The New Kings of Nonfiction

by Ira Glass

  With sixty players left, I’m back down to $82,000, so I play extra-tight for a stretch, waiting for a monster I can sic on these big shots. The leaders are Duke, Liebert, Habib, and a guy called Captain Tom Franklin, all with around a quarter of a million in chips. With the blinds at $1,500-$3,000 and $500 antes, it’s costing me nine grand per round. So the last thing I’m in the mood for is a photo op, but here, as the cameras shark in, we have Slim standing up behind Liebert, holding a butcher knife to his throat. Turns out that back in 1972 Slim reportedly threatened to cut his throat if a woman ever won the tournament. (What he said was that he’d do it if a particular woman won, but the misquote makes much better copy.) I’m sure Kathy wants to concentrate on poker, but she’s being a pretty good sport, though I’d be smiling, too, if I had big straight white teeth and $270,000 in front of me.

  With a dozen eliminations to go till we reach forty-five, I basically hang around for two hours, actively avoiding confrontations. Doesn’t work. By the time we’re down to forty-seven, I have only $36,000 left, almost exactly where I started the day. But if I can only survive two more ousters, I’ll not only be good for $15,000 but will be on a freeroll for the $1.5 million.

  At this stage we’re forced to play hand for hand, holding up the next shuffle until all six tables complete the previous hand, this to keep short stacks from stalling. My table is already a terrifying convocation, but when the player in the eight seat goes out, he’s replaced by—oh, shit—T. J. Cloutier. It gets worse. More than content to just sit here and wait, I somehow get forced into a series of make-or-break jousts. The first comes when, one off the button, I find A♣ J♥. T.J. has already raised it to $5,000, and both the tanned, blond cowboy in nine and Hasan have folded. Don’t call big bets, I remind myself. Fold or raise. Yet I’m also aware that strong players target weak players, especially when the pressure is on, and my guess is that this is what T.J. is up to. I call. Jerry, the mustachioed Latin dealer, raps the felt, turns the flop: A♦ 9♣ 6♥. T.J. stares at me, checking. If he’s got a bigger ace I am cooked, ditto for A-9 or A-6, but with top pair and a decent kicker I still have to bet $20,000, having put him on an ace with a medium kicker. I meet his warm glare for a second or two, then study the smoke-marbled distance. I must appear terribly frightened, however, because T.J. moves in with alacrity. His stack is smaller than mine, but only by three or four thousand. I call.

  Now it’s old T.J. who don’t look so happy. “I think you’ve got me outkicked,” he growls hoarsely, then exhales a yard-long plume of smoke as I show him A♣ J♥. He makes me wait while snuffing his Salem, then turns over . . . A♥ 10♠! My heart hurdles four of my ribs.

  The turn is 9♦, giving both T.J. and me aces up, with my J♥ still out-kicking his 10♠. Only a ten will beat me, I figure; any other card comes on fifth street, I win. Instead of going out two off the money, I’m a 44 to 3 favorite not only to win a big pot but to punch out the number one badass. Jerry raps the felt, turns over . . . an ace. Whew! The crowd around us gasps, and I hear Liebert say, “Oh my God!” With so much hot blood in my head, I’m able to parse neither the buzz of commentary nor the looks on the other seven players. All I know is that T.J. is grinning. Even after Jerry announces, “Split pot,” and is echoed by dozens of railbirds, it takes me a moment to fathom that we both just made aces full of nines. Jerry shoves me my measly half-share of the chips. I try to restack them by color, but my fingers don’t work very well.

  For the next thirty minutes, Liebert keeps the table pretty much under control, maneuvering her $300,000 stack like Rommel in a short desert war, blitzkrieging our antes and blinds, setting us all-in when we draw. Down to forty-six we are still hand for hand, and sometimes the suspensions last eight or ten minutes. When I try to stand up, the tendons in my legs yank me forward. As I hobble into the men’s room, Jesus Ferguson is manning a urinal in his trademark unreadable getup: full beard and yard-long auburn locks under black cowboy hat slung low over wraparound shades. “Still have chips?” he asks cordially. Sort of, I tell him. What about you? “I guess I’m still doing all right. Hey, good luck.” Heading out after washing our hands, I notice that his feet are adorned with elegant little black dancer’s shoes. Strange! Before I sit back down, I try to survey the other five tables. Jacobs and Duke have big stacks, though Liebert still rules the whole tournament. The tiniest stacks are at my table, where Appleman is down to $4,500. Another round of blinds and he’s through.

  Three hands later I flop two pair in a heads-up pot with Hasan and get elated all over again—until Hasan sets me all-in. The two diamonds on board are what scares me. If he makes his flush while I fail to improve, it’ll be me going out instead of Appleman, and in the worst of all possible places. I’ve put Hasan on a flush draw and inferred that he’s semi-bluffing before his own hand gets made—or does not. Only a fool wouldn’t do so with those scary-looking diamonds out there, and Hasan is no fool. So I call. And my sevens and sixes hold up, doubling me through to $78,000.

  During the next break I notice that Andy Glazer, the Detroit Free Press gaming columnist, is talking to Jesus. When I introduce myself and ask for a cigarette, it turns out that neither of them smokes. I tell Ferguson that I’m shocked: in spite of the dance shoes, he looks like a Marlboro Man all the way. In fact, he’s a gentle-voiced, day-trading wonk with a new Ph.D. in computer science from UCLA who happens to love ballroom dancing; the outfit is “ just for disguise.” Does he prefer to be called Jesus or Chris? “Both.” Both? “Either one. I like them both the same.” Helpful! Andy now suggests that I might want to slow down at this point. I tell him that the last thing I want is to keep mixing it up, but the table’s not giving me much choice. “Plus my hand keeps grabbing the chips and tossing them into—”

  “Almost as though you’ve been hypnotized.”

  “Ri-i-ight . . .”

  “We understand perfectly,” says Jesus.

  With me on the button and Liebert in the big blind, Appleman folds one more hand, leaving him with barely enough to post the next blind. The next player, Roman Abinsay, pushes his entire $10,500 into the pot. Appleman, of course, desperately wants someone to knock out Abinsay, in forty-sixth place, but no one ahead of me can call; neither can I, with 7♠ 4♦. Which leaves it up to Liebert to play sheriff, especially since she already has $3,500 invested in the pot. And that’s what she does, calling and turning over K♣ Q♦. Appleman’s long face never once changes expression, even when Abinsay turns over . . . aces. Liebert sighs. The flop comes Q♠ 7♥ 3♥, leaving her dead to either of the two remaining queens. The turn comes a seven, apparently helping neither of them. When a king comes on fifth street, some overexcited railbirds start chirping that we’re done for the night, and I’d love to believe them. But another quick look at the board makes it clear what Liebert already knows: that kings and queens loses to aces and whatever pair.

  On we play. I’m more determined than ever to stay on the sidelines. Even when under the gun I find aces, I think about mucking them, but it’s too easy to imagine kicking myself fifteen minutes from now, let alone fifteen years. Deciding to walk them, I bet “only” $10,000 and get called by the cowboy. When the flop comes J♠ 4♥ 2♠, I bet $12,000 more, expecting to win a nice pot then and there, though with part of me hoping he’ll raise. When he smooth-calls again, it finally dawns on me that I may well be trapped by three jacks. Fourth street is 5♥, giving me an inside straight draw to go with my aces. I can’t put the cowboy on anything higher than jacks, since he wouldn’t have called $24,000 with A-3. I almost prefer he has jacks as my right hand picks up fifteen blue chips, breaking them down into three piles . . . and Cowboy smooth-calls me again! Thank God the river card is 3♠, backdooring me into a wheel (giving me, in other words, an unexpected five-high straight on the final two cards). No way is Cowboy holding 6-3, and since the board hasn’t paired, he couldn’t have filled his three jacks. I check, hoping he’ll at least represent the 6-3 and I can raise him all-in. He had me trapped back th
ere on the flop and the turn, but now I believe I have him. When he shows me two pocket jacks, I turn over one ace for the wheel, and then, for good measure, the other one, which Cowboy doesn’t seem to appreciate.

  All of a sudden I have almost $200,000, second at this table only to Liebert’s four large. I’m reminding myself to avoid her, in fact, when, back on the button again, I find A♦ Q♠. When it gets checked around to me, I raise it to $12,000. After Bortner folds, who else but Liebert reraises to $24,000. She does this, of course, with an absolute minimum of anima. Zero. She could care less, she couldn’t care less: take your pick. Assuming again that the big-time pros want to push me around, but failing for the dozenth time to heed T.J.’s advice about raising or folding, I call.

  The flop of 2♠ 7♣ Q♣ bails me out, in a way. Because when Kathy, the reraiser, taps a slender pink finger to check, I catch a faint whiff of check-raise. As the odor becomes more insistent, my overmatched brain seizes up—chcheckcheckch—but my thumb and middle finger somehow manage to bet $20,000 without even pausing to consult with their boss. Kathy stares me down through my polarized lenses like some chick laser surgeon zinging my capillaries. Do they smoke? Do they twitch? I don’t know. The hand I’d put her on was a medium pair, but now I ain’t so sure—not that I was sure in the first place, though I doubt she reraised me preflop with Q-2 or Q-7. Whatever queen she’s playing I’ve got her tied or outkicked, but what if she’s slow-playing two of them? After weighing and squeezing her miniature blue-and-white soccer ball for over a minute, she cuts out a stack of fifteen orange chips, fondling them as though ready to move them forward, all the while watching me closely. Zzzt . . . zzzzzzt . . . I stare away from the table for ten or twelve seconds, then pointedly look back at her. I like her a lot, and she knows that.

  When she finally mucks, I flash her my Q♠ in what I hope will be taken as a comradely gesture. “Show one, show all,” Abinsay demands. I pick up both my cards from the edge of the muck and flip them over. Kathy nods twice but doesn’t look happy. She also makes a point of sliding her own cards facedown toward the dealer.

  Two hands later, after T.J. has raised to $10,000, I find an eminently foldable A♠ 5♥, but I can’t shake the feeling that my new favorite author wants to pilfer our antes and blinds. The longer I think about it the more convinced I become, so I call. My heart thumps out signals visible all over my body—fingers, neck, pupils, complexion—of how nervous I am, so I try to persuade myself that they can also be read as elation, as in, “Yes! I’m finally gonna get T.J.’s chips!” I camouflage my relief when the flop comes A♦ 3♦ 2♣, giving me an inside straight draw to go with top pair and pitiful kicker. When T.J. raps his fist on the table I’m convinced I’ll be check-raised, but even if he comes back over the top of me I’ve got enough chips to survive. I pluck two pink $10,000 chips from the top of one stack and toss them forward. Take that!

  Now it’s T.J. who’s staring me down, an altogether more visceral experience than my face-off with Kathy. While there’s nothing overt about it, the man comfortably embodies a lethal threat, even from the seated position. If it happens to suit him, he can reach across the table and rupture key vertebrae with his bare hand, and everyone sitting here understands this down in our helical enzymes—my helical enzymes, at least, not to mention my looping and straight ones. Doing my best to meet his jagged scrutiny, I decide not to taunt him about his run-on sentences or the stench from his Salems. The best way to take care of that is to break him and make him go home.

  And he mucks it, God love him! Showing me Q♣ Q♠, he seems both proud of his laydown and irked at the gall of me, slick little East Coast book-learned weasel that I am, even if it’s his goddamn book I’ve been learning from. It’s impossible not to think of Jack Palance staring down Billy Crystal: “I crap bigger’n you. . . .” Amid the ensuing buzz, I overhear Andy Glazer speaking about “how spooky things are getting. A few minutes ago he was a writer trying to hang on, and suddenly he’s messing with T.J. and Kathy?!” With T.J. perhaps. I certainly didn’t think of myself as messing with Kathy. I read them both as messing with me, each time with less than a premium hand. All I did was refuse to lay down my strong hands just because they were who they were and I didn’t have the absolute nuts. So even after I get pocket kings cracked by Appleman’s K♣ 10♥ when the board makes him a straight, everything’s still copacetic. A few hands later an unfortunate gentleman at another table gets busted in forty-sixth place and it’s time to call it a morning. And this time I do wake up Jennifer.

  Eight and a half hours later I have unwelcome company in the pool on the roof. The strong swimmer splashing away my tranquility is a big, dark-haired guy with a mustache. When he finally climbs the hell out, I recognize him as Umberto Brenes, a Costa Rican player I met, along with his younger brother, Alex, back on Monday. He’d shown me his World Series bracelet, for the 1993 seven-card stud event, and invited me down to his poker club in the Hotel Corobici in San Jose. I saw him at Ferguson’s table last night, so I knew he was still in the running. It turns out we’re both in our forties and have kids. I have four, Umberto has two; he has a World Series bracelet, I don’t. But my $276,000 is good for third place, just behind Liebert’s $283,500 and Englishman Barney Boatman’s $282,000.

  Downstairs we learn that Umberto, with $101,000, is at Table 48, the most hazardous of the five—plenty of chips to win if you catch cards and play well, but with Boatman and Liebert wielding big stacks, you risk being set all-in each time you enter a pot. Tom Jacobs’s $229,000 makes him the bully of Table 47, which has four stacks under $39,000. Duke, Habib, and Mike Sexton are all at Table 54, the second most chip-laden group and perhaps the most talented. Duke and Habib are both hot, and Sexton is fresh off a victory at the European No-Limit Championship. In seat six of Table 55 sits its putative bully, yours truly. I’ve fantasized for decades about having a World Series stack big enough to make brutal sport of my opponents, but I have zero actual experience in the role. I spent the first two days gasping and thrashing to keep my nose above water, and it isn’t so obvious how to skim along the top with the current. Another problem is that my four most chip-laden opponents sit immediately to my left. Larry Beilfuss in seat seven, with $121,500, is a bespectacled, all-business guy around my age. Then comes Dae Kim in eight with $127,500, Meng La in nine with $197,000, and Anastassios Lazarou in one with $125,000. Since chips tend to flow clockwise around the table, I’m in lousy position to kick any serious butt. On my right, I have a curly-haired Parisian by the name of Angelo Besnainou, who has what sounds like Cuban salsa leaking from his earphones. He’s about the sunniest person I’ve met in Las Vegas so far. Even sunnier is the fact that he has only $64,000, which I plan to relieve him of stat.

  At Level 11 the antes alone are $1,000 (five times the buy-in for my home game) with blinds of $2,000 and $4,000. My stacks now consist of sixteen blue-and-white dimes, twenty-four orange five-thousands, and fourteen hot-pink ten-thousands. We’ve been told to keep our pinks at the fore so that opponents can gauge whom they do or do not want to tangle with.

  As expected, the first player eliminated, over at Table 62, is Eric Schulz, who started with a single $500 chip. An old poker adage says that all you need to win is a chip and a chair, but starting from so far behind at a table with Mel Judah, T.J. Cloutier, and Jesus Ferguson, that’s what it remained for Mr. Schulz—an old adage. Yet that yellow-and-black chip of his just earned him $15,000, the same prize the next eight eliminatees will receive. Meanwhile, at our table, Appleman has just raised all-in. Angelo folds, and I’m not playing trooper with Broderick Crawford. After mucking, I have to brush away what looks like cocaine or powdered rock salt from the baize between my stack and Angelo’s. Beilfuss calls Appleman, but Kim, La, and Lazarou all fold. (Was someone snorting lines or noshing saltines here last night?) Pair of fives for Appleman, A♦ 9♠ for Beilfuss. The flop comes A♥ A♠ 5♥, ruining Beilfuss’s day while doubling Appleman through to $180,000. It seems like he was down to felt o
nly a few minutes ago.

  The white mess turns out to be sugar, and the culprit turns out to be Angelo. I discover this by watching him sprinkle out more of it. I stare at him, shaking my head. “For sweet life,” he tells me. “You know?” He goes on to explain that Tunisian Jews, of which he is one, have a tradition of adding sweetness to life by sprinkling sugar on portentous objects: a new house, a tractor, a child . . . I have to admit it’s a wonderful concept, but as its substance combines with the moisture on our fingers we’re sugarcoating the cards as we play them. Isn’t it bad enough that I’ve got either the suddenly ill-tempered Beilfuss or the ever-inscrutable Kim snapping me off with reraises each time I try stealing blinds? Have they no damn respect for the Bully? A few hands later Meng La comes over the top of me, all-in, this after I’ve made the heaviest wager of my life by raising his big blind eight pink—eight pink $10,000 chips. I’m forced to lay down the same red jacks that came to my rescue on Monday.

  After licking my fingers and wounds for a round, I’m only too happy to call, with K♣ K♦, the last $28,000 of Ron Stanley, the player in seat 2. Stanley turns over K♥ 10♠. Oh yeah, I gloat, mentally pumping my fist. Time to get back in the lead! But the Q♥ 9♦ 3♦ flop gives Stanley a belly straight draw, and when, sure enough, the beardless jack of clubs arrives on the turn, my stack and my confidence plunge to $97,000, a piddling sum at this stage. Just in time, too, for Level 12, when the blinds jump to three and six grand. Worst of all, I get high-carded to a table with Habib, Sexton, Jeff Shulman (the chip leader, with almost $500,000), Jacobs, and Cloutier. In my humble opinion, it’s over. Not that I’ve given up, but I have to be realistic before I get blinded to death. My only chance is to wait, not too long, for a monster to materialize between my knuckles, hope I get called by a worse hand and don’t get sucked out on, and so double through. And then I have to do it again. And then I have to do it again. At least we have a ravishing dealer named Red, presumably because of her fox-colored shoulder-length locks, to go with wide hazel eyes and a sly grin.