This afternoon I sent them all a picture of a brindled bomb-sniffing pit bull, a near dead ringer for our Jessie, except for its tactical vest. Jennifer gave it her big-kiss bitmoji: MUAH! Grace texted, Awww bring her home this very instant! Bea wondered, Soft serve butterscotch on the poker room carpet?
Folding K-10 to a raise, I wish there were more dogs in vests. We’re in a venue, after all, with thousands of mostly jihadi-age men, with backpacks that haven’t been checked or passed through a metal detector, let alone an EDS machine. The ceiling cams would ID them, but not before it’s too late. Pressure cookers, TATP, AR-15s broken down to fit in a North Face . . . What target represents decadent capitalism better than the World Series of Poker?
Bea will be in London for the fall trimester, which will run us a few extra grand and plenty more sleepless nights. Bridget, our oldest, is building her nanny-placement business and can always use a C-note or three for a phone or an ad. We’re lucky their kid sister, Grace, makes enough babysitting to pay for Lollapalooza and thirty other concerts, and her last two years at New Trier will be covered by property taxes. When we had three of them in public schools, the taxes were never the knee in the balls they’ll become when Grace graduates. We’ll have to move to a way cheaper town, even if Jennifer’s teaching job is two blocks from where we live now. So maybe I should play more suited connectors, since first prize would solve in one stroke what we only half-facetiously refer to as our housing crisis. We lived in a modest ranch before Fifth Street but moved into a three-storey brick in ’04. Assuming it would be the first of a string of bestsellers, we took on a bad mortgage, trading a jumbo for an interest-only Mutombo. That and the taxes come to $8,278 a month. When I turn sixty-six in March, I’ll be old enough to retire, but I can’t even consider it before I’m seventy-one, when Grace gets out of college.
I open for 100 with eights. The orthodontist lick-calls, and handsome Jake Donellan squeezes to 345. As I think about whether to smooth-call, there’s a thrum at the back of my throat, the kind that often blooms into angina. Not now, for Christ’s sake! But here it comes anyway, the dull throb beneath my sternum, not painful enough to scare me, but enough to make me not want to play for what could be the rest of my stack. So I fold, though it kills me to reinforce a principle Jake was already committed to: three-bet tight old men every time. It even says as much in raised red and white stitching on the sleeve of his navy blue hoodie.
Angina hits me maybe six times a year, but it usually fades after five or ten minutes. When I first described the attacks to Matthew Lee, my cocky but smart cardiologist, he put me through a stress echocardiogram, about as much fun as slogging up Kilimanjaro with a noose around your neck. The verdict was ‘stable angina’, for which he wrote me a scrip for nitroglycerine.
I unzip my backpack’s top pocket for the bottle of .4mg tabs. Pinching the little white pill, I pretend to scratch my nose while slipping it under my tongue. The bitter sting means it’s working. When I get home, I’ll ask Lee for the spray, which works faster, or the patch, which delivers a continual dose. You can also take it as a suppository, I think, if you really want to ruin your table image.
The clanging headache also tells you it’s working, as the pain basically leaps from your chest to your forehead, where it feels way less life-threatening. After making sure they’re not kings or aces, I fold seven hands in a row, since I might not be able to handle the stress if a big pot develops and I’m facing a staredown with less than the nuts. I finally raise to 110 with the A-Q of clubs. Tulsa seems happy to call, and we stare at the 2-K-A flop.
Lee has been on at me to lower my BMI and LDL cholesterol, and he’s got me on Tricor, fish oil, and aspirin. The stress echo showed no ischemia or arrhythmia, only some mild regurgitation of the mitral valve and trivial regurgitation of the aortic valves. I’d never been happier to be deemed mild and trivial. But another thing I need to discuss with him is that you’re not supposed to suck nitro after popping Viagra, though that’s when you’re most likely to need it.
‘Your action, Jim,’ says Buz, the new dealer.
I bet 195. Tulsa groans and goes into the tank, cutting out raising chips, but eventually mucks. I exhale and pull in the pot. Inhale. Stack some chips. Breathe.
*
By 9.45 the angina and headache have both disappeared, maybe because I’m up to 1,535,000, over half of it from busting the Run It Once pro, whose A-K got out-raced by my queens.
Tulsa’s third postprandial Corona has just been delivered. And to go with his OU windbreaker, he has donned a red Make America Great Again hat.
‘Change my dang luck,’ he said, pulling it out after losing a pair of small pots. It’s a foppy little number, not rounded like a ball cap but rising like a suspension bridge to a peak, with a matching scarlet braid across the bill. First one I’ve seen from this close. When you teach at an art school and live on the North Shore, you can go weeks without seeing a Trump supporter, at least not one willing to sport the regalia in public. Part of the beauty of the Series is that it brings together folks of every political stripe, income and education level, from every state and free-market country. Much more like real life than academia is, no doubt about that.
Tulsa meanwhile has called the Brit’s all-in shove with A-K. With a sigh, the Brit rolls over A-Q and stands up. When Buz puts a queen and a king on the flop, Tulsa thunder-claps his hands and yells, ‘Have some!’ The turn is a blank, but a second queen spikes on the river. ‘Freakin’ kiddin’ me?’ he asks Buz, who’s busy counting down the Brit’s stack, before taking 315,000 from Tulsa’s.
‘I folded a queen,’ says Jake. Rubbing it in, or the truth? Maybe both.
‘Really well played,’ Tulsa drawls sotto voce, as if he or anyone else wouldn’t shove seven bigs with A-Q. ‘Hits a fuckin’ one-outer on me?’
‘Must’ve been the lucky hat,’ says the Brit, who is back in his chair now, restacking. A fair rejoinder to the sarcasm. Then: ‘Your man is a pathogen.’
‘You mean Mr Trump?’
‘Indeed,’ says the Brit, breaking the unwritten rule that the poker table, especially when playing for long money, isn’t the place to debate religion or politics.
‘This woman’s a pig, that one’s no longer a ten, says he wants to date his bleeding dough-tuh . . .’
‘What he said, all he meant, was blood was coming out of her eyes.’
‘On his very best day, he’s an insta-left swipe.’ This from Lan Nguyen, a young LA pro who replaced Run It Once in seat seven. ‘Loud, obese, looks like he’s having a stroke. I mean—’ She chuckles and hugs herself, shivering.
‘Man’s jest bein’ himself. What can I tell you?’
‘Too much banh bo at the Phat Phuc Noodle Bar,’ says Lan. She puffs out her cheeks, or at least makes them less concave.
‘And what’s with the piss-tinted Fauntleroy hairdo?’ asks the Brit.
‘Hey, chomp a brown pickle,’ says Tulsa. ‘Or try one a these.’ He pulls the wedge of lime from the mouth of his latest Corona, cocking his wrist as if to fire it across the table. A droplet of lime juice or beer zings my left cheek. ‘You limey blokes love these, I hear.’
‘He likes people who weren’t captured,’ I say, against my better judgment. ‘He likes draft dodgers born into nine-figure fortunes.’
Attacked from all sides now, Tulsa turns and glares at me, though he must know throwing a punch gets you banned from the Rio.
‘Ain’t you the guy called down that crazy black dude with jack high?’
‘I am,’ I admit, relieved by how eager he sounds to change the subject. ‘Except it was queen high. His name was Ellix Powers. He died last September.’
Tulsa replaces the lime, pushing it down through the neck. After wiping his fingers on his jacket, he gathers his cards.
‘What’d he, OD or something?’
Finding kings between my knuckles, I raise to 110. Tulsa folds, but Lan and the orthodontist both call.
‘Heart attack,’ I say, trigg
ering a new burst of chest pain. I hope it’s just psychosomatic.
Tulsa has no response. Maybe he’s respecting that I’m in a hand, though I doubt it. When the flop comes queen high without any obvious draws, I bet 225. Both of them fold pretty quickly, thank God.
As I stack green and orange, the Brit says, ‘Will he take his forked tongue out of Putin’s mauve arsehole any time soon? Though we hear—’
‘Sounds like you’re all on the rag, like your pal Crooked Hillary.’
Lan laughs out loud at the notion.
‘Hot flashes, maybe.’
‘That’s a tell, right?’ says the Brit. ‘The Tom Thumb non sequitur?’
‘What’re you ’tards even talking about?’ says Tulsa. Taking a pull of Corona, he mumbles in the direction of Lan, ‘Nice little stack you got there.’
*
The table has chilled by the time the action kicks up to 25/50/5. The third hand dealt at this level gets folded to me, and with the A-J of spades I open from middle position for 135. Tulsa snap-calls. When no one else wants in on the pot odds, I have to wonder how many 2-7 off-suits there can be in this deck.
The flop comes A-6-5 with two baby spades. He expects me to continue, so with top pair, third kicker, and the nut flush draw I’m tempted to cross him up. Before I can act, though, he puts both meaty hands behind his five towers and leans into the cushion in a kind of drunk push-up, while making real sure his chips don’t budge even a millimetre forward. I decide to let him stay in this angle-shooting pose for a while. Comfortable like that? I sure hope so.
I used to wear sunglasses but got too many headaches straining to see the suits of the board cards, especially from seats at either end of the table. This year I’m wearing my 2013 Stanley Cup hat. The back two-thirds is mesh, so it’s cooler and lighter than the other two Cup hats. When Tulsa turns to look at me, I tilt the bill six degrees lower. He can’t see my eyes, while I can see everything from his greying red stubble to his hairy, sunburned mitts. Only when he finally leans back do I tap the felt once with one finger.
‘OK,’ he says, pushing out all his chips, about 650K, into a pot half that size.
OK, you’re crushed, or OK, I’ma bluff your lamestream-media-watching ass? He’s given me a terrible price to draw to the flush, and top pair ain’t likely to be good here – unless he’s drawing himself. I’m tempted to call just because I don’t like his attitude, though making it personal is one of the biggest mistakes you can make, especially deep in a tournament. If he’s got a bigger ace or two pair, I have twelve outs twice; if he’s flopped a fucking set, only nine. Not having seen him get out of line even once, I can’t really put him on a naked bluff, unless it’s payback for mocking his candidate. If I call and hit a spade I’ll have well over two million chips. If I lose, less than twenty big blinds. I’m good for $17,819, but I’d be out of the running for the really long money. My heart bangs and wobbles as I recheck my cards, hoping my tinsel memory made me forget I’ve got aces down there. No such luck. I also remind myself of all the times I’ve berated myself for playing too passively, that no one folds their way to a bracelet.
‘Clock,’ he says.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Clock.’
‘Fuck the clock,’ I tell him, before Buz can summon a floorman. ‘I call.’
Tulsa snaps down pocket sixes, making me a 3-1 dog. I’m in even worse shape when the turn is the trey of clubs, though my skittering pulse and imperfectly progressive bifocals made me see it at first as a spade. So that when the river is the spade trey, my heart almost clears a high hurdle, before it trips and collapses. Tulsa starts whooping it up.
‘Drawin’ dead and gettin’ there,’ he finally says, pulling the chips in.
‘Sure wasn’t dead when the money went in.’
He doesn’t seem to follow my drift, but he does have over 750K of my chips. An All-American Dave’s girl in a tank top and shorts arrives one table over with someone’s late dinner in a white paper bag, but I’m too rattled, too nauseated to watch her walk away with her tip. Down to sixteen bigs, I pretend to check my phone, as if everything’s still copacetic. The fist in my chest clenches tighter.
A new dealer, Tessa, settles into the chair, reaching for the lever to raise herself up a few inches. She spreads a fresh deck in a long face-up arc, making sure every card is where it should be, then flips them over like fifty-two acetate dominoes and washes them vigorously against the Uber logo. She shuffles four times, cuts fairly thin, burns the top card and starts pitching.
‘Good luck, everybody,’ she chirps.
Most of the table, me not included, says thank you, though we can’t all be lucky when the goal is to take everyone else’s last chip. Yet almost every dealer says this upon sitting down, leaving, or both.
‘Aw, Tessa’s jes’ bein’ nice,’ Tulsa flirts.
It’s a zero-sum contest, I think but don’t say. What we need isn’t good luck, but avoiding the bad kind. Heart attacks, second-best hands, Oklahomans.
‘Aren’t ya, doll?’ one continues, nothing if not persistent.
Tessa nods and keeps pitching, making her hazel eyes round for a beat, already tired of us. She starts me off with 2-6 for not saying thank you. And for the next five hands I don’t see a pair, or even a card above eight. At least folding’s easier on the cardiovascular system. Breathing carefully, avoiding stress, I manage to keep the discomfort at 5 or 6. I’m tempted to call a raise with Q-10, but not while in fold-or-shove mode. With only fourteen bigs, I’m shipping any pair, any ace, any king with a face or a ten. As I’m anted down further, my range will have to get wider, so c’mon, Tessa! The Royal and Ancient Gods of Randomocity know who will win my next race, but you’re the one burning and turning. And maybe she heard me, since she’s just pitched me nines. Here we go. After Lan calls my shove with A-K, Tessa puts a beautimous nine on the flop, along with an ace and a king. Lan is dead to four outs, but my scrotum and pulse are sure one will spike. The jack on the turn helps a little, but only the deuce on the river allows me to exhale. Thank you, Tessa.
More than anyone, of course, it’s the dealers who determine who wins these events. Not that poker skill isn’t a sizeable factor, but the difference in skill between the very best players and the rest of us isn’t quite big enough to overcome three days of rungood. The sample size is too small for the variance to flatten out. Over two or three years, the wizards get most of the dough, but not over three days. That’s why so many people buy into these things. If the top twenty pros kept taking them down, they’d be the only ones playing, for ever more minuscule prize money.
Three hands later, after calling a min-raise with the A-Q of hearts, I flop the nut flush draw, check, call an almost pot-sized bet on the flop, hit the third heart on the turn, and get it all in against a pierced, tatted kid who just moved here with a stack slightly smaller than mine. He shows me a king-high flush.
‘Nice hand, sir,’ he says, standing up. ‘Lotta hearts.’
‘Lotta hearts. Thanks. You got coolered.’
It takes over a minute to stack what turns out to be 1,995,000 in chips. I’m smoothing my towers of green when Tessa pitches me aces. My raise gets called by two shorter stacks. On the 3-A-8 rainbow flop it goes check, check, check, but they both shove into me on the turn – dead man’s hand for the orthodontist, set of treys for the Brit. When the river blanks off, the Brit mutters, ‘Let that be a lesson to ya,’ an old line of Devilfish Ulliott’s.
Jake and I laugh.
‘Ni han, sah,’ he says.
For decades I’ve watched dealers put out boards giving one player the nuts and one or two others strong enough hands to lose all their chips with, shipping them to the same unworthy luckbox again and again and again. In the last dozen hands, in four massive pots, I’ve been the luckbox. ’Bout time! The endorphin rush of sextupling up is harshed by the tingle running down my left arm. If I’m having a heart attack, could the timing be any more vicious? I mean, I almost have to laug
h. All these years itching for another shot at a bracelet and now I have to call 911? Lie in some chaotic ER while my stack gets blinded down to nothing? Though if it gets any harder to breathe, I’ll be lucky if it’s not the ICU. Or the morgue.
Twenty-one of us are playing seven-handed as Level 29 boosts the price of poker to 40/80/10. The buzz in my arm’s getting bad. Even worse, Tessa’s gone, though her replacement, Tim, has been kind enough to make me wait only a couple of hands before slinging me Big Slick.
Jake makes it 220, and the new guy in seat three smooth-calls, as do I, though a better move might’ve been shoving. After a flop of 9-6-7, all diamonds, I recheck my cards. (My worst range of memory is the last thirty seconds, though I remember some hands, down to the suit, from decades ago.) Neither of these is a diamond. But who says either New Guy or Jake has even a single big diamond?
After making it 500 straight, I feel like I’ve had seconds of Jennifer’s tagliatelle before running up six flights of stairs, as they both stare me down. I’m about to pass out when Jake folds. When New Guy folds too, I have over four million – four times more than I had as the chip leader late in the 2000 Main. After I won a huge pot by calling T. J.’s bet on the turn with no pair, just A-K, Slim Preston drawled, ‘That boy’s got the heart of a cliff-diver.’ All I need now is one that will keep beating till we bag up tonight. If I’m not feeling better by then, I’ll go get a shot of Thrombolyte, or have one of those balloons inserted through my groin, then try to get some sleep at the hospital and be ready to play in the Dome.
He Played for His Wife and Other Stories Page 5