He Played for His Wife and Other Stories

by Anthony Holden

  I love Bob very much. He is a screenwriter like me. When he folds me in his arms it dredges up a long-dormant memory of my dad. A faint, faded recollection of being adored, and understood. The only thing he doesn’t understand is why I have to play poker. He hates poker. Hates it. He can never join me in celebrating the wins, because he knows they will be followed by crushing losses. The losses lead to long periods of mourning where I look around for someone to blame and decide it’s his fault. I try to remember the feeling of being a winner, casually dropping into conversation how much I won, like it’s no big deal. The proud glow of accomplishment that lasts almost a week. Before I leave the house, I take a deep breath, look in the mirror, and say, ‘Tonight I am going to win a hundred thousand dollars.’ The words sound hollow to me. I think of saying it again with more conviction, but decide against it and head out the door.

  ‘Bye, honey,’ I call over my shoulder.

  ‘Bye, sweetie,’ Bob replies, happy to be acknowledged. ‘Don’t forget to . . .’

  The rest of his sentence is muffled as the door slams behind me. Don’t forget to . . . what? Straddle? Raise the button? Come home?

  I haven’t been at Dan’s house for so long I almost forget where it is. I walk in the living room and am greeted with the smell of perfume. There are about eight massage girls in five-inch heels and tight, revealing dresses. These girls are here to massage and otherwise service the players. I try to avoid letting them do anything for me, ’cause anything they do, you’re supposed to give them a chip. The smallest denomination is a hundred dollars. They bring you a bottle of water: a hundred bucks, a plate of food, a hundred bucks . . . I don’t know what the going rate is for other services. Suffice it to say every now and then a player disappears with a girl and returns twenty minutes later.

  They are very sweet. They talk in little girl voices, and lean on the men, and pout when they’re ignored. Ned Jenson once complained the girls cost him thirty thousand in one hand. They know nothing about poker so they don’t know when to back off. A million-dollar pot was developing and this girl was playing with his hair and blowing in his ear, so he gave her a 5K chip to go away. He realised his mistake almost instantly. He looked around the table, and all the other girls were pouting and giving him a sad face so he felt he should give them all a chip. There were six girls so . . . thirty thousand dollars.

  Dan’s house is big and modern and filled with excruciatingly ugly but expensive art. All these players are heavy into art investment and try to outdo themselves with acquisitions. Dan’s sister and her friend deal this game. They don’t know how to split the pots, count down stacks or call the action. If there is a complicated procedure, they look helplessly to the nearest savvy player. Obviously there is no dealer abuse allowed. The dealers have a sense of entitlement because they are related to the host. Sometimes they push the pot to the wrong player. You just have to be on your toes.

  Tonight, the players are Max, an entrepreneur who owns a string of strip clubs, Dan the Art Collector, a Hollywood director, two producers, a restaurateur, a small-time pro, and Connor, a ‘businessman’. I’m not sure what ‘business’ Connor is in but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with money laundering. He always seems to have unlimited funds. Max has flown out from Vegas with Connor on his plane.

  We start out with a 40K buy-in. I double up right away, and then again. I win every pot. I start to feel very pleased with myself. I don’t know what I was worried about. I’m up about 90K, and I feel easy and in control.

  Then the following hand happens: I look down at pocket aces. All the worst stories seem to start with pocket aces. There are already three people in the pot so I re-pop it to fifteen thousand and everyone folds but Max. The flop is seven, seven, jack, rainbow. I bet. Max calls. Turn a five, I bet. Max calls. River, a two. I check. Max goes all in. I hate it now. I fucking hate my hand. I don’t know how, but he has me beat.

  But then, you know, Max bluffs a lot. And maybe he put me on ace/king, ace/queen. Maybe he was floating for when I checked the river? He knows I’m scared money, he knows he can move me off my hand! I am standing up now and the whole room seems to be receding. One part of me notices my involuntary rise from my chair. That’s usually a bad sign. When I stand it’s usually an indication of, ‘You call, baby, and it’s all over.’

  ‘I call,’ I hear a small voice say.

  Max seems surprised.

  ‘You call?’ he repeats.

  He seems to be reluctant to expose his cards, and for a second I think it will all be a bad dream and I will have doubled up. Then he flips his cards over gleefully and the dream shatters. ‘Pay up, suckers!’ he chortles, and then feigns surprise. ‘Oh, we’re not playing the seven/deuce game? I thought we were!’

  White-hot rage crawls up between my eyes. Seven/deuce? Seven/deuce??!!! He called my fifteen-thousand-dollar raise just to fuck with me? Grimly I sit back down. Gone are my dreams of an early night, and playing within my bankroll.

  ‘Noah!’ I yell. ‘Give me a hundred thousand dollars!’

  Now the polite careful girl waiting for aces has disappeared. In her place is a raging maniac on a suicide mission. I am Binky on crack: I play every hand, I double, triple straddle. I play in position, I play out of position. I continuation bet, I check-raise, I do everything but win.

  A few hours later I am stuck balls. In poker as people get even or up, they start to drift away. Eventually everybody has gone home except me, Connor (who is also deep in the red) and Max (who is up, but has to wait for Connor). One by one the girls leave, draping a fragrant arm across my shoulder on the off-chance I give them a parting gift of a hundred-dollar chip as I am wont to do. But I am too stuck and too miserable to be Lady Bountiful, and I don’t even look up from the table.

  Max disappears upstairs with one of the remaining girls, and the game pauses. I can tell Connor desperately wants to get unstuck through me.

  ‘I don’t wanta play heads up,’ I whine.

  I have been able to exploit Max’s desire to hold on to his new-found wealth by chipping away at him slowly. He himself recognised it was slowly dripping away from him, and now he wants to fuck.

  We wait uneasily for him to return. The dealer is impatient. The sun is coming up. She wants to go home.

  ‘We’re taking a break until Max gets back,’ Connor explains. ‘He said he was going to be two minutes.’

  ‘He said ten minutes!’ she snaps.

  She’s seen these breaks before. She knows it takes time for a coked-up guy to get off.

  *

  The minutes tick by. In the harsh morning light everybody looks like a Boschian nightmare. Connor’s skin is the dull grey of a cadaver, and I can see holes in the dealer’s face covered with thick caked make-up. I imagine I look horrible too. My lips are cracked and I feel greasy and gross. Connor and Max’s plane takes off at noon.

  ‘Let’s just play a few hands until he gets back,’ suggests Connor hopefully.

  Connor labours under the delusion that he is better than me. He is wrong. Everybody is better than Connor. That, and his bankroll, makes him welcome at any game. I reluctantly sit down. Heads up is very volatile, and I am sleep deprived.

  ‘Might as well make it 500/1,000,’ says Connor casually. I recognise the hustler move, upping the stakes to accelerate action but as I said, I think I can beat him.

  ‘OK,’ I say in a tired little girl voice like I don’t know I am being manipulated.

  Twenty minutes later I have managed to extricate one hundred thousand dollars from Connor. The dealer is getting pissed. She flicks the cards out disdainfully. I ignore her. I am on my way back to getting even. I stack the chips in a business-like way, putting a hundred-dollar chip at every 10K interval.

  I barely hear the doorbell ring. Noah, who runs the game, had ordered some burgers. He wanders over to open the door, and suddenly all hell breaks loose. I hear yelling and things being broken. Then one of the girls screaming. I turn my head and see a mad scrambling
man in a ski mask hustling Noah in front of him, brandishing a gun. Noah is white but trying to maintain equilibrium. His hands are in the air in a placating manner.

  ‘There is no money here,’ he is saying. ‘We play on credit.’

  The intruder is having none of it.

  ‘On the floor!’ he screams harshly in a strange indecipherable accent.

  The girls hit the floor like they are used to it. The dealer, Connor, and I stare open-mouthed at this surreal scene. In our gambling haze we are unwilling to abandon our game. It’s only when he waves the gun wildly at us that we drop also. The girls’ purses are lined up on the coffee table, and as he riffles through them, he screams, ‘The safe! The safe!’ Obviously, he knows Noah’s claim of a cashless Utopia is not accurate. Then he discovers my pouch with the Aria chips, unzips it, stops, and slowly turns his head to look directly at me.

  I reel in shock. Under the ski mask I am staring at Binky’s puffy red-rimmed eyes. I suddenly realise why his accent sounded so strange. His native Brooklynese kept leaking through. He stands holding my chips and looking at me sadly for what seems like an eternity, and then he stuffs them in his pocket and starts to follow Noah out of the room.

  As he does there is a popping sound, and he jerks backwards in a grotesque stutter step. An explosion of blood, like a bright red firework, shoots out of his shoulder and hits one of Dan’s priceless paintings.

  Max has returned. He is naked from the waist down and raving like a lunatic.

  ‘I will kill you, motherfucker! That’s right! You come to my game and try to fuck with me! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!’

  And with each ‘fuck you’ there is a pop, pop, pop, and holes appear in Dan’s paintings. Apparently there is a silencer on his gun. Aside from the initial contact he totally misses. He is a terrible shot. Binky starts crying like a baby and runs out the door holding his shoulder, as Max chases him.

  ‘That’s right, you motherfucker, you pussy, you snivelling coward! Get the fuck out of here!’

  Dan and two half-dressed girls appear as he re-enters.

  ‘What’s going on?’ says Dan. The girls hide behind him in exaggerated damsel-in-distress mode. Max ignores him. He runs to the kitchen, and dumps out the silverware drawer. Grabbing a spatula he drops to the floor and starts frenziedly trying to scrape the red stain off the red carpet. It is not a pleasant sight. I can see his balls swinging frantically below his butt as he works.

  ‘We’ve got this motherfucker’s DNA!’ he screams triumphantly. ‘We’re gonna track him down and put him away!’

  Dan wanders out to close the open gate, and the girls cling to each other and cry prettily, enjoying the drama.

  Of course, nothing comes of it. Dan is running an illegal game, and does not have a permit for his gun. They can’t report it. Aside from my 131K in Aria chips, nothing much was taken. The girls didn’t have much money on them, and Max started shooting before Noah managed to open the safe.

  The next time I showed up at Dan’s game, he had an iron gate and expensive and ostentatious security cameras surrounding the property. As for me, I couldn’t say to Binky, ‘Dude, I know it was you, give me back my chips.’ He would just deny it. Besides he knows where I live. Many times, he has dropped off checks at my property. Who knows what a desperate person is capable of. So even though I almost got even, I ended the night with a big loss.

  Through the poker grapevine I heard rumours that the mob Binky owed money to threw him down the stairs and dislocated his shoulder. I guess I’m the only one who knows that Binky was the intruder and what really happened to his shoulder. Then a month or so later I heard he tried to cash in my Aria chips, and when they asked where he got them, like the dumb lunk he is, he claimed someone gave them to him to pay off a debt. Of course, they were confiscated. It is illegal to use casino chips as currency.

  Anyway, that morning after the robbery, I drive home in a daze. It is almost noon. On Sunset Plaza I see girls just like me, meeting their friends for lunch or shopping, carrying Starbucks in little cardboard trays. They are normal girls, like I used to be. They are just starting their day, maybe they went for a hike or to Equinox earlier. Soon they will go to the office and type, or do whatever people do in offices these days. After work they will meet their friends for Happy Hour or go bowling or something. None of them stayed awake all night in a room full of hookers and blow, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars and getting shot at.

  *

  Bob is waiting up for me.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he says anxiously.

  He knows it’s a bad sign when I come home after the sun has come up. Now he just has to find out how bad. I always play down my losses to him. When he says, ‘Was it a bad night?’ I’ll just nod, and sometimes he’ll query casually, ‘How much did you lose, five thousand? Ten thousand? More . . . ?’

  And I’ll just say, ‘More.’ I don’t say ‘About one hundred thousand more.’ I don’t want to frighten the kiddies. To a civilian, ten thousand dollars is an obscene amount of money. Likewise, I can’t tell Bob I ran into Binky and he was wearing a ski mask, and Max shot him. I just say, ‘Rough night.’ And we leave it at that. Bob says, ‘I’ll make you some eggs,’ like that will fix everything. And even though he can’t take away the pain he somehow makes me feel better.

  I dreamt I saw my dad that night. I was heads up against the billionaire Andy Beal in a super-high-stakes game. I wasn’t properly rolled to play that big, but I had taken my last most precious diamond off my finger and put it in the middle. It was going to be OK. I was all in with the nut flush on an unpaired board. And Andy called and rolled the straight flush. Just like a bad James Bond movie.

  As my entire net worth, along with my last diamond, went cascading towards Andy I looked up and my dad was standing there smiling. A wave of happiness rolled over me. I felt like we were sharing something infinitesimally special. ‘Isn’t it fantastic?’ he whispered like he was in church. His eyes were shining. ‘Poker is a fucking fantastic game!’

  Good Luck, Everyone

  by James McManus

  Twenty minutes after the dinner break I’m quietly belching iced tea and chorizo, nursing an above-average stack of 985,000. Feels good. My stack has been yo-yoing since this time last night, though I’ve won more big pots than I’ve lost. It’s Day 2, Level 26, with blinds of twenty thousand and forty thousand, and five thousand-chip antes. I peek between my knuckles at the eight and six of hearts, flick them back to the dealer. I’m waiting for decent pairs or big aces to raise with, not splashing into every damn pot, trying to out-flop or out-play folks with drawing hands. My opponents all know this, and I know that they know that I know it.

  This is the third table I’ve been high-carded to since the 1 p.m. restart. It’s neither soft nor especially terrifying. Five pros in their twenties or thirties, a nervous orthodontist who licks his upper lip before check-raising, and three tight but experienced geezers: me, a Brit with a short stack to go with his posh Oxbridge accent, and a good old Oklahoma boy on my left. The pros, with their big beards and logos and watches, all seem plenty tough, though there’s no Fedor Holz or Jason Mercier four-betting eight-seven suited. Not that these guys are incapable of such moves, but they aren’t relentless about it. At least not gulp so far.

  The kid in the Run It Once hoodie raises to 95,000 from early position and gets a call – not a shove? – from the Brit on the button, so I’m happy to call in the big blind with sevens. On a flop of 9-A-Q with two diamonds, the kid continues for 185. The Brit looks tempted to shove the 425 he has left, but after ten or twelve seconds he folds with a sigh and a wince. I just fold.

  I pull my own hoodie higher up on my neck. This part of the Amazon Room is breezy, with highs in the low to mid sixties, as the Rio’s AC overcompensates for the Mojave, where it’s still in triple digits, plus all of us humans radiating 98.6. I started the day in Brasilia, where short sleeves were in order, but you always have to pack a sweatshirt or fleece for these even
ts, to be ready for what can be a fifteen-degree difference between Brasilia and the briskest corners of Pavilion or Amazon. A plastic sign hangs from the lamp above each table, and ours, Purple 422, isn’t the only one swaying in the zephyrs. The good news, the best news, is that while this might not be the final table, it is the final room. Only ninety of us are left of the 7,213 who bought in one or two days ago for $1,500. The money bubble popped a few hours ago, so even if I get busted next hand I’m good for $8,860, my first non-mincash in a couple of summers, not that it’s all that colossal. The last nine survivors will slug it out tomorrow in the Thunder Dome, the brightly lit arena on the other side of this cavernous room, where an Omaha eight-or-better final table is down to four players. The families and friends whoop and holler whenever their boy scoops a pot. Once they calm down again, pretty much all you can hear is the clicking of hundreds of thousands of chips in the rafters and shadows above us. There’s no place on earth I’d rather be.

  With a raise and a call to me on the button, I reluctantly fold the J-9 of spades. No doubt that’s way, way too tight, unless you’re committed to surviving at least two more pay jumps. It sure ain’t the best way to win a tournament, but the difference between $8,860 and the $12,370 I’d earn by outlasting nineteen more players is roughly the difference between a family vacation next month in the Rockies or, say, Wisconsin. I admit the seven grand I husbanded for the Series could’ve simply paid for Jackson Hole, Yellowstone, the Beartooth Highway, maybe even Glacier, but I really didn’t want to break my streak. Since finishing fifth in the 2000 Main Event, I’ve played at least three bracelet events every year. I’ve already broken my vow to never skip the Main, which provided 247K and the material for the Harper’s cover story and Positively Fifth Street, which led to other good things. But when that single event started requiring eight days by itself, on top of the two you spent flying, scheduling our family vacations got harder and harder in the shrinking gaps between recitals, soccer and softball seasons, trips our daughters took with their friends, ACT prep, and my poker – and I could still get knocked out on Day 1. (Getting broke in the second hand of ’09, with queens full losing to quad treys, was particularly inconvenient.) Now I come out in early June, when the two younger ones are still in school. In the same eight days, with the same 10K bankroll or less, I can play half a dozen three-day events and be home in time to hit a few places my girls want to see.