The Noble Hustle

by Colson Whitehead

  As usual, they classed up the joint. Lex joined his table in a smart charcoal jacket and blue oxford. Coach opted for posh-ninja mode, black sweater and black pants. Only the moonlight glinting off her red fingernails would give her away, as she garroted mofos amid the mounting levels. Like the fanny-packed, beer-gutted others filling the tables, Coach and her husband wanted to place at the top of the satellite and keep the 1,600 bucks for Event 10 in their pockets. Would they fork it over if they didn’t make it tonight? The eternal calculus of the Noble Hustle, where bankroll meets the reality of how the cards are running. I watched one hopeful pad around in a daze after being flushed out of the 5:00 p.m. Mega. He walked to the doors, walked back. Still time to enter the 7:00 p.m. satellite. “Do I want to do this again?” he said aloud.

  He hiked his bag on his shoulder and reenlisted.

  I caught up with Matt in a Bobby Flay joint over in the Borgata, where we dined with Action Bob and Lana O’Brien. Bob was the star of the three-act tweet-play I related earlier. He lived in nearby Barnegat, New Jersey, with his wife and kids. Typical modern dad. When his family sleeps, he’ll come to the plush Borgata Poker Room and play $40/$80 Limit, rising early every weekend to fleece the “tired, drunk, angry” who have been playing all night and are trying to get even. “It’s worth getting up at five,” he said with a grin. Play in the morning, he can hang out with the fam in the afternoon.

  Lana was a young colleague of Matt’s from CardRunners.com, the poker academy. Currently Matt’s apprentice and trying to step up her game, although time was running out. She was pregnant with her second kid and starting to show. Maternity leave from Hold’em loomed. If the online sites were up, she could telecommute, but …

  Lobster and Crispy Squid Salad. Amid the Flaying, Matt, Lana, and Action Bob partook of the Replay. Dug into the archives, recalling a multitude of crime-scene variables—position, stack size, the opponent’s preferred range of hands. Crucial points of personal history—was that before said supervillain stopped drinking, or where they were still an ogre at the table? The action sequences of their poker movie, on slow-mo to admire the F/X work. The supporting cast had taken their marks last month at the Fall Open, and would return to deliver their lines next month at the Winter Open. Character actors too colorful to be out of work long.

  How did they keep track of it all? Those old battles.

  Action Bob shrugged. “You get used to it.” He checked his watch. He had to leave the table for a few minutes, to call home but also for face time at his $40/$80. Dinner break, yeah, but he had to pop in for two hands so he didn’t lose his seat. His kids gotta eat, too.

  Wild Mushroom Mashed Potatoes with Truffle Oil, Spice-Rubbed Rib Eye. A nice steak before they played tomorrow at Harrah’s. No satellites for them. The numbers didn’t work out. Why spend ten hours grinding when the 1,600-buck entry fee is just the price of doing business? A satellite for a $10K tourney was doable, in a time-money calculation. Not that they’d do it, but at $10K the numbers started to make sense. Sometimes you force down a Southwestern Chicken Wrap, next time it’s steak. Bankroll is all.

  Plus, satties are boring, they all agreed. You’re angling to get into the top ten, not money. You play differently, the way you adjust for Six Handed versus a ten-seat game. “Fold, fold, fold, fold,” Lana said, and wait for a good shot.

  Better to eat a nice meal, rest up, and hope for a good table. “Last year, my opening table was the best I ever had,” Action Bob said. Wistful.

  “They were good players?” Must be exciting, entering into combat with your peers. A worthy challenge.

  “He means, great meaning bad,” Matt said. Like when Run-D.M.C. says, “Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good.” May the Poker Gods gift us some terrible players, some real bozos, so we can make some money.

  Lana wasn’t entering Event 10 on Saturday, but the Ladies Event that ran at the same time. She was down to play some cards. Eager and full of cheer. Since training with Matt, she’d achieved a new level in her play. “Whenever you can get up and play poker, it’s a great day.”

  “I used to be like her,” Matt said.

  Back at Harrah’s, 10:30 p.m. The satellite had dwindled to two tables, eighty-five gladiators culled to eighteen. And there were Helen and Lex, still in it. Sitting next to each other. Married couples were rare in poker. But here they were, might as well have been sitting on the couch back home, thanks to the accident of table breakage. It was adorable, but I didn’t tell them that until the break. I didn’t want to mess up their camouflage.

  Coach was up to $38K, and Lex hanging on at $15K. Shove time for the man, once he picked his opening.

  “Will you take Lex out if you have to?” I asked.

  “Definitely,” Coach said.

  Lex smiled. “Ask us later about the Kings versus Aces story.”

  The game had decelerated, this close to the bubble. Bubble Boy, where art thou? Fold, fold, fold, fold. If Coach and Lex outlasted the next clutch of players, they were in tomorrow’s $1,600 game. They ran alternative scenarios, like everyone else in the third-floor ballroom. If Lex busted, there was an 11:00 a.m. Turbo game, and if he cashed there, he could make the second, 7:00 p.m. start of Event 10. If that didn’t work out …

  Coach, for her part, might fork over for the Main if she crapped out tonight. The Ladies Event was cheaper, but the idea incensed her. “That’s sexist!” she said. “I’m upset. They assume or whatever that women will not be in the Main Event—why else would they schedule it at the same time?” Yep, if the Mega didn’t pan out, she’d pay her way in. She was still up for the year, cashes-wise. The price of doing business.

  Lex busted out a few seats from the bubble, at fourteen.

  He hit Replay and nodded to himself. “I think that was the right move.” He joined me on the rails. To Turbo or not to Turbo?

  Eighteen to fourteen to twelve seats. Almost there. At midnight Coach was up to $70K, battling.

  I was tired. And I didn’t belong. These people were scientists. I departed to play $2/$4 No Fold’em Hold’em downstairs with my people: the Methy Mikes, the shivering elderly, and the drunken fifty-somethings in town for AC shenanigans. Back with poker’s hoi polloi, with our tepid raises and sloppy calls. Adele sang “Rolling in the Deep” and CeeLo crooned “Fuck You,” just as they had during my Vegas WSOP jaunt a year and a half ago. The same pop songs still circulating, the communal soundtrack of a life half lived. It was safe down there with the dopes.

  Outside Harrah’s the next morning, a brief scene:

  Sedans and town cars double-parked, the valet is scurrying around trying to sort it out. A quartet of weekending sixty-somethings, three men and one woman, mill around a white Honda. It’s unclear if they are arriving or departing. We know why everyone comes here, but we all leave under different circumstances.

  “C’mon, I want to gamble,” says the man at the center of the tussle. Unsteady on his feet but full of energy. Bristling.

  “You can’t stand up,” says one of his companions.

  “C’mon,” the belligerent old dude says. He gets one foot in the backseat of the Honda and then reconsiders. His companions have their hands on him.

  “You’ll fall again.”

  “C’MON. I WANT TO GAMBLE. GET A WHEELCHAIR!”

  They continue to try and pack him in the car. The woman paces back and forth, a spouse unsure what her role is in this fight. Intervene or no, what are the repercussions? After all these years the same dilemma.

  “C’MON! GET A WHEELCHAIR!”

  I’d seen a lot of gambling in the last year and a half. Exciting gambling. Foolhardy gambling. Gambling as an art form. What this old dude enacted was fodder for the pamphlets and PSAs the casinos give you as they happily hand over chips. Another great gambling truth. But I’ll leave that for other correspondents.

  Later. Saturday afternoon, the kickoff of Harrah’s Main Event. Lex was playing his Turbo. I found Matt, cheerful in his crimson zippy, and wished him luck. He
was more upbeat than he’d been on the ride down, perhaps revitalized by his night playing Open Face Chinese Poker in an amigo’s comped hotel room. It was a new game, the new cool hot rod among the gambling set, and it was his first time kicking the tires. Matt may have been burned out and preoccupied, but he perked up when he explained the rules. “You get dealt thirteen cards and you have to set your hand in such a way that your worst hand is a three-card hand in the front, then your second-best hand is a five-card hand in the middle, and then your best hand is a five-card hand in the back …” I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. But I was glad to see he still loved cards, despite his late uneasiness with success.

  I cruised between the tables and discovered Action Bob ready for battle, with his Gigantor cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, sunglasses, and earbuds. He waved, grinning. Across from him sat Coach in a turquoise blouse with gold flower petals. Just another Saturday afternoon of cards with some of the neighbors on Oak Street.

  I don’t know if their table was bad meaning bad or bad meaning good, but the cards snapped and the gamblers hunkered, the million-dollar winners and the diligent grinders, the jowly veterans and the pimply first-timers. Any one of them could win it all, and no one deserved it more than anyone else.

  Let’s leave them there, as they wait for the next hand, the one that will change it all. I have a game to return to myself.

  What do you say we see what happened that one time I went to Vegas?

  Like my first sexual experience, my time at the World Series of Poker didn’t last long … is how I would’ve started this section if I’d been eliminated the first day. But I wasn’t. Suck it, Entropy. We have an appointment, my old friend, but not today.

  I was up at 5:00 a.m. We have a saying back home: “Wake up in the grip of terror, things will get worse before they get better.” (It is also the title of one of our most beloved children’s books.) Scratch the wake-up call, which is no way to start the day, wherever you come from. Why so cold and distant, hotel robot voice? “This is your 6:00 a.m. wake-up call.” What’s wrong with “Go get ’em, Tiger!” or “You look sexy when you sleep”?

  Dig if you will a picture: Sunday at noon. I was finally able to register after the accountants found my check. My table draw was Yellow 163, Seat 9. Pavilion. When I returned half an hour before start time, the room was mostly full, the players warily clocking their tables, approaching, backing off, like guests at a reception waiting for the signal to dig into the canapés. No one wanted to be the first to go out, and no one even wanted to be the first to sit down.

  The announcer bid us to join the dealers, who had been at their stations, bow-tied and patient. Terse greetings all around. “Hey.” “How’s it going?” Mostly fifty-something white guys, with two youngsters in Seats 5 and 6. Yes, the young guys owned the game now—the past couple of winners have been under thirty. Some of them probably even did yoga.

  They played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I stood out of politeness. One does not often hear the national anthem of the Republic of Anhedonia at a sporting event. The so-called “lyrics” consist mostly of grunts, half-muttered curses, and long, drawn-out sighs, depending on the particular sufferings you’re cultivating that day. Still, it never fails to lift the spirit, however faintly, we agree on this if nothing else.

  You don’t want to see our flag, trust me.

  Phil Hellmuth, superplayer from the Silver Age, and “Playmate Holly Madison” started the tourney with, “Shuffle up and deal!” The cricket orchestra started up. I wouldn’t have minded “Shuffle through your mistakes and tremble!” but tradition is tradition.

  The blinds were $50 and $100. One of the young players at my table, the Guy in the Teal Hoodie, started off energetically. He had the demeanor of a college altrock DJ or someone building cybernetic organisms in the garage, and took down pots with quiet efficiency. Was he one of the young players Matt had warned me about the day before?

  I’d asked Matt if he’d seen any “new moves” this year, the latest gizmos, which was very silly because I barely knew the old moves, whether we were talking Hold’em or the Cabbage Patch.

  “These young players,” he said, “they’re four-betting with nothing. Five-betting.” He said young players the way World War II grunts used to say Hun bastards. The Big Blind is considered the first bet, a raise on that is the second bet, and a re-raise on top of that is a three-bet. Pretty normal stuff before the flop, the first three communal cards. In his Little Books of Poker, Phil Gordon repeatedly warned, “Beware the Fourth Bet—it means Aces.” Lemme tell you, son, in my day, four-betting used to mean something. Nowadays, these young players were four-betting, five-betting helter-skelter, who knew what these crazy kids had in their hands, they could be raising with shit, rags, 7-2. The preflop four-bet was a relatively new weapon in the arsenal, but that didn’t mean I had to back down when I had decent cards. Matt told me to trust my instincts. “If you have a good read on someone, five-bet them. If they’re bluffing, they’ll fold.” Okay! I told him I was going to play tight, try to make it to Day 3, not misplay my premium hands …

  “Do you want to do that,” Matt asked, “play it safe?” I was here to write an article, but was that all there was to it? “I think you’ll be most satisfied,” he said, “if at some point, you suddenly have a read on someone: ‘This guy doesn’t have anything’ or ‘This guy has something.’ One way or another, you’re going to have a read, and you’re going to do something that you didn’t expect you were going to do before, right or wrong.” Something new in your game expressing itself. “Obviously it’s better if you’re right, but even if you’re wrong, it can be really satisfying to just have a read, a feeling, and go with it. Your gut.”

  I could play it safe, or I could really play. Matt was asking me, Why are you here? It was the Vegas question, namely: What the fuck are you doing in Vegas? As usual in this town, whether you gambled away the mortgage money, fucked a stranger, or went to see Carrot Top, you answered in your actions.

  There were three empty seats. Brighton Beach eventually sat on my left. He was an intense, twenty-something dude with a strong cut-off-your-feet-and-mail-them-to-your-fiancée vibe. Eventually Seat 8 showed up. The dealer looked at his ID and said, “Oh, shit!”

  One thing you do not want to hear is a dealer say “Oh, shit!” when a player joins your table. He was wearing a red World Poker Tour jacket with … was that his name embroidered on the left breast? This motherfucker was so bad, he had a goddamned monogrammed World Poker Tour jacket! Floor managers and players from other tables moseyed over to say hello. He was on my right, and if he went crazy with six-betting or nine-betting or who knew what, I could make a quick muck. Horrified, nonetheless.

  I had enough chips to withstand some hits, power in the forward deflectors. We started with $30K, 300 Big Blinds. Plenty of M. “It’s all about M,” Coach had told me during our initial training session, and it was one of the first things I came to understand, slowly, the hard way, during my AC runs, the secret narrative as I passed through levels. M is how much life you have in you, how much you can take. To calculate M, you add the Big Blind, the Small Blind, and all the antes you have to pay into the pot each round, and the sum is how much it costs to play one orbit ’round the table. M, for Paul Magriel, who first articulated it, but also M for the Wave of Mutilation.

  Above 20M, twenty rounds, you can play your fancy-move poker. But once you dip below that, your spirit is draining away each round, and you have to start playing more aggressively, play a wider range of cards, swipe some blinds, so that you are not erased from existence. Existence, because this is life we’re talking about here, how much can you take before you break. Dear reader, I hope you’re operating at a big M most of the time, I really do. Things are easier that way. But then sometimes things go wrong—you lose your job, get some sort of health issue named after a foreigner, the kid won’t say why he doesn’t want you at the wedding, and the angry voices in your head are now using Auto-Tune.
You take a tumble in a thousand ways, big and small: This the Wave of Mutilation, gobbling up your reality. Replay the hand—is there something you could have done differently to keep things the way they were, something you should have said to keep them from walking away? It doesn’t matter, the dealer’s shuffling again. You dwindle to 6M and 3M and 2M and you can’t pay the rent next month, nobody’s returning your e-mails. Things are desperate. This is death. You don’t know how you’re going to survive. And the truth is, you’re not going to. Next level, the blinds will go up, and up, and up.

  That’s M.

  Seat 7 never showed and was blinded away until a floor manager removed the remnants of the stack. What came up for him or her to blow the $10K entrance fee? I hoped they were tied up in a dungeon somewhere. Not a serial-killer dungeon but one of the tony thousand-bucks-an-hour variety you can find only in Vegas, and they were having a pleasant time at the lashes.

  Coach gave me a simple order for the first three levels: “Make it to dinner.” You can sort players into dependable categories. Tight is conservative. Loose plays a lot of hands. Loose-Aggressive plays a lot of hands, plays a lot of shit, but will bully you with betting. At the first table, I played something that might be called Tight-Incompetent. I folded out of turn, tried to bet 2.5x the BB, per the table custom, but misidentified the chips and put in less than 2x, which was a no-no. I made each mistake only once (for a change; see Dating Failures of, in my index for contrary indicators) but I’d marked myself as the weak player. At Yellow 163, I got my nicest run of cards, QQ, JJ, flopped an Ace-high flush, but there wasn’t a lot of action. I wasn’t down, but I wasn’t fattening my stack.

  I heard the cries from the other tables as All Ins began and people busted out. I saw my first right before the end of Level 1, when Brighton Beach, who was down to $10K, shoved. He was getting a massage. I’d seen someone on Coach’s poker feed say that hubris is the short stack ordering a massage. Did I mention the masseuses? There were teams of them, ladies in white polos hoisting their cushions, rubbing lotion into hairy necks. Brighton Beach shoved his stack into the pot, and a minute later he was out. I wondered if his rubdown would be prorated. Everybody shook their heads and checked out their own stack. Chill wind as the Grim Reaper strolled past. Anyone could be next.