The Noble Hustle

by Colson Whitehead

  Level 1 ended. The line for the men’s was a bit long, as Coach had warned. The smokers beat it out to the patio. I hadn’t seen that many smokers in years. As I hustled back to my room, I googled the dude in the World Poker Tour jacket. He was Matt Savage, proselytizer for the New Poker. I’d been following his Twitter feed for weeks—as a director of pro tournaments and commentator on the TV show, he answered questions about rules and regulations. He wasn’t Godzilla, but I was still glad to be downwind from his betting. In my room, I wrote some notes, reviewed my tip sheets, and made it back in time for Level 2. Breathe in, breathe out.

  Enough people had busted that the floor managers started breaking up tables, rerouting players on the outskirts of the room to the empty seats at the center. Day 1D was a contracting, dying star. We gathered our chips and dispersed into the void. I saw Savage every once in a while during the following levels. We waved. The next time I spoke to the Guy in the Teal Hoodie, it was at the end of Day 6. I said hi, weirdly eager and proud that one of the fellows from the first table was still around.

  “I remember you,” he said, with a mellow drawl. “You were in Seat 9. You were a good player.”

  Too kind. “How are you doing? Still in?”

  “I’m chip leader,” he said. “I have 12.8 million.” His name was Ryan Lenaghan, an online player who had discovered he liked casino play. He finished in eighteenth place.

  My second table was Black 63, Seat 10. I have been invited to someone’s house for Thanksgiving and arrived with my sweet potato pie in the aftermath of a big argument. What happened here? There’s carnage everywhere. Two young guys would nurse $12K for the rest of the night, sober play that was a reversal of whatever had decimated them. Yeah, something big went down before I got there. Daddy’s drinking again, Gabby got her nethers pierced.

  No one seemed to like the loud Aussie in Seat 4. He’d raked some pots and when he left for cigarette breaks, everybody made fun of him. He looked like the cow-faced droog from A Clockwork Orange, completing the effect with a weird hat his shag peeked out of. The table captain was named Marc Podell. He was a fellow New Yorker in his early forties, and he made a steady accumulation for the rest of the day. He was getting cards—he had no problem showing us why the other guy should have folded—but he was also outplaying us. Half the time he was getting a rubdown (he knew the masseuse from Main Events past, they set up appointments by text), and the other half he was calling the raiser and showing the better hand. The Aussie was the other big stack at the table, and Marc tried to goad him into going on tilt. It worked.

  “How many chips do you have?” I started hearing that a lot more, this locker-room check: Who has the bigger dick? It was posturing, but also a serious consideration of how many chips this would cost you if it went south. I got more JJs and played them, a pair here and there. It was a tight table. No one wanted to go home on the first day.

  Some players sell “pieces” of themselves, where if you pay a percentage of their entrance fee, you get a cut of the winnings. If any. Whole online trading exchanges were devoted to this human capital. I wasn’t too keen on buying and selling people—legacy of slavery and whatnot—and this lot struck me as guys who were gambling with their own money. I never saw a four-bet or five-bet. I was playing tight, too, and should have started running a bluff here and there now that I’d “established a solid image at the table,” as they say in the books. But I held back. Establishing table image is like when you stab the leader of the Aryan Assholes in the neck with a fork your first day in prison: telling ’em how you do it back home.

  I was still stuck in playing good cards well, don’t get all crazy mode. I began running with my interpretation of Matt’s reads, mixed in with some tidbits from The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. Coach had told me to read it, after she’d heard about it on Oprah.

  The Gift of Fear wasn’t a poker book but a self-helper about identifying encounters that might escalate into violence. How do you know when someone is out to harm you? Use your animal intuition, developed by millions of years of evolution. Confronting a possible full house wasn’t the same thing as being followed down a deserted street at night, but Coach had discovered poker applications: “When it comes to the game, your first instinct is usually right.” Danger! Danger! Was it counterintuitive to apply lessons from a women’s self-defense book to the World Series of Poker? Yes. But if modernity has taught us anything, it’s that you don’t fuck with Oprah.

  Breathe in, hold it, breathe out. I made it to dinner, per Coach’s order. Three levels. Her other order? “Go to the seafood place. Get the swordfish.”

  The line was too big, so I got some cruddy sandwich and ate at the Sports Book. I called Coach to debrief, told her about Matt Savage and the sleepy play at my first table.

  “They’re calling that section ‘Mellow Yellow,’ ” Helen said, chuckling. She’d sworn off tournament news after her less-than-satisfying WSOP visit weeks ago. But now she was hunkered over her poker feed, reading players’ tweets from the tables, checking out the competition: She had a player in the game.

  Her order for Levels 4 and 5 was simple. Get Bagged and Tagged—crawl to the end of the day, write my name on a plastic bag, and drop my chips inside for safekeeping until Day 2B. It almost seemed possible. This horror show ran seven days. Early on, you wanted to stay cool and keep out of expensive confrontations, but you also needed to feed the stack. The stack is hungry.

  One of the players in my cheapo home game was Nathan, whose friend Steven Garfinkle was in town for the WSOP. A professor of ancient history at Western Washington University, Steven called himself a “committed amateur,” as opposed to a pro, although plenty of pros wouldn’t mind a tenth-place finish in the World Series, which is how far he made it in 2007. Yes, he’d fed his stack that year. “You can’t win it the first day,” Steven told me. But, he added, “You can’t fold your way into money.” You gotta play.

  His stay was being comped by the Aria, one of the new Cosmo-style dreadnoughts moored in the CityCenter complex. The Aria was more than twenty stories tall, a fortification dwarfing the old standbys of the Strip in the manner of the other upstarts. (“These young players,” says Circus Circus, “they do it differently.”) On the casino floor, tiny lights blinked in the walls, I walked on silvered floors, and techno music summoned me to this or that pleasure zone around the next bend. A real Logan’s Run building—outside the walls, my world was ruined, the Library of Congress half buried in sand.

  Inside Aria, however, everything was swell, except for the recent outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, which lent a “Masque of the Red Death” air to the proceedings. On the night of 1C, I tagged along for dinner at Jean Georges. Comped! I asked Steven what a good goal for the first day was.

  A good day is tripling, he told me, but hitting the room’s average is okay, too. There comes a point in the event, Steven said, when “The Big Blind is someone who was here.” Day 6 started with a $30K Big Blind, which was how many chips you got for your buy-in. Thirty thousand to start off the hand, it represented a human soul who had looked at their table draw the first day and said, I feel lucky. Just like you had. And then there is a point, he continued, “when the ante is someone who was here.” This was all that remained of a person, their buy-in, and the Final Table rolled them in their hands and tossed them to the felt. Like gods. Coach had said that her World Series time was “heaven,” and here it was: the big pot as afterlife, containing the spirits of the eliminated players.

  Take, for example, the tall, thin man in Seat 2, who arrived at Black 63 from a broken table. He had long dark hair and wire frames with light blue lenses. Throw in the black clothes, and if he declared that his job title was “Master of Illusions,” taught Criss Angel all he knew, I’d have believed him.

  He and Marc Podell, the guy who continued to command our table into the late hours, recognized each other from “around”—life in the circuit badlands. He was supertight, a clam’s clam, this older gentleman. I coul
dn’t really see him around the curve of the table, and he rarely played a hand, so I only paid attention to him when he mixed it up. Which he finally did a couple of hours after dinner break. He went for it—shoved All In before the flop. Marc called him. AA versus KK. Marc had the two Aces. The man went poof, rabbit in a hat.

  “That was sad,” I said. I don’t think “sad” is a poker term, but there it was. I’d barely spoken all day except to say, “Raise.” The Master of Illusion had been sitting so quietly for so long, mum, watching, waiting for precisely a hand like KK. KK—of course you’re going to go for it. And just like that, he was atomized, called up to the Big Stack in the Sky.

  “I’ve seen him play before,” Marc said, grabbing the chips. “I knew he had something good.” But not good enough for Marc’s Aces. He casually mentioned that this day’s haul might be larger than his starting day in 2008, when he cashed in hundredth place. He ran over the rest of the table, it was our fault. Spend that money, work at your craft for years and years and finally make it to the Main Event: People were scared. What are you going to tell them at the water cooler if you go out the first day? Poker studs loathe “nits”—tight-playing schlubs who never mix it up, only betting monster hands. A nit is a lowly person, and here we were, a nit infestation. But I knew this, too: We were nits who wanted to be men.

  I was definitely taking a grifter’s approach to my table image. This wasn’t the long con, though—I should have loosened up my betting once I saw I was playing with a bunch of Tentative Johnnys.

  But I didn’t.

  LEVEL 4: $27K

  LEVEL 5: $23K

  One improvement: mother hen-ing my blinds. I’d considered blinds and antes like income tax, what you have to pay to be a member of society. To fund pothole repair and corrupt, no-bid government contractors. But blinds are money. They are meaningful. They add up. Matt told me a lot of players nowadays preferred to use your number of Big Blinds in their actuarial tables of life expectancy, instead of M. After these crippling levels, I got it. There were two guys at Black 63 who were statues, except when targeting undefended Big Blinds. Swipers, after Dora the Explorer’s klepto nemesis. They preyed on blinds, scavenging to survive. When the latest swiper joined our table, he had a big stack of green chips, the ante chips. “That’s how you know,” Coach had told me.

  I noticed the pattern. I was folding too easily when I was Big Blind and held shit cards in my hand. The swipers had pegged me as an easy mark. The swiper on Marc’s left—he kept farting or burping, from Marc’s wrinkled-nose rebukes—perked up when he was on the button. My BBs were easy pickings.

  I finally started playing back at him, shooing flies away from my hamburger in a crappy diner. He stopped. Lesson: If you’re going to view blinds as taxes, be a Republican about them.

  Level 5 was over. We bagged our chips in ziplocks, wrote our names on the plastic. It was 12:45 a.m. I was a lump of quivering human meat, but somehow I’d made it through Day 1 with $23K. Half the average stack. The next day, the blinds would escalate to $250 and $500, with $50 antes. I whipped out the abacus: I was at 19M. On my way upstairs, I bought a pouch of Jack Link’s Beef Jerky. No mere marketing ploy, the easy-seal bag really did lock in freshness.

  I’d be back for Day 2B, if my own, personal daily Wave of Mutilation didn’t wash me away first.

  I keep mentioning jerky. On that first Vegas trip in ’91, we stumbled on a wonderland.

  It was a grubby spot on Fremont Street, just past the Four Queens and Binion’s, embedded in an outcropping of souvenir shops. The House of Jerky. I knew Slim Jims, those spicy straws of processed ears and snouts. This was something else entirely. We squinted in joyful bafflement before the rows of clear plastic pouches illed with knobs of dark, lean meat, seasoned and cured. Li’l baggie of desiccant at the bottom for freshness. The jerkys reminded me of Anhedonia’s ancient groves, specifically their tree bark, which we peel ’n’ eat in times of drought and on major holidays. We walked the aisles. The flavors were ordinary, yes. Pepper, teriyaki, barbecue. But the ark-ful of proteins was miraculous: beef, Alaskan salmon, buffalo, turkey, alligator, venison, ostrich.

  The proprietor was a middle-aged Asian man named Dexter Choi. That one man’s singular vision could beget such bounty! It was America laid out before us, dangling on metal rods set into scuffed particle board. Complete with wide open spaces, for the store had a modest inventory. Dried fruit. Nuts. But mostly jerky.

  Mr. Choi remained unmoved by our oh-snaps and holy-cows. The House of Jerky was kitsch to us, but we stood inside the man’s desert dream that day. You know there was a hater chorus when he shared his plans. “Forget about jerky, Dexter, study for the electrician’s licensing exam.” “Sure jerky is a low-calorie, high-sodium snack, Dexter, but when are you going to get your head out of the clouds?” “Look at these lips, Dexter—will your dried muscle-meat ever kiss you like I do?”

  He endured. To build a House of Jerky is to triumph against the odds, to construct a nitrate-filled monument to possibility and individual perseverance. Dexter Choi was an outlaw. He faced down fate and flopped a full house.

  Maybe things could have improved re: foot traffic, but I couldn’t help but be moved. From that day on, beef jerky was synonymous with freedom and savory pick-me-ups between meals. We bought a few bags of that sweet bark for our drive into Death Valley and continued on our journey.

  How could I foresee that this cowboy snack would become a symbol of corporate poker, indeed the commercialization of all Las Vegas? Beef jerky was now the leathery, mass-produced face of modern poker. Meat snacks generated $1.4 billion a year in business, Jack Link’s a major player. Started in the 1880s by an immigrant named Chris Link, who served up smoked meats and sausages to Wisconsin pioneer folk, Jack Link’s was now the fastest-growing meat snack firm in the world, with a hundred different products sold in forty countries. “More than a century has passed,” the Our History page of their site announced, “but the Link family principles and traditions remain the same: hard work, integrity, and a commitment to earn consumer respect by delivering the best-tasting meat snacks in the world.”

  Respect them I did. Since 2008, the company had been an official sponsor of the Main Event—the official name of the thing is “The World Series of Poker Presented by Jack Link’s Beef Jerky.” I had, in effect, been walking around in a big plastic bag ever since I stepped in the Rio. Explained the chronic suffocating feeling.

  The company’s red and black logo mottled the ESPN studio in the Amazon Room, vivid on the clothing of sponsored players like cattle brands. Jack Link’s “Messin’ with Sasquatch” commercials were a mainstay of poker TV programming, featuring their mascot Sasquatch as he was humiliated by golfers, campers, and frat boys before putting a Big Foot up their asses. The mascot’s meaning? Despite the death of the frontier, and the stifling monotony of modern life, the Savage still walks among us. That, or Betty White was unavailable.

  Watch any of ESPN’s coverage and you’ll encounter “Jack Link’s Beef Jerky Wild Card Hand,” in which host Norman Chad tries to divine the contents of a hand through betting patterns. The “hole-card cam” was a clutch innovation behind poker’s populist boom, allowing viewers to see the players’ hands. Before we pierced that veil, televised poker was like watching a baseball game with an invisible ball—i.e., even more boring than watching regular baseball. The hole-card cam allowed for simultaneous commentary—just like real sports! The fans participated in the spectacle, second-guessing, pitting their own calculations against the pros’ moves. They learned. They got better. They started playing in the events they watched on TV.

  Poker as million-dollar theater, hence the upgrade from Johnny Moss’s engraved silver cup to diamond-encrusted bracelets. I was implicated in this big-biz operation. Grantland, the magazine that sent me, was owned by ESPN. ESPN was owned by Disney. Which is why they had trouble finding my check. It was floating around the accounting office of Caesars, which was owned by Harrah’s, who owned the W
SOP. At registration, I’d kept mentioning ESPN and Grantland as my benefactors, when the check was cut by Disney. We were all confused.

  People asked if I’d be able to keep the money if I cashed at the WSOP. Yes—that had been made clear to me. I wasn’t getting paid for the article. My compensation was them paying my entrance fee. Haggle with a lowly freelancer over winnings? Peanuts to the parent corp. I was writing for an entity owned by the company that made millions and millions off WSOP coverage. My words were an advertisement, is one way of looking at it. Raise awareness of the game. Inspire some misfit kid to take up poker. Spread the gospel far and wide. Maybe they’d even hold a circuit game in Anhedonia one day. On the Eastern Coast, a popular vacation spot often free of corpses.

  Grantland. ESPN. Disney. It was all in the family.

  The House always wins.

  It was cool to be at the Rio, to sit in ESPN’s studio after watching so much poker on TV, railing at home all those years. I was a fan. That’s why I was here. When I returned to the studio on Day 5—

  Wait, he’s dilly-dallying in the stands on Day 5? Shouldn’t he be playing? Spoiler: I didn’t win the Main Event. You had suspicions, you say? For one thing, the subtitle of this book would be “The Amazing Life-Affirming Story of an Unremarkable Jerk Who Won the World Series of Poker!” instead of having the word “Death” in it. For another, do these sound like the words of a motherfucker who won a million goddamn dollars? You’d think I’d include peppier adjectives. If I’d won, you might not be reading this right now. I mean, I would’ve written this book, artistic imperative and all that, but not so soon. No, I’d still be sailing around the Caribbean on my yacht with some wretched hotties. The Lost Ones, first-round rejects from Hip Hop Honeys. Yeah, they look foxy in their drab, ill-fitting overalls, but the talent scouts always take a pass on account of their disquieting smiles and far-off stares. My kind of crowd. We chill on the aft futons, reel in marlin, shake the blender as we mix coladas. The skipper’s half in the bag but I don’t care, I’ll write the book when I get back.