The noble hustle Poker, beef jerky and death

Review by New York Times Review

ART IS THE DELIBERATE transformed by the accidental. If you're a writer, you brew a pot of coffee, adjust the lights, go over your notes and get started, though you know that something - a phone call, a memory, a random image - is likely to barge in and change everything. Instead of "art," of course, you could say "science," "making gumbo" and even "romance": You show up at Veronica's apartment with your hair slicked back and a bouquet in your hand, and who answers the door? Betty. But nothing dramatizes this collision between the deliberate and the accidental better than gambling. Walk into any casino in the world, and you'll find people who have traveled great distances to wager anything from a quarter to their life savings on a pair of tumbling dice, a ball that falls into one numbered slot and not another, the flip of a card that could mean the rest of their days will be dancey and electric or carpeted with the black mold of despair. For that reason, all gambling movies are good - not the ones that simply use Las Vegas or Atlantic City as a backdrop, but character-driven films like "The Hustler," "The Cincinnati Kid" and arguably the best of them all, "The Gambler," in which handsome, doomed James Caan plays a risk-addicted college professor who lectures on Dostoyevsky by day and wins (or loses) huge amounts of money by night. Each of these stories is headed toward a single effervescent moment where we learn one of life's most terrible truths, which is that winning is never enough. At last you have "the awful knowledge that you did what you set out to do," the novelist and essayist Colson Whitehead says in "The Noble Hustle," and "you would never, ever top it. It was gone the instant you put your hands on it. It was gambling." Of these two books, Whitehead's does a better job of taking us inside the game. Whereas the poet Brooks Haxton writes about his son's career as a poker player in "Fading Hearts on the River," Whitehead goes to the table himself, and like a reporter on the front line of battle, he files stories as the action heats up. When a magazine editor asks him if he'd like to cover the World Series of Poker, he suddenly finds himself in a high-stakes competition. "I'd never been much of an athlete," he writes, "due to a physical condition I'd had since birth (unathleticism)." So he does what any smart person would do: He reads a book on the subject, or several, actually, since, as he notes, Dan Harrington's books on strategy are to poker players what Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" is to investment bankers. The thing is, all the other players have read Harrington as well: "You knew what they were up to and vice versa." So he assembles a team, including a coach named Helen Ellis, a wonderful minor character here with a "bob of black hair" and a strong Alabama accent who has been a professional card player for years and who, when asked by other gamblers what she does for a living, says, "Housewife." They take to each other instantly. Whitehead thinks "it'd be like one of those racial harmony movies I never go to see . . . where a Southern white lady instructs a weirdo black guy in how to use a fork." Ellis has better lessons than that, the main one being that other players are going to underestimate him because he dresses like a dandy ("dreads and threads," as Whitehead puts it), so they'll come after him, and he'll have to wait for the chance to take advantage of them. As I understand it, this is a little like samurai sword fighting, where the idea isn't to win so much as it is not to lose, because when you try to win, you rush in heedlessly and make all kinds of mistakes, whereas when you try not to lose, you take your time and wait for your enemy to screw up so you can exploit his error, presuming your opponent is unselfish enough to be heedless and error-prone. Guided by Ellis, Whitehead does exactly that, and it's why he wins - well, until he doesn't. Haxton's book focuses on his son, Isaac, who takes time off from computer science studies at Brown to become a professional poker player. That goddess of retribution the old Greeks called Nemesis lurks in the back of every gambling house, searching for the prideful, and sooner or later she gets everybody. Though Isaac does very well at the tables, he runs into a problem on Jan. 14, 2007, when he deposits $800,000 in Neteller, a sort of "e-wallet" that mainly handles online gambling funds. He means to transfer his money to a brick-and-mortar bank the next day but wakes to find that the Justice Department, charging Neteller with facilitating illegal gambling, has just closed the company to American users and frozen American accounts. Worse, the I.R.S. expects him to pay income tax on his earnings with money he can't get his hands on. Eventually, Isaac gets his money back. All along, though, Haxton has watched his son become a different person. By teaching himself to lie, for example: Isaac discovers he is not deceptive enough when he is playing, so he begins to lie systematically about everything, from personal details right down to the weather, if he thinks he can get away with it. And therein lies the appeal of both books. Neither will show you how to draw that one card you need to fill an inside straight flush. But each uses poker to expand our sense of how human beings work. And each author deals differently: Whereas Haxton is prone to bighearted musings, Whitehead drops a one-liner on almost every page, as when he points out that a poker player looking at a busted hand is like a guy pining over a woman who isn't interested in him, because both "gamblers and the lovesick want to bend reality." He also has a top-shelf talent for swearing, meaning that many of his bons mots are unprintable; I laughed hard at the word his Word-a-Day calendar got stuck on for weeks. Oh, and about the snack food featured so prominently in Whitehead's subtitle: You don't want to get in the buffet line when the cards are falling your way, so to a player on a streak, "beef jerky was synonymous with freedom." It's a universal truth, Haxton says, that you should look around the table, and if you can't find the mark, you are the mark. I was always the mark. In the nickel games I played in college and grad school, I figured the player who smiled at his cards held three aces and the one who seemed on the verge of tears had a fistful of nothing. Neither of these books makes me want to return to those dismal days, though they remind me of the truest thing I know about being a human person: We play the cards we're dealt, we bring all the skill we can to the game, and not often, though often enough for us to keep coming back to the table, we get lucky. DAVID KIRBY teaches English at Florida State University.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 1, 2014]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* This is not one of those poker books about a gang of math whizzes from Harvard who go to Vegas and win a gazillion dollars. About those guys, Whitehead says, The part of the brain they used for cards, I used to keep meticulous account of my regrets. And, yet, Whitehead has some personality quirks that make him a decent poker player: I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside. A self-described citizen of the Republic of Anhedonia, whose residents are unable to experience pleasure, Whitehead, author of Zone One (2011) and other novels, agrees to enter the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas and see how far his half-dead poker face and a $10,000 stake can take him. Not very far, as it turns out, despite reading countless poker books and working with a coach and physical trainer. Yes, he learns a little, but in the end, people, as ever, are the problem. Specifically, those nine other people at the table, their weathered faces showing the underlying narrative of their decay. Yes, Whitehead's account may seem at first like just another sad story about a pair of Jacks, but it's really something very different, much sadder and much, much funnier. He calls his book Eat, Pray, Love for depressed shut-ins, and that pretty much says it, if you remember that the eating part is mostly about beef jerky and the praying is for aces. If you're looking for read-alikes, forget other poker books and pick up Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence (1998).--Ott, Bill Copyright 2014 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The eternal tension between good luck and remorseless odds animates this loose-limbed jaunt through the world of high-stakes poker. Novelist Whitehead (Zone One) was staked to a berth in the World Series of Poker by Grantland magazine, a mission for which he frankly declares himself unqualified, owing to his rather desultory pick-up games, haphazard training regimen featuring yoga lessons, deep and semi-baffled immersion in the arcana of poker-playing manuals, and bus trips to Atlantic City for seedy practice tournaments. His journey unfolds in a series of jazzy, jokey riffs on the cultural detritus of poker: the take-over of the game by young "Robotrons" honed by online gaming; Vegas's "Leisure-Industrial Complex," a terrain of soulful soullessness where "your true self is laid bare with all its hungers and flaws and grubby aspirations." Along the way, poker emerges as the national sport of "the Republic of Anhedonia," his habitually depressive, fatalistic State of mind that recognizes that "eventually, you will lose it all"-and that playing it safe is therefore the ultimate sucker's strategy. Whitehead serves up an engrossing mix of casual yet astute reportage and hang-dog philosophizing, showing us that, for all of poker's intricate calculations and shrewd stratagems, everything still hangs on the turn of a card. (May 6) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In 2011, Whiting Writers' Award-winning author Whitehead (Zone One) attended and participated in the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in Las Vegas as part of an assignment for Grantland magazine. There was just one problem: he had never before played in a casino tournament. Having only six weeks to prepare, the author began to hone his skills in the casinos of Atlantic City while trying to maintain some semblance of a home life. Hilarity ensued. Whitehead quickly developed a rhythm of dropping off and picking up his kid from school; riding the Greyhound bus to New Jersey with the "day-trippers, day-workers, and hollow-eyed freaks"; gambling; and then returning home to sleep. The author's satirical descriptions and observations of his days spent preparing, filled with playing cards, eating at artery-clogging all-you-can-eat buffets, and his interactions with the people who haunt the casinos there are only prolog for the grand finale of the Leisure-Industrial Complex (LIC) of Vegas. VERDICT Entertaining and absorbing, Whitehead's look at the subculture of gambling and casino tournaments will appeal even to nongambling readers. Also recommended for those who enjoy memoir. [See Prepub Alert, 12/7/13.]-Mark Manivong, Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Excerpted from the Hardcover edition I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside. My particular combo of slack features, negligible affect, and soulless gaze has helped my game ever since I started playing twenty years ago, when I was ignorant of pot odds and M-theory and four-betting, and it gave me a boost as I collected my trove of lore, game by game, hand by hand. It has not helped me human relationships-wise over the years, but surely I'm not alone here. Anyone whose peculiar mix of genetic material and formative experiences has resulted in a near-expressionless mask can relate. Nature giveth, taketh, etc. You make the best of the hand you're dealt. This thing draped over my skull and fastened by muscle is also a not-too-bad public-transportation face, a kind of wretched camouflage, which would come in handy on my trip to Atlantic City. Flash this mug and people don't mess with you on buses, and this day I was heading to training camp. I had six weeks to get in shape. I was being staked to play in the World Series of Poker for a magazine, and my regular game was a five-dollar buy-in where catching up with friends took precedence over pulverizing your opponents. There was no question about taking a bus. I'm of that subset of native New Yorkers who can't drive. Every spring, I made noises about getting my license and checked out the websites of local driving schools, which as a species embodied the most retrograde web design on the internet, real Galápagos stuff, replete with frenetic logos and fonts they don't make anymore, the HTML flourishes of the previous century. How could I give my money to a business with so incompetent a portal? My wife and I owned a car, and she drove us everywhere, which came to be a hassle. I used to joke that I was afraid of getting my license--that I was at a point in my life that the first time I got behind the wheel, I'd just keep driving. The first couple of times I made this joke, people laughed. Then maybe my delivery began to falter, there was a change in tone, and they'd look around nervously, peek over my shoulder for another person to talk to. My wife had the car now. We got divorced four days prior. I'd been looking forward to a descent into some primo degradation to start my trip, a little atmosphere to match my mood, but of course the Port Authority was cleaned up now, like the rest of the city. In the daytime, anyway. Across the street, the shining New York Times tower watched over the entryway, a beacon of truth and justice and Renzo Piano, and inside the terminal corridors the stores were scrubbed nightly, well-buffed, the reassuring and familiar places you've shopped at plenty. Duane Reade, Hudson News, the kiosks of big banks yet to fail. I could be anywhere, starting a journey to anyplace, a new life or a funeral. I rushed to make the 3:30 bus and thought I'd have to gulp down a hot dog from a street vendor--fearing a grim return of said frank hours later at the table--but had time to pick up an albacore tuna sandwich with dill, capers, and lemon mayo on marbled rye, plus an artisanal root cola, all for ten bucks across the street at Dean and DeLuca. Estimated Probability of Degradation: down 35 percent. I waited to board and saw I didn't need a public-transportation face. The other passengers queued up for AC were exfoliated and fit, heading down for Memorial Day fun, not the disreputable lot of Port Authority legend. Their weekend bags gave no indication that they contained their owners' sole possessions. Where have all the molesters gone, the weenie wagglers and chicken hawks? Whither the diddlers? The only shabby element I registered was the signage at the Greyhound and Peter Pan counters, still showcasing the dependable logos remembered from the bad trips of yore. Returning from a botched assignation or misguided attempt to reconnect with an old friend. Rumbling and put-putting to a scary relative's house in bleak winter as you peered out into the gray mush through green, trapezoid windows. Greyhounds were raised in deplorable puppy mills and drugged up for the racetrack, I think I read somewhere, and Peter Pan used to enter kids' bedrooms and entice them, so perhaps there is a core aspect to the bus industry that defies rebranding. The bus was state of the art, like it had wi-fi, and even though I sat two rows up from the lav I did not smell it. It was two and a half hours to AC, plenty of time for me to graze on my inadequacies. Poker eminence Doyle Brunson called Hold'em "the Cadillac of poker," and I was only qualified to steer a Segway. In one of the fiction-writing manuals, it says that there are only two stories: a hero goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. I don't know. This being life, and not literature, we'll have to make do with this: A middle-aged man, already bowing and half broken under his psychic burdens, decides to take on the stress of being one of the most unqualified players in the history of the Big Game. A hapless loser goes on a journey, a strange man comes to gamble. According to the two crew cuts in the row in front of me, the weekly pool party at their casino was killer, but I wasn't going to make it over there. I hit my poker book, cramming. "Big raises make big pots." "Before you enter a pot, think about who the likely flop bettor will be." The highway bored through miles of Jersey's old growth, as if the forests had been mowed down specifically for passage to our destination, a tunnel to the Land of Atrocious Odds, and then we broke off the expressway and the big gambling houses burst up, looming over the gray water. We passed the one- and two-story buildings of downtown Atlantic City--clapboard homes, broken chapels, purveyors of quick cash--that seemed washed up against the casinos like driftwood and soda bottles. Then we pulled into the Leisure Industrial Complex. Growing up in the city, I never went to a lot of malls, so I didn't have the psychological scars of my Midwestern friends, who cringed at the thought of all the adolescent afternoons spent mindlessly drifting across the buffed tile. I like the Leisure Industrial Complex when I can find it, those meticulously arranged consumer arenas. I don't care if it's a suburban galleria sucking the human plankton into itself from the exit ramps or a metro-area monolith stuffed with escalators to convey the herd to the multiple price-pointed retail outlets, food court stalls, and movie screens. Gimme a red-brick pedestrian mall reclaimed from urban blight and dolled up to commemorate some location of inflated historical import--I love those guys. There is the multiplicity of diversion, sure, but more important is that a sector of human endeavor is diligently trying to improve itself and succeeding spectacularly. Consumer theorists, commercial architects, scientists of demography are working hard to make the LIC better, more efficient, more perfect. They analyze the traffic patterns and microscopic eye movements of shoppers, the implications of rest room and water fountain placement, and disseminate their innovations for the universal good. Even if we fail ourselves in a thousand ways every day, we can depend on this one grace in our lives. We are in good hands. Anyone who's gambled in the past twenty years knows that casinos are high rollers in the LIC. The contemporary casino is more than a gambling destination; it's a multifarious pleasure enclosure intended to satisfy every member of the family unit. Reimagined as resorts, there's moderate-stakes blackjack for Dad, a sea-salt spa scrub for Mom, the cortex-agitating arcade for the youngsters--or the Men's Mani-Pedi Suite for Dad, Pai Gau Poker for Mom, and Highly Supervised Kidz Camp for the little ones (once you sign the liability waiver). A mall with living rooms. The concept of such a thing, to eat, drink, and play, and then dream inside its walls. No windows, for what sight could be more inspiring than your true self laid bare, with all its hungers and flaws and grubby aspirations. Stroll past the high-end shops with accented names, recognizable theme restaurants owned by TV chefs, indoor Big Tops, man-made wave pools, and find nourishment for any desire zipping through your brain. If there's a gap in perimeter through which an unfulfilled wish might escape, it will be plugged by your next trip. They even have bus depots. Some casinos are equipped with snap-on bus depots, an optional component for the base model. Like the Tropicana. Today's outpost of the LIC was the Tropicana, local franchise of the famous Vegas standby, where James Bond busted heads in Diamonds Are Forever. Methinks he did not arrive on Greyhound. You might escape if the bus didn't pull directly into the building itself, so the depot was a worthy investment. Some of the passengers stood and funneled to the door, causing a scandal. "Where is he going?" "They're not waiting for their bonus?" Meaning the twenty-dollar voucher they give you to play upstairs--it's worked out between Greyhound and the casino (they really want you to stay). For what kind of inhuman monster didn't wait for their bonus--it's free money. I jumped up and joined the apostates. I was vibrating with newly acquired poker knowledge and couldn't wait. The smell of ancient cigarette smoke and the mellow undertones of men's room disinfectant were an intoxicant. I checked in, chucked in some buffalo wings for fuel, and soon I was in the Tropicana Poker Room. I found my degradation. You can rubble the old Times Square and erect magnificent corporate towers, hose down Port Authority and clean under its fingernails, but you can't change people. I was among gamblers. I sat down at a $1/$2 table with types I would encounter with some frequency during my training. Like Big Mitch. Big Mitch is a potbellied endomorph in fabric-softened khaki shorts and polo shirt, a middle-aged white guy here with his wife, who was off dropping chips on the roulette felt according to her patented system. Fully equipped with a mortgage, a decent job, and disposable income. The segments of his thick metal watchband chick-chicked on his hairy wrist each time he entered the pot. Your average home player. What Big Mitch wants the most, apart from coming home to see that young Kaitlyn hasn't had a party and wrecked the house while they were away (she's really been acting out lately, but Pat says all girls go through that stage), is to brag to his home-game buddies and certain guys at the office of how much he won tonight, with a breakdown of a Really Big Hand or two. He will be less vocal about his failures, as we all are. Next to two Big Mitches was a Methy Mike, a harrowed man who had been tested in untold skirmishes, of which the poker table was only one. If Methy Mike had been hitched, the lady had packed her bags long ago, and if they had spawned, their parenting goals probably ended with making sure their kid didn't get a tattoo on her face, and they did not always succeed. Often locals, Methy Mikes are on a first-name basis with the bosses and dealers and cocktail waitresses, and you can count on hearing a little catching up. "Haven't seen you in a while." "I've been . . . had some stuff come up." So I see. Iggy Pop takes a look at these guys and says, "Wow, he's really let himself go." They are weathered by the sun, by their lifestyles, which you can only guess at, the underlying narrative of their decay, and resemble unfortunates who have been dragged on chains from the back of a beat-up van and left to desiccate in the desert, like one of the down-and-outers in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Undone by their hardwired inclinations and undying dream of a new start. "Can you help a fellow American who's down on his luck?" Luck--they believe in luck, its patterns, its unknowable rules. They will, seeing pocket Jacks demolish some weekend punter, tell the table, "Let me tell you a sad story about a pair a Jacks." A sad story for every hand, every one of the 1,326 possible starting combinations. And then there was Robotron, wedged in there, lean and wiry and hunkered down, a young man with sunglasses and earbuds, his hoodie cinched tight around his face like a school shooter or a bathroom loiterer. Weaned on internet play, Robotron is only here tonight because the Feds shut down all the U.S. online poker sites a month ago. Black Friday, something about money laundering. Here with the humans. Otherwise the Robotrons would be back in their childhood rooms, eight pixelated tables open on the screen; he can play eight games at once, zip zip. It's not so hard once you retrain those pathways in the brain, cramming decades of poker experience into eighteen months. Why leave the house at all, between the poker sites and the porn sites? What are other people for, but for robbing or fucking? (The goddamned Feds, breeding a new generation of libertarians in the subdivs.) Real people, talking, breathing, it must be so weird to them. Their earbuds help keep 'em out, playing music, self-help manuals, If I'm So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single? as read by Edward James Olmos, or the latest invasion plans transmitted from their home planet. There was one woman at the table, a quiet sixty-something lady with bright red hair, the follicles of which it was perhaps possible to count. Five percent of commercially available hair dyes actually match a color that occurs in nature. Hers was not one of them. I liked her. I will now take a moment to explain Hold'em to the lay reader, I don't mind. In my home games, I often assumed the mantle of the Explainer, laying out the rules for the newbies--the indulging girlfriend, the language poet in town for the weekend, and, maddeningly, people I had played with dozens of times before. I wrote the hand rankings on a little piece of paper for them to keep by their chips, reminded them it's "one or two or none from your hand, and three or four or five from the board." I stopped being so amenable once my kid started talking because I was explaining shit all the time now. "Daddy, why is the sky blue?" "Daddy, how do fish swim?" "Daddy, where shall I keep my secret fears of the world, and tend to them like my private garden?" Nowadays my poker neophytes are on their own. Excerpted from The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death by Colson Whitehead All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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