Drawing Dead (29 page)

Damn. Waiting for the turn and river cards is going to take seven years off my life. I’m sweating up a flash flood. My heart is going to split open like a piece of firewood under the axe.

The turn is a King of hearts.

I get up. I shake my cramping hands. I give Spikey Mike a conspiratorial smile. He smiles back. He looks calm as a dentist.

I prepare myself for Doom.

The river’s the Jack of hearts.

I jump in the air. I stride over to Mike, give him my hand.

It was never in doubt, I say with a smile.

He nods his head. He’s taking it well. I admire the guy. He’d played a great game. I just hope for him he has the ten grand to buy in.

Half an hour later, I’m floating down the endless corridors to the Amazon Room.

All was right with the world.

O
N MY WAY TO THE
M
AIN
E
VENT
, I passed the IDEX Convention. The D stood for Dolls, apparently. I’d first noticed it when one of the Scooter People—a gargantuan woman draped in what looked like chintz upholstery—glided by me in the hallway. She had two dolls in the basket of the scooter and one cradled lovingly in her arms. The one in her arms was scarily realistic, too, small and perfect, like some manifestation of evil in a horror film.

According to the ten-foot-high sign in front of the convention room, you could get the IDEX 15th Anniversary Commemorative Doll for only $130. Apparently this was the Very Special LE300 Susie IDEX,
and she came with her own IDEX canvas bag and teddy bear.
Very Few Are Left!!
shouted the sign. Events at the 15th Anniversary IDEX Convention included Teddy Bear Jeopardy, and Sculpting Heads with Jack Johnston. Apparently Jack was an icon of the IDEX world, hosting a number of other seminars, including One-of-a-Kind Shoes. You could also enjoy a seminar entitled Sculpting a New-Born Baby with Maryanne Oldenburg, or The Pro’s [sic] and Con’s [sic] of Vinyl vs. Silicone, among other topics too enthralling to mention.

God Bless America.

I looked at my Main Event ticket. Table 147. Seat 5. Sighed. Here it began. Days of torture. If I was lucky enough to last more than a day. The starting field was more than eight thousand, way too many players to fit into a room even as big as the Amazon Room at the Rio. So they divided the field into four tranches of two thousand or so, to get it down to a manageable size. To survive Day One, I only had to outlast about twelve hundred players. Easier said than done.

At the beginning of any tournament, even more so the Main Event, everybody plays tight. Well, all the decent players play tight. There’s always a few maniacs around. Guys willing to bet their whole stack on pocket Tens on the first hand of the tournament. Sometimes they even win that hand. Get to play another one. But the tournament lasts for five long days. Thousands of hands. You’ve got to be lucky as hell just to get through Day One, playing like that. A few always do. You got eight thousand players. Maybe a couple hundred maniacs. The odds are pretty good a few of the maniacs will ride a rush to Day Two. Like Guatemala Steve, a five-foot guy with a fedora, a huge gambling habit and a taste for drugs to match. He was the chip leader deep into Day One a couple years ago, busted out around two in the morning when one of his mammoth bluffs finally got called and he failed to suck out with Seven, Three off suit.

Hey, he told me later, I’d been up three days playing poker by then.

Three fucking days? I said.

Sure, he said. Every time the blinds went up, I just doubled the Percodan.

Plus, the joint is packed with rich fish, guys who actually pony up the ten grand entry fee and have a gnat’s chance to cash. And a gazil-lion Internet qualifiers. Guys who got in for thirty bucks by beating a field of hundreds, or thousands, online. Either way, you’ve never seen
or heard of them. They could be good. They could suck. You don’t know. They could be tight, or loose. Passive or aggressive. You don’t know. So, unless you want to crap out early, the first two hours, four, six, of a five-day event, you’ve got to be cautious. Give it time. Figure them out. The problem is, all the other decent players are doing the same thing. Waiting. Folding. Watching. So it’s hard to get a read. And if you happen to get lucky enough to have a premium hand when one of the lunatics goes all in, you still have to fade his outs, avoid the bad beat, the suckout, the nasty five percent draw on the river. If you do, and you double up early, you can relax, stay patient, sit on your stack a bit.

Even if you’ve been patient, built up your stack a little, survived to later in the day, they move you to another table. You look around. Nine new faces. Nine new players to figure out. Shit. And if they’re not new faces, they’re Johnny Chan. ‘Jesus’ Ferguson. Phil Hellmuth. Professionals. World-class professionals. World Champions. Shit.

So you sit for hours. The first day lasts about sixteen. Hours. Some days are longer. Hours of boredom interspersed with occasional moments of terror, somebody said. Exactly right. And when you do get involved in a hand, after all those hours of fold, fold, fold, you’d better have all your poker skills humming. If you don’t, and you crap out, you’ll have a whole year to beat yourself up about it.

Poker is a game of incomplete information—you don’t know the other guys’ cards, and much of the skill, of course, is in using the information you do have to narrow the range of hands they can be holding. So you watch, watch, watch, assimilate and wait. There’s a hitch, though: too much information can cause mistakes, too. The thing of it is, sometimes your brain, having assimilated not only what’s been going on at this table, but what’s happened at every other table you’ve ever played at, subconsciously throws you a zinger. And you’ve got to recognize it when it does. If you don’t, you start overthinking the situation, thinking about all the information you’ve consciously acquired, you can make a big mistake.

My first year at the WSOP, I’d been watching a video about tells. One of the well-known tells is what’s called self-soothing behavior by the psych mob. Somebody’s stroking their fingers, rubbing their thighs. It means they’re nervous, worried. My opponent that day, two seats to my right, was a tight, fairly sophisticated player, a young guy who was pissing me off with his arrogant air. He was way too good-looking, for
one thing. I hate guys like that. He had the backwards baseball cap, the fancy chip-shuffling tricks. Made a point of telling everybody he’d never read a poker book.

So we’re halfway through the first day. I haven’t changed tables yet, so I’ve gotten to know the guys around me pretty well. I look down at Ace, Seven of hearts. I’m in late-middle position. The little snot is in the big blind. The table in general has been quite tight. I take a flier and call. The kid checks, so I get to see the flop cheap. It comes Ace, King, Jack, two diamonds. This is a very scary board. It gives me a pair of Aces. The kid may well have an Ace in the hole, too. He’s unlikely to have a King or Jack with it, though, or any other decent kicker, because he likely would have raised preflop with those hands. On the other hand, the board is full of straight and flush draws.

The kid bets half the pot. What does it mean? Well, he could be trying to steal the pot, or he’s got that weak Ace like mine.

But without thinking it through, I immediately decide he’s on a flush draw. Now, with the benefit of hindsight I could say that, maybe, he has a bit of an insecure expression on his face, but I’m not noticing that. My subconscious is simply screaming it at me: flush draw!

But of course I can’t be certain that he doesn’t have something else entirely: a better Ace, or an even better hand. Two pair, Kings and Jacks. My Ace, Seven is a donkey hand. You want to keep the pot small with a hand like that, not pump it up. So I just call. The turn is a rag, an inconsequential non-diamond. The kid flips a stack of chips into the middle of the felt, again about half the pot.

I have no reason to change my evaluation of his hand. Flush draw. He hasn’t hit it yet. I call again. The odds of a diamond hitting on the river are less than four to one, and if my opponent doesn’t hit it, I can take down a decent pot without a lot of risk.

The river, sadly, is the Two of diamonds.

The kid thinks for a while, checks.

And here’s where I mess it all up. I look at the little shit. I watch him for a while. His right index finger is, almost imperceptibly, rubbing his middle finger. He looks uncomfortable. And I start thinking. Maybe, I think, I was wrong. Maybe he has a pair of Aces, lousy kicker. Maybe he’s the one who’s afraid of the flush card on the river. Maybe his kicker is better than mine, and maybe, even if I don’t have the best hand, I can bet him off his hand by representing the flush.

So I throw in a big bet. Three-quarters of the pot.

The kid starts thinking, and I’m figuring, bingo, he’s got to think, I got him. Then, he shrugs, calls, and turns over … the Seven and Three of diamonds.

Ugly. So very ugly.

The fact was, you see, I’d had the situation read perfectly. But on the end, I allowed myself to become distracted by other information. But how do you tell the wrong information from the right information? Is your gut right, or your head? The answer to this one, like the answer to all poker questions is: it depends. In that hand, the right information was my subconscious read. The situation on the river was the distraction. It can easily be the other way around. So, it’s all about judgement. It’s about seeing what’s important, and ignoring the underbrush. The problem, of course, is that the underbrush often disguises itself. As, say, a giant redwood.

This year, I vowed, it would be different. And it started out well. Seemed like I had drawn a good table. There were no name players. There was an online qualifier kid—ridiculously young. He had the sweatshirt with the hood, the cargo shorts, the New Balance sneakers, the beginner’s goatee, the shades. In other words, he had the whole look down, except: the glasses had a big, gold D&G on the side. Dolce & Gabbana. Designer glasses! Blatantly designer glasses. I wanted to lean over to him, explain the situation. I decided against it.

A couple seats over was a Middle Eastern–looking guy, smooth and well dressed, who quickly established himself as a loose and tricky player—tricky in the bad sense: bad for him. After losing a few pots, he started backing down. He wasn’t going to last long. Next to him, a guy with a double chin big enough it could have been eight of them. He never cracked a smile or, as far as I can remember, played a hand. The guy to my left had greased-back hair, a widow’s peak, a jutting cleft chin, a big hook nose. He said he was writing a novel,
The Crucifixion of the Swan
. I didn’t want to know what it was about. He told me anyway. It was based on real events, he said. Something about an obscure Bolivian anarchist popular with teenage girls. I told him I’d be sure to pick up a copy.

There was one good player at the table, a sick-looking kid—so skinny and pale he could have been in advanced chemo, or maybe terminal anorexia. But he didn’t act like it. He was confident, energetic, aggressive.
He wasn’t hurt by the fact that twice in early hands he flopped a monster, a full house and then a straight, both times holding King, Jack. So he had a nice big stack to play with right away. I tried to stay out of his way.

I started out well. I played tight-aggressive. I picked some spots to steal smallish pots. I worked my way up to 13,500 chips, a third above the starting stack. The rest of the day went back and forth, nothing fancy either way. So when at the end of the day I’d not only survived but done a bit better than that, I was feeling pretty good. Solid. Safe. Middle of the pack. I looked around. Saw some guys with stone huge stacks. Eighty thousand. Ninety. I didn’t worry about them. They wouldn’t survive Day Two. The first-day chip leader had never won the World Series. There’s a reason for that.

Two aisles away I found Butch, finishing the last hand of the night. He had a respectable stack. Fifteen grand. Good. Score two out of three for The Outfit.

I thought about Brendan. He didn’t have it all together, at the best of times. All the hype, all the lead-up, made it worse. He didn’t have the temperament to do well in these long events. Too up and down. You had to be calm. Composed. Impervious. Able to take the bad beats and stay focused. Hunker down. Stay on message. Build up that small stack patiently, if you got small-stacked. Play good hands. Play them strong. The luck runs against you, so long as you’re still in the tournament, you live with it. You keep on keeping on. In the long run, you do that, you do okay.

You still had to get lucky a few times, though. In the right spots. And luck was something Brendan had never had. Not big luck. Not when it counted. Starting with being born to some awesomely odd parents. Of course, most of us could say that. But his were special that way. And when your life starts out unlucky, you tend to bring your own bad luck with you. Something to which Brendan was no stranger. His hyper-aggressive, take-no-prisoners style could build an awesome stack, when the cards fell his way. But then the cards always seem to start falling wrong. And that’s when you have to be able to adjust. Change your style to suit the different circumstances. And Brendan just couldn’t adjust. Or rather, his idea of adjusting was to get even more aggressive. Hope to get lucky again.

And as the sage once said: That don’t work, son.

Out in the hallway, I saw him holding court with his Russian buddies. He had a big smile for me.

Hey, he said. One-oh-five. You?

Are you kidding me? I said.

Nope. One-oh-five. You?

Thirteen.

Hah! he laughed.

Ya got me, I said. Today.

I know, I know. I took a few risks.

A few?

More than a few. But I’m looking good, man. I’m feeling it.

Great, buddy, I said. That’s great. Champagne time. Let’s get Butch.

Okay, he said, without enthusiasm.

He was enjoying his moment. Basking in his chip stack with the Russkie boys.

Meet us over at the Hang, I said.

Yeah, sure, he said.