The Noble Hustle

by Colson Whitehead

  Here’s a typical volley from Matros crony Robert Hwang, or Action Bob. It’s Day 2 at the spring WSOP gathering in Atlantic City:

  Caesar’s main event. 120K playing 1200-2400.

  135 players left. 174K for first.

  After the first day, he’s up to $120,000 in chips. The blinds at this level are $1,200 for Small, $2,400 for Big. The field has been culled to 135, and the winner will make $174,000. Time stamp: 4:38 p.m. He’s been playing for a few hours. Then comes this at 6:10 p.m.:

  Lost 110K pot QQ<
  Hey, now! The blinds are up. A pair of Kings has Paul Bunyoned his stack. At home, or on the bus home from work, Action Bob’s fans, enemies, and spam followers wait to see how it turns out. Rubbing lips to a rosary, sacrificing goats to Beelzebub. The Poker Gods, wherever they may be. Eighteen minutes later:

  Busto. AQ<<77 for my last 20 blinds.

  Cue the music from The Untouchables, when Sean Connery is bleeding out and Robert De Niro as Capone chuckles as he gets word in his opera box. “Ri-i-i-di, Paglia-a-a-a-ccio!” Action Bob razed by a pair of 7s, losing twenty times the Big Blind of $3,000, or $60,000. Which he just mentioned was the size of his stack.

  A nice three-act play. His followers look up at the sky and shake a smartphone at the indifferent heavens, or indifferent hell, if they are more Beelzebub-oriented.

  All June, up at 3:00 a.m. and paddling the insomniac’s dinghy, I scrolled through Coach’s Twitter list of poker players. Three a.m. EST was prime-time Vegas action. An early encounter: a tweet with a picture of a registration card for a $25,000 Heads-Up Event, and the words: All reg’d. Time to eat some souls. So I had soul-eating to look forward to on top of everything else. The fact that my soul was very “eat it now and you’ll be hungry again in a hour” was no comfort.

  Combine poker lingo and textspeak and you’re deep in linguistic badlands. Check out this string of integers from Jon Eaton, a habitué of Coach’s list and of whom I knew little apart from his gnomic transmissions: Sb limp i chk t8hh in bb flop 7h9hx he bets 1k i r to 3.2 w 9 back he calls turn 4h chk chk riv offsuit 4 he chks i jam he calls n mucks. My first translation was pretty off: “All around is Sadness and Despair. Who will Save us, to Whom do we look for safety? There is No One.” Eaton’s tweet was actually the digest of a single hand playing out between the Small Blind and Big Blind. I think.

  Daniel Negreanu was one of the few players with a Q rating, after all the poker shows, cameos in flicks like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and charming-bachelor duty on Millionaire Matchmaker. He surveyed the ebb and flow of his stacks, but also invited his followers into the occasional post-epiphany glow: Happiness on a scale of 1-10, I’m about a 312 right now! Can’t get this silly grin off my face :-) Life is good … Mike Sexton, avuncular commentator on World Poker Tour, dropped knowledge: Stu Ungar once said to me, “Sexton, always remember this: All two aces are good for is to win a small pot or lose a big one.” Amen.

  Others weighed in on lifestyle issues. Kevin Saul, one of Coach’s buddies, was a war correspondent. My dealer smells so bad now, I’m seriously tempted to pull my bottle of cologne out of my bag and spray it straight up n middle of tbl. And: Attn borgata poker, dood in red brooklyn spicers hoodie is too cool to wash his hands after pissing. “The chips is filthy.”

  Before my arrival, I puzzled over his repeated references to the “hooker bar.” Was hooker slang for a high roller? Some rootin’-tootin’ tobacco-spittin’ super ace? Then one evening I sat down at a Rio bar next to a hooker and knew: This must be the place.

  As the WSOP death march progressed, event by event, week by week, for every LOL I’m here 2 crush u tweet, there was a Busted out of the Main Event. Getting in my car and driving back to AZ. Middle of the night, hitting the blacktop in sadness, that’s messed up. I would’ve enjoyed a little more Vegas before splitting. Hot rock massage. A fucking mud treatment at least. Open the pores. But Matt keyed me into the pro mentality. “If you’re trying to win it,” he said, “it doesn’t really matter how many days you’re in it for. You’re trying to get as many chips as you can, and if you get knocked out in the first couple of hours, it’s really the same thing as getting knocked out on the third day, ’cause you didn’t make any money either way.”

  Okay: Don’t worry about the war chants on social media, and concentrate on rallying my meager skills for tomorrow. Leave the five-dimensional poker thinking for my betters.

  At the time, I didn’t know how my own Twitter feed would save me on Day 2.

  In a corner of the Pavilion, the last-chance dance continued. The Noble Hustle, behind velvet ropes. Since September there had been Moneymaker-worthy satellites to transport you to the Main Event, underwritten by online sites and hosted by official WSOP circuit events in Biloxi, Council Bluffs, all over. Your local casino sponsors ’em, to lure you in for some ancillary losses. Even on Day 1C, there was still time for these hoboes to hop on the freight before it pulled away. Grind. Fail. Grind better. No way to know which one of these last-chancers I’d play with tomorrow. They were in the scrum, working.

  Next year, June 2012, I came back to Vegas to see where it all began. You’ll permit me a little time travel, buddy, this far into our journey. I’m not such a disagreeable companion, am I? Changing the cassettes, drawing my finger across the map to see we’re headed in the right direction. By now I’m that old friend of yours, your fuckup friend, the one you love dearly and need desperately because he makes you feel better about your own disasters. Stick around for the usual denouement.

  By the time the WSOP returned, I hadn’t played a tournament in a year, for reasons that will become obvious. But I came back anyway, to watch Coach battle her way into the Big Game.

  I bumped into her and her hubby, Lex, at check-in. Turned out we were on the same flight. They were giddy. According to real-time poker blogs and Twitter, twenty-seven-year-old Amanda Musumeci had smashed ’n’ grabbed her way to the Final Table of Event 9, No-Limit Hold’em Re-Entry. Team Murder in effect. What’s Team Murder? “Team Murder is this crew out of New Jersey,” Coach explained. Okay. If Musumeci took it, she’d be the first woman to win a bracelet since Vanessa Selbst’s 2008 win.

  Musumeci eventually placed second, but it was a positive development. It had been seventeen years since a woman made it to the Final Table. The game was overdue.

  In a few months, Selbst would become the top-earning female poker player of all time, with more than seven mil in earnings. “Tough as a Denny’s porterhouse,” as World Poker Tour host Mike Sexton put it. She first got her hands dirty online, where, according to James McManus’s estimation, women make up 30 percent of the players. As opposed to the brick-and-mortar World Series, where that number was 5 percent.

  Gender parity in poker is a joke. Walk into any card room, cue up any poker telecast, and the only place where you’ll find a majority of women is on World Poker Tour, thanks to the show’s Royal Flush Girls. Hey there, Brittany, Danielle, and Tugba! The girls are “event ambassadors” wafting past the camera between hands. In bikinis by the pool, and waving to the folk at home during a pleasant gondola ride down Venetian canals. Venice, Copenhagen, Prague—dude, that’s why they call it the World Poker Tour. It’s nice to have a job that lets you travel a lot and meet interesting people. With the addition of the Royal Flush Girls Social Media Bar, you can catch the girls in the background of the studio, perched on stools, small-talking with lucky members of the audience. “Bring your A game, fellas,” Sexton advised.

  Helen and Lex’s excitement over Musumeci’s run was in addition to the standard going-to-Vegas euphoria. They’d given themselves a week to come up with the Main Event money, whether it was from satellites, a couple of Deep Stacks, or robust cashes in $1,500-tier games. You need cash, and that ever-dwindling currency that always falls through a hole in your pocket: Time. Across the WSOP’s six-week run, players cashed in their personal days and one-week’s paid in search of the Big Score. “You’ll have to go to trial with
out me—here’s my PowerPoint on ‘Why the Death Penalty Is Bad.’ ” Missing Junior’s Li’l Pelé Soccer Championship and Aunt May’s fiftieth wedding anniversary.

  If the cards behave? These plucky souls will have to come back in July, take an unpaid week, fake their kidnapping or the paperwork for glue-sniffing rehab. Shoot, they’ll quit their jobs when they Final Table, anyway, all that money. This is not to minimize the tortured negotiations with significant others over another poker trip. With pets. How are you going to break it to Cujo? That Chihuahua has a lot of heart, but these absences take a toll.

  None of that for Coach. Her partnership was pokerpositive. They made a nice picture at the tables, Helen and Lex, rebuking the “I tuck my T-shirt into my jeans without a belt” crowd with her decorous ensembles and his fitted sports jackets and dress shirts. Table image: Nick and Nora, not Bud and Wheezie. Lex was taking a furlough from his day job as a writer and editor of business news. Said job which had added benefits: Lex served on his company’s Diversity Committee and the annual Unity: Journalists for Diversity conference was in Vegas this August. They had a legit, societally acceptable excuse to come back, whether they cashed or not.

  This trip they were beginning with a three-day event, Six Handed Hold’em. “The game that started it all,” as Helen put it, referring to her Phil Ivey–James Akenhead match two years prior. Maybe it’s lucky.

  At starting time, Coach was cozy at Bronze 61, Brasilia Room. It was the first time I’d seen her play. She wore a black dress with a white collar, pearl bracelet on her wrist. Legs crossed, vivid red nail polish glinting. Her fingers lightly brushed the table, as if she were in a canoe, her hand dipping lazily in the current. If this was her housewife costume, this day she was hosting a dinner party for some swell couples from the planned community, the roast cooling on the rack. If you check out the director’s cut of Rocky this is exactly what Burgess Meredith wears when he gives his “A Bum’s a Bum” speech in the deleted “Perfect Ham Sandwich” scene.

  She patted the red purse in her lap: Let’s go. When the cards flew, her table waited on one player, some hotshot who was tearing up shit in another event in the next ballroom. Or just some guy filling his Velcro pockets with protein bars and Pepto tablets at the sundries shop down the hall. At present, her adversaries were two young guys plugged into devices, one of the Ubiquitous Loquacious Middle-Aged White Guys, and a tattooed man with a sinister air. Yeah, I know your mom has a tattoo of Simon Le Bon on her back, but this was something else, a rather impressive wrist-to-shoulder ornamentation, “sleeves” they’re called. Which seems a misnomer because generally one of the main things I look for in sleeves is remove-functionability.

  Familiar types from my training missions at first glance. But no, their postures were more controlled, their expressions more rigid, their movements less slack. Versions of people I’d been playing against, impurities removed. The higher stakes, the cleansing fires of these hallowed WSOP halls, had burned away the weak stuff. What was still familiar: They could outplay me.

  Let’s patrol. Sixteen hundred runners entered Event 16, spread out among the convention hall. In other parts of the ballrooms, earlier matches wound down to the final, inevitable All Ins. Over in the Amazon, for example, it was Day 3, Level 70 of the $10K Heads-Up game, ESPN capturing one of the final tables for posterity. In the Pavilion, PokerNews.com streamed Day 2 of the $1,500 Limit Hold’em event, beguiling some thirteen-year-old in Punxsutawney with visions of future bracelet glory.

  Early in the series, the population was sparse, the Main Event mob yet to curl into a fist. This locomotive was slow to accelerate. Fewer concessions hawking away in the corridors. The “misting station” on the terrace, which cooled the flesh from the desert’s heat, was devoid of basking enthusiasts. The terrace: I loved it for its respite from the intense poker frequencies inside the convention hall. Even if the heat shriveled me like a piece of charqui, or jerky. (Charqui, “cut into strips and dried,” from the Spanish, and the Incans, who dehydrated llama meat in the sun to preserve it.) A nice sprint through the misting-station jets sets you right.

  The iPad population was up this year, however. In the Pavilion I caught one character squinting at an action scroller between hands, Beats by Dre headphones beeping in his ears. The Pavilion was where Lex was installed. Relaxed but alert in his dapper sports coat, some color in his angular face from his time at VooDoo Beach. Helen enjoyed a nice spa treatment before a big game; Lex didn’t mind catching some rays at the Rio pool.

  I tried to find Matt, but he was fathom deep at a table far from the velvet rope. I could just see him when his neighbor leaned back. Matt looked a bit flushed in his sweatshirt. Earbuds screwed in, concentrating on whatever holographic poker abstraction he projected into the air above the felt.

  Then I was compelled to the satellite grottos, the Sit-n-Go’s. Sit-n-Go’s were not, as I had mistakenly thought, adult diapers for poker players, so they don’t have to leave the table. Who wants to miss getting dealt aces? They’re actually one-table, ten-player tournaments. Which explained a lot, like that time that floor manager kept shouting, “The Sit-n-Go is full! No more room in the Sit-n-Go!”

  At our first meeting the year before, Coach had instructed me to hit some Sit-n-Go’s during my AC training. But time was tight and I never did, concentrating on longer, protracted tournaments instead. When I told Matt at our lunch that I might warm up for Day 1D with a few, he shook his head. Why bother at that point? It was a different game than what I’d be playing in the Main Event. Different rhythms, different goals. It was too late.

  Now I was fixated. See, something wonderful had happened the day before. In the cab to the Rio, Coach and Lex asked me if I was going to play. Naw, just take notes. Grateful to be a passenger again, after last year’s ordeal. But an hour after I dropped off my bags, I was leching outside the Sit-n-Go’s. Bunch of other pervs flitting around in anticipation, too. I wanted to play. Just one game.

  The floor guy shuffled cards with different table stakes—125, 175, 200 smackers. Employing their idiosyncratic gambling spider-sense, the hopefuls registered for stakes that possessed the aura of good fortune. I recognized that feeling I first got in roller rinks and at high-school parties/shame cauldrons, where I’m going to dance but the song isn’t right. I need the right one, some beat-box/synth concoction devised by weirdos. This one is too slow. This one is too corny—and then Prince comes on. I laced up and skated to a $125 table. After a few rotations, I saw it was the cheapest.

  The order of business was simple: ten seats, ten players, winner takes all. I was rusty, but after an hour of “Do I cut the green wire or the red wire?” it was down to me and an older white guy. He was in a rush: Want to chop? Split the take? We shook hands.

  I was up $490, and my old friend down in the utility room flipped the switch: More. The rest of the night I told myself I was done. The next morning, too. But how was I supposed to kill some time while Coach and Lex ran through their levels? I was almost done reading I Wish I’d Never Had You: The Best of “The Family Circus.”

  The word More, and also this bat-shit incantation over crazy-clown music: Gonna do it, take ’em down, grab the pot, win it all. Summon the waitress for a BAVERGE: self-delusion, neat. Gonna do it. I’m a fucking Sit-n-Go Master, I shoulda been playing these tables all along. My lucky number was $125. I played those stakes again. Lost. Back on the dance floor. Played $175—I won $490 at a $125 game, so if I win a $175 table, I’d pocket that much more. Take ’em down. It’ll make up for that $125 I just lost. Plus, I’m still ahead from that one win, so the game I just lost doesn’t really count. That’s a natural dip. Up, down, that’s how it goes, don’t sweat it. Grab the pot. Those crazy clowns are really going nuts on that xylophone! Lost another $175. Cool. Still ahead. I’m not the only one doing this nutty tango, with this frenetic monologue running in my head. There’s that scruffy Robotron with the backpack, and that woman in the baggy hoodie who nods at me when I play with her again, we
’re pals now. Oh—she’s out again. She hit another Sit-n-Go the next table over. Win it all. I lose $175. Again $175. Again $175.

  Stop.

  This is insane. Feels great.

  I should probably see how Coach is doing.

  Whistling the Cold Deck Blues. Whittled down to $1,200 in chips, Perma-Sleeves on her left using simple gravity to suck chips to his person.

  At break, Coach was vexed. Shaking her head. She told me about the pink note card she kept in her red purse for consultation in the bathroom: a list of dos and don’ts, her strategies and weaknesses set down by typewriter keys. Old-school. “And I just did that!” she said, referring to some unspecified prohibition. “It’s a tough table. I can go All In, but it’s going to be expensive.”

  Gosh. If I had Magic Negro hands, I could touch her chips, multiply them in a flurry of sparks. But I didn’t have Magic Negro hands. Just hand hands.

  “I’ve been in tougher spots,” she said.

  Across the afternoon and a succession of table breaks, Matt had drifted farther and farther from the rails. I got a glimpse of him grinding. We arranged dinner by text. Him and some Math Players, at Martorano’s in the Rio.

  Some of his pals were partaking of the Six Handed downstairs, others taking a day off. Picking their shots, sticking to their lucky games. Appetizers before the main course. Today I fancied myself some sort of Sit-n-Go monster because of one chopped pot—well, imagine how you feel toward a game after taking home hundreds of thousands of dollars. Matt’s posse returned to the WSOP salivating over this year’s $10K H.O.R.S.E. or the $5K Limit outing, predisposed by previous outcomes. This shirt got me laid last time, it’s sure to work again.