The Game Player

by Rafael Yglesias

  That explanation, Brian having a freaky streak of luck, captured everyone’s fear of the beating he was giving the table, and calmed them into resignation. If Brian’s cards looked good toward the end of a hand, and he was raising casually—with a silent, bored, and angry posture—everyone folded and his behavior, a quick, private tightening of the features as if in disappointment, seemed to justify their action. But instead of this happening once every two rounds, as in the past, it was happening two or three times a round, and Brian’s winnings mounted to over six hundred dollars with less than an hour to go. With the end in sight, and Josh having taken a ghastly thrashing all night, as he desperately tried to bluff hand after hand against Brian, and then against the other losers (the theory being that they were hurting too badly to stand up to him), some of the other players stayed with Brian to the end of hands that he looked strong on, and, sure enough, they caught him bluffing five times. Each time they did, it seemed impossible he had bet so strongly on the cards he had, and when the totals were in (Brian, up six hundred eighty-five; Don, up one hundred forty; me, up forty-seven; Josh, down five hundred eighteen; the others losing amounts between one hundred and two hundred dollars) there was a unanimity of opinion that Brian had been bluffing for most of the night. He smiled impishly when accused, but he denied the charge quickly, trying to control his grin, and that convinced everyone.

  In one night, he had established himself as a bluffer, in spite of twenty sessions of rigidly tight play. Josh had been hopelessly discombobulated by the few comments Brian directed at the others about his play. He had told us Josh bluffed flushes in three-sub, low hands in seven-stud, and liked to sandbag in three-sub when playing low. Indeed, the money I made that night was by calling Josh in those situations. I did so reluctantly, because I was accustomed to folding against Josh, but Brian’s casual remarks were confident and never repeated, as if he knew the information was too good to waste. And Josh seemed obsessed with proving he could still get away with doing it. He was to lose fifteen hundred dollars in three sessions before changing his style to a quiet, even bewildered, defensive posture.

  I hated to ask Brian anything about his maneuvers. I had vowed that his success at this game wouldn’t deteriorate my lead, and I think I did well that night by recognizing immediately that Brian’s sudden raising wasn’t a by-product of luck. But I had to know one thing and I knocked on his door early the next morning after Karen had left. He yelled come in and I squinted, on opening the door, at the harsh sunlight flooding his unshaded windows. His black hair glistened a reddish brown as he turned to face me. He was at his desk, poker hands laid out on the table before him. “Well, that’s appropriate,” I said sullenly. He looked at me with that face from almost ten years ago: the concentrated, distant face of a warrior in training. He watched me sit on his bed as if measuring my body weight. “I want to know, since you never called Josh on any of those bluffs until last night, and neither did anybody else, how you knew he did them?”

  “Howard,” he said, without sarcasm or irony or, indeed, any tone other than a sincerely factual one, “I believe, if my stats are right, that you’re winning two thousand, six hundred and twenty-seven dollars. I am only—”

  “Brian,” I started angrily, but then I laughed. “I have very little faith in the gap between our totals.”

  “I wasn’t being snotty,” he said, again in a straight tone of voice. “I meant, simply, that you must have known it as well, or you wouldn’t have been winning so much. You just never isolated it from your natural instincts into a statement.”

  “No, thank you, but I don’t think that’s right. I used to believe those bluffs of his. Anyway, I’d still like to know how you did.”

  He cleared his throat. “I think this is a bit premature. I haven’t proved that I deserve to lecture you. Okay,” he said, forestalling me from throwing something at him. “I don’t have good instincts like you. I have no feel for the way in which people’s personalities relate to their game playing.”

  “That’s rubbish! That’s exactly what you do have.”

  “Oh, no, Howard,” he said, his eyes wide with surprise. “Oh, God, no. I’m amazed you think that. I have to work very hard at establishing that correlation. Of course, once I know it, it becomes like an instinct, and I think I know how to use it a little better than you do. I’ve been dealing out hands here for—uh! it seems like centuries. But there is a real pattern, unmistakable, though complex, in the way cards fall, and if you play certain styles, certain hands repeat themselves more often, especially in a game like three-sub, where the player has a substantial chance to discard certain possibilities in favor of others.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” I said, as if I knew it, but it had never struck me before. “I get rid of high pairs and if I don’t develop a flush or a low quickly, I fold.”

  “Right. Exactly. I’ve observed that. And if I find you playing high when there’s a chance for a low, I know that you must have another pair concealed or even triplets, because you’re low-oriented. So I wouldn’t buck you, right?” He smiled at me while I nodded slowly. “All right, so, if you wish to discover what sort of hand a player bluffs, all you have to do is discover what is his favorite real hand. You hardly ever bluff high hands, just as you hardly ever play for them. But Josh, given a fifty-fifty chance between a low and a flush, always goes for the flush. He even gives it a nickname, like the way you might nickname a lover, right? He calls a flush a bouquet. I’ve got a diamond bouquet, he says.” He waited while I laughed, remembering the times Josh had vainly shown off a flush. “Now, the odds against getting flushes are constant and yet he is getting twice or three times as many as is normal. He had to be bluffing at least a third of them.”

  “But,” I protested, “he would get more flushes since he plays for them.”

  “Howard, analysis depends on a certain flexibility. Absolutes are for theorists and children.” He waited for my reception of this pearl with the patience of a seer.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, he might get as much as twice as many possible flushes and fifty per cent more actual flushes, but he cannot change the morality of the cards. No amount of selective substituting is going to make three times as many flushes appear. Josh only remembers the times they come in, so he thinks they’re his lucky hand. But don’t expect, once everybody knows he is bluffing them, for him to continue just because he likes the way flushes look. Being called on them will make them ugly. But his mind will wander and he’ll find another lover, another type of hand, and that will become his new bluff. You see, for him and most poker players, they’re not really bluffs, that’s why they succeed as bluffs. The bluffer unconsciously feels even a possible flush is better than a real hand.”

  I found myself sitting for three hours listening to Brian’s theories and observations instead of attending my favorite seminar. He seemed to know the most minute and subtle prejudices of each player; he had charted a careful guidebook to the back roads and hidden mansions of our styles.

  And if I had any doubt as to its usefulness, the next weeks would dispel it. Almost every other hand, Brian would be in a showdown with a player and at some point he would terrify him with advice on how to play his hand, advice that presumed a knowledge of his hole card. “The eights are live-er,” he said to Stan when Stan took a while considering a substitution. The tone was quiet, even kindly, as if Brian were a friendly uncle teaching. Stan looked at him blankly and Don said, “I think he’s paired the eights.”

  “Indeed?” answered Brian. “Well, then he would have two pair and there’s nothing for him to think about.” There was a touch of laughter at how obvious that should have been and someone joked to Stan that he might as well flip his hole card up. “He has triplets,” Brian mumbled, looking at his chips; and though that could have been observed by anyone, it was Brian who carefully created such moments to distract an opponent from noticing Brian’s maneuvers. Stan never questioned, after the substitutions were over and his tripl
ets hadn’t turned into a full house, whether Brian really had a flush, even though it had developed suddenly and inconsistently from Brian’s early play in the hand. Stan just smiled at Brian while folding, and said, “You prick, you talked me out of keeping the eight. I would have had a boat.”

  Brian, embarrassed and casual while dividing the pot, said timidly, “The eights really were live-er. I wasn’t lying. You should have faith in people.”

  His cards never struck you until the last round, when suddenly, with a sinking feeling, you knew he had figured out that your great-looking low was really just a pair. Unlike ours, his bluffs weren’t the haphazard result of a hand going bad underneath while appearing strong up top; his bluffs were schemed to catch us in the one or two hands a night that we were unsure of; his bluffs always came when you had decided that you had to cut back on your losses and stop playing two pair to the end when facing a straight. Everyone hesitated over substitutions, thereby announcing weakness, or, worse, implying a particular hole card, but Brian’s decisions and betting were instantaneous. He would look at his hole card at the beginning of the hand and never have to look again to check the suit or simply from the anxiety that the great hand he had might not really exist. His betting, whether he was up five hundred or down two hundred, was always the same: a maximum raise if he looked stronger, a kill raise if weaker. He might know, in fact, that he was stronger, but he still would play it as weak; and even with a ghastly bust card down, his raises were calm and indistinguishable from confident ones.

  For twenty weeks we had exposed our idiosyncrasies in front of him, while his laughably tight play had taught us nothing about how he behaved when the frayed edge of a tense mind meets the mathematical and psychological teasers of poker. In a month he broke every record we had: he won fifteen hundred dollars in one night, almost double our previous record win; on the other two nights, with his luck not running a fourth as well, he still won eight hundred and five hundred respectively—a total of thirty-four hundred dollars in four weeks. I lost a thousand dollars during that stretch. He was crudest to me, smiling contemptuously as he stood pat on an eight low while I raised and raised on my four-card perfect low, sure that with three chances to come, I would get an eight or better and beat him. After I went bust three times, but stubbornly tried to bluff, only to throw my cards across the room when he called and won, he said, “It was silly to raise, Howard.”

  “You raise in that situation! The odds were with me.”

  He leaned back, his white teeth and pale face flashing amid the black of his clothes and the harsh light of the overhead lamp, and spoke in a disgusted drawl, “The odds are against any hand developing, my boy. No matter that any of four cards would help you. There are nine others that hurt you.”

  Once or twice a night he would be caught bluffing when a player decided to ignore his better instincts and call Brian anyway. Even when caught, we admired his performance so much, that it was a kind of victory. For the next hour he would be called on everything, but then, of course, he would never bluff. Only when we began to not call would his bluffing begin again. And while the table became obsessed with switching from one strategy to another, Brian’s countless hours of study, and incredible memory of the cards that had been played, guided him smoothly and consistently to the best chances, to play against the most vulnerable hands, to substitute for the livest cards, and seemed to give him another ear with which to listen to the faint rhythm of the cards’ patterns.

  Josh insisted during the month that it was a nutty streak that would end and Brian agreed freely that his winnings were bloated by fortune. But after that immediate hurricane of his birth as a poker player, though there was a lull during which he won little, every other week he would break loose from our massive effort to divert his gigantic powers from the population of our chips.

  Josh’s winnings were reduced to nothing and mine would have been as well if I hadn’t resorted to a strategy I learned playing Diplomacy with Brian at age twelve. I avoided any confrontation with him that I could and never took my maximum raises when forced to face him. I played for second, a vulture swarming over the leavings that Brian scorned. At the end of our senior year, our graduation from Yale, Brian had won five thousand dollars and I another two thousand, with Josh winning a little over two hundred, and everyone else a loser. From the twentieth session on, Brian averaged three hundred dollars in winnings a week, a figure, especially since I have continued to play poker at those stakes with many people, that I consider more than staggering or unbelievable; any of the clichés of the sports world are inadequate to describe so long (ninety hours), so complex (six opponents) a dominance in a game laced by the poison of capricious Luck.

  11

  Some praise at morning what they blame at night, But always think the last opinion right.

  —Alexander Pope

  MY PARENTS AGREED, at the end of my last year of Yale, that I should wait for the publication of my book, which involved a considerable tour of television, newspaper, and radio interviews, wait, in other words, a year before deciding whether to go into graduate school. I cannot explain why, in the fall of 1974, a book about the meaning of the current trend in clothing, music, and occupation among young people should become a best seller and earn me nearly six hundred thousand dollars. An ironic achievement since my point was that my peers were in danger from their greed for, not the suburban family dream of the fifties, but greed for superstardom and endless wealth. I suppose it was misread as an attack on how middle-class parents had spoiled their children; I know some leftists thought I was trying to reverse the anti-political feelings of the people who were teen-agers during the late sixties. But I think, I’m very sorry to say, that the book’s success was due to reactionary feelings of adults against the troubles young people had caused; they were given a stamp of approval by me, with my admirable credentials of being young and politically left. Even he says so, I could see a disgruntled parent saying.

  Of course, as any intelligent reader can surmise, I was in a state of almost constant ecstasy for the seven months of my book’s prominence. I lost touch with all of my friends except for Brian if for no other reason than the fact that I had no residence for three months while I toured the country, and that I did not join their entrance into various far-flung graduate writing programs. I spoke to Brian on the phone once a week for the first few months. He was the only friend I had who didn’t resent or feel distanced from me by my success; even Karen seemed to think that my new wealth and fame somehow made me alien. She needed constant reassurance that I loved her, just as my writing comrades needed a continual admission from me that my book’s success came from factors that weren’t connected to skill or intelligence. But Brian relished my triumph as if it were communal: “I can see,” he said, the evening after I appeared on the “Today” show, “your writing teachers choking on their orange juice.” He would remind me (actually I needed no prodding) of the times my instructors or my friends had told me my work wasn’t cohesive or forceful, that a mass audience didn’t care about the minutia I concerned myself with. While others would insult me, by implication, with suggestions that I shouldn’t spend my money since I probably would never have another best seller, Brian would say, “I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t see why you should settle for a Mercedes. That’s as if you’re saving money for your grandchildren. Buy a Rolls. It’ll last you the rest of your life, anyway, so it’s probably cheaper.” The conversations were absurd and they relieved my loneliness and mounting terror of the future. I could relax in my horrendous hotel room, lying on the bed with a Coke poured into a clear plastic cup, and laugh like a boy with my friend on the phone. He knew that the only way to enjoy the way this society farts out successes, fully grown, was to be vulgarly exuberant. He never suggested I pretend to a mincing distaste for best seller lists, big money, the preposterous capsuling of ideas on television, and the imperfect praise of reviewers. He knew that integrity is a quality only fakes and scoundrels preserve.<
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  But when my book’s success had crested and withdrawn to a tranquil state, I found my capacity for withstanding the pressures of envy, of writing another book, of finding a home for my life, wasn’t great. I retreated to New York with Karen, repressing my desire to propose and, I assume, marry her, because of all the boring, reasonable things people say about marriage. I was too young, she was too young, marriage too silly except for parenthood and surely I wasn’t considering that? We got a one-bedroom apartment in the Village, not even as luxurious as the New Haven place, and allowed my father to have my money invested so as to provide me with a modest income. Disgusted by the reactionary use my book had been put to, I wrote another article for the Times, saying so, and that put me in touch with a group of leftists who, with the collapse of the movement, had decided to start an intellectual magazine. I suppose they hoped, though they would deny it now, that I would guiltily give them a hundred thousand or so. But I did agree to write for them for free and in a few weeks, I became one of the editors, eventually buying into the magazine quite voluntarily for a mere eight thousand dollars. My colleagues were all between eight and fifteen years older than I and I enjoyed this freedom from the dreamy atmosphere of youth: the magazine was hard, practical work, frustrating and satisfying.

  Brian had also asked his father for a year off before entering law school and that had been agreed to as long as Brian traveled in Europe for half of that time. Mr. Stoppard seemed to feel that even if Brian just slept and ate in that Continent, there would be a mysterious absorption of culture. Brian left for Europe a week after I moved to New York and though I halfheartedly wrote to him, my letters were pathetic. I stopped, one day, after a frustrating hour of writing disconnected informational sentences, because I realized my difficulty was that my friendship with him always involved my reacting to his actions and statements. I never brought anything to the friendship except loyalty and admiration: I needed a letter to answer and he wrote none. Perhaps that suddenly struck me as degrading, but I decided true friendship wasn’t unequal, and that Brian was just a monument, a souvenir of my childhood.