Yuki Fuji’s Poker Analytics and Theory graduate-level course is still popular enough to be held in Huntington Hall, which offers stadium seating, the security attendant giving only a perfunctory once-over to the students entering the classroom and not picking me out of the crowd even though I wasn’t carrying a laptop or a trillion dollars in student debt. Or maybe I’m not giving myself enough credit. For all I know the guy at the desk was the next Spenser for Hire and I just looked that smart out of my biking gear.
It was nice to pretend, though. As kids, Zero and I would often skip school and meander through college campuses, marveling at the tidy and organized otherworld maintained for a class of young people who appeared to know what they wanted from life and had the means and good fortune to incubate their dreams in a place that shielded them like a force field.
Zero and I would speak of this as we leaned in shoulder to shoulder to share a clove cigarette or the last of a roach, and though we were seeing the same things, we had completely different takes on it.
While I maintained an idealist’s view of college campuses—an occasional pause of study among Ultimate Frisbee, keg parties, and coffee shops—I also had legit respect for the steady grind it must have taken some of the kids to be there. They couldn’t have all waltzed in on the backs of tutors, essay mills, test-prep factories, and their parents’ legacy status.
Zero, in contrast, saw nothing but a zoo of privilege. To him, the ivy-covered walls, the hovering security, was nothing but evidence of a machine that feigned meritocracy but was as insular and guarded as any criminal organization. Zero’s young anarchist’s brain seethed at the seeming ease with which these young people glided through life blissfully unaware of the bumpers set up in their lanes to make sure that they knocked over the pins lined up before them.
At this point in our lives, our mother was long gone, her once sporadic and unpredictable communiqués dwindled to nothing, the vanishing point arriving as a silent pinprick of pain that we never discussed. Did my father speak to Zero of our mother in those days? I had no way of knowing. We each occupied a different space regarding our relationship with him, though Zero shared more of his outlook on life, his distrust of the system, his cynicism.
My father’s silence after our mother disappeared must have frustrated the FBI as they bugged our phones, and then showed up periodically as another political contemporary of hers was either freed from prison or published a book, the public infatuation regarding her actions and disappearance always resurrected on the anniversary of the Bank of Boston heist.
The vanishing point was so much closer at home, our father’s nocturnal poker schedule, games that we no longer attended as we grew older, creating a distance between us; we were basically on our own and left free to play our own hands. We often played them wildly, Zero relishing his barroom brawls, our father’s connections effortlessly getting us into bars and clubs even though we were underage and looked it.
When Zero started his moving company, the bulk of his early jobs were student moves, the two men and a truck variety. They were quick, relatively small hauls in or out of campus housing, or first apartments, generally speaking a step up for these young customers who rarely tipped and who confirmed Zero’s early beliefs regarding the incubation of wealth and privilege. These customers treated Zero as he suspected they would. As if he were barely there at all and at most a curiosity, their rare brush with an authentic blue-collar world.
It must have stung Zero in those early days, though he would never admit it; every few months another tattoo was added, an armor of color going up on his skin and something harder settling in. Or maybe that’s just my way of looking at him, trying to read his down cards. Even preparing for our father’s death without me was another layer between us; not a word spoken, only the prayer for the dead filtering past his lips and giving him away.
“Why does MIT offer a course on poker?” Yuki Fuji must be wearing a small microphone that blends into her long black dress because I can’t see it, her confident voice flooding out of the speakers filling the hall while her graduate teaching assistant, a short kid in an MIT hoodie with the starched button-down collar peeking out at the neck, works the PowerPoint, eager as a DJ spinning records. A few of the students had actually applauded her entrance as she appeared through a side door, stage right.
“Well, for starters, nobody wants to be a donkey,” she says and a couple of predictable eey-yaws filter out of the crowd.
A donkey in poker parlance is somebody who thinks they know the game because they’ve played in house games and won some money, maybe even been anointed king or queen of their small poker world, but would get eaten alive by experienced professionals.
“And because you’re sitting here, because this grand institution of learning has invited you to pursue your passion, you chose this class because you thought it would be fun. And it will be.” Yuki Fuji smiles slyly. “But when we talk poker, what we are really talking is risk assessment as the type practiced in the business and finance world, where most of you will undoubtedly end up. We’re talking a basic stoicism which many of you will probably never actually master, and by which I mean poker face. Why won’t you master it? Because your alumni predecessors have shattered your attention spans by making you screen addicts.” At this, Fuji’s TA clicks a button, the screen projecting a mathematical formula I’m likely the only one in the audience who doesn’t have a clue what it means. “Expected value is identical in poker as it is in math,” Fuji says as students squirrel their fingers over their keyboards, taking notes. Or order shit off Amazon.
“And this,” Fuji says, as a slide with a curved line graph appears behind her, “is where calculus comes in.”
And here I totally lose her, though a number of young men start shifting in their seats like she’s gotten to the gospel, their dicks gone rock hard at the mention of calculus.
I try to picture Sam in this class. Undoubtedly he would have understood the math, but I’d never seen him play poker and not once had we ever talked about the game.
“Any questions thus far?”
There were, mostly mathematical in nature; they could have been talking another language. I wait my turn then raise my hand.
“Yes?” Fuji points at me.
“This is all pretty interesting but I have to note you didn’t say anything about the human element. I’m wondering how you think all these sexy math formulas will work when they’re thrown off by what you haven’t mentioned, which is bluffing.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to castigate you, but you need to pay closer attention … your name?”
“Zesty.”
“Zesty,” she repeats, as most people do initially. Which you’d think would annoy me but doesn’t as I’m always curious to see what condiment they’ll relate my name to. “Bluffing is exactly what I’ve been talking about for the last ten minutes.” She winks at me and the curved line graph goes up again, followed by what could be Einstein’s theory of relativity, followed by who the fuck knows; it might be the magic formula for getting into a coed’s pants, in which case I really should be taking notes. The graduate assistant is practically dancing now. Maybe he’s seen this impending dressing-down before and it’s about to get hot in here.
“It just looks like game theory to me,” I say. “Not real life.”
“No? You’re qualified to argue with”—she laser points to the screen behind her—“R*T/k=T/E/t=1*ut*(Qk)-ut(0t)? You don’t consider this real life?”
“People are emotional,” I say. “I don’t need to understand the math to understand the play on a particular hand if I can play the person.”
A small murmur ripples through the auditorium, bringing a frown to Fuji’s face. I’m assuming that when she plays poker, she manages to hide her annoyance better.
“You’re saying that it’s easier to play the complexities of a person than absorb and utilize these formulas?”
“Exactly.”
“Which have been run through more hands than you’re likely to play in a lifetime?” Fuji arches her well-defined eyebrows.
“I’m saying—”
“This formula, in case you didn’t catch this the first time I said it,” Fuji’s voice has risen to bully volume out of the speakers, jarring everyone whose attention was still on their computer screens like a flock of birds startled to the same danger, the graduate assistant’s eyes wide with glee, “has a very human component, which you’re so enamored with. Built into it. Its very name, regret minimization, addresses how your opponents at the table are playing and therefore addresses how you should approach your hand.”
“It’s a great name,” I concede. “It doesn’t factor fear. Or history. Or greed. Or lust.”
“Lust?” Fuji rears back like I’ve just thrown a fastball under her chin.
“The mind wanders, is my point. Even with all that cash in the pot. You might already be spending the money in your head or formulating lies to explain where the money went, already making up bad beat excuses. What I’m saying is people carry baggage into games. Eventually it shows if you’re paying attention and you’re skilled enough to catch it.”
“And you’re skilled enough to catch it, Zesty?” Fuji had regained her composure, maybe even lowered the volume on her microphone, her TA registering his disappointment at a lack of fireworks and moving on to the next slide, an unspoken signal passed between them to continue.
“I’m one step ahead of that,” I respond. “I know better than to get into a game that I can’t afford to lose.”
Fuji blinks as if I’ve struck her.