances you’re the best, most special person in the room? If you were handed cards, you might expect to be crowned one time out of ten.

  People, as ever, are the problem. The more people there are, the tougher you have it. Just by sitting next to you, they fuck you up, as if life were nothing more than a bus ride to hell (which it is). But what if you moved to another seat? Changed position? Your seat is everything. It can give you room to relax, to contemplate your next move. Or it might instigate your unraveling.

  Sometimes you act first. Sometimes last. If you have a small pair and you’re under the gun, as they say, how do you know what to bet? Nine intruders are going to act after you, and your big raise might be a mistake. It’d be so nice to wait and see what they were going to do, to kick back and enjoy the scenery before committing. The lady in late position has that luxury of time and space. If four crazies jump in, raising and re-raising and bebop-ping all over the place, she can politely fold and watch the carnage.

  Different hands are more or less playable depending on whether you’re the first, middle, or late to act. You’ll always play a pair of Aces, but when you’re sitting in late position with deuces while Mothra and Godzilla are stomping Tokyo? Hide in the subway tunnels with the other terrified citizens and wait for the sounds of carnage to stop. Pick your fights like you pick your nose: with complete awareness of where you are.

  Why was Six Handed different, and why did Helen like it? If you ask me, it’s because I’m only competing with five people to be the best, most special person in the room. The more learned among us would say that Six Handed is a different beast because there’s more action. Mercenaries like war because they like to scrap it up, and they get paid. More hands per hour at a smaller table, the orbits spinning and spinning, and weaker holdings, like one pair or two pair, become more playable due to less competition. Heads-Up, even more so. Pure combat.