Great story

Matt Savage posted on Twitter a link to this interesting story from the 2002 World Series of Poker, one which I had never seen before, well told by Jesse May. It contains important lessons for both players and tournament officials.

http://www.thegoodgamblingguide.co.uk/spotlight/wsop2002/wsop2002_jessemayreports.htm

Professional jealousy

It just doesn't seem fair that some people can put up blog posts like this, and the rest of us are stuck just pretending that we know how to write:

Two young things are heads up at a table buttressed to the front rail. 200-400 limit mix. Plaques stacked on the table show the current game, switched every ten hands. One player is thirty, slow and solid, his girth backing up his moves and his gaze, deliberate in front of five stacks of black, ten grand worth. His opponent, twenty-three and perhaps a day, hates having to be here. He belies his disdain for these archaic cards, shuffled by hands, and the snail paced movement of the game, and every element of life in this the real world, with every ounce of his actions. His left hand moves like a piston, down over a tall stack of his chips, breaking it into two, and then breaking one of those into four, and then stacking them all back up again. He does it again. His eyes roll with exasperation when his opponent thinks for all of five seconds. He bets blind, he tries in vain to speed the game to catch his mind. He’s stuck, losing, but it’s more than that. He’s stuck at this table, this life, this virtual hell brought on by the DOJ when all he dreams of is being in his underpants at his desk with his two monitors, his headset, and ten tabling with his expensive mouse....

A new dealer comes into the box in the Aria game. She’s a pert forty year old lady with a coiffed perm and angular face. The kid goes right for her, long before she’s even taken the purse from her shoulder and hung it over her dealer’s chair. He’s at her jugular with pointy jabs. “Can you deal?” he barks. “Then let’s go.” She gathers the deck and then looks into her rack, trying to get her bearings straight. He leans over and reaches into the rack, invading her personal space. “These!” he barks. “See these chips? They go here, at ten you switch the game. Let’s go. Let’s go!” Most of his chips are in one tall stack, double high. The rest he’s clacking from one hand to another, making noise. He can’t stop moving, his energy boundlessly reflecting his mind. He swigs from a glass litre water bottle. He can’t stop. Nothing is fast enough. Nothing can make him happy. Nothing here outside the virtual world.

That's Jesse May, whole thing here.

World-class rant

It's Jesse May, on the astonishing incompetence of the Full Tilt Poker PR team.

Key excerpt:

Just take the case of British Petroleum, as an example. BP faded a six billion dollar lawsuit, the wrath of Greenpeace and the US government, the extinction of half of the planet’s ocean wildlife and one of the largest disasters in the history of the universe. They didn’t wait six weeks to release a statement. They didn’t tell the public that they had no idea how they were going to stop the oil. What they did do, and wait for this one, they did the only sensible thing in the circumstances… They BLUFFED!! How is it possible that a poker company, supposedly endorsed and run by the finest poker minds that have ever been produced, couldn’t run a simple bluff for six weeks while they figured out what the hell they were going to do. It’s not rocket science. Smile a few times in public, pay out a couple of the five dollar accounts, let everybody else know the checks are in the mail, grab a photo op next to the Statue of Liberty, send your sponsored pros out on the talk show circuit, villianize the US attorney and run a freaking two barrel bluff like any poker player who’s only just learned the game and is playing 1-2 Hold’em at the Excalibur. How is it possible that these great minds couldn’t just keep a poker face for six damn weeks? How is it possible that at the first sign of opposition they folded, ran, and tried to see if any casino was still cashing Bellagio chips? It’s only a few indictments and a couple of hundred million dollars in frozen assets. If businesses couldn’t bluff their way out of these spots, there’d be no America in the first place.

Poker gems, #35

I hope at least a few readers have followed and enjoyed the extended excerpts from Shut Up and Deal. I loved the book. It's highly unlikely that I'll devote anywhere near as much space to snippets from other stuff, but at least now I will return to other sources for this series of posts, for those who didn't much care for May's work.


Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 201:

It ain’t like I’m getting up every five minutes to go to my [hotel] room. Some buy-ins last longer than others, and sometimes I double my stack through before I lose it and once I’m almost even for fifteen minutes or so. But there’s no doubt as the session wears on that I’m losing, and my cards are rather gruesome. There’s no flow. There’s no order. Sometimes I go for an hour without playing more than a few hands, and then all of the sudden I get about ten to play in a row and get brutalized and then it’s all over and I feel like a tornado went through my head and sucked up my chips and I’m just shell-shocked and thinking about all the hands while Louie and Porky are chortling. And then dry as a bone. Sit back and wait. And fume.

Sometimes I make a pledge like I’m gonna die right here in this seat rather than quit this game because it’s so good. And don’t it always seem to be that when you make the pledge, those are the days you really do sit there and just die in the seat. That’s what it feels like. Just sitting there and dying, man.

Poker gems, #34

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 163:

Player asks, How’s my game, man, my game? Your game? Who gives a fuck about your game, I want to know what you’re gonna do when they’re fuckin’ breathing down your neck they got you hooked so good and you’re so scared you’re praying you ain’t got a pair when you look down at those hole cards because Krock he just raised again with a queen up, and even though you know he’s got shit, you know it, man, I could fuckin’ swear it down to my bones. If I look down and see a pair of sickly eights my stomach is just turning, 'cause I don’t want to get there in no pot with him, where the river card is a big black snake and fate has already decided which cards are in that deck and which order they come out and odds in my favor has much less meaning to me than the pain in my stomach that feels like the lining is getting eaten away by acid—at least that feels real. I don’t know how the odds feel.

Poker gems, #33

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 162-163:

I’m a watcher. Always have been. Maybe that’s why I learned. I love to watch people, love to stare at ‘em behind my dark shades as they load up racks with new-found dollars and walk away. Or as they fall apart, as they crumple up, as their eyes become big and glassy and lose focus and they take deep drags on their cigarettes. As they come in all smiles and how ya doing and start winning and talk about how good they are and how they could have made an extra bet by checking the flop, and then a month later they’re stuck on the rail trying to borrow money from the same guys they called losers a little while before. I just watch. Don’t say nothing. Nothing. Just sit there and watch 'em night after night with a big silly grin on my face as they call me a live one.

Poker gems, #32

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 158:

Yeah, but about the eighteen [losing sessions] in a row. I didn’t start out trying to break any record. I guess maybe I finished trying to. I mean I remember distinctly one time in the Taj Mahal where I had been playing almost five hours and I was ahead like seventy-five bucks or something and I thought to quit and Morty advised me heavily to quit. It was the same night I had gotten my hair cut for the first time in two years and I’d lost about nine or ten in a row at this point and I just should have gone home and cursed the streak. But maybe I needed to see that doom doesn’t have to have an end and just because the roulette ball has come up black fourteen times in a row, don’t go betting on red again. Just walk away.

And maybe I learned the lesson vividly. Because that was the only end for that streak. Just walk away. Or go broke. Or run through the valley of the shadow of death because you get through the valley quicker that way. Or go home, lock your door, pace the floor, pace the house, flip the channel, grind marijuana stems, listen to every CD, go to the market and construct elaborate huge meals not to eat because everything makes you sick, mumble, talk out loud, put your palm to your forehead, cry out and groan, and want to go back into that poker room but be so scared to do it that in the end I just had to leave town, had to leave the country, in fear of what might happen with me in proximity to my money.

Poker gems, #31

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 145:

Everybody has gotta draw the line somewhere. Actually, a lot of people manage to go through life without having to draw a line at all, but if you play poker, if you gamble, if you do drugs, you better draw that line because sure enough you’re gonna be slammed up against it often enough, and one step over—well, it’s just over.

Poker gems, #30

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 140:

It’s not that it’s impossible to make money at poker in the long run. It’s just that you’d be better off packing up your stuff and going to Alaska to dig for gold.

Poker gems, #29

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 75:

It’s like when people hear that I’m a professional poker player the bulk say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re so lucky because you can do whatever you want, play whenever you want, make your own schedule. But I know a lot of guys who play poker—hell, I feel like I know all of them—and to a man it’s play poker, eat, sleep, eat, play poker…poker, poker.

And when I’m in the groove after playing for something unreal like eighteen or twenty hours and then home for five or six hours of fitful sleep and then pop out of bed, it’s not relax, flip on the TV, go out to eat, call my friends, read a book, play golf, see a movie. But jump awake, run in the shower, convince myself I don’t even have time to shave or finish listening to a song on the stereo, and run down to the kitchen and no time to cook a proper meal or even sit down and eat but whatever I can grab and run to the car and eat on the way. And fifteen minutes later, after running a few questionably yellow red lights, there I am back at the table like I never left, and as I look around it’s the same everywhere—bleary-eyed and in action.

Poker gems, #28

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 73-74:

Like at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City when Floyd has been playing seventeen or eighteen hours in a row without stopping to eat, sleep, or go to the bathroom because he’s so fuckin’ stuck he don’t want to move. And finally he can’t take it any longer so after he folds his hand he says, “Deal me in,” and starts sprinting for the bathroom, which in the Taj isn’t so close—no, you have to go out of the whole poker room and down the hall—and so the hand ends and the dealer shuffles and says, “Should I deal him in?” and Virginia says, “Yeah, give him a hand…he’ll make it.” And sure enough it hasn’t even been thirty or forty seconds and you can see Floyd through the plate-glass windows separating the poker room from the hall coming at a dead run, full sprint, waving frantically so we can see that he wants to be dealt in and there’s no way that the guy had time to finish let alone wash his hands, but when you’re stuck you don’t want to miss even one hand, not even after eighteen hours and five or six hundred of them. And it’s not just Floyd—I mean we all been there. And I heard that’s why Tom H got booted from the Stardust casino because the game was so rocking and wild and he didn’t want to miss a hand and walk all the way to the bathroom so he went in a corner and pissed in a garbage can.

Poker gems, #27

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 65-66:

My friend and roommate Jimmy put it in perspective about two years later when he told me a story about one day down at the Taj Mahal when he was playing with Hot Mama Earl in a Hold’em game. Now Earl thinks Jimmy is some sort of superhuman… possessing some special knowledge about poker that’s way beyond him. At one point Jimmy does something stupid—I mean really stupid—like he calls before the flop with a hand that’s way bad against a guy who maybe hasn’t played a hand in a while. Calls the flop with nothing and then check-raises on the turn with almost zero except maybe some twenty-to-one-shot draw that miraculously makes a straight on the river, so when he flips his hand over at the end everybody’s eyes widen in disbelief, and the poor chump who Jimmy beat in the hand gets out of his seat to make sure he’s not seeing things. And Jimmy is keeping on his cool-rider face, but inside he’s laughing hysterically because he knows how lucky he just got. Jimmy’s not the sort to rub it in or show his emotions and admit that he made a stupid play so he’s just looking down and raking the pot, and meanwhile Earl is sitting across the table with stars in his eyes, enraptured, drinking it all in because he thinks he has just witnessed a world-class player making a world-class play and not an ordinary sod who just had a snake charm stuck up his ass. Later when Jimmy and Earl both happen to be walking to the bathroom together and they’re out of earshot of the other players Earl says, “Now I understand if you don’t want to give away too many secrets, but could you explain to me about that play you made with the ace-six?” And Jimmy wants to look Earl dead in the eye and say to him, Earl, sometimes I just don’t know what the hell is going on and I just do stupid things and get lucky. But Earl doesn’t want to hear that and he says, “No, stop. Don’t tell me. It’s probably too deep to understand.”

So Jimmy instead smiles and looks mysterious and says, “Poker is a very complicated game,” which is what Hot Mama Earl wants to hear anyway and he walks away thinking Jimmy is a poker god and Jimmy takes a deep breath and goes to the bathroom and tries to figure out how he’s going to get back the five thousand dollars that he’s stuck in this 75-150 Hold’em game and how the hell is it possible to be losing in a game where everybody is playing so bad. But luck is strange and the short run in poker is very unpredictable, so even though he’s tired from eight hours of poker and hurting and feeling like a good seafood meal and a nice cold beer and a long sleep, he freezes his face in his cool-rider mask and trudges back toward the table. But all anyone can see is a relaxed smile, dark glasses, and impeccable concentration. And Earl is able to walk away thinking poker is deep, mysterious, and romantic, wonderful to be involved in, and not base, crude, and filthy.

Poker gems, #26

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 50-51:

Poker players keep ledgers because they need them. They need them to show that they got it all under control. But it’s never under control. No matter how many wins you got in a row, no matter what your hourly win rate is, no matter what. A few things go this way or that way and you’re sitting there counting your money, cursing under your breath, shuffling your chips, heart a-pounding, gasping for air, and making those questionable decisions when you’re stuck in a big game after twenty-four hours wondering what the fuck’s happening and why it’s going on now.

Poker gems, #25

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 45:

I live in Vegas now, been here three months. It’s almost two years since I dropped out of college. I had classes on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and our poker games were Monday and Wednesday nights. Irreconcilable differences.

Poker gems, #24

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 37:

And now he’s telling me that he’s making the jump [to playing poker for a living] and what can I tell him about his play or the game or the big game and so on and is he good enough. And I say, “Jamie, all I can tell you is that it’s lonely out there, real fuckin’ lonely, and your play doesn’t matter so much as how tough you are and whether or not you fall apart.”

Poker gems, #24

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 29:

So all in all it’s a pretty good game. It’s a very good game and the pots are big, but the live ones have all the money and they might leave. I just wish I could pick up a hand soon because this game doesn’t have a lot of staying promise. I mean two guys already left with big loads and all the wrong guys are stuck. And if the three live guys with all the chips take off as they maybe are wont to do, the game will break up in ten minutes flat and I’ll be left with no option but to put what’s left of my money and chips in my box, go up the escalator, trudge to the parking lot, climb in my car, and when I’m sure that no one can hear me, yell “Aarghh” at the top of my lungs before driving home and collapsing into a fitful sleep plagued by poker nightmares of cards, chips, and disreputable characters robbing and cheating me ad infinitum.

Poker gems, #23

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 16-17:

Ever since I started playing poker it seems like it’s always been the same. Win a little. Lose a little. Stay in action, afford the buy-in, keep my head above water and keep moving, always moving. And watch people go broke. Watch 'em fold up and go broke.

Then I go on a losing streak. Or have one bad night, or whatever. Just something that makes me question everything I know about poker—no, everything I believe—and consider giving up and be scared to go in the card room and not know when to fold or when to raise or when to play or when to stop.

And then it turns around. Pop. Just like that it turns around and I start winning and don’t stop winning and start playing higher and faster, and then the cycle starts again. Over the last six years this cycle has been perpetual, and always vicious, and always of lunar-type proportions. And these cycles have been punctuated by leaves of absence, lots of them, because basically I can’t deal, I’m dysfunctional, I need to reorient myself, my place in space, my poker philosophy…. And every time I’m away, I’m away from the table, but the game is right there next to me, it’s living with me as I replay hands and people and conversations and games and days and plays and angles. And every time I come back, I break through, my thoughts are different, my understanding feels deeper. And here’s the funny part. I always think I understand. And everybody else doesn’t. And they’re all thinking the same thing.

Poker gems, #22

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 30:

But sometimes if you can catch a guy right after a big win then he’s an easier touch and he’ll still hem and haw, but a broke might be able to squeeze a few hundred out of him that will rarely to never get paid back. Some people think that it’s kind of a winner’s tax that they pay and spread the money around a little bit and then when they run bad or go broke everybody will help them out a little too. But maybe they’re thinking that they have a peer group and they have some buddies in there and they haven’t found out that everybody hates you under their breath if you’re doing well, that poker peers feel no sympathy and no pity for you when you’re doing bad, they’re merely glad it’s not them and move in for the kill like big buzzards who know it’s much easier taking money from someone on his way down.

Poker gems, #21

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 6:

Everybody wants to know about skill. Who’s the best and who’s got it and who ain’t and what we’ve got here, and all I can say is that the answer is never that easy. Like for example there’s this guy, call him Ace, and he plays well, I mean he plays really well, better than me, like if we were ever to get involved in a heads-up match, Ace would clean me up. And he has. Nothing to it. But one night maybe Ace and I are in a Hold 'em game together, and we both have bad luck and we both lose five thousand dollars. Now Ace, what does he do? He gets so mad at losing that five thousand dollars that he stalks off into the pit to try and get even and blow off some steam and he ends up losing twenty thousand more playing craps. Meanwhile, I get so mad at losing my five dimes that I go home, get in my closet, stuff a pillow in my face, and scream until I lose my voice. What’s the difference? Twenty thousand dollars. Now who’s the better poker player? It ain’t that easy.

Poker gems, #20

I'm reading Jesse May's 1998 novel, Shut Up and Deal. It's brilliant, not in terms of traditional literary values, but because nothing else I've ever read, in fiction or non-fiction, has so perfectly captured the deeply cynical, selfish, and lonely existence of a poker grinder. This is a book that could be written only by one who has been through it. There are likely to be a bunch of excerpts from it posted here, because I'm finding so much in it that resonates with my recent life. I start with the most famous passage:

Poker is a combination of luck and skill. People think mastering the skill part is hard, but they’re wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck.