Bellin - Poker nation: a high stakes, low-life adventure into the heart of a gambling country

The guy who invented gambling was bright, but the guy who invented chips was a genius.

B IG J ULIE ,
a New York City gambler

There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as pokerit is enough to make one ashamed of ones species.

M ARK T WAIN

In my years at various poker tables, I met lots of people, and heard lots of stories. None of the people I knew in those days could have expected me to write a book about my experiences. I have therefore given fictitious names to people I met while playing poker or whose stories were told to me by other players, and I have also disguised some people by changing inconsequential details about their stories. The names of the private poker clubs that I frequented in New York City and elsewhere have also been changed.

High card (no pair)
Pair
Two pair
Three of a kind
Straight
Flush
Full house
Four of a kind
Straight flush
Royal straight flush

I am an excellent poker player. If I had to be more specific, my guess would be that Im in the top .1 percentile in the world. Thats a fancy statistic if youre talking about SATs or something like archery, but when it comes to poker, it can create an enormous problem. With somewhere in the neighborhood of 135 million people across the planet who play the game, a little eighth-grade math will tell you that there are about 135,000 people shuffling cards at this very moment who are better than me.

A bigger problem is that three or four of those individuals are usually seated at my card table on any given night. My home club, the Winchesterwhere I have spent around three thousand hours playing over the past three yearsis in the heart of New York City, where poker is technically illegal. Thats kind of a sexy fact if you are one of those people who likes life a little dirty (which I do), but it also means that every individual in my club is the genuine article. There is no tourist/insurance salesman who just got lucky at the craps table wandering into my game like in Vegas or Atlantic City. Weve got no sheep who bet into your flush with a straight thinking their hand is the winner.

At those casino tables, Im a huge favorite to win. Almost any semiconscious human being is. An average casino game of Texas Holdem poker is played with nine or ten people. If youre in a $500 buy-in game, and youve got two sheep at the table, thats $1,000 for the other six or seven of us to chop up. I just made 22 percent on my money, and I havent even started to play. God bless America. But thats why my home club is so toughno sheep.

So why play there? There was a big-time Wild West gambler named Canada Bill Jones. Asked once why he voluntarily played in a small-town game he knew to be crooked, Bill replied, Because its the only game in town. Theres your answer.

The club is basically a low-rent glorified basement. On any given night you can find a hundred strippers, chiropractors, tax attorneys, and cabdrivers huddled around fifteen tables, stacking chips, shuffling cards, and watching sports. Some people even find time to eat their dinner there. Thats the worst partgrown men shoveling forkfuls of food into their mouths at a panicked pace, trying not to miss a hand. Three burritos in four minutes cant be good for the digestion.

A typical night at my club is unlike a typical night anywhere else. These people are true originals. As the old adage goes: The only thing stranger than a poker player is the person sitting next to him.

Jesus Christ, Morty! Deal the cards. Amy has no patience at a poker table. She is a beautiful, petite Filipino woman in her early forties who has a metabolism that could power the Vegas strip for two weeks straight. Shes always moving, always doing something, talking, smoking, shuffling, and when she does sit still, she has a look in her eyes like shes going to combust at any moment. Deal, or Ill cut your balls off! Like I said, shes got no patience.

Morty, on the other hand, has all the time in the world. Slow by nature, he goes through moments of total disorientation and detachment, as if the minute dust particle floating by his face has taken complete control of his consciousness. These episodes could last forever if it were not for the caring attention his fellow cardplayers give to him. From under the table comes a noise that sounds suspiciously like a switchblade knife opening. Amy leans toward Morty, her hands out of sight, and says very slowly and deliberately into his ear, Get the cards in the air, old man. Mortys back from the ethereal plane now. He deals.

Everybody thinks Mortya garmento from Manhattans Lower East Side in his late fiftiesis losing his mind. In poker, when you put somebody on a hand, that means youre making an assumption about what they are holding. I put that guy on two pair means thats what you think hes got. Most people at the club put Morty on the early stages of Alzheimers.

But I know whats really going on with him. Covered head to toe in silver American Indian jewelry, always well tanned from a week in Jamaica, Morty should be bronzed in the Natural History Museum as the last living semi-functional hippie. My readI put him on burnout. When that tiny dust particle carries him off into his private little world, hes not trying to remember his girlfriends name, or where he was born; hes back at Woodstock contemplating whether one or two hits of LSD is necessary to get him off just right for the upcoming Santana set. And remember this: Morty is a good cardplayer. He wouldnt be at the club if he wasnt. So most of the time, when hes daydreaming, hes doing it to piss everybody else off. Poker players play much worse when theyre pissed. Its called being on tilt. And Morty can tilt anybody. Thats his gift.