Card Sharks

by Liz Maverick

  Her hand automatically went up to fluff her hair before she remembered that real women probably didn’t fluff their hair for ESPN. Not that she was a religious viewer of the channel, but Marianne couldn’t remember ever seeing Venus or Annika fluff their hair for ESPN.

  Marianne looked over her shoulder into the stands. Bijoux stood up and flapped her arms madly just in case she hadn’t been spotted. It was absolute bedlam back there.

  Spectators sat in chairs or hung over the cords and railings separating them from the playing field. Globe lights hung from the rafters, along with security monitors and cameras. Closer inspection revealed that aside from the inherent excitement and glitz of the normal playing areas of the casino, the tournament itself had all the atmosphere of a low budget Hollywood film set. Cameramen and tournament officials scampered along the worn scarlet carpeting, dodging wastebaskets already overflowing with coffee cups, bottles, cans, and napkins and paper plates.

  It was almost impossible to believe that this was a sport with prize money of over $8 million.

  Marianne settled into her chair, slinging her purse over the back of it and trying to relax. A couple of players who knew each other from a prior tournament were reliving old times behind the back of a rumpled fellow wearing square prescription glasses and a green tracksuit who was delicately arranging his apparently lucky orange, fingernail-gored Johnny Chang–style, in the mouth of a shredded Styrofoam cup. The orange looked as though it had been lucky for some time now, and was beginning to develop a slight green fuzz along the rind.

  Looking around the table at her fellow competitors, she found much of the same, but with different accessories. Some people had MP3 players. Some wore sunglasses. Some fiddled with religious icons. There were stuffed animals, lucky charms, and grotesquely large medallion jewelry meant to intimidate.

  The room was filling to capacity with all of them. Men in floods, bad hairpieces, leather jackets. Men wearing T-shirts with poker puns splashed across them, suspenders, or ridiculous hats. There were men of all shapes and sizes, all ages, all persuasions.

  There were hardly any women. And there was nobody at all who looked like Marianne, done up specially for Vegas in some of Bijoux’s borrowed clothes. Conscious that she was attracting attention and not at all unhappy about it, Marianne set about looking busy and relaxed, which involved sliding her water bottle to and fro to find just the right out-of-the-way spot for it. All she’d really brought was the water, some moisturizing lip gloss, and her card cap, the small token she planned to use to designate her facedown cards still in play.

  A camera set up behind one end of the featured table suddenly swiveled in her direction. Marianne looked straight into the lens and flashed a brilliant smile. It swiveled away and she looked up at her friends. Bijoux raised a defiant fist into the air and nodded in a go-get-’em-girl way. Peter didn’t make eye contact; he was too busy scribbling wildly in his notebook.

  And then, a hush fell over the crowd. There was a flurry of activity during which any players still standing suddenly scrambled for their seats and the camera folk adjusted their headsets . . . and that was it.

  The game was on.

  The announcer reached for the microphone, and quite dramatically called out, “Dealers! Shuffle up and deal!” The Championship Event of the World Series of Poker began.

  Tonya Harding’s doppelgänger dealt the first round of cards, her face completely blank, her eyes nearly hidden by the green sweep of her plastic visor, and her roots unapologetic and quite visible against her dyed-blond hair.

  Marianne reached out to collect her two cards and noticed with disgust that her fingers were trembling from the adrenaline. She looked around the table at the nine men assembled there and began to use the old trick of imagining her fellow players naked, former champions and potential champions alike. Of course, poker being a sedentary sort of game, the image developing in her head of man-breasts and beer guts immediately started throwing her off her game, and she had to stop.

  Looking around to see how everyone else was doing it, Marianne mimicked a player across the table, scraping her face-down cards along the felt until the very last moment, when she bent her head down toward the table and curled up only the corners of the cards to see rank and suit.

  First hand, first day, her first World Series of Poker . . . a five and ten, off-suit. Aha! A little visit to what was known as “the five and dime.” Also known to Marianne as crap.

  She didn’t have any money committed as the small or the big blind. Obvious: fold and let the idiots shake out. Marianne mucked her cards and crossed her arms—no chips committed, no harm done.

  And with that, her game was on. Marianne released a deep breath. This wasn’t so hard. She watched the other players intently, noting how too many of them paid up to see the flop. No way they all had playworthy hands.

  The hand played out, revealing the truth of her suspicions. And just like that, Marianne’s nerves vanished. She really didn’t have to be in the group of players slinking out of the casino on day one. “It was a privilege just to play,” wasn’t going to cut it.

  Every competitive cell in her body was primed as the winner raked in his chips and the dealer dealt the next round.

  The guy on her left bounced his knee, sitting forward as if he couldn’t wait to play some cards. Marianne guessed he wouldn’t be patient enough and would be out before the day was up.

  The guy three seats to her right was apparently someone important. She stole glances at him, not wanting to make a spectacle of staring at him. The overly caffeinated guy on her left whispered into her ear, “Last year’s champion. They call him Texas Trouble.”

  Last year’s champion? Cripes. She looked over at the former champion once again and a cocky little smirk greeted her. She might have imagined it, but she could have sworn he was giving her a dismissive look. Possibly the you’re-a-female dismissive look.

  Watching her competition closely for any giveaways, Marianne stayed under the radar, tossing in her next few hands, just watching and biding her time. As the hands played out without her participation, she noticed a shift in the vibe of the table. The men were forgetting she was even there. The men were disregarding her potential, even as the chip stacks in front of everyone went from even to lopsided with her stack remaining at its original level.

  The gears of the tournament had begun to turn within minutes of the start. The rich were already becoming richer, the poor were already betting themselves right out of the game, and Marianne was exactly the same, watching, learning, studying . . . and waiting.

  At last the big blind came around the table. Marianne paid up and ended up scoring a pocket pair for the first time all morning. Too bad it was a middle pair. Sevens. Across the table, a college-age kid wearing his baseball cap on backwards raised the pot, and when the betting came around to Marianne, she called; her sevens were a bit of a borderline hand, but worth seeing a flop for under the circumstances.

  The flop came with a jumble of suits. Ace . . . five . . . seven! The third seven gave Marianne the set she had been fantasizing about, and it was all she could do not to reveal her excitement. And besides, there were still more than a few ways she could lose. A couple of different straights could be built around the community cards, and if anyone had a pair of pocket aces, their set would clearly annihilate hers.

  The thing to do was play it slow, for now, and hopefully trap him on Fourth Street. The kid bet, and Marianne just called even though the potential of those sevens made her almost giddy enough to raise.

  She checked, hoping he would bet and raise her. But he didn’t; the kid checked behind her and Marianne knew he must be holding weak cards. If she didn’t get too greedy, she could still take some extra chips from him on the river.

  A ten on the river, a modest bet from Marianne, and a kid falling prey to decent pot odds. Nice.

  Her heart pounding, Marianne flipped her cards over as the kid did the same, and smiled when they revealed she was the wi
nner. Scooping a pile of chips toward her from the center of the table felt amazing. Winning a pot at tournament was like mainlining adrenaline, and she had to suppress the urge to jump up from her chair, shriek like a banshee, call in the cameras for a booty-dance close-up, and order up an umbrella cocktail. Instead she said, “Oh, my!” Then she giggled and began arranging her chips, quickly fading herself back into the background as the idiots around her continued to shake themselves out.

  The possibility of surviving day one became very real in Marianne’s mind. Her focus tightened. Her world became the table. Four hours into the tournament, two players from their table had played themselves out, and Marianne’s slowly but consistently rising stack was beginning to attract attention.

  In fact, it was beginning to attract a certain amount of ire from Texas Trouble, who seemed unclear on the concept of women playing poker. Her success seemed personally offensive to him. Every time she won a pot, he’d snort loudly and mutter something about “lady luck.”

  And as time wore on and Marianne’s eyes began to blur a bit, and her back began to ache and the probabilities she was tracking in her head began to swim with misplaced decimal points, the vibe of the game changed.

  Her early euphoria flagged as she realized that successfully navigating the tournament wasn’t going to be as easy as it first looked.

  The very real possibility of being drummed out of the tournament settled over the playing floor and a kind of collective tension began to spread throughout the room.

  As far as Marianne could tell, those players who weren’t trying to win the poker championship were apparently making a play for the championship of being annoying.

  Habits that were annoying in strangers for short periods of time (i.e., waiting for your “just a regular venti coffee, room for milk” behind all those fucking caramel-drizzled extra-shot coconut-mocha frappuccinos with “just an extra crumble of graham cracker on top if you don’t mind” that took ten minutes apiece to make, sitting in the movie theater just as the lights dim and the U.N. representatives from the Amazon run in and sit down in front of you, etc.) took on new and excruciating levels of insidiousness, threatening to distract the weak and unprepared from their game.

  Those in the know used headphones, tuning out the small talk and focusing on their personal game. But Marianne and anyone who’d never played a floor tournament before had to contend with the humming and intentional distraction in the form of loaded questions, leading questions, stupid questions, and the even more stupid rhetorical questions. There were noises that didn’t sound accidental and smells that didn’t smell coincidental.

  There were a host of methodologies employed for the apparent purpose of getting an opponent to reveal something about his hand or strategy or even just to get you so pissed off that it rendered you unable to play with your customary logic due to being so overwhelmingly consumed by thoughts of revenge.

  Marianne was beginning to find herself falling into the trap of the latter.

  For the last hour, last year’s champion had decided that he would offend Marianne out of the game. Apparently gross misogyny was a key component of his poker playing strategy which involved insulting Marianne to the point of becoming so flustered that she’d just turn and “run like a girl” or so consumed with vengeance that she’d make a fatal error in the course of trying to drum him out of the game.

  Seeing as how he was the short stack, not she, Marianne felt confident in her ability to both extract vengeance and survive to play another day. It was just going to take a little patience.

  The small blind this time, Marianne pushed the required chips into the center of the table and waited for her cards. She’d scored a pair of pocket queens, not a slam dunk, for sure, but an excellent hand to trap with from the small blind, especially since she already had an investment on the table.

  Unfortunately for herself and the green-tracksuit guy who’d already been committed by default due to the big blind, Texas Trouble went all-in.

  Marianne inwardly sighed. He could have anything. He was short-stacked as it was, so he might not have waited for one of the top hands, fearing he’d bleed out with the blinds. But he could have scored something big, a king/king, ace/ace, or ‘Big Slick,’ ace/king. The amount of chips he had going all-in would have taken a sizable chunk out of her stash, and she just wasn’t sure she wanted to risk it right now, with this particular player who seemed so intent on screwing her out of the game.

  Next to her, she could sense the green-tracksuit guy going through the same thought processes.

  “Tell you what,” Texas Trouble said. “Give me this one and I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. Give you a little insight into the mind of a champion.”

  Marianne glanced over at Green Tracksuit, who wiped his sweaty forehead with his sleeve. She wasn’t planning to go for it, so she might as well get insight, though she’d be revealing she threw away a pretty powerful hand. But if it did turn out to be a stupid reveal, she figured she could just chalk it up to the stupid-female stereotype that she planned to blow out of the water later down the road.

  She nodded, Green Tracksuit nodded, and the two of them went out, revealing her queens and Green Tracksuit’s suited nine and five. Texas Trouble shrugged, a sly little grin plastering his face, and revealed a pair of jacks.

  That could have been the end of it. Marianne was hating the guy, really hating him, but he’d beaten her fair and square, with a nice psychological fake-out tossed in there to boot. But he made the mistake of pointing at her instead of the queens he was referencing and drawled, “Nice pair of tits!”

  Someone had the courtesy to actually gasp in horror, and then the table fell silent and all eyes shifted to Marianne. She moistened her lips and smiled, pointing at Green Tracksuit’s cards. “Speaking of which,” she said, “we have a Dolly Parton on the table, working nine to five. Did you know that the first cloned mammal was a sheep named ‘Dolly’ in honor of Dolly Parton, because it was cloned from a mammary cell?”

  Nobody said a word. And then from the bowels of the table over there, out of Texas Trouble’s sinus came a disdainful short.

  Something in Marianne snapped. Perhaps it was the mounting tension in the room, the exhaustion from focusing on the cards for so many consecutive hours. Maybe it was the fact that she desperately had to pee or the reality that the empty spots around the table used to belong to people who’d lost the right to play the game.

  Whatever it was, Marianne just looked over at Texas Trouble. She called his snort, raising it with a slightly daffy, oh-so-calculated girlish giggle, and kept the following thought to herself:

  I am so going to eviscerate you.

  chapter eleven

  A few hours into the tournament, Bijoux left an enthralled Peter and slipped out of the mob, beelined for the casino lobby, and asked the doorman to hail her a cab. One pulled up immediately and emptied itself of the tournament curious, no doubt.

  Ditching the tournament after Marianne dumped a pair of queens and shot what Bijoux recognized as a death stare on that Texas champion guy’s face was no problem at all. Marianne was fixated on the tournament, Peter was fixated on the tournament, and Bijoux had, of course, prepared for the possibility of becoming terminally bored watching poker by wearing her bathing suit under her clothes.

  In the backseat of the cab, she threw her shoes into the tote bag she’d lugged down with her and swapped them for more pool-appropriate designer sandals. By the time she’d touched up her makeup, she’d arrived at Caesar’s casino and looked the part.

  She paid the taxi, stepped into Caesar’s sumptuous lobby, and began bribing the appropriate nubile young man for a pass to VIP poolside treatment.

  She meant to be a good supporter. She’d stuck in there at the tournament for hours, straining to catch a glimpse of Marianne the entire time.

  But the video screens mounted on the ceiling were too small and didn’t have a special one just to feature Marianne, which Bijoux couldn’t unders
tand at all, given that she was the cutest player out there and undoubtedly one of the most interesting to watch.

  The nubile young Roman escorted Bijoux to the pool area. Bijoux pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and slipped it into the hand that he raised to his lips.

  She strutted out to the pool, choosing a lounge chair and accepting a snowy-white towel from a toga-clad cart jockey.

  Well, who could blame her for being anxious? Marianne might be putting her time to good use making money, but Bijoux wasn’t accomplishing a thing. The men squashing into her from all sides at the tournament clearly weren’t of interest, and obviously she couldn’t make money gambling if she were sitting on her ass all day watching Marianne do it.

  Bijoux settled and looked around. This was more like it. This had potential.

  Bijoux had picked the pools at Caesar’s over the other casino pools for a reason. Mandalay Bay had a wave pool, sure. But what the hell did Bijoux want with a wave pool? Wave pools attracted kids, and the last thing she wanted was to put herself in a situation with a bunch of married folk and their sticky progeny.

  At Caesar’s, with the white, white of the Roman columns and the blue, blue of the water in the pool, she could actually start to imagine herself in a place of peacefulness.

  A waitress approached in full sassy toga-themed getup and handed her a menu.

  “First, a cocktail. Let’s see . . . is this a new menu? I think it’s changed since the last time I was here. Well . . . I’ll have an Aphrodite’s Kiss, please. And just a snack . . . just a snack . . . yes, I’ll have a side of the fried cheese balls.”

  “The Kiss and David’s Balls. I’ll have that out to you shortly.”

  She reached back and managed to raise her lounge chair up a bit, then began to work her low-digit sunblock into her skin. She frowned as she reached her feet; tiny little chips appeared along the very tips of her toenails. A polish change was in her future. She could go up to the spa and maybe get a massage and some Jacuzzi time first.