The Noble Hustle

by Colson Whitehead

  But for those who want to hang on to hope, let’s say I was watching Day 5 of an unspecified WSOP, not necessarily 2011 (even though that’s when it was).

  On Day 5 the TV room, the Amazon, was the last room left. The Main Event had been cut down to 378 players, so they were already packing up. The sad endgame atmosphere of conventions the world over. The 24/7 video display in the rotunda had been wheeled away, the bunting was half ripped down, the gigantic head shots of game legends rolled up until next year. The Pavilion was shut. I peeked in: In the vast, empty hall, union guys stacked the chairs and loaded them onto dollies. No more legions of would-be heroes and their spank-bank visions of poker glory. You were playing the Amazon Room, or you were busto.

  Given the number of combatants, the Feature Table was distilled poker prowess. Like Allen Cunningham, five-time bracelet winner, who had stared me down for days from his gigantic head shot on the rotunda wall. Drowsy in person. Unimposing in his white checkered button-down. He was sharing close-ups with Jean-Robert Bellande and Daniel Negreanu, who’d wrangled their poker TV fame into slots on reality shows, Survivor and Millionaire Matchmaker, respectively. They were more than poker stars, they were TV stars and knew the business of being in front of the camera. Bellande ambled up to the Feature Table, looking slick, trailed by a skinny guy in a black suit: “Is everything all right?” Almost showtime, Mr. Bellande. Bellande asked for a chip count—where’s everybody stand before the next level starts?—and posed for a picture with a fan.

  The railbirds chirped. Can I get an autograph, Kid Poker? I’d seen Negreanu emanating the last few days, providing wiseacre pull quotes to the press during their blog check-ins, chuckling through an at-table massage, his blond highlights glinting. Relaxed, chipper. He’d been through it all before, this imp. Between hands he and Bellande yukked it up about some Twitter incident, and belittled annoying tournament rules. The Powers That Be were always instituting new protocols, to curb the arms race of who can wear the most sponsored gear on-screen, to regulate table talk. Negreanu was affable, joshing with the table and the fans, but he’d started the day with half the average stack, and was now down to twenty Big Blinds. Then it was fifteen Big Blinds …

  When the next level started—$6,000/$12,000 blinds, $2,000 antes—I was so programmed that I heard the TV announcer’s voice in my head, drowning out the live commentator’s. When I watched the broadcast months later, ESPN framed the episode as Kid Poker’s Last Stand, with heavy metal guitar to punctuate:

  Player of the Year! [power chord!] Millions in Tournament winnings! [power chord!] Celebrity and stardom! [Kid Poker holds up wads of cash] Daniel Negreanu has accomplished everything in poker except his biggest and toughest goal—the Main Event! [Kid Poker storms away from a busted hand] Tonight it’s put up or shut up for Kid Poker and his dwindling stack. Will he continue to climb poker’s highest peak, or will he fall short once again?

  Live, the end of his Main Event was less dramatic. More humble and human-size. The spectator area was just a couple of rows, but the dark cobalt lighting gave them false depth on TV. Friends of the high-performing amateur players at the Feature Table and fans of the big shots jostled for seats. Some of them were on the job. The Feature Table action was being livestreamed, with a thirty-minute delay. Which meant that anyone watching knew what players had held in this or that showdown a couple of hands back. And they could inform their pals. Sorry to break it to you, but she was bluffing with 5-10 offsuit. What kind of range forced that tall Swede to move All In? Your cronies relay information, texting, waving you over to the rails for a quick huddle, to help navigate course corrections. “Dude, he totally got inside your head thirty-one minutes ago.” The hole-card cam strikes again.

  Negreanu had no choice but to shove when he got dealt a pair of 10s. Everyone mucked except Rupert Elder, a British pro, who turned over his A7. Elder kept mum, perhaps because he must have been sweltering in that white cable-knit sweater.

  Negreanu jumped from his seat, punching the air. “We need a 10 and we’re good!” He whirled. “I wanna win this hand really bad! Really bad!” I didn’t know if he was addressing his supporters, who loudly rooted from the rails, or the viewers behind the camera feeds, or himself. Maybe he danced for the Poker Gods, as Maud of the Magic River checked the ledgers. Had he been naughty or nice?

  The flop was 9-5-3—no help. “This World Series sucks! Every time I’m two to one, I lose!”

  Elder said nothing. Negreanu remained the favorite. If there was a Poker God present, it was Tim Old Spice, keeping Elder fresh. The man didn’t flinch.

  The turn gave Elder a pair of aces. It was no longer two to one.

  “He has to catch a 10,” the live commentator said, “or he will be eliminated.”

  “A 10!” Negreanu implored.

  The River. It was not a 10. Kid Poker was out.

  Bellande shook his head.

  “How about a big round of applause for Mr. Daniel Negreanu!” Kid Poker patted Elder on the back with a “Good luck, bro,” submitted to a quick exit interview with Kara Scott. Then he was gone.

  Which left Cunningham and Bellande as the seniors at the table. Bellande busted the next day in seventy-eighth place. Cunningham busted soon after in sixty-ninth place. They made some money. August rolls around, and it’s just another tournament.

  Yosemite Sam and his posse had been deposed by young hotshots like Kid Poker, and now Kid Poker had to shake these even younger players off his pants leg. With more than ten million in poker winnings, that was a lot of pants leg, but there were a lot of kids, too. At the Final Table in 2011, the contenders were in their early-to-mid-twenties, except for Badih Bounahra, a forty-nine-year-old amateur who’d squeezed into the lifeboat. The winner was Pius Heinz, a twenty-two-year-old German player who’d started online and was introduced to the game by watching hole-card cams in the Main Event on TV. The last hole-card cam of the 2011 WSOP revealed cards that gave Pius $8 million.

  You’ll never get a Final Table full of colorful cowboys again. Simple numbers. To make it to the November Nine, the cards need to run too well for you and too poorly for too many other people. Poker dexterity will rescue you from riptides that overwhelmed weak players and driftwood-hugging Robotrons, but you’d still need a surfeit of good fortune.

  In a couple of days they’d dismantle the studio, Bubble Wrap the more expensive branding material. Drop it into crates with the rest of the equipment, as if it were a fresh batch of jerky, packed into handy resealable pouches for distribution across the land. Resume the game in November, to celebrate the nine players who endured.

  I kept Dexter Choi’s business card in my wallet for ten years, until one day I got worried I might lose it. I took it out and never saw it again. On a Thanksgiving ’97 trip, I looked for the House of Jerky. It was gone. Pushed out to make room for the Fremont Street Experience, an electronic canopy that covers four blocks of downtown.

  At night they turn off the casino marquees and the light show begins, eleven million LEDs blinking out tribute to Vegas history. One light for every bad beat and botched connection this evening, one light for that poker hero cut down, and another for that luckless conventioneer returning to her hotel room alone. Enough lights to spare some for a mad dreamer or two. The Dexter Chois of the world. No one can see what they see, until they build it. If their plans sound ridiculous, if they’ve overstepped their abilities and aimed too high, they are not the first in this town to do so.

  Tourists foolish enough to be ensnared by the promos for this crummy light show look up for a few minutes, and then it’s over. They drift away. The night is young, the city endless, and there are so many more disappointments to savor before dawn.

  I woke up Tuesday with low M, emotion-wise. I wasn’t concerned about my short stack, as I was strangely optimistic that I’d get a good run of cards on Day 2B. Now that I’d finished a day of play, I’d come out swinging. But I’d been hit with a powerful case of the local affliction, the symptoms of which
consisted of repeatedly mumbling “What the fuck am I doing in Vegas?” until you worked yourself into a desperate froth. I think residents were immune, but tourists were particularly susceptible to this strain of existential Montezuma’s revenge.

  Coach was up and at ’em on the East Coast. She direct-messaged a pep talk:

  Bagged and tagged! Goal! While you are sleeping this morning, I’ll research the field. Today’s goal: rest and recuperate. Great job.

  You’ve outlasted 2,324 players—3rd largest entry in live history. 1D is largest entry day ever. 4,540 remain—on 2B there will be less.

  Chip average looks to be 45K, but don’t let this worry you. 23K is nearly an M of 20x pot. You have enough to play and cripple others.

  Great 2B table draw! 6 seat with no notable players and no monster stacks. Table low stack 14K. 4 seats shorter than you. Big: 50K. Avg: 25.

  Day 2, we’ll talk about ways to double up and who to go after. You are in fine shape. You’re alive!

  We talked on the phone in the afternoon, a debrief on the rest of Day 1. I was still depressed by the Master of Illusion’s anticlimactic exit. To play for so long, pay ten grand, wait for the perfect hand, and then have your KK pulverized by a meteor from the deep cold of space: AA.

  “You’re not going to see that hand again,” Coach told me. You saw that maybe once a tournament, and now I’d gotten it out of the way. She gave me homework, Dan Harrington, natch: Reread DH Vol 1 Pt 5 (betting) p.198-213, 275-286. Vol 2 (zones) 133-155. Get ready to say, ‘All in.’

  Call her if I needed anything else. Hit the books (yeah, I’d brought them cross-country with me), get some food, maybe I’d feel better. At 2:34 p.m., Coach sent me a message: “Dan Harrington just busted. Moment of silence, please.”

  Great.

  Coach’s breakdown of the situation alleviated any remaining stress over my game plan, and I was grateful. Her Southern accent and chipper delivery really sold it. My Vegas melancholy deepened throughout my day off, however. I missed my kid. I was sick of the Rio food. Christ, the All-American Bar and Grille—the flavor profiles of foreign lands had never agreed with me. I wanted to exist one single day on this miserable planet without having the thought, “I should really have the Caesar salad.” I should have called my college roommate Shecky—he’d tried to get in on a satellite but no go—to see if he wanted to hang, but I was embroiled in a full-on wallow.

  The mere fact of Vegas, its necessity, was an indictment of our normal lives. If we needed this place—to transform into a high roller or a sexy swinger, to be someone else, a winner for once—then certainly the world beyond the desert was a small and mealy place indeed. We shuffled under fluorescent tubes in offices, steered the shopping carts through outlet malls and organic supermarkets while consulting a succession of moronic lists, and wearily collapsed on our beds at night with visions of the Big Score shimmering in our heads. There’s a leak in the attic again, the TV’s out of warranty, maybe we should get a tutor for Dylan, he’s a smart kid but doesn’t test well—and then there was Vegas. Vegas will heal us.

  I didn’t want to be healed, but I knew there was something in the cards I needed. This was the assignment of a lifetime, right? It had never occurred to me that one day I’d play in the World Series of Poker. I was just a home-game scrub. But I loved them, I loved cards. I always had.

  Memory is the past with volume control, turn it up, turn it down. Can I make out what I heard in the cards? The martial snap of an expertly shuffled deck, the sleek whisper of laminated paper jetting across the table. Crazy 8s and Spit and then Hearts in college. I was the Bruce Lee of Hearts, no joke, knew all the nerve clusters to paralyze your ass. I’d prowl around the dorm on becalmed afternoons, searching for Hearts players like the disheveled emissary of a ramshackle sect. Our holy text was composed of cut-up newsprint and down-market glossies, but we hit the streets anyway and hoped no one would notice. Everyone was busy studying or calling “their people” back home or whatever, except for me. Cards killed the hours. Then bridge, and then poker, the games that helped me unscramble the secret message: The next card, the next card is the one that will save me.

  I slept poorly the night of 2A. I had played it safe the first day, stuck to the winners. I hadn’t gambled too much. Now I had to reconnect with that old faith, that when the next card turned over, I’d see my future there.

  I thought I heard crickets.

  There was some nice theater to the Ceremonial Unbagging of the Chips at the start of Day 2B. “Dealers, if a player is not present two minutes before start, remove their chips and place the bag on their seat.” I was at White 83, Seat 6, and per Coach’s assessment, I was still swimming in a tide pool with the guppy luckless and jelly-organism amateurs. No big stacks. Steven Garfinkle had told me that one of the great wonders of poker was that a normal Joe could sit down at a tournament table next to one of their idols. Which was true, it was a beautiful thing, like finding yourself playing [a sport] with [a famous player]. (I stopped following sports once Ty Cobb retired.) But I didn’t want to sit next to Jonathan Duhamel.

  Country Time was my speed. Country Time, on my right, was a sober, elderly gentleman in a brown sweater, and I did not think he meant me harm. I did a little Alexander to chill me out, breathe in, breathe out, and checked the other stacks through my sunglasses.

  Did I neglect to say I was wearing sunglasses? I hadn’t the nerve during my trial tourneys, as I felt like a douchebag, but the first time I stepped into the Pavilion I happened to be wearing them, and it felt good. I felt safe. They were nothing special, the ones I’d been wearing for years, but they’d filtered out some of my city’s more evil wavelengths many times. The visor in my suit of armor.

  Perhaps it is also possible that I have not mentioned the rest of my battle gear. I wore a track jacket. A special track jacket. A few weeks before the Main Event, I set up a solicitation on one of the social media sites:

  If you’ve seen the tournament on ESPN, you know that all the real players wear the names of sponsors on their sweatshirts and caps and T-shirts.

  I want to blend in, so I am now accepting sponsors. There are two tiers of sponsorship.

  In the Premium “God’s Chosen” Sponsorship Level, I will wear your name, enterprise, slogan, or credo on my shirt for $11.25. There are three slots open.

  In the Hoi Polloi Sponsorship Level, you can purchase one of 10 Commemorative Signature Bracelets. They will be green or orange in color, I haven’t decided which. On the outside, they will bear the slogan KEEP WINNING HANDS. This will “buck you up” when you need it, an imperative, a prayer, or simple statement of fact, depending. On the inner part of the bracelet, where no one can see, they will read STILL SAD INSIDE. This will remind you of the truth.

  They will be sold for $4.95…

  It has been pointed out that the cost of producing this merchandise will exceed the money raised. To which I say, I have never been good at math.

  I got a few responses. I didn’t get my act together to order the bracelets before I left, but I got the duds. I went to a custom T-shirt joint in Dumbo and handed the designer the specs. I’d have to pay extra for a rush job. She double-checked my chicken-scratch, track jacket first.

  “Republic of … Ann-hee—”

  “Anhedonia,” I said.

  “What are those?”

  “Those are lightning bolts,” I said.

  She told me to pick out a color for the T-shirt’s font, something to accent the brown fabric. I didn’t want to clash. Fuck that. She made two suggestions. I picked one.

  “That’s ‘Vegas Gold,’ ” she said. “Maybe it’ll be good luck!”

  I wanted diverse sponsors: a person, a business, and a slogan for the back. So I put “WSOP 2011” over the left breast in Space: 1999 letters, and my pal Nathan Englander’s name on the right sleeve—he was in my home game and had been a stalwart ally during Poker Quest. The NYC bookstore McNally Jackson anchored the left sleeve. The bookstore’s Twitter feed had of
fered up a slogan, something like “Crying on National TV Is My Tell,” but, uh, the name of the store was shorter so I went with that. The owner had given me some picture books for the kid one time, so it felt right.

  Finally, on the back I put “My Other Hand Is Bullets,” in an old-timey Western font, which my friend Rob Spillman had suggested. I explained to the designer that “Bullets” was slang for a pair of pocket Aces. I didn’t want her to think I was going on a murder spree, or to a panel discussion. I already owned a “This Is More of a Statement Than a Question” T for panel discussions.

  When I told Coach about the paraphernalia, she laughed but also suggested that maybe I hold off on wearing the TV shirt until I made it into the money. “It’s a bit snarky,” she declared. Players were going to target me anyway, because they’d catch on to my inexperience (gee, how?) and because I “didn’t look like the average poker player,” like a Big Mitch, one hand eternally patting his gut. No point in giving them another reason. Okay, in the money, sure. As it happened, the WSOP cracked down on logos this year, part of the fallout from the Feds’ assault on online poker sites. It reduced the sometimes absurd number of patches you saw on the TV shows, which made the grizzled players look like steamer trunks in a ’40s movie.

  I was going to wear the jacket, though, a snazzy red number with the name of my homeland on the front and the aforementioned lightning bolts, lest anyone doubt where I was coming from.