I have seen panic destroy prudence in both skilled and inept players. I have seen it happen to men who had guts enough to face bayonets on the battlefield.
—Irwin Steig, POKER FOR FUN AND PROFIT
THOUGH OUR LAST year of Yale was the easiest and least pressured as to studies, the wait for LSAT scores and the news of graduate school acceptances made it a period of anxious suspense. Brian was not worried. He had taken the LSAT in his junior year and, when he got the form telling him he had scored 798 (out of a possible 800), he asked Mr. Stoppard for more money. Mr. Stoppard wasn’t content with the security of Brian’s score, so, using channels of information available to a distinguished and generous alumnus, he checked on Brian’s situation: Brian was sure to graduate top in his class even with a routine result for his senior year.
Brian set this precedent, asking for money ahead of his father’s schedule, because he not only failed to win money from poker, he actually lost four hundred dollars that spring. He bought all the books in print on poker (there were only five) the day after our first session and the study of them, along with his torturous practice of dealing hands, recreating betting, keeping totals of individual betting and group betting, became his evening entertainment. Brian went so far as to review a mathematics course to relearn a series of algebraic formulas that can be used to predict card probabilities, but he told me it was almost useless for practical application.
The appearance of my second article for the Times led to a book contract, as many of you may know, that I fulfilled towards the end of my senior year. I had no inkling, while at work on the book, of the sensation it would create, but even so it had a tremendous impact on my plans. I dropped any idea of pursuing graduate studies that would lead to a teaching job and the article made me more of a celebrity in the school than Brian. I had my first serious disagreement with my parents over the importance of the book contract—they still insisted I should amass enough academic credentials so that money would never be far from my grasp—and I had my first terrible taste of the anxiety of working for the adult world. It would come over me in a choking fog while writing that this was not going to be scanned by a professor who cared only for good research, clear development of idea, and purity of grammar. I would feel hopeless while I sat at my typewriter, or on the verge of a cold sweat while I lay awake at four in the morning, next to a sleeping Karen with whom fucking had become an increasingly perfunctory and distant act, and tried to convince myself that my prose was more cleverly masturbatory than Mailer, snottier than Tom Wolfe, more dignified and better researched than Edmund Wilson, and as compelling as (though more correct than) Solzhenitsyn. For the first time in the protracted struggle for preeminence with my peers, I was ahead of the pack and I felt like a runner who has made his move too early, and, with his breath catching, his legs failing, sees nothing ahead but hears the stamping feet of his pursuers.
Despite the fact that Brian insisted Karen and I should rent the apartment with him, he and I weren’t close for most of the senior year. Our only shared activity was poker and that was an embarrassment. Josh and I were the consistent winners, with Don occasionally having a big night (that was usually followed by a big loss due to exuberance and a delusion of invulnerability), while Brian, though not one of the two big losers, would lose small amounts and never win more than fifty dollars so consistently that his performance seemed more pathetic than that of the players who would drop three or four hundred in a night. He played very few hands beyond the opening cards, and almost none to the end, and his presence in a hand, especially if he was raising, would immediately cause the borderline hands to fold and the good ones to play cautiously.
He was predictable to an absurd extent. After we had played together for twenty sessions or so (roughly one hundred and twenty hours) we joked openly about his tightness. In three-sub, if he stayed in on a low card, and his next card was a nine or higher, the dealer would comment, “Well, there goes Brian.” And if he stayed in, we would all announce in unison, “Ah, he has an ace in the hole.” All the players’ styles were mocked in this fashion so it was reasonable that Brian didn’t think his was especially prominent; however, the other players’ habits varied not only because of strategy, but because after three hours of disciplined play, all of us were giddier: the winners willing to gamble more and the losers having to. But Brian’s consistency was as impervious to time as it was to scorn.
At first, I gave myself no credit for winning. I assumed my calm about the money, my common sense, my good cards, and Brian’s strange passivity were the cause. His timidity and incompetence were the calm before the storm, I thought, since whenever I peeked in on his experimental hands, they involved bluffs and long shot maneuvers that were the forte of Don and, to a lesser extent, Josh. I would listen, amazed, to the endless taunts and lectures of the other players towards Brian: “You have to bet a hand like that stronger,” Don would say. And Josh, who would fold nine times out of ten when in a showdown with Brian, saying, “Oh, no, Brian, I don’t play against people who never drive a car over forty miles an hour.” He would sop up our laughter while Brian intently split the small, conceded pot with another player and add: “One day I’m gonna call him. Next time I get four aces, I’ll do it.”
Brian was silent, intense, uninvolved, and unable to sleep after the sessions. He would only say yes or no if I asked what his intention or holding had been in one of the hands, and then change the subject, saying good night as soon as we were home, making hot chocolate and carrying it to his room to deal out another night of cards. He had stopped his daily acquisition of women, only seeing a girl once a week and never letting her spend the night, often going to her place and returning home towards dawn. My curiosity about this change was marvelously satisfied by Karen. She became good friends with Joan, who was one of the two women Brian still saw, and after an evening they spent together while Brian and I played poker, Karen returned home late and answered my question about where she had been by putting a finger to her lips, shushing me, and motioning me to follow her to the bedroom.
“I found out heavy gossip about Brian from Joan. She kept me until just now talking about it.”
I watched her take off her coat and hang it up. I felt ashamed that I wanted to hear something scandalous about Brian’s sexuality. “Do you want something to eat or drink?” I asked, to pretend disinterest.
“No, no. Unless you don’t want to hear the gossip.” She smiled at me mischievously.
I sighed. “I do. But—”
“What?” she said impatiently.
“It’s not something horrible, right? I mean, nothing like his penis having fallen off.”
“God!” she said, shaking her head incredulously. “That’s really interesting. That’s what you would imagine?”
“Oh, come on! Jesus, I wish you had never taken psychology.”
“Howard, don’t start that crap that everything I say is a Freudian cliché.”
“All right,” I begged, putting up a hand.
“It’s very insulting, do you realize that?” She stared at me, frowning, and I sheepishly went over to kiss her. But she pulled away at the last minute so it landed awkwardly on her cheek. “You are such a sexist,” she said, not angrily, but rather wearily, as if I were a hopeless case.
“Because I kissed you?”
“Right. Because you think I’ll calm down if you pat me.” She said, “pat me,” with tremendous contempt.
“Okay,” I said, my tone suggesting that I was through kidding around with her. “That really pissed me off. I made a typical exaggeration about male sexual fear. I was trying to be ironic. Have you ever heard the word? And you take it at face value, ready to analyze me as having castration fears. I need that?”
She listened to me with her mouth tensely closed, nodded sarcastically when I questioned her knowledge of irony, and answered calmly. “You see? You just got angry without asking why I commented on it. The answer, if you had the decency to ask, is that I know you can’t figure out why he’s losing at poker, right?” She raised her eyebrows. I made a face of bewilderment. “So what do you imagine to be his sexual problem, without, mind you, my having said he had one? That he lost his power, his penis.”
I sighed and sat down, trying to settle my ruffled feelings enough to think out her analysis. She watched me eagerly, hopefully, and I said at last, “You’re probably right. But I think you exaggerate the importance of those kinds of things. I am worried about his performance powers, you’re right, but—” I stopped and laughed, and she laughed with me, pleased. “You’re right,” I admitted, and quickly changed my tone. “So he doesn’t have a problem?”
“You’re not gonna say you’re sorry?” she asked coolly.
“I’m sorry,” I said honestly. “You were right.”
She smiled and walked over to kiss me primly on my forehead. “Now I’m being sexist,” she said.
“So what did Joan say?”
“Well, I was very nosy. I just asked her why she bothered to see him. I mean, she has nothing to say about when they get together. They don’t go out, apart from sleeping together. They don’t do anything. And how often does it please him to see her? Once a week at most, right? And he’s quite open about the fact that he sees other people.”
“She does know that?”
“Oh, yeah. She made a joke about it. So, when I asked why she bothered, she said that there wasn’t anybody else whom she was serious about, and she enjoys sleeping with him.”
I was pacing restlessly but I stopped at this, put a hand on my hip, and regarded Karen with disbelief. “Bullshit. She must be hoping he’ll be nice.”
“Why?” She paused and looked inquiringly at me. “I mean, it made a lot of sense when she explained it.”
“What did she explain?”
“She was so Cosmo about it, I loved it,” Karen said laughing, but with a touch of embarrassment. “He’s good-looking, he makes no demands, and he’s very considerate in bed.” Karen read off the list in a vague imitation of Joan’s soft, aloof voice.
“You’re right, it is Cosmo and it’s bullshit. I don’t believe it. If all that’s true, then she’d want him to be serious even more.”
“She says no. I asked the same question. I agree with you. But she says she wouldn’t commit herself if he did ask.”
“Why?” I said the word harshly, almost furiously.
Karen looked at me fondly. “Howard, that’s sweet. You’re upset that your friend is being put down.”
“I am,” I said in a tone of both surprise and emphasis. “She’s no prize. She’s an alienated shithead—”
“Come on,” Karen said indulgently. “You don’t really know her. She’s very smart and nice. And her reasons are good ones. He doesn’t talk about his feelings, he doesn’t even talk about his hopes.”
“Does she ask?”
“Of course, she asks. And though she likes the sex, it still makes her uncomfortable.” I screwed up my features at this confusing sentence. “She doesn’t think he enjoys it,” Karen explained.
“All right, look,” I said, sitting down at my desk. “I’m too young to understand these distinctions. She enjoys it but is afraid he doesn’t.”
“She feels like she’s a manual he’s following.”
I began to laugh but still got out my question. “You mean, like he’s studied a manual and is following it to the letter?”
“That’s right. And that’s the way he plays games, right?”
I was incapacitated now from laughter. I tried to start a sentence several times, but I would be hit with the image of Brian poring over a sex manual as if it were a poker book, making notes, and memorizing steps on how to fuck. Just as if she had made a ghastly joke about a cripple, I was embarrassed by my desire to laugh, so I giggled uncontrollably with naughty shame. Karen watched this exhibition wonderingly and asked if she had made sense. I finally could answer. “It’s got to be right. God, is that sad,” I said cheerfully.
“It must be a very thorough manual,” Karen said without irony. “He apparently covers everything.” My head hit the desk while I shrieked with laughter that was almost hysterical. “Come on, Howard, you’re being very cruel.”
“Okay, okay. But that can’t be too bad for her.”
“It’s not. She says it’s great. But he never comes.”
“Comes?”
“You know, he never has, well, not never, but he very rarely has an orgasm. And when he does, it’s very, um, you know, repressed.”
This sobered and entranced me. The absurd comparison between games and fucking was remaining consistent. “People have different ways of coming. Maybe he is enjoying it, maybe she’s very passive and feels guilty.”
“Look who’s being Freudian,” Karen said with a look of self-love.
“Will you give me a break? I apologized.”
She smiled. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Anyway,” I said, “that’s no reason to not want someone.”
“Well, but he’s very depressed and he doesn’t go out and he’s not warm. You know, he goes through the motions. He holds her hand when they’re walking but she says she doesn’t think it’s genuine.”
“Well,” I said, my tone ending the conversation. “If he loved her he probably would be happier and go out more. He’s just making casual sex a heavy experience instead of a bang-bang fuck. I think that’s being extraordinary, not repressed.”
“But, Howard, it sounds like he’s a performance freak. That’s the way he is about everything else. That’s why he’s depressed. He doesn’t let himself feel anything.”
“Has she done anything to stop him from busily manipulating her to orgasm?” I was annoyed and looked at her with my face serious and intent. “Huh? Has she stopped him and serviced him? Oh, no, on the contrary, she comes back, she takes any amount of neglect and alienation just so that she can get her rocks off.”
Karen was shaking her head. “You’re wrong,” she said earnestly. “You’re wrong.”
“She has? Is that what you mean?”
“No, I don’t know what she’s done about sex, but she’s tried to get him to talk about feelings and—”
“Look,” I interrupted. “It’s very easy to tell yourself that the reason a person is a top student and can win at everything is because he’s a nut. That’s what it amounts to. You can put fancy words to replace that judgment—he’s repressed, he’s compulsive. Or you can minimize that achievement by saying it makes him unhappy. The fact is everybody is trying to cover up their feeling that he’s better. That’s all. He’s better. I think the reasons he’s unhappy have nothing to do with the existence of his skills. They may have something to do with the extent to which he develops them. If he were happier, he probably wouldn’t waste his time studying games, but that does not explain why he is good at them.”
I had wanted to yell that truth, to stop her from pecking at Brian’s purity, and to stop the creep inside me that was saying he was through, that he couldn’t complete any project, that his talents had broken down as I could prove with poker, that his approach to life was too one-dimensional for adulthood. She reasonably refuted my speech, denied that she had meant his personality explained his talents, but insisted that his discipline was harmful and obsessive. I pretended to agree (I suppose part of me did), because I no longer expect people to genuinely resolve differences: I became a writer so that I could always have the last word.
But since Brian’s three-week depression, he did seem wounded and dysfunctional. His poker playing had been vague, timid, even becoming inconsistent as he slowly began to play less tightly, and his average loss doubled, without a complementary rise in winnings. The change wasn’t due to more bluffing, he was just staying in a little longer on each hand before folding. If he played to the end, as before, he had a dynamite hand. Nine times out of ten, his hand would win, and people rarely called him, going high if he was playing low, or vice versa, making his winning hands worth much less than other people’s.
And he no longer took care of himself or the apartment the way he used to. He would shave every three or four days, stopped ironing his shirts, and would wear torn clothes. Though his friends tried to visit with the same frequency as in the past, even more desperate for his advice on papers and tests, he rarely agreed, and became openly contemptuous of their brain picking. “I prefer the old days,” he said to one while letting him out, “when we poor white trash would be paid to cheat on the tests for you gentry.” He ended his closest friendship among the law students over the phone by saying, “Fuck off! Why don’t you spend three days and nights looking it up like I did. Your father bought you into this university and I’m tired of bailing you out for free.”
These fits presumed a position of oppression that was incomprehensible to the others: who or what had ever oppressed Brian? They thought he had gone mad. And, for once, Brian became a loner, involved in school only to the extent that was absolutely necessary. His free time was dominated by an imaginary poker game, a poker game that allowed him a flamboyant style of play the real one didn’t.
During the fall and winter, while I found myself emerging as the big winner in the game, Karen and I had our major crisis. She laboriously picked away at my attitudes and behavior, convincing me first that male chauvinism was more complicated than women not having jobs, and then, having established the abstract principles, was merciless in her pursuit of the devils in my unconscious. Though this process has made our relationship a happy and easy one, I still resent that period. I was humiliated most by the discovery that I was so naïve and incomplete a person as I approached my majority; I blamed it on never having a sister. Her influence did have one effect I regret: it killed my natural instinct to admire Brian. Though she stopped using him as an example early on in our talks, the point was made. He was the ultimate product of a sexist society. Emotionally selfish and closed, concerned only with the awards, marks, and signposts of accomplishment, and never with the quality of the achievement, a person obsessed with possessions and status symbols whose ability to express love extended no farther than saying good night with the remorse of a dying man.
And, of course, his failure at poker and his inability to sustain interest in something that he had mastered, were really results of the same disease, I realized. His disconnected relationship between the emotionally crushing, hard work he put into succeeding and the amount of satisfaction it gave him, inevitably led to repeated disappointments—and that had to create a terror of victory. Victory meant death, victory meant the anesthesia of study and preparation were over. He was disappointed in people for resenting and begrudging his wins, but wasn’t that an unnatural demand: to demand love because of success? He had nothing for his ambition to feed on, except for itself, and when opposition disappeared there was no genuine desire to create a valuable human truth out of his talents. He was a dynamo that supplied no warmth or light, a skyscraper without doors, a supersonic plane that is too destructive to use.
When Don told me he had added up the sheets we used to keep track of how much money each player owed to the bank—which meant that, at the end of each game, when players cashed in their chips, there was an exact total of who had won what—I listened to the figures with a feeling of sad triumph. I was the leading money winner at the end of twenty sessions, counting from the previous year, with a score of two thousand, five hundred and eighty dollars; Josh was second with a little over two thousand; Don was the only other winner at eight hundred; and Brian was fourth with a total of three hundred in losses. “That’s all?” I asked when I heard Brian’s figure. “I thought he was doing worse. That’s not bad at all.”
Don let out his version of a laugh: a high-pitched grunt. “He’s only losing three hundred because he hardly plays. If he did, he’d be losing more than anybody.”
I protested that his problem was that he played too few hands, that if he changed he would win more. But, I thought to myself, when I considered how much more effort Brian put into the game than we did, how especially pathetic his result was.
“No,” Don said in his telegraphic tone of speech, words bursting out and stopping suddenly. “Not true. He’s the most readable player in the game. I just look at him and I know what he’s got.”
Our conversation occurred during my weekly phone call to Don, two or three hours before game time, to check that we were indeed playing. Since my winning had been consistent, I was now a liked, talkative, and feared player. When Josh and I faced each other in a hand, we bantered in an excellent imitation of Steve McQueen and Edward G. Robinson; the other players would lean back and laugh, ask us how we knew certain subtleties, and listen to our explanations raptly. Poker is a very fluid game, however, and even the biggest loser among us would have his big winning night, not only getting a fair share of good hands, but many long shots coming in, something that always disturbs a good player more than anything else; but the game blindly rewards bad strategy on occasion, seducing a poor player, the following week, to continue hoping for lucky pulls and leading to his losing even more than usual. We sat down for our twenty-first session in a typical mood of trepidation, waiting to see which one of us would start out hot.
The first round’s pots were small and twice I lost on good starts that soured on the final cards. Typically, Brian won these hands often and tonight was no exception. “You got it, Brian,” Josh said with mock horror when Brian turned over a six low (a superb hand) that he hadn’t bet strongly. “I was hanging in there with a jack low.” The table laughed. Josh was famous for playing horrible hands and somehow bluffing his way through, or reading another player for a bluff, so the laughter was admiring. “He can have these chintzy early pots,” Josh said while shuffling the cards. “I just stayed in to make him feel good.” Again the enjoyment of Josh’s arrogance was full; he often mocked Brian without there being retaliation.
But tonight, Brian, dressed in a black silk shirt that I hadn’t seen before, his pale face bleached from a recent shave, said in a rumbling voice, calm only because it was heavily sarcastic, “Tonight, Josh, the joking ends. You’ll find me dogging every move you make.”
“Oh?” Josh smiled at me while I cut the cards. “You mean, Brian, you’ll actually call me? You can’t mean you’re gonna bluff?”
“Is this three-sub?” Brian asked as he got his hole card.
“Only game I play, my friend,” Josh said.
“If you know what’s good for you,” Brian answered, tossing a white chip into the pot. “One on the ace,” he said before looking at Josh, “you won’t bluff any more four-flushes.”
I thought, He’s terrible at this, he’s ugly when he tries to banter, but Josh’s reaction was oddly constrained. “I never do,” he mumbled.
“Really?” Brian said. “Amazing that you get twice as many flushes than are statistically possible.”
It was nicely timed and the table laughed. I remembered then, as I’m sure the others did, that Josh often did pull apparent flushes on the last substitution; and, since it made so little sense for Josh to buck strong hands with only a possible bluff, when he hit for a card, people assumed he had made the flush and they folded. In any case, when Josh began to develop a flush in the very hand after Brian’s accusation, the table was in hysterics. After we had received our first five cards and had done one substitution, the hand was down to four players: Brian, who was showing eight, seven, three, ace; Stan, a bad player, who had a pair of kings; me, trying for a low against Brian, holding a two down, and three, five, eight, jack up; and Josh with his three diamonds and a spade, trying for a flush. We substituted and Brian made one of his overcautious plays that I unhappily felt contemptuous of: he got rid of his eight and received a deuce, so that, when I got a bust card, I folded quickly, knowing Brian must have a great low hand. Stan got another pair to go with his kings and Josh got his fourth diamond, giving him an apparent flush. “Your two pair isn’t going to be enough,” he said to Stan.
There was a lot of talk about whether Josh was bluffing, inspired by Brian’s comment, and Josh wilted on the last sub, because he took a card down, an admission he had been bluffing. Stan also took a card down, hoping for a full house, but it was Brian’s play that stunned us. With a lock for low, he threw away his seven and got another ace, giving him a pair. “He could have three aces,” someone said.
“Horseshit,” Josh said. “He was trying for a straight. And now I’ve got him for low.”
“A pair of aces is lower than any other pair,” Brian answered. “So you’d better check that that card didn’t pair you.” After Stan bet five dollars on his two pair, Josh raised five dollars, saying to Brian, “I’ve got ya low.”
Brian looked sadly at Josh’s cards. “I have to see,” he said, calling the ten dollars and raising one. Stan took the last raise for five but the expected call from Josh didn’t come. He looked at his hole card. “What a bitch,” he said. “If I’d hit for that flush, I’d have the whole pot.”
“That’s right,” I said, laughing, “but I see you must have hit for a pair.”
“Yep,” Josh said cheerfully. “And since this scumbag plays too few hands to fold this one, I’m gonna save some money.” He turned over his cards.
“Let’s split it,” Stan said to Brian, reaching for the pot.
“How about the formality of declaring?” Brian asked.
“Okay,” Stan said angrily, picking up a chip and waving it in the air. “I’m high.”
“Me too,” Brian said. “I have three aces.” The table moaned while Brian took in the pot made huge because it was all his. I don’t think the others thought anything about Brian’s victory in this hand was special except that a person winning a pot by himself was always considered remarkable. But I took a good look at him and the symptoms, for me, were obvious. He was dressed to kill and he had played that hand to the hilt. And though he had opened the attack against Josh, I was also an enemy—for the first time in our friendship my winnings stood in his way.
It wasn’t long, however, before the others knew that something was up. Brian began to push each hand, taking every raise that came his way, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes hard, with their secret lids that seemed to cover them even when they stared most directly at you. He would be raising mercilessly, and he could fold a moment later, without shame, or he might push on to reveal a good hand, but not nearly as good as the hands he used to play cautiously. Luck was his handmaiden for the first two hours: though his opponents were shocked by his raising, they called out of curiosity at first, and lost at the same rate they were used to when he played tightly. When you lose nine hands out of ten to a player taking maximum raises, it isn’t long before you begin to fold and not call him.
Josh helped it along. “Stop calling him,” he would scream at the others. “The guy is practically turning over his hole card and you fools keep calling him.”
Brian sat silently during these analyses of his playing. He counted his chips and would ask who was dealing as if Josh’s imprecations were the sirens of engines in the street, calls of distress that he couldn’t aid. He met my glances as he would a stranger’s and despite all my experience of play, I began to watch his cards, as they were dealt to him, fearfully, sure that each one would be a perfect hit, terrified that my hand and his were on a collision course. We reached the midpoint of the game with Brian up over three hundred dollars, the usual amount when someone was on the way to a once-a-year big win.
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 triplets 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.