The Noble Hustle

by Colson Whitehead

  Alvarez was an Englishman, a foreigner like me, chatting up poker legends like Johnny Moss and Doyle Brunson, as well as pseudonymous high rollers whose lunatic attitudes toward money were queasy evidence of the gambler mentality. Chapter by chapter, we traversed the gangplank to the original Showboat: “It was as if the old riverboat cardsharps had never been quite exorcised and now they were back again … reincarnated as gnarled, relentless good ol’ boys who knew how to turn on the charm but never gave a sucker an even break.”

  The 1981 game was still run by the Binion family. A closed fraternity of hard-bitten pros and the well-heeled fish foolish enough to tangle with them. Before TV cameras and poker memoirs, The Biggest Game in Town was as close as most regular enthusiasts were ever going to come to the action. Lucky them: Alvarez’s portraiture was warmhearted and wry, the enthusiasm of a good pal who saves you a primo spot at the rail. He was a less unctuous version of Saul Rubinek in Unforgiven, the penny-dreadful scribe chronicling the lethal day-to-day of Little Bill and the Duck of Death, setting down high-noon showdowns for the audience safe at home, far from the frontier.

  Like many humans, writers need money for food and travel. The New Yorker underwrote Alvarez’s trip to Vegas. McManus traveled out on Harper’s dime to chronicle the 2000 Main Event and the death of Ted Binion, son of Benny, who’d taken over operations at the Horseshoe. Positively Fifth Street toggled between McManus’s coverage of the Binion murder trial (narcotics, desert gangsters, the attendant autopsies), his tentative dips into Vegas strip-club culture (the Cheetahs of the subtitle), and his miraculous Main Event adventure.

  McManus was a poet and fiction writer, but also an amateur poker player. Hells yeah, he was going to play a little while out West. Internet gaming was just a sparkle of code in some programmer’s eye, so McManus crammed the books (as you do) and pointed and clicked through rudimentary computer games, whose crappy graphics I can only imagine. Shudder. Once he arrived, he parleyed a $200 satellite into a seat at the Main Event. His passage was not without hardship (it’s stressful, dude) but the improbably badass conclusion was exhilarating—the Final Table, where he placed third and raked in almost a quarter of a million dollars. Holy megillah!

  When the book version of his underdog story was published in 2003, it helped popularize the myth of the Rise of the Amateur. Chris Moneymaker’s Main Event coup that year, and the internet gaming that made it possible, detonated the World Series as if it were some faded Sinatra hangout hogging development space on the Strip. Moneymaker, a humble accountant, earned a trip to Vegas after wiring forty bucks for an online satellite. Here’s to new blood: He ended up winning the whole shebang, 2.5 million bucks, besting poker maestros and star-crossed chumps, sidestepping bad fortune all the while.

  Quake and tremble before the terrible power of the “Moneymaker Effect.” The guys at home—Miller Lite wisping out of their pores and into the upholstery of their fave recliners, the latest arguments with the wife and the most recent workplace humiliations buzzing in their brains—said to themselves: “I can do that. I’m the best player in my weekly game, everyone says so.” The Moneymaker mythology was a version of a core gambling fantasy: I am different from those losers I see on the street every day, this time I will prove it has not been all for naught. I am a winner.

  Various forces had intersected. In 1998, Rounders triggered Hold’em fever among the kids. They start playing when they’re sixteen, brains aswim with visions of Hollywood glory and Gretchen Mol’s boobs, and then nascent internet sites give them a chance to play tournaments night and day, fueled by microwave burritos and Red Bull. TV shows like World Poker Tour, which debuted in 2003, insert them elbow to elbow with poker heavyweights in all their kooky glory. The camera as rail-bird, sweating foul-mouthed Scotty Nguyen, cranky Phil Hellmuth. Shoot, this is a racket where severe personality deficits aren’t a hindrance for once. And might even help. If you’re half dead inside, for example.

  The books, the divine primers—Harrington’s trilogy, and the thousand-plus pages of Brunson’s Super System—delivered Prometheus’s fire to the hoodied cavemen. When Moneymaker, account holder at PokerStars.com, one of them, wins his bracelet, we have entered a new age, when knuckle-dragging wretches can grab a seat at the table. In McManus’s 2000 game the field was 512. In Moneymaker’s game, 839. The next year, attendance tripled to 2,500 hopefuls. By 2006, 8,000 players showed up at the Rio—sharps, internet homunculi, Sarasota dentists, and hedge-fund dinks with $10K in disposable cash. America was in a cash bubble, and so was organized poker.

  The Binion family sold off the casino and Harrah’s Entertainment picked up the rights to the WSOP in 2004. It’s big biz, like everything else in town. Walking the Rio floors, the machine hums, you can barely hear it. There is no such thing as a seedy underbelly when everybody’s on their back, airing out their bits. You smile indulgently at the minor vulgarities described by Alvarez—hookers making propositions in elevators, the imbecilic stage shows—as years of viral YouTube atrocities, C-listers’ sex tapes, and a million texted nudie shots have collapsed the travel time to the desert. Like Shecky Green, we are all a bit Vegas now, more comfortable exposing ourselves in all our weaknesses and appetites. Goodbye cowboy, hello middle-class schlub.

  McManus covered a murder trial, the specters of drugs and organized crime circling his stories of the Main Event like tourists around the crab-claw tray at an all-you-can-eat. That kind of trouble, real trouble, permanent trouble, puts a dent in visitor-retention stats. The only crimes I witnessed during my stay this time were some ill-considered shirts and multiple counts of misdemeanor hairdos.

  McManus’s deep run in the Main Event not only made him the Man among amateur players but likened him unto a god to amateur player-scribblers. Shoot, he earned his way into his seat. I had my entrance fee handed to me. (Assuming it showed up. We’ll get to that.) The shame.

  I didn’t have illusions about being one of the November Nine. We live in an age in which sitcoms outnumber miracles, and perhaps that is what we deserve. The amateurs were thumping the fabled cowboys these days, but I was an amateur’s amateur. I didn’t want to go out first, and I wanted to make it to Day 3 at least. Day 3 had the sheen of respectability. I would not bring dishonor to my house—my friends, family, and poker game back home. To Coach. Day 3, then take it from there.

  Despite my persistent terrors about being the first one to wash out, there were four starting days to the Main Event, so the first player flamed out while I was still brooding in my Brooklyn hermit shack. Twenty minutes into Day 1A, his KKs got smithereened by Aces. Aces, Aces. He stumbled out of the hall, ducking the media, this nameless, hapless schmuck, and into the neon desert-within-a-desert that is Las Vegas. Where presumably he lost some more money.

  On the bright side, that didn’t mean I couldn’t be the first player to wash out on my starting day.

  With less than twenty-four hours to go, I made another trip to registration. I’d tried to snag my table draw earlier, but they couldn’t find my check. As a writer, I was used to this. The silver-haired lady in the Cage remembered me from before and was quite helpful despite the lack of news.

  “You’re wearing your hair down,” she said.

  I like to mix it up. “Yeah. What do you think?”

  “If you want to look like a badass, wear it back.”

  “Okay, then.”

  If the check didn’t appear, I was fucked. I was having trouble keeping track of affronts to my psyche, but I was used to that, too. I pinballed between the ballrooms, Amazon to Brasilia, Brasilia to Pavilion, Pavilion to Amazon. Mapping the castle, the system of unmarked doors, secret passageways. This one shoots me to the terrace where I can sweat out toxins in the brutal sun, that one is a wormhole to the Poker Kitchen and its Have-It-Your-Way Wraps. And this exit is most important: for here be the johns.

  After six weeks, the run-up tourneys were finished. No helter-skelter sprinting from room to room to scoop up Player of the Year points. Can a
nyone catch up to Ben Lamb, this year’s leader? So young, Ben Lamb, such healthy skin, such psycho-killer eyes. Stray cats disappear in his hometown. Pass Lamb, bounce back after What Happened in Prague, that Cold Deck in Melbourne. The names like cities in spy novels where bad shit went down, it was Ivan’s trap all along, no need to elaborate.

  Whatever 2-7 Triple Draw Lowball (Limit) is, it’s history, cashes added to a player’s lifetime winnings on the online ledgers. The three-day Seven Card Razz, with its $2,500 buy-in. And also the niche events, such as the Casino Employees game (congrats, Sean Drake!), the Seniors event (fifty-plus only, please), and the Ladies No-Limit Championship (Marsha Wolak, represent!). The specialty events were supposed to give subcommunities a time to shine, but it didn’t always work out. Last year, some bros dressed in drag and crashed the ladies’ event to protest “gender discrimination.” Rhinestone buckles, fringed vests, camisoles. Poker dudes: any excuse to wear something a little fancy.

  The bracelets, for example, were snazzy as hell. Every sport has their trophy. What you get when you win. Stanley Cup. Super Bowl Ring. Here it’s bracelets. Fifty-seven of them handed out so far this year, sparkly numbers, with fifty-two diamonds embedded in buttery white-and-yellow gold. Walk up to the 7-Eleven counter to pay for your Snapple and pork rinds, they’ll know you’re a man of substance, maybe throw in some scratchers, gratis. I’m reminded of the Republic of Anhedonia’s Medal of Honor, the Pouch of Sighs. It’s a little sack of oiled leather, stuffed with twenty-five captured sighs, that hangs around your neck on a silk lanyard. They come up on eBay from time to time, if you’re interested.

  The final remaining bracelet was the Big One.

  Also starting on Day 1D was Matt Matros, whom I’d met eight years ago, when he was in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence. He supported himself on poker through grad school, carving out fiction during the day and wagering at night. His book The Making of a Poker Player: How an Ivy League Math Geek Learned to Play Championship Poker detailed his trip to glory.

  We’d only talked briefly, but Matt reached out to me when I was Rio-bound and offered to give me some tips. You may wonder why I kept meeting writers on my journey, but my social circle is quite small these days. “Why are there so many crackheads in this crackhouse?” the crackhead asked. People like that are the only people here.

  Not many people know that Anhedonians invented brunch. It makes sense now that you think about it, right? Because brunch is horrible. A weekend midday food engagement was a sacrament to my kind and made me feel at home in this alien place, even if it was “ethnic food” at an establishment called the All-American Bar and Grille. It was located in a Rio eddy, where the convention hall joined the raging waters of the casino.

  Old hands at the WSOP avoided the place, Matt informed me. “We’re on such an absurd schedule out here,” he said. “Half the tournaments start at 5:00 p.m., and they go til 3:00 in the morning and then they start the next day at 3:00 p.m.” It messes with the digestion. “There’s basically two thousand people all trying to eat in these restaurants and they don’t hold two thousand people. So we get out of here, clear our heads, have a meal someplace we like. Nothing too heavy.”

  Talk about proper nutrition, and I know you’re a veteran. I opened my marble notebook after apologizing for its cover, which the kid had decorated with bright-colored stickers and Cray-Pas during an impromptu “crafts project.” Did McManus write in gaily colored notebooks? Hells no. But the red, yellow, and blue dots were a constellation to steer by. I was far from home, but I’d find my way back to the kid.

  The last two WSOPs had been good to Matt. The previous year, he’d won the $1,500 Limit Hold’em bracelet, and in the run-up to this year’s Main Event, he’d bagged the $2,500 Mixed Hold’em event (“Mixed” means alternating between Limit and No Limit, switching your brain back and forth). He pocketed $300,000 and was my Rio John McClane, creeping barefoot over glass with a machine gun, ho-ho-ho.

  Not that you’d know it from Matt’s low-key demeanor. This is how I judge character: If you were a stranger, would I ask you to watch my bag while I hit the coffee-shop bathroom? Not that anyone would want to steal what’s in there. Breath mints. Misery beads. The matted, moth-eaten arm of a teddy bear, the final remains of my childhood companion Emilio Pepper, who taught me about love and loss. Nonetheless. I trusted Matt.

  Underneath the wash of his brown hair, behind his rectangular glasses, his eyes give no indication of the multifarious calculations zipping ’round his brain. Matt had a sideline in poker coaching, which perhaps reinforced his patience with morons like me, but doubtless his composure had been perfected by years at the table. Everybody tilts, but he who tilts less, tilts best.

  We chowed down. He dispensed betting tips, urged me to widen my range of starting hands, and swatted down my flurry of ignorant questions without a hint of exasperation. Like when I asked about his tribe, the Math Players.

  “What’s a Math Player? Just like knowing the odds and—”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  “So when I say a Math Player, I mean …” The Math Players took their cues from game theory, in search of the Platonic way to play each hand. They availed themselves of the road gambler’s arsenal of exploitation—bluffing, decoding tells, exploiting weak players’ mistakes—when it was easy, but their holy grail was optimum play.

  Exploitive play asked, How can I take advantage of this situation? The optimum play of Math Players inquires, What is the correct play for this situation? Super-aggressive chest-thumping before the flop, like sociopathic raising and re-raising when all you have is 9-3 offsuit, will fatten your stack as long as you can scare people off. But eventually exploitative players will have to duel through the Flop, the Turn, and the River, and they’ll need a deeper tool kit. The Math Players insist that over time, sticking to a solid core strategy will maximize profits.

  “It’s not just about calculating your chances of winning,” Matt told Card Player, “it’s about calculating the correct play based on what my opponent’s range of hands is, what he will do with those range of hands, how can I maximize the amount of chips I will make based on how he’s gonna play. And it’s very complicated.” Reason trumps intuition, that staple of Hollywood poker.

  It was working out so far. Matt’s poker evolution tracked with many players his age, capturing Hold’em’s trajectory from niche variation to its current Rio-size madness. Preflop: He started playing at fifteen with his friends out on Long Island. He wanted to rebel, but driving doughnuts on the mean bio teacher’s lawn wasn’t his style. “An all-night poker game,” he wrote in his book, “seemed just illicit and interesting enough to be acceptable.” He played in his first casino at eighteen, courtesy of a family trip to Arizona, pocketing $500 from the slots. The gateway slots, I tells ya, they change a person.

  The Flop: Three years later, Rounders was a vista of the exotic world of Hold’em. Underground card dens, Russian mobsters, and a hero who abandons the straight life to play in the World Series of Poker. That could be you up there. Matt’s dad gave him and his friends a three-page pamphlet of basic Hold’em strategy. Like many card-crazy kids his age, Matt dove into live tournaments, enrolled in night classes via the new technology. Computer programs such as the World Series of Poker Deluxe Casino Pack simulated a complete Vegas jaunt, from wheels down at McCarran International Airport to a virtual Binion’s. The game even included a Gambler’s Book Shop, where scholars could peruse digital excerpts from Brunson’s Super System. Then came the poker classics on old-fashioned paper, like Sklansky’s Theory of Poker. Matt got more out of it than I did.

  The Turn: Matt swapped strategy on Precambrian online forums like rec.gambling.poker and, later, Twoplustwo.com, where Sklansky held court. PartyPoker.com and PokerStars.com were the hunting grounds for rubes. Televised poker, such as World Poker Tour, captured the Real Deal for pause and rewind.

  And, finally, the River: He finished writing The Making of a Poker Player just
before he leveraged a satellite to the Final Table of the WPT 2004 Championship, and took home $700,000. All postscripts should come so easily.

  The Making of appeared in 2005, squeezed into crowded Games & Amusements sections in bookstores. The gold rush was on, and proliferating how-tos were picks and shovels, crucial gear. Cardoza Publishing, the home of Super System, had enjoyed a 1,000 percent increase in sales the two years prior. Two Plus Two went from selling 45,000 books a year to half a million. (Dropping a lot of numbers these last few pages, but poker’s a numbers game. How much, how many, baby.) Matt adjusted to the post-Moneymaker ecology of the game, and tech continued to provide an angle. He coached players over the phone, instant message, and e-mail, whatever your fancy. Narrated online training videos—wherein the Matt Himself mixed it up in computer tourneys while deconstructing his strategy in different hands. All downloadable to your handy mobile device, if you want.

  Our digital existence, in fact, had made our meal possible. I’d sent up a flare to alert people on Twitter re: my Vegas plans. Matt responded: “If you want poker help … I can translate poker language into lit-speak.” Social media wasn’t usually my thing, as it had the word “social” in it, but I’d taken to the platform after a personal tragedy. I had a cat, the cat died, and now what I used to say to my cat all day, I tweeted. It helped that 140 characters was roughly my preferred limit when it came to human interaction.

  There was rarely a misfit shortage at a poker table, given the more or less stable misfit percentages at any gathering of Americans, so I was not surprised that Twitter was big among their clan. I followed Coach’s list of poker notables, poker scholars, and sundry jackanapes. A disturbing field excursion into player anthropology for someone of my delicate sensibilities. Apart from the standard “here’s what I’m eating” updates, your poker feed kept your crew back home apprised of how you were faring, night and day, whether it’s a strafing run at the casino just over the county line or the Aussie Millions in Melbourne. “You are there!” Stack size, notes on the talent in the room, table temperament. They dispatched little digital carrier pigeons at the table after a tournament, on breaks, and even hand by hand.