Jes drinkin’ and gamblin’, boys,” he says, laying down his cards. “Drinkin’ and gamblin’! Evuh day’s a party and evuh night’s a Saturday night!”

He’s got the “nuts,” the unbeatable lock hand, a hand he wasn’t supposed to have—and he’s letting the other nine players at our poker table know it. “Gimme that money, honey!” he implores the dealer. “I’m jes a po’ boy from Texas and I need as much money as I can git.” Raymond—that’s what we’ll call him—is one of the most successful bookies in Houston. He doesn’t need the $600 pile of poker chips the dealer, inevitably, shoves his way. (His organization clears more than $100,000 a week; winning or losing $600 concerns him about as much as it would you or me if a quarter fell through a hole in our pocket.) Indeed, the $600 in chips is not even worth $600. It’s tournament money, a bunch of tokens. Still, Raymond intends to crow long and loud enough that his opponents get sufficiently fed up with him to do something stupid.

It’s 1992. I’m playing with Ray and a school of other sharks in a satellite tournament at the World Series of Poker at Binion’s Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas.

The main event, the World Championship, is a grueling four-day affair that costs $10,000 to enter. Some competitors, such as two-time World Champions Johnny Chan and Doyle Brunson, are too busy playing in side games laden with $1,000 chips—real $1,000 chips—to waste time dabbling in satellite tournaments. But for working stiffs like me, satellites are mandatory. The PGA Tour has them, and so does the tennis circuit. For those without full-time playing privileges, these golf and tennis mini-tournaments are a weekly odyssey. The winner of the satellite earns a coveted spot in the big show. It’s the same at the World Series of Poker. The Horseshoe conducts daily $220-buy-in tournaments that award winners a $10,000 seat in the World Championship. The losers watch on television. Or get press credentials.

I’ve played in dozens of satellites leading up to my 1992 campaign, winning a few minor events and finishing in the money (the final table) at some major ones. But I’ve never won a satellite for the Big One, the World Series of Poker main event. For years I’ve written about the championship, enjoying intimate access to the greatest tournament poker players on Earth, observing the insights and judgments and character that place these wizards on a slightly elevated plane, a place where studying and reading (and writing) about the game are woeful substitutes for talent and experience. Years of chronicling the exploits of the best players in the game have afforded me the kind of training a young lad earned in the Middle Ages when he served as an unpaid and much-abused apprentice to, say, a pedophilic blacksmith.

Thanks to my assignments as an ink-stained wretch, I’ve effectively been mentored in the game of poker, though my mentors are blissfully unaware that they’ve taught me anything—except perhaps how to give a thoroughly uninteresting interview filled with a litany of clichés. (Most great poker players—as with most great artists—have difficulty articulating how they do what they do; they just do.) Armed with what I take to be an unimpeachably authoritative compendium of poker knowledge, I figure I’m ready to cross the threshold from voyeur to participant. If I can win my way into the main event, I’ll know I deserve to play with the big boys. Thus far I haven’t deserved it. Tonight, though, I’m seated with a bunch of fools like Raymond, and I’ve got a terrific chance.

We’re down to 27 players. The top three will all win $10,000 seats in the main event; fourth, fifth, and sixth will earn several thousand dollars, and the remaining three at the final table will pocket several hundred. I’m feeling good.

Mine is one of those dream tables you sometimes encounter in Las Vegas, a collection of players who, lacking skill, compensate with outlandish theatrics. Dueling Raymond for the title of Loudest Voice is Jimmy, who raises fighting cocks outside of Lafayette, Louisiana. All week, Jimmy, who looks to be in his fifties, has garnered the admiration of his opponents by having two fetching teenage girls—one blonde, one brunette—accompany his every move, like a couple of Cajun geishas. When he makes an ill-advised bluff and gets raised, Jimmy turns to his girls and proclaims in a Creole growl, “I make a bet, everyone call me. Shit, guy at the next table call me! Guy across the street pick up the phone and call me!” His girls titter respectfully and return to preening.

Billy’s at my table, too. He runs a gun shop in Alabama. Someone asks him how’s business. “Bettuh’n evuh,” drawls Billy. “Evuh-budy got someone they wanna kill.” I tell myself that even if I fail to place in this satellite tournament, my cash investment has bought me an evening worthy of Guys and Dolls. What a cast! The Jew Boy writer and a chorus of redneck Bubbas. Earlier in the tourney, our table disposed of a 450-pound guy named Oklahoma Bob, owner of a port-a-potty concern. His baseball cap, tilted rakishly on his balding crown, proclaimed him to be “Number One in the Number Two Business!”

Across from the empty space that Bob’s gargantuan girth previously occupied sits a taciturn enigma named John, whose dyed-black perm, smoky sunglasses, and necklaces entwined in chest hair recall a disco-era wild and crazy guy. Despite a gold-chunk bracelet around one wrist and diamond-encrusted watch around the other, John takes a distant second in the over-accessorized department. That honor easily goes to the gentleman on my left, Ed, who sports sparkling diamond rings on every finger of both hands.

Ray continues to yell about drinking and gambling. Jimmy is sending one of his under-aged ladies-in-waiting for an antacid. Ed is clipping his manicured nails. John has a few chips left. Billy is surveying the room, seeing if he can outlast 18 more players. And I look down and see my poker dreams have come true.

Aces in the hole.

It’s become a mythic phrase applied to any situation where hidden power lurks, where a secret weapon waits to be unleashed. In almost any poker game—seven-stud, five-card draw—aces in the hole are strong. In no-limit Texas hold ’em , the game we’re playing now, aces in the hole is the most powerful hand you can possibly start with. (Hold ’em is played with two hole cards and five “community” cards. Players make the best five-card poker hand from the quintet of “up” cards and the duo of “down” cards. “No limit” means just that—you can bet all of your chips at any time.) Like Stanley Cups in New York and pennants in Chicago, pocket aces show up with depressing infrequency, only .45% of the time, one in every 220 hands, or about once in every six hours of continuous betting, raising, and folding.

Not only do I have wired aces, I’m on the “button,” the last player to act. With nine people before me, chances are good that someone will raise the pot, either because he’s bluffing or because he has a legitimately strong hand. I’m hoping someone will make a large bet, which I can then re-raise. Please! I’m screaming in my head, someone raise this pot!

During the eternal 10 seconds it takes for betting to commence, I glance around the room: three tables left in the satellite; my birthday numbers up on the keno board; Doyle Brunson, playing with Chan, one table over in the corner, scooping up a pot larger than most people’s yearly income. Doyle’s book, Super/System, is the poker-player’s bible, a 605-page repository of secrets that every fledgling card sharp commits to memory. One of Brunson’s maxims, buried in the chapter on no-limit Texas hold ’em, goes like this: “Most of the time, a pair of aces in the hole will either win you a small pot or lose you a big one.” I’m displeased to remember that lesson at this particular moment.

In early position, Billy raises the antes $400. (Yes!) Everyone folds until it comes around to Raymond, who’s grown unusually circumspect. He scratches his beard, looks at Billy, and re-raises $1,200. (Yes!!) John folds. Jimmy folds. It’s up to me. I don’t want to put on too much of a show, but I don’t want to act too quickly either. I want to suggest uncertainty, even though I’m completely certain of what I must do. I peek at my hole cards, look at the pot, scan my stack of chips, and deadpan, “Raise.” I match Raymond’s $1,600 and shove $2,200 more—all my money—toward the center. “All in,” announces the dealer.

Billy sighs and folds without hesitation. Raymond stares at me glumly. “You got somethin’ there, writer boy?” he asks, riffling chips between his long fingers. I stare beyond him, at Doyle Brunson. “I’m gonna have to call you,” Raymond snarls. (Yes!!!) He puts in nearly all his chips. The pot has swelled to more than $8,000. Winning it will virtually guarantee me a spot at the final table and an odds-on shot at grabbing my first seat at the $10,000 World Championship.

“You got a pair?” Raymond asks me weakly. I nod confidently. “Shit,” he groans, turning over two little deuces. “I was hoping you had ace-king or something.” I show him my two aces, and he nods. “Shit.” He knows the probabilities, and they’re the poker equivalent of having Shaquille O’Neal posted up on Mugsy Bogues: The only card that can help him now is a deuce, and only two remain in the deck. I’m close to a 5-1 favorite. The dealer flops the first three community cards: six-nine-king of various suits. He turns the next card, “fourth street.” Another six. Only one card, “the river,” remains. One card between me and poker nirvana.

It’s a deuce.

“How ‘bout that!” Raymond yelps, gathering in the spoils of his improbable full house. I try unsuccessfully to force a smile and wish everyone luck, but my face feels frozen, as though the fateful deuce has splashed a large puddle of novocaine onto my cheeks. I’m speechless. I’m catatonic. I’m done.

As I depart, hoping I’ll make it back to my room before I start whimpering, Doyle Brunson glances my way. The dealer at his table is pushing Johnny Chan a pot that appears to have nearly $100,000 of Doyle’s money in it. Brunson, the old master, sits placidly, unmoved. His expression is blank, unreadable. I briefly consider telling him about my $8,000 bad beat, about his aces-in-the-hole maxim getting proven one more ugly time. But I sense this might not be the best moment.

Doyle Brunson reaches into a black shoulder bag and pulls out $75,000 more to play with. I walk past the Horseshoe’s Gallery of Champions, a pantheon of the World Series of Poker’s past winners, and trudge off toward the nickel slots.

For six more years I write about the World Series of Poker, the world’s greatest gambling tournament, where, in the World Championship main event, players put up $10,000 each and play until one person has all the chips. And a $1 million cash prize. I play in poker tournaments around the world, events you’ve probably never heard of, losing many, placing in the money in some, and winning a few. Like the minor-league baseball prospect who has just enough success at Double A ball to think he might get a crack at the Big Leagues, I win enough (and learn enough) to think I might one day be worthy of a shot at the Main Event. Every year I trek to Binion’s Horseshoe and, pen in hand, dutifully note the exploits of the world’s best poker players. And with every passing year, I come closer to convincing myself that I’m one of them—that I should be huddled with the living legends of the game, the Johnny Chans and Stu Ungars and Doyle Brunsons, betting, raising, and folding in quest of the most revered prize in poker.

But I’ve always had this rule: If you can’t win your way in, you’re not good enough to compete. Fact is, anyone who wants to play in the Main Event can simply plunk down $10,000 cash and take a seat, and every year about a third of the field does. But the majority of players, me included, play in satellites. Granted, these are numerical longshots—typically 200 or more players vying for a few spots—but every night during the three weeks leading up to the Main Event, someone converts a $220 entry fee into an invitation to the big dance. Satellites are difficult to win, terribly difficult, but if you do beat the long odds, you’ve instantly created for yourself an overlay, a situation in which your long-term expectation is greater than the equity you’ve invested. Indeed, to play in a $10,000-buy-in poker tournament for a few hundred dollars is about as big of an overlay as you’ll ever find inside a casino.

On the night in 1998 that I arrive at the Horseshoe, five days before the Main Event, I play in the first of what I expect will be many satellite tournaments. Thanks to sharp play, good judgment and, it must be said, some extraordinarily good luck, my first satellite tournament of the 1998 World Series of Poker is my last. Eight hours after I arrive in Las Vegas, I’ve won a seat in the Main Event.

As the final hand is dealt, eliminating the last player standing between me and my poker dream-come-true, I sit dumbly in my chair, staring blankly at the dealer. All around me there is much hooting and hollering and back-slapping. But I am stunned. Because I realize: In five days I’m going to be playing for the World Championship of Poker. And then I do something you should never do at a poker table: I cry.

Like a boxer preparing for the ring, I spend the next few days getting ready. But instead of road work and hours on the heavy bag, I review oft-read poker textbooks, play a few more satellite tourneys down the street at the Plaza (winning again!), and conduct a feverish internal debate with myself over the importance of having lucky talismans wedged in my pocket when the Main Event begins. Look, I’m a long-time gambling writer; I know holding onto locks of hair from my dog, cat, and girlfriend will have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the cards I am dealt. I know!

But I figure, what the hell. They can’t hurt.

The morning of the World Championship, I rise early and complete what is supposed to be an hour-long jog in twenty minutes. I eat about four bites of what is supposed to be a nourishing fruit-plate breakfast. My digestive system is not working well.

You might say I’m nervous.

What worries me most, I come to understand after an impromptu therapy session with my girlfriend, is failure. Not the failure of losing the $1 million—or, for that matter, the $697,000 second prize, or $25,000 27th prize—but of failing to play well. I’m scared of playing like an idiot, of giving my chips away like a hopeless old lady in thrall to a televangelist. I’m scared of not belonging in this competition—and scared that my play will confirm my fears.

An hour before game time, I’m laying in my hotel bed, with the shades drawn, silently reassuring myself that the only way I can fail is if I don’t enjoy myself.

It works. I feel swell. I’m ready. Only problem is, so immersed am I in deep-breathing exercises, positive visualization, and various other affirming rituals I’m too embarrassed to describe, I arrive late, missing the tournament’s first two hands and the poker equivalent of “Gentlemen, start your engines!”: Tournament Coordinator Jack McClelland’s famous direction of “Shuffle-up and deal!”

When I float in, carried along on a buoyant current of newfound equanimity, the scene is electric, pulsing with a potent mixture of anticipation and dread. Four days from now, someone, one of the 350 players congregated at Binion’s Horseshoe, will be crowned the World Champion of Poker. Someone will have survived.

Everyone else will have perished. This accident scene waiting to happen draws a large crowd of onlookers, a menagerie of media types, curious bystanders taking a break from the slot machines, and legions of crestfallen poker players who didn’t make it into the field. I know how they feel, because for many years I stood exactly where they stand, wishing I were inside the ropes, not outside looking in.

Dashing to Table 50, I take my seat—the 8-seat, two to the dealer’s right—check that my $10,000 stake is intact, and look around to get my bearings. Matt Damon, doing publicity for his upcoming poker movie and, thus, surrounded by a swarm of television cameras, is two tables away. The legendary Doyle Brunson is at Damon’s table, waiting to suck in his loose movie-star money. Huck Seed, a former World Champion I’ve previously written about, is at a table over my left shoulder, as is Berry Johnston, another all-time-great former titleholder.

And at my table, the only table in the universe that matters to me, starting now, are the eight other fellows with whom I hope to be spending the next eight hours. I’ve played with all but two of these guys, and none of them are soft. There aren’t any World Champions here, but several of the players have come breathlessly close. In the 2-seat is John Spadevecchia, who finished third three years ago; next to him is Hans “Tuna” Lund, who has finished second in the Main Event and first in numerous other poker tournaments; and beside the big fish is my friend Blair Rodman, a fierce competitor who finished high in the money last year, and who, coincidentally, played golf with me two days earlier. But there will be no “gimmes” today.

My game plan—to fold everything for the first hour unless I’m dealt aces, kings, queens, or ace-king—becomes obsolete within five minutes. Like a hound on the scent of a squirrel, I can’t contradict my instincts. My poker conditioning has become so acute that when I see a good opportunity to “pick up” (or steal) a tiny pot, I pounce—like that old hound. That I have nothing worth playing in my hand doesn’t make any difference. My position—last of the players to act—is perfect, and based on the betting and body language of my opponents, I can sense, I’m certain, nobody is going to call my modest raise. The fear I thought might cripple me, the kind of fear that paralyzes and robs sound judgment, never materializes. I had envisioned myself hyperventilating the first time I tried to play a pot in the World Championship, like a fledgling actor gripped with stage fright, but when I say “raise” and toss my chips into the pot, it feels just like any other of the hundreds of poker tournaments I’ve played in. My life is on a weird tape-delay at the moment. A few seconds later, when I fully realize how much is at stake, I get way too nervous to make the raise. Fortunately, it’s already in the recent past.

Everybody folds, the dealer pushes me the pot, and, simple as that, I’m no longer a World Series of Poker virgin. I’ve won my first pot on the eighth hand of the tournament. And my heart did not suffer any unusual palpitations. My palms did not start secreting a cold viscous liquid. I did not soil myself. Everything is fine. Now I can play.

For the next 90 minutes, I build up to $11,400 without ever having a showdown. A little pot here, a minor bluff there—no major confrontations, no high drama. Just solid positional poker—the kind that can get you in the money, yet seldom wins first place. For now, though, that will do nicely. I’m just relieved not to have made a premature exit. I want to live a little before I die.

At the end of the first level, several big name professionals are out, including the brilliant Phil Hellmuth, Jr., another of my profile subjects, a man of whom I have written admiringly in the past. How strange—how wonderful, I must admit—to be in the running while he’s not. I feel like a young boy who has just discovered, after many years of practice and instruction, that he can finally drive his golf ball past his dad. I feel like I belong here.

The “blind” bets—a form of anteing—double in size at the second level, as they will continue to do for the rest of the tournament. Steadily escalating stakes means you have to play; you can’t merely sit and wait to be dealt miracle cards. But you can’t be reckless, either. Success in any poker tournament, especially the World Series of Poker, is contingent on many factors—skill, timing, luck—but the key element may be picking your spots, engaging in big confrontations selectively and, unless you know you have way the best of the battle, rarely.

During the tournament’s second level, almost three-and-a-half hours after the first hand has been dealt, I still haven’t shown down a single hand. That is to say, I haven’t turned over my cards once! Yet I’ve managed to build my bankroll to a healthy $15,000, mainly by betting aggressively when I’m committed to a hand and folding it when I’m not. No raising wars, no final-card heroics—just solid well-modulated poker. The largest pot I win, about $1,800, comes to me when my opponent, Spadevecchia, who had called a series of raises before and after the flop, decides he can’t call my $2,000 bet on the end.

Almost concurrent with my emerging belief that I’m playing wonderfully well, I make two big blunders and blow off a big chunk of chips. Twice I lead at a flop, get called, and lead again, only to be raised. Two bad bluffs and I’m back down to $7,800.

Immediately returning to form, I grind my way back up to $12,400, never showing down a hand. After four hours of play, nearly 100 contestants have already been eliminated. The 250 or so of us that remain should now have proportionally more chips among us. In a poker tournament, you need to be like a whale swimming through an ocean of plankton, slurping up as many chips as you can get your jaws around. Paul “Eskimo” Clark, a top tournament player who, as you might imagine, looks like an Alaskan Inuit, is the king of the Arctic at this point. Every time I turn around to check the tables behind me, his stack of chips has grown another inch or two. The $45,000 or so he’s accumulated makes my wee twelve-and-change feel like a country cottage compared to his burgeoning skyscraper.

During the next two hours, the third level, I play poker about as well as I ever have. Without putting too many of my chips at risk, yet betting aggressively enough to shake the confidence of my opponents, I steadily build to $18,600 in chips without losing a hand. My competitors, I can feel, are starting to fear and respect me—the ideal result, according to my United States Marine Corps upbringing. After six hours, I know I can play with anyone at my table, including the almost-World Champions.

And even better, I can see they know it, too.

At the fourth level, we’re playing with $100 and $200 blind bets, as well as a compulsory $25 ante, and contestants are starting to drop out quickly. The field is down to 225 or so, and our table has already had its share of victims. Each time someone gets eliminated, tables are consolidated and another player is brought in to fill the seat. (Sometimes two players in a row get eliminated from the same seat; it then becomes known as “the electric chair.”) When the player to my immediate left loses the last of his chips, a new kid comes to town, taking the empty seat. And that’s when the trouble begins.

I know the man—his name is Larry—since I’ve played in many tournaments with him. But I can’t remember his style of play—if he’s a loose cannon or as tight as a miser. I can’t recall if he can be induced into making bad calls or if he’s impossible to bluff. He’s a cipher.

Ideally, I’d like to watch Larry for a few rounds. But two hands after he sits down, before I can get a line on his play, I’m dealt the best cards I’ve seen since the World Series of Poker Main Event began. I peek at my pair of red kings, and I know I’ve got to play.

I’m first to act—“one off the blinds,” in poker parlance—and I raise the pot $600, requiring anyone who wants to play his hand to put in $800. Larry, the next to act, pauses momentarily and, to my surprise, calls. Everyone else folds.

Unless he has aces—and I don’t think he does, or else he probably would have re-raised me—I’ve got the best hand before the flop. I figure him for something like ace-king, possibly of the same suit. As long as the dealer doesn’t put an ace on the board, I figure I’m good.

The flop comes 10-6-4, with two hearts. It’s a flop I like. Not wanting to give my opponent a “free” card, a chance to improve his hand at no cost, I bet $1,600.

Larry thinks for a moment, looks at his pile of $24,000 in chips, and says, “I raise.” He matches my $1,600 bet and puts another $3,000 in the pot.

Before I do any analysis, my first instinct is to fold. There’s an old saying in poker: “If you can’t sometimes fold the best hand, you’ll never be a winner.” I think I probably have the best hand—but I’m not sure. And given my position (first to act), Larry can exploit my uncertainty. I have about $18,000 in front of me. I can fold, accept my $2,400 loss and live to fight another battle, when I’m sure of where I stand.

But. Yet. However … This is the best hand I’ve seen in more than seven hours of poker. I may have Larry drawing dead to two or three cards, making me a big favorite to take down a monster pot. On the other hand. …

I run through the possibilities.

—He has aces, which he slow-played before the flop, hoping I would bet out: Possible, but unlikely.

—He has a flush draw, ace-queen of hearts maybe, and he’s running what’s called a semi-bluff, raising with the worst hand, but knowing it can improve to the best hand if called: Possible. But very courageous.

—He has three-of-a-kind and wants to shut me out of the pot in case I have the flush draw: Could it be? Would he call my raise from early position with a pair of fours, sixes, or tens? Possibly. But if he has indeed flopped trips, wouldn’t he merely want to call and let me blow off more money on the next round? If I knew my man better, I could make a better decision.

—He has the same hand as me, kings, and he’s exploiting his superior position: Highly improbable.

—He has queens or jacks and thinks he has the best hand: Were it so! But probably not.

—He has nothing (a small pair, perhaps) and is running a stone-cold bluff: Only one way to find out.

I mull my options. Fold or raise; fold or raise. I don’t even consider calling, since, if any card but a king falls on fourth street, I’m stuck in the same uncertain predicament. (One professional gambler friend of mine thinks calling the $3,000 would have been a great play, for reasons that are too esoteric for my meager poker intelligence.) To me, the decision is clear: Either fold or raise.

I can’t decide. I just don’t know.

For two minutes I think. (Two minutes is an eternity at the poker table.) I stare at Larry, trying to get a hint from his body language. He’s still and silent, and he doesn’t respond when I talk to him. “If you’ve got aces, you’ve got me beat,” I say, seeing if he’ll react. He doesn’t.

I don’t know. I look around the table. The rest of the group is growing impatient, yet nobody says anything. They sense the gravity of the moment.

I decide to raise.

Now, “decide” is not really the word, since I’m not at all convinced that this is the correct move. But I’m having something akin to an out-of-body experience: My mouth is saying “raise” and my hands are putting another $8,000 in chips into the pot. Yet my heart is not remotely convinced that my hands and mouth know what they’re doing. I’m watching a film of myself, and I am powerless to change the ending.

Larry considers my bet for about three seconds and moves all his chips into the pot. “All in,” he says, raising me another $10,000 or so.

I shake my head in disgust and flip my kings into the muck.

“I guess I should have just folded after the first bet,” I say ruefully to Blair, at the other end of the table.

“I smelled trips,” he says. I nod disconsolately. Larry, busy stacking up what used to be mine, has no comment.

I’ve lost $10,400 on one hand, my entire profit after nearly seven-and-a-half-hours of tournament poker. I’m back down to $10,000.

And I’m officially on tilt.

It doesn’t take me long to blow off what remains of my bankroll. I run two horribly unsuccessful bluffs against the only two players at the table on whom a bluff isn’t going to work. In other words, I try to get fancy with a couple of donkeys.

That costs me another $5,000 or so.

And then, twenty minutes later, I pick up a moderately good hand, ace-queen of diamonds, in early position and, not thinking about lasting until the second day, not thinking about collecting myself and recouping the chips I’ve given away, not thinking about much of anything, I raise all-in.

This is a terrifically stupid play, since the only hands that will call me are hands that can beat me. And sure enough, a quiet fellow who hasn’t played anything all day calls me with aces. Thirty seconds later, I’m out of the 1998 World Series of Poker.

I spend the next few hours—okay, the next few days—filled with self-loathing and regret. Failing to win, to place in the money, to even make the second day wouldn’t bother me so much if I had merely gotten unlucky. That happens; it’s a cruel part of poker. What hurts is knowing I played so well, so beautifully, then managed to play so rottenly. I—not fate, not Lady Luck, not any other euphemistic apparition—am the reason I was eliminated from the World Series of Poker. And for that I am profoundly disappointed.

For weeks, I have nightmares about my big hand with Larry. I literally wake up in the middle of the night, reliving the pot as if it were a fiery plane crash. Almost every day I torture myself (and my friends) recounting the ominous events. I talk about the hand endlessly with my poker pals, and I always come to the same conclusion: I played the hand badly, really badly.

It starts to consume me. I even suggest to my girlfriend that I might get Larry’s telephone number from the Horseshoe and give him a call, tell him I’m writing a story, and, you know, would he mind telling me, for the sake of journalism, what he had?

But eventually I come to my senses. And I’m consoled by a simple realization: There will be another World Series of Poker next year. And the next. And I will only get better. As in life, there will be some poker decisions I’ll regret and some I’ll rejoice, some memories I’ll loathe and some I’ll cherish. And, like life, the game will go on and on, making heroes and fools out of us all, long after I’ve stopped playing.

My equanimity and wisdom last for about two days. Like a jilted suitor, I brood for many months over the One That Got Away. This is not to say I obsess about my missed opportunity at the 1998 World Series of Poker on a daily basis—only weekly. After several months of “beating myself up,” as the 12-step crowd is fond of saying, I eventually realize the general unhealthiness—not to mention silliness—of fixating on a poker tournament I never came close to winning.

But instead of seeking psychoanalytic counseling and various serotonin-affecting medications, I launch a new strategy: Play as many no-limit tournaments as time permits, and condition myself into a better, more infallible, player, like a boxer preparing for a fight. My inspiration is something Oscar de la Hoya told me when I interviewed him one day during a friendly round of golf. “When you’re in the best shape of your life,” the welterweight champ counseled, “you feel like nothing can hurt you. You can get hit with the other guy’s best shot, and you don’t even feel it. It’s like you’re invincible.”

In my quest to possess something like poker invincibility, I play and study and think and play and analyze and play and play some more. And between the conclusion of the 1998 World Series of Poker and the weeks leading up to the 1999 World Series of Poker, I finish at the final table of more than 50% of the 16 no-limit tournaments I enter. This may be some sort of record, and if it isn’t, it ought to be. It’s a record for me, certainly. I tell my friend C, a superb tournament player who has finished in the money several times at the World Championship, that I’m playing no-limit hold ’em as well as I ever have—and that if I play with anything like the form I’ve achieved of late, I will surely finish in the money, and maybe at the final table.

“What about winning the damn thing?” he wonders.

I tell him, “Honestly, I haven’t let myself think about that.”

“Well, you better,” he advises. “None of those guys play any better than you. None of them. You’re putting them up on a pedestal. But I think you’ll find the more you play with them, they don’t know anything you don’t. You can play with any of them.”

I thank him for the pep talk. But the truth is, I don’t really believe him. I’ve watched the Hellmuths and Chans and Ungars for years. I’ve studied them like lab rats, and I know—I truly know—that I can’t think as they do. Some of the plays I’ve witnessed these guys make are utterly inscrutable to me, the work of maestros operating on a slightly evolved plane of poker reality that I can only hope to one day reach. Calling a guy down for all your chips with nothing but queen high? Folding kings before the flop when a volatile raise-every-other-pot maniac comes over the top of your raise? Moving all in with nothing but third pair? And being right. I don’t get it. And that’s why I know if I were to face one of these guys across the final table, with the title and the $1 million at stake, I’m certain I couldn’t outplay them. I’d have to get lucky.

The vast sea of others, though? I’m not afraid of them. I relish the opportunity to match wits and skill and heart.

So many players, I’ve noted over the past year, seem to be very much like I was six years earlier: smart and accomplished and talented—but only about half as smart and accomplished and talented as they believe themselves to be. It’s not that they’re arrogant or delusional. They’re merely mistaken. They make errors—errors they aren’t even aware are errors—that I used to make and can now recognize. I’m not talking about monumental gaffes, just subtle little things (slightly overvaluing certain starting hands; overbetting certain pots; playing cards instead of people) that, when added together, separate the good players from the very good ones and the very good ones from the greats.

The vision I’ve acquired from playing in—and winning at—numerous no-limit tournaments has allowed me to better assess the quality of my opponents. And more important, it’s allowed me to better assess myself. I feel as though, monk-like, I’ve attained a sense of wisdom about this game that I lacked several years ago—and that the vast majority of players, it seems, continue to lack. This vision, this knowing, instills in me a sense of calm, much like what I imagine deeply religious people feel when they have come to “know” their god.

Of course, I’ve always believed such zealots to be profoundly deluded. So perhaps I’m truly no better off than I was the year before, only more full of specious theories and ersatz power.

At the 1999 World Series of Poker, I arrive at the Horseshoe several days before the main event commences and promptly play, and lose, my first satellite. I play as well as I know I can, but get eliminated by an improbable and statistically rare series of so-called bad beats. I march over to the registration desk and buy in for $10,000 cash. It’s my symbolic way of proclaiming that no amount of infortuitous river cards can keep me from my rightful place in the elite field of poker titans. And on a simpler level, I know—I mean I really know—I’m going to win more supers than I lose. The fields are just too weak, too mistake prone, too unwise. Sure, there are wild variances in the short term and the cream doesn’t necessarily always rise above the curds. But my expected value, were I able to play super satellites every night of my life, is enormous. Given the quality of the fields, I feel as though I’m the casino, raking off my demonstrable edge hand after hand.

Less than 24 hours after purchasing a seat in the 1999 World Series of Poker World Championship, I win one (which I sell to a value-minded pro for $9,900 in cash) after a total investment of $620. And 24 hours after that I do it again for $220 and pocket nearly $10,000 in profit.

My success at the tables is doubly satisfying, since I’ve just published a collection of gambling stories, The Man With the $100,000 Breasts, and amid the book signings and media interviews and general good wishes from the stars of the poker community I’ve long written about, I’m actually playing like a member of that rare fraternity. No different from the theater critic who feels compelled to write Broadway musicals or the golf-equipment salesman who feels compelled to qualify for the U.S. Open, I’m infinitely happier being a participant than an observer—and not just a dilettante and dabbler, but a force. When Emile Zola was reporting the Dreyfus trial, so deeply did he immerse himself in the minutiae of the case that it was said he knew more about the affair than the judge and lawyers combined. My reportage of the gambling world hasn’t probed even fractionally as deep as old Emile’s, but I feel a similar sense of intimacy and expertise, if only from some sort of weird osmosis in which the collective brilliance of my essay subjects has somehow seeped through my pores. I no longer feel like a writer who plays poker, but a poker player who writes.

All seems right with the world. I’m playing beautifully, my book is a critical and commercial success, and I’m in love with a goddess of a woman, the magical T, who has made the past two years of my life happier than I could previously imagine.

I can’t wait for the World Championship to begin.

On Day One I play the best poker of my life.

For eight hours I hold a legitimately powerful starting hand exactly twice, yet I manage to churn my $10,000 stake into nearly $26,000. My table is unusually weak for a major tournament—mostly satellite winners and a few low-limit grinders taking a once-in-a-lifetime shot—and I feel as though my opponents are playing with their cards turned up, a glorious state that makes the preposterously difficult game of poker seem ridiculously easy. So acute are my reads (my assessments of who has what) that I can play fiercely and cleverly despite holding virtually nothing of worth the entire day. The one time I have aces wired—ah, that hand again—I re-raise a not very good player, a reckless heavy-breathing fellow from Wisconsin, before the flop. With little consideration, he calls. When the flop comes down unmatched rags, I bet the size of the now rather juicy pot. The Cheesehead, reduced to a jumble of tells, huffs and puffs and fiddles his chips. I see his trembling fingers and quivering lip and I know my aces are no longer any good. He re-raises, as I already knew he would, and after not much consternation, I toss my cards face-up into the muck.

The others at the table are wide-eyed and credulous. But I have no doubt—zero—that my previously unbeatable starting hand has been run down from behind. And that’s that.

Several of the railbirds chirp excitedly about what has just transpired—“No, he didn’t slow play ’em. He raised and the other guy called and then …”—and two of my tablemates merely nod affirmatively and say, “Tough decision.” And I know everyone at this particular table at Binion’s Horseshoe knows for certain that, save for the most outrageous quirk of implausible fortune, there is no way in the world they can beat me at no-limit hold ’em.

Twenty minutes later I pick up kings on the button, get called by a desperate woman in the big blind, flop a set, play it slow and cool and controlled for every dollar it’s worth, and reap the spoils of what’s left of her stack when she makes an impotent two-pair on the end.

This is how it’s supposed to work in a perfect universe.

When play concludes at the end of the first day, I’m in the top 40 in chips, poised to make a run for the money tomorrow—my first foray into Day Two—and supremely equanimous about the state of my game and the state of my life.

At this moment I like poker very much.

Hubris, as Aeschylus and Sophocles and scores of ancient sages have taught us, is … well, a tragic flaw. And while it may produce a sense of catharsis in the rest of the World of Series of Poker field—not to mention the attentive reader—in me it produces only a sense of profound disgust.

Hubris is what knocks me out of the 1999 World Championship on Day Two. Not obnoxiousness, not arrogance, not cockiness, not braggadocio, not delusions of grandeur. (All of which I’m eminently capable of periodically exhibiting, just not now.) What knocks me out is pride—pride in abilities that have ripened like so many juicy Cabernet Sauvignon grapes on a vine, but failed to mature and soften like so many bottles of young Bordeaux in a cellar.

For five hours I play unspectacular poker against a table of players who are approximately ten times tougher than the previous day’s ensemble. (On the second day seats are re-drawn at random.) This group of no-limit experts plays a classical game: circumspect, aggressive, and unpredictable. They are much harder to read and much harder to take advantage of. Moreover, the player with the table’s largest trove of chips, a wily Persian fellow who languidly chain-smokes Camels, is sitting directly to my left, ready to punish me if I step out of line too brashly or boldly. Without holding good cards, I find it monstrously difficult to make gains against these fierce competitors.

Lacking what a poker buddy of mine calls “psychological ascendancy” over the table (which, in layman’s terms, means “everyone’s scared of you”), I can do little more than tread tournament water, picking up some small pots a few times an hour and folding just about everything else. Now, if the blinds and antes didn’t escalate every two hours, this would be a fine way to survive infinitely. But faced with progressively bigger stakes at each new level, contestants must consistently grow their war chest or face annihilation by those who have. At the start of the day I had one of the bigger stacks at my table. Five hours later I’m well below average—and I’ve barely lost a dollar!

Near the beginning of the day’s third level of play, our table is “broken” (players are re-assigned to other tables who have lost contestants) and I’m moved across the room to one of the worst spots in the tournament. I’m sandwiched between Erik Seidel, a former New Yorker I’ve written about admiringly who has finished as high as second in this event and won many others, and a fast-playing Vietnamese dude whose style I find impossible to read.

To the observant player with a slightly below-average stash of chips, getting transferred qualifies as something of a bad break. The hours of mental notes you’ve taken on the eight other opponents at your table are instantly useless, and any judgments you make about the new octet you face must be made from past experience or intuition, neither of which are typically as effective as observation and deduction. Part science, part art, reading people is the rare skill that makes no-limit poker such a thrill to play. And without it—no matter how well-versed you are in probabilities—you can’t win.

My drought of useless starting hands continues to vex me. I’m forced to periodically glance down at my two cards, not really look at what I’m holding, pretend I’ve seen a big pair—and then play my hand as though it’s the real thing. Usually the other guys fold. But when someone plays back at me, I have to look carefully to see what I have and reconsider my options.

Stuck between a potential World Champion on my left—Seidel will, in fact, go on to finish sixth in 1999—and a potential chip inhaler on my right, I’ve got nothing going for me at the moment but my people skills. They’re what got me to this position, I remind myself, and they’re what will see me through to the next level, when, I hope, I’ll get hit by the deck and find brilliantly colored stacks of red-white-and-blue $1,000 chips flung my way.

Did I mention this hubris concept?

For nearly an hour I’ve been watching everyone at my table like I’m a leopard lying in wait, camouflaged and patient, but ready to spring when the injured or feeble cross my deadly path. I’ve noticed a rotund bespectacled man with a short shock of peppery hair playing just a few more pots than he statistically ought to be. He’s taking advantage of my—and most of the other players’—tendency not to make expensive pre-flop raises unless there’s something that warrants such a display of power. He’s been sneaking in out of position to see flops for a cheap price, trying to make something, and quickly exiting if he doesn’t connect. But I’ve noticed that when this round fellow in seat four gets raised or in any way put to a tough decision, he predictably mucks his hand. I can almost hear him thinking out loud: I didn’t have much to begin with anyway, so there’s no use getting involved against better hands unless I flop a monster.

I generally like seat four’s strategy. But those of us who pay close attention to his play—I assume Seidel and the Vietnamese assassin have noted this pattern as well—will take advantage of him in one of two ways. Either we’ll push him off hands with nothing, or we’ll let him play along with his slightly inferior starting cards, let him make just enough of a hand on the flop to feel he’s got a winner, then charge him full price for a peek at the best hand. At least that’s what I plan to do. The problem is, by the time the action gets around to me in seat nine, one or more hungry jackals has already gotten his teeth into the prey, and I’m forced to watch. (And dribble off more chips to the inexorable blinds.)

My stack has been depleted to less than $20,000 now, and I know I truly must start playing, no matter how marginal my starting cards, or whatever leverage and threat I once possessed will be rendered useless.

Finally, something good happens. My round pal in seat four looks over his glasses and blithely tosses in a call from early position. One off the button, I look down and find the ace-king of hearts. I raise three times the size of the blind. Everyone folds except, as I suspected, seat four.

The flop contains three small rags of three different suits. Player four checks to me. I bet the size of the pot, fairly certain that, having noticed I haven’t played a hand since I sat down at his table, my opponent will credit me for a big holding and go quietly into that good night.

Instead, he calls.

Hmm. Curious. I look my man over. I apply my, um, world-class reading skills to him—hello, hubris!—and determine beyond a doubt that he is prospecting. One more unhelpful card and he’ll be gone.

The dealer turns another small card, pairing the board and creating a flush draw. Now the board reads 7♣ 4♠ 2♦ 4♣.

Seat four checks. Thanks to all sorts of extraordinarily esoteric reasons that I can no longer recall and wouldn’t be able to elucidate even if I could, I now know he has something like A-10 or A-J and I’ve got him drawing dead to two or three cards.

I bet the pot, about $6,000 now.

He immediately looks down at his chips—uh oh, bad sign—fiddles with his cards, and rests his chin in his palm. I can see (and hear) him breathing. The man is either putting on a tremendous act or he’s beaten like a dirty rug and doesn’t want to acknowledge it. Now, I would like very much for him to come to this realization. After all, I’m holding merely an ace high, albeit the best possible ace high. I would dearly love to add these chips to my stack and get back in the battle. I would like to reassert my—

He calls.

Hmm. Curious. When faced with heat, my man is supposed to crumble meekly. I mean, that’s what I saw; that’s what I read. Very curious, indeed.

As the dealer puts out the river, I watch seat four, not the card. After staring at the middle of the table for a few seconds, he looks up and catches me eyeing him. He looks back at the flop, looks at me, and says, “All in.”

Seat four pushes his last $9,000 into the pot.

I look to the cards to see what has inspired this momentary bout of madness. There, on the end of the flop, is the king of clubs.

Since I know without question that a player who has survived this long in the greatest poker tournament in the world—there are only about 125 players left—would never commit so many chips on the flop and fourth street to a backdoor flush draw, I can eliminate the possibility that seat four has a flush. And thanks to all sorts of other incredibly complex calculations that I can no longer recall or smartly express, I can confidently eliminate a whole bunch of other winning hands he could possibly be holding. Which leaves only a lot of second-best hands or an outright bluff.

But beside all that exquisite analysis and logic and science, I have something artful going for me: my impeccable reading skills. I don’t have to fret over the practical exigencies of card sequences; I can rely instead on the ephemeral alchemy of people reading. Magic triumphing over intellect, and all that.

I look at seat four. I see. I see his hands and his eyes and his neck and his chest and his posture and his lips.

I see into his soul.

And I know those chips he has foolishly committed to the pot in a piteous attempt at a bluff are now mine.

I’m Johnny Chan. I’m Stu Ungar. I’m a wizard who doesn’t need the nuts to call a guy down for all the money. I have reached a higher plane.

Smiling—yes, actually smiling—I say, “I call,” and flip up my ace-king.

“Flush!” seat four yelps, revealing his queen-nine of clubs.

It will be another year, approximately, before I will know what it feels like to have everything you believe in be exposed as a pernicious lie, but when it does happen—and it will, I assure you—I will look back on this moment and remember that, yes, I once felt this way, gasping for air, grasping for solace.

To be so right and so very wrong.

Ten minutes later I put in my last $1,800 with a pair of tens, get called by a pair of jacks, and say goodbye to the 1999 World Series of Poker.

As I speed-walk out of the room toward the elevators, I hear Bob Thompson, the Horseshoe’s new Tournament Director, announce on the intercom, “We just lost Michael Konik, author of The Man With the $100,000 Breasts. Just knocked out on table forty-one.”

Fighting back tears, like a weepy sentimentalist watching a sweet love story on an airplane, I resolve to reread Sophocles before I play another no-limit poker tournament.

Many successful men like to remind the chroniclers of their fabulous ascent to the pinnacle of their professions that the monumental triumphs they have enjoyed, whether on the golf course or Wall Street or in the research lab, couldn’t have been accomplished without the support of a remarkable woman. I myself have been told this in so many words by Jack Nicklaus and Raymond Floyd, Jerry Rice and Dick “Night Train” Lane, T.J. Cloutier and Scotty Nguyen, not to mention nearly a half-dozen other luminaries accustomed to having the spotlight shining on their every exploit. Some of these men recite this sentiment, I think, out of guilt, remorseful for not having been better husbands and fathers in their single-minded quests to be the best at whatever occupations captivated their souls. Others say it because it’s the most expedient way to utter the words “I love and adore my wife” without actually uttering those exact words.

But I think there’s some inherent truth to the idea; I think that all of us do better on our individual stages with a strong and loving partner waiting in the wings. (I know I do.) I have found that I play my best poker, my most liberated and unfettered poker, when my home life is sweet. Strong. A terrifically contented feeling washes over me when I’m playing a poker tournament and, amid the pressures of constant decision-making, I remember that no matter how I perform, whether I win or lose, a sublime woman will be waiting in our bed for my return—and she’ll feel as she does about me whether I play well or badly. It’s a quick and effective way of putting the vagaries of gambling into perspective: The money and the championship titles and all the rest really mean very little when measured against the love of a good woman.

At the 2000 World Series of Poker, for the first time in many years, I am playing in a major poker tournament without an emotional anchor. I am alone.

This sorry state of solitude wouldn’t feel so bad if not for … well, if not for one disappointment after another accreting like so much rust on the valves of my heart.

For several months I contemplated skipping the tournament altogether, reasoning that my flummoxed emotional state wouldn’t allow me to play well enough to make my entry into the Main Event a positive expectation. It wasn’t that I thought I wouldn’t be able to concentrate well enough to make good decisions; my concern was that when faced with the inevitable misfortunes that are an intrinsic part of the game, I would crumble—so fragile and battered did I feel. I mean, it takes strength and equanimity to have the best hand run down by a 22-1 underdog. It takes clarity and vision to see such calamities for what they really are and what they really mean—short-term variances in a long continuum of results—and not assign to them all sorts of spurious symbolism that accomplishes little and breeds self-pity. And I wasn’t sure I had the strength, the emotional resilience, to absorb and deflect the psychological pummeling that inevitably accompanies a four-day poker tournament.

But the counter-argument, helpfully proposed by my non-gambling therapist, was that continuing with my life “normally,” doing all the things that typically give me joy, would be an affirmative statement of wellness, a proclamation to myself—and certain unseen others—that no matter what injuries of the heart I had suffered, I was still whole enough to carry on. Paradise lost but then regained—something Miltonian like that.

Still, with only a few days left before departing Los Angeles for Las Vegas, I’m not convinced I want to play. I am, however, absolutely convinced that I don’t want to repeat ad infinitum my relationship travails of the past year to dozens of people I hardly know but see frequently on the tournament trail. So, instead of arriving four or five days before the Main Event per my usual schedule, I plan to arrive two nights before, leaving time to play a super satellite or two, as well as the dreaded (and unwinnable) Horseshoe free-roll press tournament.

On the morning of the Friday I’m to depart, I harvest a large bouquet of herbs and flowers from my backyard garden. I’m meeting N for what promises to be a supremely romantic date. If all goes well—and I can just tell it will—I may not be alone during the 2000 World Series of Poker after all. N is an important member of the Las Vegas media, with whom I have had professional relations that always crackled with an undercurrent of attraction and flirtation. Following a series of deliciously seductive e-mails and telephone calls, we agree to rendezvous for a proper date at a superb French restaurant overlooking one of the Strip’s premier ersatz lakes. I’m dizzy with anticipation, already calculating how we’re going to maintain our neighboring state-to-state relationship.

The plan is for me to dash directly from the McCarran baggage claim to my table with N, whose deep eyes and full lips and saucy sense of humor are already making my knees weak from 280 miles across the Mojave. So I’m dressed in one of my best suits, clean-shaven and grasping the garland of lavender and roses I’ve extracted from my garden, when I check my messages one last time before departing for a week of romance, love-making, debauchery, giddiness, mutual discovery, high hopes, and, incidentally, the World Series of Poker.

There’s a missive from N! Seems, let’s see, there’s something she wants me to know … feels a little awkward about saying so … isn’t sure exactly how much to tell … but wanted me to know in the spirit of candor …

N tells me she has a boyfriend.

I swallow hard and instantly feel very bad about what I’ve done to my garden.

Standing at the World Series of Poker registration desk, watching the nice lady recount the $10,000 in cash I’ve just handed her, I feel overdressed. My light Italian suit—the one that fits me so well; the one that was meant to draw N’s attention to my broad shoulders and slim waist; that one—suddenly feels like a comical affectation. The scent of rosemary and lemon verbena on my fingers suddenly seems effete. The fantasy I had of champagne and kisses with N suddenly seems as absurd as the one this roomful of hopeful but ill-equipped gamblers collectively has of winning the World Championship of poker.

I should be in T-shirt and jeans, stinking of smoke and whiskey, getting my fingernails dirty from scraping in chips across the green baize. Instead I’m an innocent boy done up in his best, left at the altar of romance by a girl he really liked, the one who was going to make all that transpired before seem like a faint memory. Woe is me. Boo-hoo. And so forth.

Rather than do the responsible thing and reconsider how I feel about playing in the World Series, I lower my head and plow on, undeterred. My maladjusted, maniacal response to the N debacle was to bolt from the McCarran baggage claim, speed past the luxe casino where we were to have gazed longingly across a crisp white tablecloth and flickering candles, and head directly to the grungy charms of Binion’s Horseshoe Hotel and Casino, in downtown Las Vegas. And buy into the 2000 World Series of Poker. Broken heart be damned!

I told myself this was a fine and healthy way to remind my fractured ego that I’m all right. Indeed, I told myself even more forcefully, it’s a fine and healthy way to move on, to do something you like and you’re good at, to prosper. I told myself all this. But now, as I watch the lady counting my money, I’m not sure if that stack of hundreds represents a position of strength or a monumental bluff.

I probably wouldn’t feel as badly as I do about the last-minute N revelation were it not for what happened with J. J was the magic elixir, the delicious nepenthe I would drink in with all my senses. And all my sadness would go away.

For many months previous to J, I met a bountiful series of interesting and smart and provocative and vivacious women. I liked many of them immensely. I enjoyed being with them, in and out of bed. But none of these splendid women ever inspired in me dreams of permanence, of lasting and transcendent partnership. None of them, I knew, would be my mate.

J was different. After but one date, during which we had a spirited discussion on the merits (or lack thereof) of Madama Butterfly’s libretto, I was smitten. Drinking in her raven hair and golden eyes, her I’m-thinking-something-naughty smile, her thrilling laughter—for the first time in a long time I could envision spending my life with someone. J was perfect for me in so many ways: an uber-fraulien with the mind of a novelist and the body of an aerobics instructor. She was smart and confident and articulate; she was sexy and elegant and stylish; she was passionate and sensitive and imaginative. She was dreamy.

She was too good to be true.

Like Goethe’s suffering young Werther—but with significantly less lyricism—shortly after declaring my amorous devotion to this extraordinary woman, I learned my affection would be wholly unrequited. I told J how magnificent I believed her to be. She told me if I really knew her—truly and fully—I wouldn’t love her. Indeed, she promised, I probably wouldn’t even like her. J had habits and proclivities that, should I know them, would either make me “puke blood or take out a restraining order” against her, as she evocatively put it.

As a younger lad, filled with evangelical Mr. Fixit zeal, I would have hushed my beloved and promised that everything would be all right. And even though it wouldn’t be, of course, I would have tried mightily to change what I could not, in direct defiance of Alcoholics Anonymous and various other get-well organizations. Older—and infinitesimally, microscopically—wiser, I took J at her word. I was besotted, but not crazy.

Losing J—or, more precisely choosing to believe her—was doubly crushing. In the here and now I could no longer, with this preposterously beautiful woman, have trenchant conversations on, alternately, the banality of Monet’s paintings and the piquancy of Pauline Reage’s pornography. I could no longer marvel at her acrobatic mind and lust after her shapely bottom. I couldn’t have her. What J’s evaporation meant in the long-term, though, was even more troubling: Meeting a perfect woman, I had to admit, was impossible, an elaborate fiction I wished fervently to believe but, under sober examination, remained little more than a juvenile delusion.

That’s not the kind of realization that puts you in jolly spirits. Or makes you want to play poker. Or do much beside lay in bed, your concerned dog staring at you quizzically, and listen to torchy Frank Sinatra records about the one that got away.

I should explain. There’s some history—some “back-story” as my colleagues in the screenwriting trade like to say. See, what happened with J—and with N, and with everything else in my life leading up to the 2000 World Series of Poker—probably wouldn’t have felt so bad, or even felt like it mattered at all, if not for T.

T was my lover for three years. She was there when I played in my first World Series of Poker Main Event. She was there when I won and she was there when I lost, especially when I lost, ready to console me with kind words and a warm embrace and a perspective-illuminating kiss. She was my best friend.

Among her many charms, including her abundant physical attributes, I discovered what most appealed to me about T was her ability to teach me. Thanks to a bookish childhood and an even more bookish adulthood, I know lots of facts, mostly useless stuff that comes in handy on game shows, but doesn’t necessarily help one live a life. I’m pretty well-educated, I think, but not very wise.

T taught me wisdom. Though she has the irresistible figure of a centerfold, and mischievous blue eyes, and a magnificent mane of auburn hair, and deliciously fair and freckled Irish skin, T is no mere sexpot. I mean, she is a sexpot. She oozes sex, and I’ve never met another woman more inherently libidinous, insatiable, and utterly unashamed of her libertine desires. But T is not a bimbo. She’s clever, with an appetite for enlightenment matched only by her appetite for pleasure. When we met, in her native country of Canada where she held an important public relations position for a large hotel concern, I was instantly attracted to her alluring visage. When I grew to know her well, I was enduringly attracted to her mind and spirit. She was, to my shuttered eyes, a goddess.

T taught me many lessons, some of which involved her various interests in homeopathy, numerology, witchcraft, cosmology, and erotica. But the greatest and most profound lesson she imparted was this: Always be honest, no matter how difficult.

That sounds absurdly simple, a hackneyed homily imparted from the pulpit of a parish church. The power of this message, however, transcends the whiff of cliché that trails behind it. Before T touched my life, I was never able to master its simple premise.

I conducted many of my love affairs dishonestly. I ruined my marriage, a sublime storybook partnership to a woman I didn’t deserve, thanks to dishonesty. Indeed, dishonesty nearly ruined my love affair with T.

But was I ever a great poker player.

Many have pontificated on the similarities between life and poker. And any sentient person can see those parallels easily: taking risks; weighing rewards; alternately suffering and basking in the vicissitudes of luck. Sure. Yes. Of course. But there’s one dramatic fissure where the metaphor crumbles. In poker you have to lie to win; in life telling lies will only make you lose.

We all perhaps suspect this last bit to be true. And some of us may even believe it in our souls. But many of us—me included—confronted with enormous caches of evidence to the contrary, blasphemously suppose otherwise. We see liars and cheats and criminals reaping the apparent fruits of an American dream; we see badness rewarded and goodness scorned; we see righteousness trod upon in our civic offices and the halls of academia and perhaps even on our own playing fields and in our own living rooms. And we start to imagine that telling lies isn’t such a bad thing after all. It’s merely how one gets through life. We learn that one gets what one wants by telling lies.

T taught me otherwise. We had what most people would consider a wild and untraditional relationship, filled with sexual adventures involving other men and women. (T is ravenously bisexual. I’m ravenously hetero. Our desires dovetailed nicely.) But the keystone around which our “alternative” lifestyle was built was candor. She showed me that the only way a man and a woman—a highly sexualized man and woman—could cultivate a lasting partnership was by fertilizing the seeds of passion with honesty. Unqualified honesty. No matter how troublesome, no matter how expedient the alternative, Be True! was the way, the only way, to be.

This, if you’ve ever tried it, is not an easy way to conduct your life. It can be painful. And tiresome. And way more complicated than anything not involving particle-string theory ought to be. It is, however, the surest method to construct a communion between two lonely souls that will last far beyond the pain and fatigue and complications of being alive.

This edict was not impressed upon me without considerable effort. I commenced my (initially “long-distance”) relationship with T poorly, telling fibs—OK, lies—when that seemed easier than the alternative. The sexy neighbor across the street who sometimes brought me fruit after dinner? We were just friends, not one-time lovers. The charming woman meeting me in Vegas over the weekend? She was merely a friend of a friend, and we wouldn’t be sharing a bed or any other intimacies.

My dissembling was, of course, found out, like an inveterate bluffer’s continuous attempts to steal pots. And I was nearly knocked out of the game, if you will. But—forgive the strained simile—T allowed me a re-buy, a chance at redemption, where I could prove that my earlier misplays were not reflective of my real character and talent. At this stage of the relationship, I was made to understand that if I succumbed again to weakness, to the urge to tell the simple lie when it was more convenient than admitting the difficult truth, I’d be removed from the game as swiftly and surely as a flush beats a straight. T put it to me in a way she knew a poker player would understand: Basically, she told me, I must play our relationship face-up. Otherwise, she promised, I would have no shot at having her as my friend and lover and playmate, and every other glorious role we wish our life companion to play.

I couldn’t bear to see T walk out of my life, so I resolved to learn my lessons well and, even more important, to apply them to every waking moment of my newly enlightened existence.

And I did. For nearly three years I told many lies at the poker tables, taking advantage of too-trusting opponents when I knew I could. But not once did I tell a lie to my beloved T. She was my inspiration, my mentor, and I vowed not to disappoint her. Or myself.

If you think I’m making too much of this accomplishment, consider how you would answer impossible questions from your earnest spouse. Consider how you would reply when asked to confront your deepest secrets, your blackest fears, your most private dreams.

Being honest is hard. But in every other arena besides the poker table, it’s supposed to pay.

That’s what I learned from T.

So it was with some dismay that I discovered in September 1999 that T had for six months been conducting a long-distance affair with some guy she met in a taxi line at McCarran Airport on her way to meet up with me at Caesars Palace. She’d been charmed, I subsequently discovered, by the fanciful story he told her of formerly being a gigolo based in Nebraska. On the pretext of doing public-relations work for his fledgling—and now extinct—T-shirt business, whose success hinged on the alleged humor in endlessly repeating a misspelled expletive, T met with the Cornhusker Gigolo several times on her out-of-town business trips, where he was invited to exercise the talents that putatively gained him entrée into the elite Nebraskan sex-for-pay industry.

To camouflage her illicit relationship, about which she (rightly) suspected I wouldn’t be thrilled, T told me many lies. Not one. Not a few. A litany of them. And I believed every one.

Why wouldn’t I? I was T’s greatest student, a previously unenlightened dolt living by the pernicious getaway-with-what-you-can maxim that makes scoundrels of us all. But I learned. I learned so very well. My divine girlfriend showed me the true and righteous way, and I followed gladly, knowing I was blessed by newfound grace. All those others who took the easy way out of hard decisions would burn in a hellfire of their own making; I was headed to nirvana, with the flame-haired T leading me by the scrotum. Like the preacher who gets his congregants to sign over the deeds to their homes, she knew I had been utterly converted.

I was, in retrospect, a piteously easy mark—mostly because, like all deluded souls, I wanted so badly to have something to believe in.

Part of running a successful bluff is knowing against whom your lie will work. You don’t try to get a guy to fold two-pair if he’s the kind of player who thinks one pair is an unbeatable hand. It’s been said—most recently by a friend of mine who is used to being cheated regularly by his business partners—that you can only be bluffed and betrayed by those you completely trust, for they’re the only ones whom you’ll allow to prance around your heart without cautionary guards. T knew her man. And she played me like a World Champion.

After learning of T’s affair, I also discovered that she’d stolen from me large sums of money. She’d forged my signature on a check. She’d run up enormous charges on my credit cards. She had, for some time, been a consummate liar and an accomplished cheat. And I never knew.

I was all-in. My money and my heart and my soul were all piled in the center of the table. And I got bluffed.

The eight months between T’s exit from my life and the 2000 World Series of Poker were not happy ones. Between therapy and grieving and longing and hurting, and trying vainly to heal the broken heart that I imagined was manifested with a large “SAD” sign pasted on my forehead, I didn’t have much interest in anything. Particularly poker. Poker was the game where people got paid for telling lies. For some time this notion offended me. If you lied you were supposed to be punished. If you told the truth you were supposed to be rewarded. And poker had it all backwards.

This simplistic reduction of how poker (and life) works is, I think, indicative of how decayed my mind—not to mention my self-esteem, confidence, and sense of trust—had become thanks to T’s hypocrisy. So shocked was I, so stunned, that I clung to the most rudimentary “truths” I could sink the tenterhooks of my mushy psyche into without collapsing in a bout of angst and despair. For a time I knew what the Catholic community must feel like approximately every other week or so when one of their beloved and trusted priests is found out to be diddling the altar boys.

Around six months after the T debacle, I began playing poker again.

And I went back to telling expedient fibs.

The most frequent one I circulated was that T and I had broken up because she’d decided that she wanted children more than bisexual affairs involving me and Las Vegas strippers—which was true, sort of, though far from the essential reason I was heartbroken. Still wounded and weak, I didn’t want to relive my horror and disappointment every time someone asked me what happened to the shining goddess I had been living with.

I played mean poker during this dark period. I finished in the money a few times, but didn’t win any tournaments. I was too impatient, too distracted, too angry. And eventually, I paid the price for being exceedingly aggressive and hostile. Observant players always noticed that I was an unhappy man trying to force results he once was able to conjure through magic, and they took advantage of my fury in the same way matadors defeat a charging bull. Like that noble but doomed beast, I ended up with a sword in what was left of my heart.

In one no-limit tournament at the Bicycle Club in Los Angeles, I was the chip leader at the final table. With seven players left, I should have patiently and masterfully carved up the remaining competitors, using the big stack of chips piled before me to jab and cajole and finally knock out anyone who dared to tangle with me. Instead, I called an all-in raise by the only other big stack in the tournament with something weak like A-J (so putrid was my call, I have forgotten the exact cards) and lost most of my winnings. I think I finished sixth. Why did I make this amateurish call? Not because of any well-reasoned analysis, I assure you. I did it because I wanted to change my state of mind right there; I wanted my life to feel better immediately. I wanted the pain to go away.

These are not good reasons to play poker. In fact, these can be very expensive reasons to play poker. Fortunately, I recognized my malady before impetuously deciding to pull up a seat at the $400-$800 game, buy in for $30,000 or so, and wreak a little mayhem upon myself. I resolved, instead, to take a poker hiatus until I felt a wee bit better. Because only then could I enjoy an evening of telling lies and getting paid.

At the start of every poker tournament, players engage in a curious ritual without overtly admitting to everyone else at the table that the ritual is occurring. Here’s what appears to happen: Each competitor takes his seat, says hello or nods or counts his chips, then pretends to be fascinated by anything other than the octet of strangers ringed around him. But what’s really happening is this: Each competitor silently and secretly assesses his opponents before play begins. Unless the talents of the combatants is obvious—“Man, talk about a bad beat!” a guy might exclaim, “Three World Champions at my table and two of them on my blind!”—the evaluation is done surreptitiously, with a sidelong glance, a quick peek, like at a single’s bar where men and women play the charade of seduction.

At both the bar and the poker table, the participants know what the furtive glances mean, but almost no one admits these glances even exist. In the sexual milieu, this coyness, I suppose, is meant to be confident and flirtatious, particularly since the alternative—staring—is considered poor manners. In poker, the coyness is meant to conceal fear and weakness. If you make too big a deal of evaluating your opponents, the implication is you’re terribly concerned about whom you’ll be playing against. You should, naturally, have this concern. Your opponents are precisely what stands between you and the final-table prize pool. But most players like to behave as though the other eight seats are occupied by stuffed mannequins, that it makes no difference to them if the other contestants are World Champions or world-class chumps. Then again, most players, it must be said, don’t look up from their cards long enough for the identities of their opponents to register, let alone affect the style of their play, which, it must also be said, is often mechanical and unimaginative. People who claim to have become proficient at no-limit hold ’em through computer tutorials often find the real world—where thinking, feeling, breathing human beings replace sophisticated software—a frightening place to play poker. And fear is not something a hunted animal cares ever to display—particularly when he has designs on being a predator.

This year I’m not sure whether I’m predator or prey.

And this year, without an affirming companion to calm me before the battle begins, I don’t waste any time lying in my hotel bed doing breathing exercises or getting pep talks. Rather than wallow in my solitude, I mingle with the burgeoning crowd of players and fans, all eager to commence the 2000 Main Event. Forsaking the blithe, oh-has-the-game already-started? late arrival some cool cats favor, I encamp at my table early to do some pre-deal analysis.

My first impression is that I like very much where my table is located, in the center of the tournament room, near one of the room’s two exits. (This makes quick getaways possible during the regularly scheduled breaks, as well as during unscheduled toilet dashes.) My second impression, as the table fills with players, is that I dislike the competitors who’ve been randomly drawn as my tablemates.

I’m sitting at what qualifies as a “tough” table. That I recognize (and respect) four of the eight other competitors is rare, especially given the record field of 512 entrants. The guys I’m most displeased to be seated with are Chris Bjorin, who has won multiple World Championships, including the 2000 World Series of Poker’s big $3,000-buy-in no-limit hold ’em event two nights earlier, where he earned more than $334,000, and Todd Brunson, son of the legendary Doyle and himself a fierce player with an impressive resumé of tournament finishes, including second at the inaugural Main Event in Tunica, a new stop on the major tournament trail.

Bjorin, a portly Swede living in London who, I’m told, considers himself a part-time poker pro and full-time sports bettor, plays in some of the biggest live games in town and, from what I’ve witnessed, is utterly without fear. I’ve been seated at tables with him before and he seems to vaguely remember me (and that I can play some), though I’d be willing to bet he doesn’t know my name. I’m in the #1 seat, directly to left of the dealer; he’s in the #5 seat, squarely in the middle of the table. If we’re to play classical positional poker, he and I shouldn’t engage in too many confrontations, unless we both have big hands that require forceful investments, regardless of our spot in the betting rotation.

Young Todd Brunson, on the other hand, is sitting in the #8 seat. This means every time he’s on “the button,” in the favorable last-to-act position, I’ll be in the big blind. Which, means, in essence, I can look forward to getting pounded most times I’m in the worst position. When you’re in the big blind, you’re compelled to put in a predetermined ante bet before seeing your cards. (Thus, “blind.” The metaphorical ramifications here are rich, but they’re also obvious, so I’ll let it go at that.) You are, in effect, committing money to a pot that your cards, once you get them, may not warrant playing. Sort of like throwing your heart into a relationship with a red-haired dream girl who may or may not be everything she seems to be. (Oops …) Worse than having to invest money without foresight, the blind positions, directly to the left of the dealer button, have the disadvantage of acting first once play has commenced.

This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Even if you don’t gamble, you’re probably familiar with the power associated with “getting in the last word.” In a no-limit hold ’em game, the player on the button has the luxury of always getting in the last word—or, alternatively, the luxury of remaining mute after he’s heard everyone else speak. Conversely, the big-blind player, two to the left of the dealer button, suffers the unenviable predicament of having to act either first or second—depending on if the small blind, who posts a similar ante bet that’s half the size of the big blind, has decided to play his hand—for all subsequent betting rounds. So the key players in hold ’em tournaments are those who sit directly to your left and directly to your right.

When you’re the button, you have the opportunity to bully the blinds. When you’re in the blinds, you get bullied. Since the flavor of the game relies so heavily on position—at least when it’s played competently, if not expertly—the players against whom you contend the majority of pots generally cluster around the button, and having a strong player acting last when you’re blind means constant aggravation and pressure.

Todd Brunson is a strong player. What I mean by this is he’s aggressive and fearless and, thanks to his pedigree and talent, has seen just about every poker play ever attempted, including some of his own creations, and he’s not prone to be intimidated by some pensive writer-gambler with the unprotected blind money sitting before him. (Having played in poker tournaments with both Todd and Doyle, I can honestly say I’d rather play against Famous Dad than Precocious Scion.) Like his dad, who is huge, Todd Brunson is beginning to show signs that he’ll eventually wind up a very big boy; every year when I see him at the World Series of Poker, he seems to have grown a few suit sizes—though a suit is about the last thing you would catch this kid wearing. He sports an awful mullet haircut, with the long straight back part reaching nearly to his waist, and a T-shirt-and-jeans ensemble that doesn’t flatter his expanding physique.

Todd’s heft, I should note, doesn’t seem to prevent him from always having an overtly sexy girlfriend hanging off his shoulder. Cynics might claim Brunson’s success in enrapturing comely lasses is another example of the intoxicating power of a large bankroll on the female libido. This may be true in many of the hilarious mismatches one sees in the gambling world—not to mention every other world—but I think in Todd’s case the chicks actually like him for something other than his money and his biker-dude-meets-John-Daly coiffure. Todd is a genuinely sweet guy, with mischievously sleepy eyes, a perpetual grin playing at the corners of his mouth, and a pleasant sense of humor that seems to suggest he doesn’t take anything too seriously, especially this silly gambling nonsense. He carries around an official-looking business card listing his occupation as “Investigator: Internal Revenue Service.”

I know all this about Brunson because we spent one of the most surreal weeks of our lives together some years ago in Egypt, of all places, where he was ostensibly in search of high-stakes poker action against oil-enriched sheiks and I was ostensibly in search of a peculiar gambling story for my first book. When much of the promised action never materialized, Todd and I spent many goofy hours amusing ourselves in Cairo, where he taught me how to play a then-new and now-popular game called Chinese poker, which requires almost no poker skills at all. It was there in Egypt, beside the pool of the Mena House Oberoi Hotel across the road from the Pyramids at Giza, that I first learned from Todd the term “slow roll,” as in when a player acts as though he has a losing hand, but then, excruciatingly, reveals that, in fact, he holds a winner. In a typical poker game, slow rolling is considered extraordinarily poor form, and its practitioner quickly earns a reputation as a lowlife. But in Cairo, where the professional gamblers in attendance had virtually no interest in the treasures of Cheops, amusement was in short supply. So Todd kept himself (and subsequently me) in a near constant state of giggles by playing low-limit Chinese poker and devilishly slow-rolling every hand. (In retrospect, I see that there’s nothing inherently funny about this diversion, but, believe me, it was.) Thanks to shared laughs, a general proximity in age, and a mutual admiration for the topless Czech sunbathers on our Nile cruiseship, he was, for that week at least, my best pal.

Todd grew up around the biggest and best gamblers in the world, and virtually no occurrence in the poker world, I imagine, would startle or amuse him half as much as the bigger-than-life exploits he probably witnessed growing up in a most unusual Las Vegas household. There’s not much I can do to bamboozle him.

For a few moments, sitting at the table sizing up my opponents, I catch myself hoping that Todd shows some mercy today at the World Championship, if only because he sort of likes me too. Of course, I quickly admit, this is an absurd notion, because once the cards begin to fly and the betting and raising and folding begin, best pals become the gambling equivalent of Serbs and Muslims. (At least that’s usually the case. I’ve witnessed numerous occurrences of friends playing “soft” against each other. This doesn’t necessarily violate the letter of poker rules, but it does contravene the spirit of the game, which encourages each individual to hunt down and slay every other competitor, including the ones with whom he just enjoyed dinner and cocktails.) If Todd punishes me too frequently and too well, I’ll just have to see if he can take a joke. I’ll unleash my secret weapon: I’ll slow roll him.

As Todd relates a funny story about how he attempted to turn the label of the beer he was drinking at the final table in Tunica toward the ESPN television cameras so as to secure a sponsorship deal from the brewer, I evaluate the rest of the players at our table.

To my left, in seat #2, is a young chain-smoking Vietnamese lad dressed in designer everything. Generalizations based on race are insensitive and inappropriate, not to mention frequently wrong, I’m aware. So let me apologize in advance for being a horrible person. The Vietnamese tournament-poker contestants—generally—are remarkably good players. In my experience, the majority of Vietnamese poker pros take advantage of the Occidental misconception that all Orientals are degenerate gamblers dependent on inscrutable superstitions to guide their wagering decisions. The truth is, most of these guys, diminutive in stature and enormous in heart, play with a potent mix of discipline and aggression. A (white) poker-playing friend of mine who did three tours in Vietnam as a United States Marine morbidly jokes that the poker world would be a safer place if we would have won the war. That way, he says, “none of those little fuckers would have immigrated here on their boats and started winning all the poker tournaments.”

Crudely as he puts it, my friend has a point. Look at the results from poker tournaments around America—particularly those in Nevada and California—and the frequency of Mas and Nguyens, Dangs and Phams at final tables will startle you. Fantastical as it sounds, some of these guys actually did come over on boats, with the proverbial $20 in their pockets and heads full of golden dreams. Men “the Master” Nguyen, the grand old man of the Vietnamese poker community, was, in fact, one of these fellows. Proving that the Horatio Alger myth still applies to modern American life, Men transformed himself from a traumatized, broke, and confused émigré into a wealthy property-owning member of the upper-middle class—not to mention a multiple World Champion of poker. He’s a superb competitor, prone to entertaining verbal outbursts that tend to mask the computer-like analysis he constantly performs on his opponents. I like Men. Dressed in silk shirts, gold chains, and platform shoes that elevate him slightly above the five-foot plateau, he’s a flashy vision of a foreigner-made-good, and his generosity with friends and fledgling poker players is legendary. (Once many years ago, when I was still a young journalist covering the World Series with neither the skill nor the bankroll to play in it, Men won a tournament and, unbidden, slipped $50 into my hand one evening with the imprecation to take my new bride out for a nice dinner.) To the dozens of Vietnamese players on the tournament circuit—and there seem to be more every year—Men, I gather, is something of a Godfather figure, the guru to go to when searching for advice or instruction or a loan.

He has led his flock well. The Vietnamese players, for the most part, play in the Master’s wildly aggressive style, appearing to frequently “gamble it up” but, in fact, only doing so when they sense weakness in their opponents or—surprise!—hold a killer hand. I hate playing against them. They’re just too damn good.

Unfortunately, for the next eight hours, I’ll have the distinct displeasure of having one of the illustrious immigrants directly to my left. I don’t know this kid’s name—it probably features the consonant cluster n-h at some point—but I’ve played with him before, and he’s no bargain. The best way to handle a threatening dude like the man in seat #2 is to play back at him hard. As in life, the most efficient method for dealing with a poker bully is to slap him back occasionally, for there’s nothing a bully likes less than to be victimized by his victim. (Or, in the parlance of my semi-literate poker brethren, “It ain’t no fun when the rabbit’s got the gun.”) To make this strategy work, you have to be willing to engage in bloody confrontations, and you have to handle them like going to the voting polls in Chicago: early and often. I was hoping to have a pleasant, nerve-settling, first few hours at the 2000 World Series of Poker. With the Viper from Vietnam on my left, I can forget about waiting for the 12th round to start unleashing volleys of punches. I’ll have to start sticking and moving from the opening bell.

The other tablemate that concerns me is a suave young Latin chulo named Carlos, who made an impressive final-table appearance several nights earlier at the pot-limit hold ’em event. I’ve never played against him, but based on what little I saw when he was competing for the big money, I know he’s the real deal. Carlos, who looks to be in his late 20s, is from Madrid, and like many Europeans, he has cultivated an affinity for poker games like pot- and no-limit, where leverage and psychology supercede number-crunching. Before play commences, I realize I have mixed feelings about Carlos. On the one hand, I instantly like him. He’s polite and kind, with a warm smile and sympathetic eyes. On the other hand, I dislike him for having a beautiful girlfriend (wife?) whispering words of encouragement in and raining kisses upon his ears. His richness underscores my poverty. I’m displeased to have noted such a thing, even in passing. Before I paid my way into the 2000 Main Event, I vowed that I would put all thoughts of T and J and N and all the rest out of my mind and concentrate solely on playing world-class poker. Now, minutes before the first cards are pitched in the air, instead of focusing on future victory, I’m fixated on past loss.

Happily, Carlos’ amore departs quickly, leaving me time to assess the four other less threatening players at my table. In seat #3, the guy who will be posting his big blind every time I’m on the button is a bearded fellow named David, who sports mirrored sunglasses and a T-shirt with the slogan “Competition is Fierce” emblazoned across the front. People whose clothes make epigrammatic proclamations, particularly quasi-combative ones, give me the giggles. I’m glad to have him as my blind boy.

Beside David, in seat #4, is a mustachioed man in his 40s who wears a windbreaker and a white golf visor, as if he’s preparing for an afternoon tour of some Scottish links. Small and narrow-shouldered, this fellow looks like the perfect computer nerd. I notice, however, that though he seems introverted and circumspect, he keeps his head up, observantly taking in all the “data” around him.

In seat #6, to the left of Chris Bjorin, is the table’s most dangerous player. That would be Ned, a former taxi-fleet owner from New York City who, when I lived in Manhattan, was one of the most sought-after participants in a weekly no-limit game held in an Upper West Side brownstone. He was always an honored guest, because he seems to play as though he has no conception of the fundamental concepts of no-limit hold ’em. I’ve always found players of this ilk extraordinarily difficult to beat, as evidenced by my dismal record in the annual Binion’s Horseshoe press tournament where, in something like nine years, I’ve managed exactly one final-table appearance and numerous early exits. In the press tournament, half the field isn’t really sure if three-of-a-kind beats two- pair, let alone what constitutes a legitimate starting hand, so it’s nearly impossible to read anyone, or to run a successful bluff. Ned is not as poor a player as the typical media leech running around the Horseshoe with a notepad in one hand and free buffet tickets in the other, but his cluelessness makes him nearly as troublesome. I’d almost rather play against the Vietnamese Viper and Todd Brunson than Ned. Of course, I won’t have much choice. Since Ned plays approximately two out of every three hands dealt to him, it’s a statistical certainty we’ll engage each other frequently.

To the left of Carlos and Todd, in seat #9, the man who will have the button when I have the small blind is a quiet Caucasian in his late 30s who, based on what I’ve seen the few times I’ve sat with him, has a playing style that mirrors his personality. The guy almost never speaks, and he slumps down in his chair, as if to attempt invisibility, like the proverbial ostrich burying his head in the sand. He’s what’s known as “tight-weak,” meaning he doesn’t participate much, and when he does it’s typically one of a few predictable hands. If he makes a big hand he pushes it; if he doesn’t he slinks quietly away. Seat #9 projects an air of apprehension—which is not exactly the kind of aroma you wish to be wafting in the nostrils of eight hungry jackals. I know if Chris or Carlos or Todd haven’t raised the pot by the time it comes around to Mr. Invisible, I’ll probably get to see a lot of flops cheaply from the small blind. And when seat #9 does occasionally wake up to find he’s been dealt something juicy, he’ll surely bet it with five-alarm bells and I’ll gladly tiptoe out of his way.

Given this eclectic roster of competitors, my plan is to play super tight for the first level, folding everything speculative and playing only large premium hands. This is not a revolutionary strategy. Whether they say so out loud or not, at least half the field asserts they will follow this game plan at the commencement of the World Series of Poker. But probably one out of four players who intended on circumspection adheres to his pre-deal guidelines. Adrenaline and testosterone and other naturally occurring brain-altering chemicals tend to transform even the most patient monk into a raise-the-roof libertine. The action begins and suddenly a pair of sixes looks like kings. But this year I think I can exercise the discipline commensurate with such a “boring” style. And the reasons I think so are not great ones: I’m a little frightened. I’m a little intimidated. And I’m a lot distracted by thoughts and emotions that have nothing to do with poker.

I wonder if my opponents sense this. I wonder if they read me for the wrecked man I feel myself to be. I wonder if they’re glad to have me at their table.

Holding a cordless microphone, tournament director Bob Thompson, wearing his usual ten-gallon hat and embroidered cowboy duds, which work wonderfully well for Las Vegas and slightly less so in London, instructs the dealers to “shuffle up and deal.” With a crisp riffle of the plastic-coated cards, the clatter of plastic and clay chips, and the ritualistically uttered “blinds, please,” the 2000 World Series of Poker Main Event begins. Instantly, nearly a year’s worth of travails becomes irrelevant. All that matters is right here, at this little table, at this little casino, in the desert. Everything else goes away.

According to my fold-immediately strategy, the A-10 I’m dealt in early position is unplayable. So too are the late-position A-5 and the K-J suited on the button. I even fold a pair of sevens when another player makes a modest raise. Strangely, I don’t feel even a tinge of doubt as I toss these hands into the muck. Instead, I feel a sense of relief. For a brief time at least, I can avoid getting involved in ugly confrontations; I can avoid telling lies; I can avoid having to wonder if I’m being told the truth.

For nearly an hour I fold and watch, fold and watch, fold and watch. The folding part isn’t fun, but the watching part is. I’m noticing things, constructing hypotheses, conducting highly unscientific experiments. I’m making silent proclamations and seeing if the evidence bears them out. Brunson is playing fast; Bjorin is playing faster; Carlos has observantly pegged me as an easy victim for blind-stealing; no one understands Ned. Like a titillated voyeur, I’m actually having fun, though I’m not ostensibly “playing” at this point. That is, I’m not contending for any pots. But in a weird counterintuitive way, I am participating. My role is that of the submissive, content to let the dominants at my table dictate how the game will be played. The observant ones—and only the mildly brain-damaged could not notice that the guy in seat #1 hasn’t played a hand in nearly 60 minutes—will ascribe to me certain traits and proclivities based on my passivity. And they will either take advantage of my “character” or be manipulated by it.

If this all sounds vaguely sexual, it’s no accident. I think poker played at the highest levels has a distinctly—though sublimated—seductive flavor to it, in which the participants choose, consciously or otherwise, to pursue or be pursued, to direct or be directed, to be on top or bottom. The dramatic confrontations in this game frequently occur when the previously submissive-passive player decides to be a whip-toting leather-clad dominatrix and order the previously bossy table bully to bend over and drop his drawers. As in life, when these role reversals occur, they can be simultaneously troubling and thrilling. And as in life, the first player to understand what’s really happening often enjoys the experience most fully.

Anyone who says poker is “just a game” and should not be assigned such fanciful meanings has not spent much time around world-class poker tournaments. Though it’s mostly camouflaged or simmering beneath the visible surface, sex pulses here.

On the other hand, for all its “outlaw” resonances, redolent of the gun-slinging Old West and backroom hooch joints, the professional poker world looks like a strangely sexless place—or to be more precise, a strangely sexually sublimated place. In most forums where men congregate—and even with the recent addition every year of several more very good female players, the poker room is still a predominantly male bastion—the talk inevitably turns to the human male’s favorite topic: females. Men love to talk about women. Whether on the golf course or at the gym or at the airport business lounge, the conversation eventually turns to women, particularly their breasts and behinds and their facility for performing fellatio. In the poker world, however, this idle chatter is oddly absent. Sports, investing, restaurants—this stuff comes trippingly off the tongues of poker players as smoothly as Ernie Els swings a fairway wood. But the usual (and expected) banter about women? Only the most obviously attractive cocktail waitress dressed in the most overtly revealing costumes seem to be able to elicit much more than a raised eyebrow from a table full of professional poker players.

The Freudian explanation for this is that all the men in the game, flinging their chips in and out, dominating and submitting, are symbolically trying to “fuck” each other, trying to use another’s charms (in the form of money and chips) for personal pleasure. Whether through sweet romancing, gentle cajoling, or overt rape, someone—and often more than one—is trying to conquer a weaker and not necessarily cooperative partner. To speak openly, then, about matters sexual, even if they’re ostensibly heterosexual desires, would be to draw attention to the homoerotic qualities that shroud this game. And what Cadillac-owning, Republican-voting, Liberal-mistrusting good ol’ boy wants to do that?

The more obvious reason the poker milieu appears to be such a sexless place is that the average participant in this “sport” is grossly overweight or in some other way physically unattractive. I don’t mean a few fat people inhabit the poker world, just as in any segment of American society. I mean a plurality of the participants are heavier than they ought to be. This, of course, is primarily the product of an entirely sedentary lifestyle, in which the most strenuous exercises one encounters are tossing the car keys to the valet guy and carrying a rack of chips to the cashier’s cage. For hours at a time a tournament poker player sits on a cushioned chair trying not to raise his heart rate.

But this is not necessarily why so many poker players are fat. From what I’ve observed at chow lines across the country, the poker player’s general inertia is exacerbated and augmented by a preternaturally acquisitive outlook on life. Just as gobbling up all the chips on the table is foremost in a poker player’s mind, so too, it seems, is gobbling up seconds (not to mention thirds and fourths) at the all-you-can-gorge buffet. Many professional gamblers fancy themselves gourmands, with refined tastes in gastronomy and oenology gleaned from dozens of comped dinners to casino restaurants. But based on the conspicuous consumption of prodigious total calories inhaled at poker tournaments, I suspect portion control—or lack thereof—is the main criterion in determining a dining establishment’s relative merits. One frequently hears gossip about weight-loss bets—for stakes as high as $1,000 per pound—discussed at the tables, and though there’s much talk among top players about going on a diet, most poker players wear their prosperity around their waist, like chieftains of a primitive tribe. When someone in the poker world is really serious about dropping a hundred or two hundred pounds, like former World Champion Jack Keller, he gets his stomach stapled.

Given this propensity for sloth and gluttony (and the unattractive results these qualities produce), is it any wonder professional poker has failed to attract the financial interest of corporate America? For many years, as long as I’ve been involved in the game, the leading poker publications have been promising that major sponsorship of poker tournaments is imminent, that “any day now” a handful of visionary companies will see the heretofore murky business wisdom in subsidizing the prize pools at major poker competitions. Apparently, the hopeful thinking goes, some big company with way too much money in its marketing budget will come to the conclusion that giving cash to a bunch of physically unappealing, devious, chain-smoking gamblers will do wonders for their public image. Well, who would you rather have representing your company? A neatly dressed golfer with a winning smile and a solid work ethic who displays his lean physique and hard-earned talent on television every weekend? Or some lazy slob with dirty fingernails, a toothpick between his lips, and unwashed hair erupting from a worn baseball cap? To almost no one’s surprise—except maybe the specialty publications whose raison d’etre is to lead breathless cheers for the gambling industry (and publish their advertisements)—professional poker remains for the most part sponsorless.

A few times a year, you can find television coverage of a major poker tournament, notably the World Series of Poker, on one of the ESPN networks. But these programs are highly edited and condensed, a Reader’s Digest version of a Homeric odyssey. The truth is, even if the majority of the protagonists weren’t unappealing, watching poker can be excruciatingly boring, particularly if you aren’t a serious player. Even when the final table features garrulously entertaining performers (and they’re as rare as royal flushes), the typical poker tournament offers spectators hours of tedium occasionally interrupted by brief moments of gripping drama. Unfortunately, poker is not a viewer-friendly activity.

For one thing, you can’t see what the combatants are holding beneath their cupped protective hands. From a distance it looks like several corpulent degenerates staring blankly at each other. Without omnipresent television cameras to prime the corporate pump, I suspect most professional players can look forward to many more years of gambling with their own money, rather than, say, Slim-Fast’s.

Of course, I could be wrong. Just as I was wrong about T. And just as I might have been wrong to program my 2000 World Series of Poker game to the “super-tight” setting.

So diligent have I been in the first 90 minutes about proceeding cautiously that when I’m finally dealt something playable—like the two black aces I pick up in late position—no one wants to gamble with me when I enter the pot. Aside from Ned, who notices little beside the ever-changing height of his chip stacks (which grow and deteriorate in predictable boom-and-bust cycles), all the other players have pegged my opening style and chosen smartly to avoid me on the rare occasion that I show strength.

The only antidote for this malady is to “change gears,” as tournament players like to say. I need to drive a little more recklessly while my opponents still take me for a law-abiding citizen respectful of the posted speed limits.

In practical terms, this means playing more hands—even a couple of cards that have virtually zero intrinsic value—and acquiring chips that a weak hand surely doesn’t deserve. The optimal players against whom to attempt such thievery are the best, most observant ones, the guys who have (correctly) surmised that I’m hesitant to crawl out of my shell with anything less than premium holdings. For my first victim I select Carlos, who’s been stealing my big blind with a scheduled regularity that would make a train conductor proud—particularly one with a penchant for larceny.

I put in my big blind; everyone folds around to the Spaniard; he peeks at his cards and utters a nonchalant “raise” while stacking $250 in chips before him; everyone after him folds; I look at my cards, an 8-2 unsuited, and say “raise.” I match his $250 and put another $500 beside it. Carlos looks at me, smirks subtly, and flicks his cards into the muck.

A few hands later, Todd Brunson raises in middle position. Again holding nothing, I re-raise him, indicating I’m holding a big hand. He furls his brow, nods, and surrenders.

The Vietnamese Viper lets me see a flop for “free” from the small blind. The board comes rags and I check. He bets. I raise him. He takes a long drag on his cigarette, blows the smoke over his shoulder while eyeing me suspiciously, and folds.

These are not monumental hands. But they win me back all the dead chips (and a few hundred more) I’ve donated for the most part of the first level, while I waited timidly, like an invalid boy watching the other kids play ball from my lonely bedroom window.

I can sense the better players at my table have caught on that I’m playing remarkably faster than twenty minutes earlier. They know I’m probably not holding aces or kings every time I raise a pot. Therefore, I now expect some retaliation, the non-verbal equivalent of: Fine, you want to play? I’ll play with you then. But don’t expect me to be nice anymore.

This is a fine state of affairs, actually. Now no one can really be certain where I’m at—primarily because I don’t know myself. I haven’t decided if I’m going to throw my playing transmission into overdrive or spool back down to fuel-conserving cruise control. All I do know is this: Being a voyeur is fun; being a participant, even if it means the occasional hurt feeling or bruised knee, is even more fun. Nearly two hours after the 2000 World Series of Poker World Championship commenced, I’m finally a contestant.

And just as one who doesn’t fear a broken heart makes for a most liberated and passionate lover, one who doesn’t fear losing his chips makes for a most fearsome poker player. Something I’ve known for years, but allowed myself to forget for approximately an hour and a half, suddenly dawns on me: The most important elements in winning a no-limit poker tournament are people, position, and, subordinately, cards. Play the people, play your position and, oh yeah, play the cards. The money will come. I’m no longer scared of losing it, I realize. Perhaps I never was. It was the residual fear of being bamboozled, of being made a gullible fool, that momentarily paralyzed me.

Before I can construct further metaphors connecting what happened with T to my initial performance in the Main Event, I get involved in a big hand. (Note to aspiring philosopher-gamblers: Metaphor construction during poker games is generally a bad idea.) Everything goes away. There’s no past or future. There is only the present. If poker has a salutary quality, it’s this ability to encourage—no, to force—the game’s participants to live in the moment, free of old wounds and anticipated travails, embracing the vaunted carpe diem ethos more often talked about than honored. Like Cartier-Bresson’s photography, poker magically distills life into a “decisive moment.” Maybe that’s why I love the game.

I’m dealt a pair of threes on the button. Chris Bjorin limps in in early position; Ned, as usual, pays to see the flop; everyone else folds. I consider raising when the action comes to me, but I’m concerned Bjorin might play back at me (whether he has a premium hand or not), and I would then have to release the hand. Many novice no-limit hold ’em players overvalue small pairs before the flop. The fact is, most of their value is implied. Only a fool—and there are plenty, believe me—is willing to put in most of his chips pre-flop with a little pair, even if he’s “certain” he’s up against two over-cards—for example, A-J. But if you can get in cheap and turn a “set” (three-of-a-kind), these hands suddenly become delightfully worthwhile.

My friend Hal Kant, known as “Deadman” for his previous career as the Grateful Dead’s lawyer, is one of the game’s best players, as evidenced by numerous tournament victories and even more numerous in-the-money finishes. His theory, which I’ve seen him employ many times with great success, is that no-limit hold ’em tournaments are best won by making big unassailable hands that can crush unsuspecting opponents who may (or may not) have held marginally better starting hands. The Deadman likes to make straights and flushes and full houses—don’t we all?—and tries not to overplay top pair with a big kicker, as many less-seasoned competitors often do. Thus, in Hal’s way of thinking, small pairs that require little investment are almost always worth playing. You hit a flop and you’re a snarling Gargantua baring your teeth; you don’t and you’re a retiring Candide tending your garden.

So I simply call, hoping to connect. The Viper calls from the small blind, and David, Mr. Competition is Fierce, checks from the big blind.

The dealer lays down the flop: 3, 4, 9 of various suits. Instantly, I become acutely aware of my body language, which, I fear, may appear too calm, too pleased. Rather than do something rank and telling, like shake my head in disgust—yes, some chumps still do such things, even at this level of competition—I put my focus where it should be, on the other players. I get no indication of anything from the Viper, who checks. From David I do, something that indicates more than the usual interest, but he checks as well. Bjorin, who has cultivated the lucrative skill of pouncing when he senses weakness, bets a little more than the pot, $300. Ned, beside him, frets over whatever it is he’s holding, which could be literally anything, and folds his cards while uttering some sort of non sequitur that would take more time to decipher than it’s worth. Now it’s up to me.

I have two options: I can call Bjorin and hope for more callers behind me, in the form of the Viper or Mr. Fierce. Or I can raise.

After brief consideration, I raise—$1,000 more, to be exact, one little red-white-and-blue plastic disc. My hope is that Bjorin, who limped in early position with a big pair, likes the small flop and might get married to his presently beaten starting hand. Furthermore, he’s the kind of highly evolved player who can win hands without holding anything, merely by applying pressure in a timely and accurately aimed fashion, like a jiu-jitsu master pinching a nerve in his opponent’s neck. He might try to test my will and conviction with a re-raise; given the three-of-a-kind I now possess, it won’t take much soul-searching to find the gumption to answer his inquiry.

Subordinately, there’s something about the Fierce One’s demeanor that tells me he’s pleased with what he’s holding. It’s not a particular behavior or overt gesture that tips me, just a subconscious message that has somehow made it to my consciousness. Where this faculty was nine months earlier when T was offering herself on all fours to someone other than her True Beloved and systematically bluffing me into oblivion, I don’t know. But at this moment at Binion’s Horseshoe, my antennae are suddenly working.

The Viper folds immediately and lights another cigarette. Mr. Fierce looks at me and the pot and his cards, and then calls. I do not react outwardly, but I can feel my heart rate quicken. This little patch of green felt has been transformed into Agincourt and I into Henry V. Once more unto the breach, dear friends! A battle awaits.

Bjorin folds. He was, it seems, merely trying to steal this pot with an early-position show of strength. So now it’s just me and the big blind. I count the pot. There’s about $3,000 in it.

The dealer says, “Two players,” and lays down the turn card, an eight. At this point, any card that doesn’t complete an open-end straight draw—in this case, a deuce or a seven—is a “safe” card in my eyes. More important, I don’t sense any change in Mr. Fierce’s energy; I don’t think the card changed his hand.

He checks. I consider being très clever and checking it back to him, hoping he’ll try a big steal bet on the end. Instead, I opt for the better play: I bet approximately the size of the pot, $3,000. It’s my biggest wager of the tournament and I can feel my breath shortening as I release the chips into action. Surely, Mr. Fierce will either fold or raise me here. For a variety of reasons that would be obvious to expert players and inscrutable to novices—and too tiresome to recount no matter your skill level—he can’t possibly call my bet. If he were Chan or Hellmuth or someone similarly masterful, he could, particularly if he were planning on pushing me off the hand on the river. But he’s not. He’s a guy with a threatening T-shirt.

After thinking about ten seconds, he reaches for his chips. Immediately, I begin calculating why he is raising me and what my best decision will be. But before I can proceed down my logic flowchart, much to my surprise Mr. Fierce calls my $3,000 bet.

I watch him very carefully. Instead of torturing myself with running through an exhaustive list of What Could He Have?, I merely want to know the answer to one question: How much does he like his hand? The answer pleases me: He looks like he likes his hand, but fears I have a better one. How exactly I arrive at this information I cannot say. It’s a combination of intuition and science, educated guessing and careful observation, Jungian behaviorism and voodoo. And experience. Sometimes you just know. And sometimes you don’t.

But this time I do.

When the dealer turns the river card, an ace, and Mr. Fierce checks, I know my set of threes is going to win this pot. The only question is how much of a pot will it be.

My opponent has a little more than $5,000 left to play with, and that’s what I bet.

I can almost hear him thinking, “Why didn’t I fold on the flop? Why didn’t I fold on the turn? Why did I have to be so stubborn? Now what?” And I’m pretty certain he won’t be able to resist helplessly calling off what remains of his depleted chips.

I go into false-tell mode. Now that I’m certain I have the winning hand, I want to project an air of uncertainty and fear, not supreme satisfaction. The obvious way to do this—trying to look nervous—is not the most effective way. As Steven Seagal has proved countless times, bad acting always looks like bad acting. Instead, I maintain a look of blankness and stare at the chips in the pot. And I hold my breath.

Try looking completely comfortable for more than a few seconds while you hold your breath. No matter how relaxed you believe yourself to be, tension will eventually invade your features, imperceptibly at first, then more noticeably as the carbon dioxide fills your lungs. If Mr. Fierce bothers to look at me—and he’d have to be crazy not to—he would see a man who is trying, but failing, to look relaxed. And the longer this man, me, must wait for his opponent to make a decision, the more uncomfortable his visage will become, thanks to the wonders of lactic acid and other curious by-products of an anaerobic poker interlude.

When I was much younger I could hold my breath for nearly two minutes. (I spent many childhood summer afternoons at the Fox Point municipal pool, in suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin, swimming underwater laps. Later in life I learned Frank Sinatra had endured similar self-inflicted torture to build his lung power, albeit in Hoboken, New Jersey. My breathless aquatic journeys had nothing to do with singing the Great American Songbook; it just seemed like a cool thing to do, slightly more so than performing cannonballs off the high diving board or peeing in the deep end.) Now in my thirties, two minutes without a gulp of oxygen would likely cause some sort of irreparable brain damage. While the Fierce One plays with his chips, trying to imagine what life is going to be like without them stacked so prettily before him, I take in furtive little slurps of air, which, I assume, make me look even less functional, less right.

And of course, nothing is “right” with a man who is willing to mildly asphyxiate himself for the sake of a poker pot. But, brother, that extra $5,000 would do wonders for my early Main Event status.

Since Mr. Fierce has now taken close to three minutes to decide if he’s going to call my all-in bet, I’m not in any way nervous that he has a better hand. If he did, he would have called immediately and with smug contentment. My “nervousness” now is the kind you feel when you’re certain you’re about to experience a first kiss. It’s anticipation and wonder, not dread. Unfortunately, poker tournaments have too few of these delicious moments. Most of them more closely resemble standing on the edge of a 300-foot-high bungee-jumping platform while some annoyingly enthusiastic Australian guy with wraparound sunglasses and bleached blond hair stands behind you and loudly counts to three.

After a decisive shake of his bearded head, Mr. Fierce picks up his chips with both hands, puts them down with a pronounced thump, and says “I’m going to wait to play another hand.”

He throws his cards in the muck and the dealer pushes me the pot.

I say nothing and show nothing, letting Fierce and the others wonder. At the World Series of Poker, seeds of doubt have a way of blossoming into weeds of insecurity. The less information I volunteer, the more my opponents must guess at my intentions. The greatest players at this game sometimes show their cards at the conclusion of an un-called pot. Their motives, I assume, are to condition and coerce the opposition into making mistakes. But I’m not one of those inscrutable masters. I’m just an emotionally fragile gambling writer operating on a decidedly terrestrial plane. I’ll opt for good old reliable sensibleness over esoterica. No free clues.

The big pot brings my chip total to $15,300, by no means a spectacular total, but serenely comfortable. At the next level, $50 and $100 blinds, I can pay the tax for dozens of rounds, waiting for profitable hands, without feeling financially pressured to get involved in ill-advised confrontations. I’m already beginning to plan my tactics for the upcoming second level, which follows a fifteen-minute break, when I hear Bob Thompson announce, “Players and dealers, finish the hand you’re on and hold up.” Half the room dashes for the exits and the elevators. I, however, find that my ultimate hand at this level is one I want to play.

I’m two off the button holding a pair of sevens. Everyone has folded except for Ned, who, per his usual strategy, has smooth-called from under the gun. I raise several hundred, hoping Ned will get the message, get out of the way, and get to his room to enjoy the intermission.

Instead, he calls. The majority of our table leaves; they’ve seen plenty of poker hands over the past two hours. At this moment, the only thing most of the competitors at the World Series of Poker are looking forward to seeing is a waiting toilet bowl.

The dealer puts down a flop of little cards: 4, 4, 6. Ned checks; I bet the pot. He calls without hesitation, which is what he almost always does. Typically, he’ll pay to see four cards and bail out when seeing the fifth one becomes too expensive. Still, I’d rather he would just fold and give me the smallish return on investment. Since I have trouble putting him on a hand, the less decisions involving Taxi Ned the better. Plus, I like the idea of ending the first level with 50% more chips than I began with.

The next card is an ace. Ned checks; I bet. Lots.

Against a typical player, I would bet the size of the pot, a reasonably strong but not unreasonably dangerous amount. Ned, though, is stubborn. He doesn’t do things like calculate pot odds or play the player. He merely looks down at his pile of chips, sees how many he’ll have left if he calls, and makes a decision based on spatial relationships involving the relative heights of his towers. The more I bet here—$3,200 to be exact—the better chance I have of getting him to fold.

Besides, my sevens could very well be the best hand, though I’m not clairvoyant enough to know.

To my dismay, Ned calls. My first suspicion is that he has an ace and the turn card has given him top pair. There’s no other draw that I can see, except the absurdly unlikely 5-7, which would give him eight shots at making a straight. He could also have virtually any unimproved pocket pair, some of which beat me, some of which don’t, and some of which he would have raised with before the flop. I don’t know. And that’s not good.

I look him over. He seems happy. The ace, I’m guessing, made him chuckle.

The dealer flips over the river card, a jack. Ned moves all in, about $9,000.

Clearly, I have to fold. This does not please me.

Though my decision is already made, I sit motionless for half a minute, seething and staring. So much for the vaunted “poker face”: Ned is smiling.

A small crowd of contestants from other tables heading toward the exits pauses to watch the “drama,” an all-in bet being considered by another player. The truth is, I’m not considering calling at all. I’m taking a few moments to feel inordinately sorry for myself before releasing my beaten hand.

After a minute or so of intense staring, in which I make mental notes about what Ned looks like when he knows he’s holding a winner, I say, “I fold,” and push my cards to the dealer. Ned gleefully scoops in the pot, which contains something like $4,400 of my money in it, and, unbidden, shows me his A-K.

“What did you have?” he asks innocently.

“Pair of queens,” I lie. “What did you think I had betting all that money on the flop?”

“Wow. I guess I got lucky,” Ned chirps.

I mumble something unintelligible that’s supposed to pass for graceful sportsmanship and charge off to my room, where I know there’s no one waiting to hear about how I’ve played, about how I feel, about anything. So much for keeping life’s lessons in perspective. All I can think as I fume in the elevator up to my room is having $4,400 more at this moment would, I reckon, make me feel a bit better.

Either that or a lover.

Spend enough time in casinos and you will eventually, if not rapidly, find people who are clearly bent on self-destruction. Their gambling habits, it seems, are some sort of perverse punishment for unseen transgressions and failures. No matter how much they claim to gamble “for entertainment” or “the fun distraction” or because they “always win,” the truth is that almost all high-rolling (and big-losing) devotees of the slots and roulette and keno and baccarat and dice—and every other unbeatable casino game—play for dark psychological reasons that are probably better worked out for $100 an hour in the office of a caring therapist than for exponentially more in a heartless Las Vegas casino.

I’ve often regarded such monetary masochists with a mixture of pity and bemusement—but never with a sense of identification. I’ve always fancied myself too smart, too much of an insider with special knowledge of how the casinos bleed cash from their “unwitting” victims. I’ve always thought I had too much, I don’t know, character, to use a casino as a convenient way to expiate my inner demons.

During the tournament’s first break, pacing in my cigarette-fragranced hotel room (the Horseshoe doesn’t believe in modern amenities like smoke-free floors), I can feel the urge, the nefarious compulsion, to be reckless, to be self-destructive. To give it all away.

I suddenly understand why so many Las Vegas hotel rooms have windows that cannot be opened more than an inch. Though I’m not considering a flying leap onto the geodesic canopy above Fremont Street—which, come to think of it, would probably provide significantly more entertainment value than the nightly sound-and-light “spectacular” projected there above the heads of mildly perplexed tourists—I understand in my heart the not-very-healthy impulse to lash out at the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with self-directed floggings.

Fearful I might return to the poker table and boldly push all my chips in on the first hand, I have one of those internal conversations that, were they verbal, would be utterly embarrassing. One of those, “Calm down. Everything is all right! Hang in there, champ!” kind of conversations that are best left to hackneyed action thrillers where the recovering alcoholic-cop-demolitions-expert single dad has to defuse a nuclear device enmeshed in the rafters of his daughter’s grade-school gymnasium. I think the judicial system calls such skills “anger management,” which wife beaters and bikers who delight in picking bar fights ostensibly lack, but well-educated writers are supposed to possess as readily as dictionaries and well-thumbed copies of Strunk & White.

So I return to the World Series of Poker World Championship event resolved not to be a destructive idiot. But now I know the awful truth: I have the capacity to be one. Maybe we all do.

Given the psychological contortions I experienced up on the fifteenth floor, the events on the second, where the tournament is conducted, seem comically banal. I was mentally prepared for Wagner; I get Gilbert and Sullivan. Thanks to one of those unforeseen collisions between poor cards and inopportune betting sequences, the second level, in which the blinds escalate to $50 and $100, brings me only two hands in which more than a few hundred dollars of my chips change owners.

On the first, I win $1,500 of ill-begotten profits from Carlos, who I notice is playing a bit faster than at the first level. I call his pre-flop raise with nothing but position. And when he bets the flop, as he seems to do on most hands he’s involved in, I come over the top. He sighs disgustedly and folds. I feel like a player—and not just because I’ve run a successful bluff (anyone with chips can do that), but because, like a detective on the trail of a serial killer, I’ve read my man correctly and found a way to exploit his habits.

On the only other hand I commit to, my play is less commendable. Indeed, in retrospect, it’s one of my worst hands. And one of the most instructive to me. Though I lose only $2,000, it is one of two hands that convince me I don’t have what it takes—whatever that is—to win the World Series of Poker.

Unfortunately, it’s too late to ask for a refund.

Playing from the button position against Mr. Fierce, I raise his big blind. He calls. On the flop he checks. I bet the pot. He thinks and thinks, and then he calls. (I have nothing; I’m almost certain he doesn’t have anything either—maybe some sort of flush draw to complement the two clubs on board.) Fourth street brings a blank. He checks. I bet the pot—again with nothing but position. If he holds nothing but a flush draw, as I believe he does, he can’t call here. (Well, he can’t correctly call here.) But after losing so many chips to me on our big confrontation during the first level—a hand he failed to call—the Fierce One may be feeling a bit bullied; he may have surmised (somewhat correctly) that the writer dude in seat #1 has found in him a convenient target.

Now, if this is what Fierce truly believed, he would raise my sorry ass, slapping me back twice as hard as I’ve hit him.

Instead, he calls.

This perplexes me. Surely he couldn’t be calling in hopes of hitting his flush. If a club comes he won’t get a dollar out of me. He must know that. His call, therefore, is paying him even money on something like a 3-to-1 shot. (If you want to retire rich, offer your customers this kind of price; if you want to retire destitute, take this kind of price.) If a club doesn’t come—well, he’s got to assume he’s beat and, as in the other scenario, also won’t get another dollar from me.

In other words, he can’t be calling a bet the size of the pot with one card to come holding only a flush draw. In thousands of casual games across America, yeah, sure, he could be. In friendly little $20-buy-in tournaments attended primarily by retirees and refugees from the slot machines, absolutely he could be. But not in the World Series of Poker he couldn’t be.

So he must have something other than a flush draw—say, two-pair he’s been cleverly slow playing while I mistakenly try to steal what’s rightfully his. Ergo, since I am indeed holding nothing but a wee 4-5 of hearts and am probably beaten by Mr. Fierce’s concealed strength, I cannot bet on the end. Q.E.D.

See how cleverly I figured that all out?

Here’s a lesson my friend Pat, a seasoned tournament veteran, once taught me, which I’ll graciously pass along to you without charge (though he extracted 10% of my winnings for a year to teach me this concept, among, admittedly, a few other juicy morsels of poker wisdom): Don’t give the suckers too much credit.

This invaluable imperative took me several years to incorporate into my game. If everything about your opponent’s behavior indicates he’s holding a hand, no matter how unlikely it seems, he probably is, despite the apparent idiocy such a holding would seem to require. The correct question an expert poker player asks himself, I eventually discovered, isn’t, “How the hell could he possibly have what he seems to be suggesting he has?” It’s, rather, “How did I get so lucky as to be seated with someone who would play so ludicrously?”

In the case of Mr. Fierce, I wrongly gave the man credit for playing well enough not to call a pot-size bet with nothing but a flush draw. That was in violation of Pat’s Law.

The final card is a blank. Fierce checks, probably with the intention of raising me when I try to bluff his two-pair. At this moment I know I can’t win the pot no matter what I do—I have a five high!—so I check also, glad that I’ve only lost $2,000 on this clumsy hand.

To my amazement, Fierce turns over the Q-2 of clubs. “That wins,” I say, trying to force an isn’t-that-funny? smile on my stricken face. I’ve let the guy win a $4,000 pot with a queen high.

All I had to do, in blissful hindsight, was bet on the end. He would’ve folded, having missed the flush draw he thought worthy of such a large investment. The pot would have been mine. But more important than the chips, I would have proven to the table—and even moreso to myself—that I could win with or without cards, just like all the other champions who have earned the Horseshoe’s golden bracelet (and $1 million in cash.) Instead, I misread my man.

By not betting on the river, I proved, however inconclusively, that I wasn’t ready to win this tournament.

I’d very much like to tell you that the previous passage was a terrific way to build dramatic tension, that, in fact, I do go on to win the tournament, despite my self-doubts, despite my tactical errors, despite my brief forays into self-pitying remembrances of the One Who Did Me Wrong. That would be a fairytale kind of story, wouldn’t it? A fantasy. Something that could only come true in the fertile fields of a writer’s imagination. A writer-dilettante, of all people, thinks he knows how to play poker as well as the best professionals in the world enters the 2000 World Series of Poker and somehow—how? how?—manages to beat 500 of the greatest card players on the planet. And lives to tell the tale.

Well, it happens. Sort of.

Just not to me.

Shortly after I buy in for the Main Event, on the evening of my arrival at Binion’s, I run into my friend Andy, who has quickly (and deservedly) earned himself a reputation as one of poker’s keenest observers. His sharply written accounts of major poker-tournament action, known in the industry as “wrap-ups,” are the one readable respite in an otherwise unreadable journey through poker’s leading magazine, which seems to pride itself in publishing people whose vast poker knowledge is inversely proportional to their command of written English. Andy, in his role as the “poker pundit,” as he calls himself, keeps abreast of all the latest news and developments on the tournament trail. Tonight, he’s got some news for me.

Seems the venerable Harper’s magazine has sent a contributing editor here to the Horseshoe to compose one of the magazine’s famously breezy and reflective essays on this grand and instructive event. The writer, I imagine, has been charged with explaining what it all really means, holding forth on what this tournament says about American culture, and, if I know Harper’s, finding poetic but tenuous connections between the debasement of the American political system (particularly the Senate) and some poker game in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

Harper’s is one of my two favorite magazines—the other being the New Yorker, which has published my friend Al Alvarez’s seminal accounts of the World Series of Poker on two occasions. Though it lacks the New Yorker’s ineffably wonderful cartoons, which single-handedly make life worth living, Harper’s is one of the few mass-market publications still extant that cater to smart readers with smart writing. While nearly every other magazine in the United States—not to mention the galaxy—relies on the cult of celebrity and sex to move the merchandise (including the New Yorker in some issues), more than 150 years after two eponymous brothers started the enterprise, Harper’s still trades in the far less reliable market of ideas. Though the magazine’s current editor, Lewis Lapham, is sometimes too reflexively liberal for my libertarian tastes, his graceful “Notebook” essays, a monthly tutorial in how to be a great writer, set a lofty standard for the stories and arguments and investigations that follow. A mediocre writer occasionally slips through Lapham’s editorial filter, but his magazine is consistently filled with good minds expressing themselves well. To me, one who finds so much of popular culture an embarrassment and an insult, Harper’s is like a sanctuary, a literary hiding place where I can take refuge from our media’s ongoing Apotheosis of Fame.

I’ve never written for Harper’s. (Nor have I written for the New Yorker.) I have written to both those magazines and received some polite rejection notices.

Many years ago, when I was starting out as an author, I got some useful guidance from one of my first editors, an older fellow who, it seemed to me, knew how the words-for-hire business worked. This mentor of mine worked at the Village Voice, a Greenwich Village-based newspaper that, in the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, could be reliably counted upon to denigrate “the establishment” and celebrate the works, however dubious, of the “alternative” community. And what was he doing there? Writing about tennis.

His advice was to find a subject, something that spoke to you, and become an expert on it, learning all you could about this passion of yours and writing everything you knew about it in whatever publication would have you. Eventually, he told me, when a magazine wanted a story on, say, tennis, it would know who to call.

When Andy tells me the Harper’s news, I’m dismayed that they wanted a story about gambling and they didn’t know who to call.

Though I’ve never met the man, I instantly dislike Jim McManus, the writer Lewis Lapham has assigned to cover the 2000 World Series of Poker. I’m sure McManus is a good writer—he’s published in Harper’s, after all—and a nice enough fellow, and maybe he even knows something about poker. But damn! He’s got something I thought was mine. In this sense McManus isn’t much different than the guy who was fucking my girlfriend while I looked the other way.

The one thing of his I have read—a magazine account of the McManus’ incomprehensibly obnoxious insistence on inflicting their food-throwing infant daughter on the fine restaurants of Paris—had me convinced that the author must surely be one of the most ill-mannered asses to have ever visited France. Surely, only the most insensitive prick would subject fellow adults engaged in rapt conversation and silent seduction and sensual pleasure to the mood-killing antics of his screaming baby daughter. The guy must be an idiot.

Turns out after meeting him briefly that McManus is a decent enough fellow and a decent enough writer and—shit!—knows a little about poker. What begins in my heart as envy melts into admiration.

The admiration quickly devolves back into envy a few days later. Jim McManus, who is merely supposed to be here in Las Vegas to write a lovably literary account of the World Series of Poker, wins a $220 super satellite, enters the Main Event, and, miraculously, finishes fifth and earns more than $250,000.

Never mind that he frequently plays terribly along the way; never mind that his magazine account of his great luck is riddled with editing errors and inexplicable dullness; never mind. To my fractured ego and fragile psyche, what Jim McManus does strikes me as irrefutable evidence that, once more, I’m not good enough. Not good enough to write for Harper’s. Not good enough to get in the money at the World Series of Poker. Not good enough to earn the faithful love of T. In retrospect, I’m able to see the general ickiness of this formulation. But at the time, while the cards are flying and the chips are clattering, the McManus revelation is more depressing than being all-in with a 7-2 offsuit against a pair of aces.

Several other professional scribes have played in the World Championship over the years, notably Alvarez, Tony Holden, and the late David Spanier, but none have ever finished in the money. I’d hoped to be the first of the ink-stained wretches to accomplish this unthinkable feat. Not only has McManus beaten me to the record, he’s done it in a fashion—final table! on the Discovery Channel broadcast!—that can only be bettered by winning the thing.

And he’s writing all about it for my favorite magazine. I guess they knew who to call.

At the end of the second level, I have $9,300, which is well below “par” (the amount of chips in action divided by the number of surviving players), but significantly more than Bjorin and Brunson, the two pre-tournament favorites at my table. They’ve failed to adjust their usual tactics to account for the inscrutable decision-making of Taxi Ned who, at present, has most of our table’s chips. He’ll give them back as surely as Vanity Fair will swoon over a handsome movie star’s efforts to find a home for retired circus animals. But in the interim I can feel the other players’ pain. (Having played with Ned for so many years in New York, I’ve built up something like an immunity; I’ve developed Ned antibodies.) Here’s a guy who seems to get involved in every other hand and yet, in defiance of everything one reads in Sklansky and Malmuth and all the other leading poker theoreticians, somehow manages to gobble up the chips like a slot machine consumes coins. To expert players accustomed to competing against other experts, Ned’s “strategy”—not to mention its apparent efficacy—must be maddening.

As I say, I don’t mind it. And not just because I’m accustomed to it. The fact is, the more his inept poker abilities continue to confound the better players, the more apt they are to blow off their remaining chips. They know the correct way to attack an enigma such as Ned. (That would be: patiently, cautiously, imperiously.) But their emotions cloud their judgment. Having experienced this expensive syndrome about, oh, 496 times, I can speak with some authority about it. The cloudier a good player’s judgment becomes, the more diluted his powers, and the less distinct the differences between his play and hapless Ned’s. The Bjorin and Brunson I’m seeing are recognizable only in silhouette. I’m watching two captains who have lost command of their respective ships, as though they were two marionettes manipulated by a puppeteer who didn’t know much about the game of Texas hold ’em. It’s not really their fault. It’s poker’s.

Poker has a funny way of carrying your mind outside of your body, sort of in the way people who have come back from the dead describe their exit and re-entry from quotidian life. As in a bad dream, you see yourself from a small distance, close enough to observe every detail of your horrifyingly destructive actions, but too far away to prevent them. Someone else, it seems, is controlling your motor functions, your decision making. Someone else is convincing you it’s good and proper and, in fact, utterly necessary to call off the last of your chips with an A-9 after two other players have raised and re-raised the pot. You know this is not really what you want to do. But when you’re enraged and frustrated and perplexed, you can’t help yourself. Rather than wake with a start and sigh with relief, you continue to sleepwalk through the game, oblivious to things like pot-odds and position and patience. Inebriated by the bitter wine of poker disappointment, you play like Ned on his worst day.

If you’ve never seen a losing poker player, I can tell you what he looks like: sad, bewildered, angry, resigned, inconsolable. Very much like someone mourning a lost love.

During the break, I retreat to my hotel room and look out the window at the hundreds of tourists wandering around Fremont Street, plastic buckets of nickels clutched to their chests like so many protective crosses. Standing in the doorway of Sassy Sally’s—one of downtown’s slots-only hustle joints—a tall young woman wearing a foam cowboy hat the size of a well-fed albacore tuna repeatedly drones “free spin, free spin” into a microphone. She’s in showbiz now, I suppose. But back when she was growing up in, I don’t know, Fresno or Sioux City or Staten Island, did she ever think this was how she would spend 40 hours a week of her life?

Seeing the girl in the hat encouraging credulous visitors to invest their social-security checks in her casino’s parsimonious slot machines, I think back to my Wisconsin childhood. Did I ever imagine as a schoolboy that 20 years later I would be in a surreal city called Las Vegas, competing in the World Series of Poker? Playing with my neighborhood chums for dimes and quarters, I don’t recall being aware that such a thing existed, or that I had any aspirations to participate in poker games—besides those in which the players stuck cards to their foreheads. Yet here I am, a man in his thirties, sitting in a lonely Glitter Gulch hotel room, exactly 12 minutes away from returning to the most important poker game on Earth, where the approximately 400 remaining players will test their skills against a roomful of people intent on sending them home with nothing but memories.

I figure I ought to call my mom.

She hates all this gambling stuff I’m involved in. To her it’s slimy and distasteful and somehow unclean. My mother is a lifelong elementary-school teacher. She taught me to read at age three and filled my childhood with books and vaguely hippie-ish slogans, such as “Make Love, Not War,” and probably secretly wished my brother and I would turn out to be Peace Corps volunteers. If she’d had her way, instead of writing about the underbelly of American culture, her elder son would be composing books about fine art and yoga and doing readings at nursing homes.

I love my mom very much. When something good happens in my life, she’s the first person I want to tell, because the genuine happiness that bubbles out of her is often more fun and exciting than the good thing I’ve called to tell her about. My dad I love, too. He’s more circumspect, a former Marine who feels and thinks deeply, but is less effusive about his emotions. My dad is a warm smile; my mom is hysterical jumping up and down and trembling hands. When they’re gone, I’ll miss them both. And nothing I accomplish in my life, I know, will ever feel quite as rich without being able to telephone them to share the news. Indeed, if I feel any compulsion in my life to succeed, to create, to win, it’s because I want to do so while my parents are still around to enjoy the triumph with me.

This year I’m nearly certain I won’t have any wonderful news from the World Series of Poker to share with them. And that’s a shame, since they could both use a cheerful report from the gambling netherworld.

My parents’ marriage of 37 years is crumbling. Nothing cataclysmic has happened—no affairs, no alcoholism, no financial irresponsibility. Their relationship, for reasons that are both apparent and mysterious to me and my younger brother, is not working. And for the first time in decades of partnership, they’re living apart, lonely, frightened, and profoundly sad.

I sort of know how they feel.

Surveying the cluster of casinos below my hotel room, the liquid reflection of color across the way on the Golden Nugget’s black-glass tower, I dial my mom in Milwaukee, knowing she’ll be pleased to hear her son’s voice, no matter how he’s doing in that silly poker nonsense he’s gotten himself involved in.

She sounds tired and defeated, my mom does, and I don’t have the heart to tell her that this year, honestly and truly, I know I won’t win the World Series of Poker. Instead, I stress that I still have chips and that I’m thinking clearly. I leave out the part about missing T and occasionally being enveloped by a shroud of rage that nearly makes me nauseous.

My mom tells me how poorly her counseling sessions are proceeding with my dad. She tells me how sad she is. And then, in the best uplifting mom spirit, she urges me to get back to the tournament and play as well as I can.

I decide right then to do as she asks.

Professional golfers often talk about “grinding”—as though their highly sponsored khakis-and-titanium livelihood involved spending the workday bent over a millstone. In the parlance of the PGA Tour, a grinder is someone who scratches out his score one unspectacular shot after another, hitting fairways and greens, making a few putts, and scrambling imaginatively when his swing performs unreliably. Grinders don’t necessarily hit long par-fives in two or execute stylish flop shots. They just go about their resolutely unspectacular business, surreptitiously climbing the leader-board while the longer flashier players make the highlight reels.

During level three at the World Series of Poker Main Event, I’m a grinder.

Playing with $100 and $200 blinds, I grind my stack back up to $14,700, $600 and $800 at a time. Never involved in dramatic confrontations, never invested more than $2,500 in a single pot, I bob and weave, stick and move, picking up a few blinds and several tiny pots that no one seems much interested in. Grinding is a fine (and marginally fun) way to play no-limit hold ’em. You never have to showdown your cards; you never put much of your money at risk; and you steadily, almost invisibly, increase your wealth and power.

Bjorin and Brunson both exit the tournament at this level, and the table’s play grows briefly subdued, almost somnolent, as if observing a moment of silence for these two fallen warriors. With a couple of the “faster” contestants eliminated, the remaining players seem to enjoy a respite of equilibrium, when every move made doesn’t have to withstand the rigorous inspection of the table’s two leading heart-testers. With Chris off to a juicy side game and Todd surrounded by friends at the race-book bar, Carlos and the Viper nominate themselves for the now-vacant position of table bully. (Ned, with his mountain of chips growing like a high-school football player on steroids, could easily harass and manipulate anyone at the game, but he, inscrutably as always, prefers to make more cold calls than a boiler-room broker with a hot new penny stock.) Me? I grind.

A large gallery of onlookers, three-deep in some places, has formed at the rail. Some of the audience just wants to get a commemorative peek at what’s touted as the world’s best collection of poker players under one roof. For a first-time visitor to the World Series of Poker, I imagine the scene of hundreds of sullen people looking phenomenally bored must be a bit of a letdown. The gawkers come to Binion’s with visions of outsized characters like Amarillo Slim and Puggy Pearson dancing in their heads; instead, for the most part, they get an eyeful of anonymous contestants, whose table comportment has about as much color as a Robert Motherwell painting.

Very large, very obviously armed security guards, dressed like a cross between highway patrolmen and waiters at a western steakhouse, deny access to the tournament arena to all but the contestants and accredited media; many of the latter aimlessly wander around the sea of tables, pausing momentarily to watch the action from a delightfully intimate perspective—like, right over some guy’s shoulder—and scribble erudite memos (Chan: playing well!) before moving on to their next free meal. Whenever an innocent scribe stays parked in one place too long—two hands seems to be the unspoken limit—he generally receives dirty looks from some paranoid gambler who imagines the fellow standing behind him with the notepad is actually a covert operative surreptitiously telegraphing his hole cards to the other players.

If you’ve ever seen the World Series of Poker Press Tournament, a free-roll extravaganza sponsored by Binion’s, you know what a comically absurd concept this is. Most of the media in attendance couldn’t tell you what the phrase “full house on the river” means, let alone comprehend the relative merits of various middle-position starting hands. (In fact, more than a few media contestants each year must show their cards to the dealer so they can be told what they’re holding.)

Since so much money is at stake at the World Series—more than $5 million in the Main Event alone—correspondents from around the world come to the Horseshoe every spring in search of a good story, a compelling character, a cute sound bite. No one seems to mind that most of the tournament’s interesting narratives have by now been endlessly repeated like a bad rumor, worn smooth by the hot winds of lazy punditry. In addition to the hardcore gambling publications, for which the World Series of Poker is like the Super Bowl to Pro Football Weekly, an astonishing variety of mainstream outlets descend on downtown Las Vegas to chronicle the mildly debauched mayhem. Even the curiously labeled “women’s” magazines—how anything so baldly misogynistic as the average fashion rag could be considered a women’s magazine is beyond my ken—show up every year to do error-prone stories on “women in poker.” Invariably a fresh young news hound right out of Yale jets in from her New York City cubicle, endures the clumsy flirtations of the male players she interviews by the dozens, and hangs around with the insular Poker Girl Mafia just long enough to become convinced that these independent businesswomen would make terrific role models for all the office drones who read, say, Cosmo—never mind how socially maladjusted a singular focus on gambling tends to make people, male or female.

Then there are the small-market newspapers, which typically hope to document some hometown boy’s Las Vegas dreams coming true. The fledgling reporter dispatched to chronicle the fantasy-in-progress, I’ve noticed, often disappears for 48 hours at a time and returns to his assignment with ashen complexion, a wicked hangover, and pockets that are otherwise empty, save for business cards from thriving corporations like Misty’s International Escorts.

Most amusing are the members of the “electronic media.” With the advent of the World Wide Web, almost anyone with a Web site can get press credentials to most any newsworthy event, including the World Series of Poker. At the press tournament this year, I sat at the same table as a British woman who worked for a porno site.

The throngs ringing the rails surrounding the poker action are probably more intently focused on the players than the television crews and digital-camera-toting Internet reporter-photographers, who transmit variations on the theme of facial blankness to computer users around the globe. Relatives and friends, investors and lovers all want to get close to their favorite player, though it’s almost impossible to actually see what he or she is being dealt. Still, some “sweaters,” as they’re known, stand for hours at a time, religiously monitoring the ebb and flow of their favorite player’s chip tide. They quietly observe his body language, his demeanor, searching for clues, just as his opponents are, of what he’s really thinking and feeling behind the mask of inexpressiveness. Mostly, though, sweaters in the audience try to make eye contact with their player and communicate silent messages that, at the end of the day, all more or less mean the same thing: “Someone cares about how you’re doing.”

This year I’m not getting such messages, furtively or otherwise. Still, I catch myself scanning the faces in the crowd when I’m not involved in a hand. Were I playing my best, I would use these frequent longeurs to study the faces and hands and shoulders of my opponents, not the faces and hands and breasts of attractive women on the rail. Funny, isn’t it, how attractive women and large sums of cash often seem to collide at the same spot? This is not to suggest that a nice lady I notice, a nearly six-foot-tall Eurasian woman sporting black hot pants and a tank-top the size of a cocktail napkin covering her wonders-of-modern-medicine décolletage, is an expensive prostitute. But, it must be noted, she seems inordinately fascinated with a diminutive fellow two tables to my left who, every time he means to tip the attending waitress exactly $1, takes great pains to extract from the pocket of his nylon track pants a wad of hundred-dollar-bills the size of your fist.

These kind of oblique mating rituals occur at the World Series of Poker as naturally and openly as a male peacock fans his tail feathers. But in addition to their ostensible aphrodisiacal quality, crisp hundreds, when flashed properly, also serve notice to anyone who cares to look that the possessor of such ready cash really truly honestly doesn’t care about the money he stands to win or lose in this sweet little $5 million poker game. He’s got way too much of the smelly old stuff to be bothered. This non-verbal message, of course, is a patent lie, the same as betting into a pot with nothing but a busted straight draw. Yet I see such “declarations” made at the World Series of Poker regularly—almost as regularly as, well, big bets being made by players holding nothing but a busted straight draw. It’s all part of the bluffing that’s essential to getting paid.

As I idly search the eyes in the crowd, wondering which pair belong to someone immune to the allure of power and which belong to someone who has journeyed here to Las Vegas specifically in search of it, I notice, almost subconsciously, that I’m being stared at. From the periphery, to my right, on a sight-line between Taxi Ned and Carlos, I feel the unmistakable heat of an unwavering gaze locked on me.

I turn to look. It’s my art-critic-cum-porno-fantasy dream girl reincarnated. It’s J.

My eyes widen and my mouth opens in a most unpokerly way. It’s J!

She’s tracked me down here at Binion’s Horseshoe because—because why? Because she had an epiphany last night, a stunning and inspiring moment of clarity in which she knew, she just knew, I am a man she couldn’t let slip out of her life? Because she couldn’t continue living without at least one more of my kisses? Because she finally understood that love is stronger than her secret compulsions?

In the millisecond it takes me to consider the myriad explanations for J’s stunning arrival at the World Series of Poker, I notice that her gorgeous face is indeed fixed upon mine—but that her eyes are looking through me, on another man, who sits at the table behind me with his back nearly touching mine.

And then I notice that this ravishing brunette staring beyond me is not J at all.

After I stop shuddering, I make a mental note: Get your contact lenses and your psyche checked upon returning to Los Angeles.

For the first 90 minutes of level three, I don’t hold any hands worth playing. Between furtive glances at the J impostor at the rail and larcenous raids on unprotected blinds, I fold innumerable trouble hands, like A-4, K-9, and even K-Q in early position. Unless the flop hits starting cards like these perfectly, you usually end up possessing the second best hand, which, in a poker game, tends to be about as useful as picking place horses to win. It takes discipline worthy of a dominatrix with a military school upbringing to watch everyone around you getting involved, winning and losing—playing—while you pass, pass, pass, observing the human folly from an ascetic distance. But in a true and just world—as opposed to the one we currently inhabit—such virtue, the good books tell us, is sure to be rewarded. The meek shall inherit the chips, and the unworthy will be relegated to the gloomiest corners of purgatory, where someone always beats your top pair with a slightly better kicker.

And thus, the poker gods decreed, it shall be so. Right?

Right! Either my patience is finally being rewarded or I’m unwittingly fulfilling that great cliché about lucky-in-love-unlucky-in-cards that my father likes to use to explain his reticence to take a risk on anything involving the vagaries of chance. T is gone with my money, N has a boyfriend, and J has dispatched a remarkably lifelike cyborg replicant of herself to torment me from a small distance. Yes, it’s all true. But I finally have a hand!

The Invisible One in seat #9 opens the pot from first position for the minimum bet, $200. I look down at my cards and find J-J. At this point, to eyes weary of espying starting hands better suited to doubling down at blackjack than playing no-limit hold ’em, two jacks looks like a sequential royal flush. I raise $800. The Viper, having previously read me correctly as living the wastrel’s life of crime, has come over the top of my last two raises. This time he considers his hand for a few seconds before acting. Then he sneers slightly and says, “I raise.” He matches my bet and raises another $1,600. Sensing impending drama, the rest of the table quickly folds. They’re eager to have the gambling equivalent of rink-side seats at a hockey game when the home team, down by three goals, puts its “enforcer” on the ice for some poetic retribution against the other team’s stylish Czech wing looking to pad his hat trick statistics. They can smell blood.

So can Mr. Invisible. He folds.

Now the action is back to me. It’s that time again, ladies and gentleman! It’s time to play everyone’s favorite game, Fold or Raise.

Fold or raise. Raise or fold. What shall I do?

Well, if he’s attempting a steal—and the Viper is a good enough player to pick the optimal spot to pull off such a pernicious maneuver—I should re-raise him. End of drama.

If he’s not stealing—that is, if he’s betting his hand for value, I should fold, since I am at best a tiny favorite against the A-K he might have in this situation, and at worst a big underdog against the bigger pocket pair he could well have in this situation.

Of course, there’s the small chance he’s feeling a bit too frisky with something like a pair of nines, in which case I’m a big favorite.

So, which is it, I wonder.

This is one of those moments that occur regularly in poker games, one of those moments when you wish you possessed x-ray vision or, at the very least, a Nostradamus-like ability to foresee the future. The great players seem to have mortgaged their souls—or at least a sizable part of their personalities—to be blessed with such gifts. They may be one-dimensional, emotionally barren, obsessive-compulsive weirdos. But at a card table they can see forever.

Regrettably, I possess none of this magic. I’m forced to rely on far less spectacular talents.

I carefully assess the Viper, who appears to me inscrutable as ever, a confident young Asian man with a slight air of menace and danger about him, as though he were a recently initiated member of some terribly violent gang of automatic-weapon-toting thugs intent on cornering the Los Angeles heroin trade. (Hell, for all I know he’s on full scholarship to UCLA, where he’s completing his residency in anesthesiology.) What’s there in seat #2, besides a tabula rasa?

Look carefully, beneath the obvious and the apparent, I urge myself. Find the answer.

Has the cumulative ennui of folding for 90 minutes clouded my judgment? Or is it something I sense in his breathing that convinces me he’s trying to take advantage of me? Or have I come to a dark bleak point in my life where I secretly believe everyone is trying to take advantage of me?

At the moment I don’t know conclusively, which is the problem with this vexing game called poker. One too seldom knows. If you require further evidence that poker in many ways operates as a neat little metaphor for life, I submit the foregoing. We all wish at one time or another to answer the essential questions Paul Gauguin proposed to explore in paint more than 100 years ago, while he was in Tahiti, sating his appetite for underaged Polynesian nymphs: Who am I and, tell me, where am I going? Based on the success of “psychics” and tarot-card interpreters and other charlatans of the seeing-into-the-future industry, more than a few people yearn to be told, to have some certainty, that the path they are traveling will lead to Valhalla or, at the very worst, a nice home in the suburbs and a membership at the country club.

I’m generally not interested in such prognostications. I don’t want someone to tell me what lies ahead. Discovering the bumps and pits, the summits and vistas, on my own is perhaps the greatest thrill in being alive. If your life’s story were indeed preordained by some master author with a taste for black humor, would you really want to know how it turns out? I wouldn’t. I want to unravel the mystery slowly and never find out how it ends.

That said, when playing in the World Championship of poker, particularly after you’ve had your pair of jacks re-raised by a tricky Vietnamese dude, it would occasionally be nice to get a sneak preview.

Alas, with none forthcoming, I decide the Viper is stealing. Now, I use the word “decide” here loosely, in the way one might “decide” between a night of unspeakable debauchery with Juliette Binoche instead of Nicole Kidman. As with so many poker questions, the correct answer is not always patently clear, and the brave player must allow art to take up where science leaves off. Of course, true artists are rarer than an Orthodox Jew hog farmer. The great ones, the men who win multiple World Championships and dazzle onlookers with their otherworldly vision, are gambling’s version of Bach and Michelangelo and Wordsworth. The rest of us must be content with making feeble lunges at the sublime, saddled with the knowledge that we cannot capture whatever it is that separates the genius from the anonymous herd of earnest toilers. Just as one must eventually make peace with the realization that truly knowing what occurs in the mind of another—like, one’s lover of three years—is epistemologically impossible, a very good but not great poker player must make peace with the fact that he can’t truly be certain of anything. And that playing in such a state of doubt is fine.

I have not yet reached that state of blissful equanimity. I want to feel like Kasparov when he stands over a chessboard, Woods when he strides to the 18th tee, Chan when he gets heads-up with a 2-1 chip lead. I want guarantees.

Maybe I’m playing the wrong game. Or maybe—and this is far more likely—I haven’t yet fully digested the Facts of Life, cheerless as they may be.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle aside, I convince myself that the Viper is attempting a courageous steal with his bold re-raise. “I raise,” I say flatly, sliding $4,000 more into the pot.

Possibly faster than it takes for a synapse to traverse the distance of one microscopic cell, the Viper moves in his entire stack.

Whoops.

I think for about five seconds before folding. My brief reverie has nothing to do with “should I or shouldn’t I?”—clearly I’m going to fold. Instead, I take a moment to reflect on What Can Be Learned From This Mistake. The answer is: I don’t rightly know at the moment, other than, perhaps, I have a highly developed talent for talking myself into seeing things that aren’t really there. It’s a wonder, a miracle actually, that I’ve yet to be converted to some obscure cult whose primary article of faith is the periodic appearance of the Virgin Mary in the burned-out lightbulbs on the Stardust Casino’s marquee (right below the advertisement for the $9.95 steak and lobster special). Silly me. I should have been a character in Aesop’s Fables, The Blundering Poker Dog, a confused bloodhound who constantly picks up the wrong scent and follows it directly to the secret lair of hungry carnivores much larger and meaner than he. Moral of this story? Don’t re-raise a ferocious Vietnamese dude when he comes over the top of two previous early-position raisers.

As I disconsolately toss my now worthless jacks into the muck, I mutter (just loudly enough for the Viper to hear) about how lucky this guy is to hold a big hand whenever I get kings. This is a lie, of course, the kind of “innocent” malfeasance that occurs regularly at a poker table—particularly when someone pulling in a pot declares he had been the proud owner of two specific cards, yet for some reason that’s never made clear he wasn’t proud enough to actually support his claim with a public viewing of his face-down masterpiece. (This common stunt is typically accompanied by the words “Now, you fellas know I wouldn’t lie at the poker table,” followed by much forced laughter and a variety of unwitty ripostes that would have Sheridan spinning in his scandalous grave.)

Being a good and prolific liar is not only acceptable at the poker table, it’s celebrated. One could argue that this fact alone makes poker tournaments an intrinsically bad place, where the forces of evil have overrun the guard-posts of morality. Morality, though, is often just thinly veiled envy. The alternative argument goes something like this: The fact that lying is rewarded makes poker tournaments an intrinsically good place, where the hypocrisies of the world at large have no currency. Say what you will about Bill Clinton’s choice of phallus-slurping interns, his refined ability to lie blithely and convincingly under immense pressure was both dazzling and enlightening. And in some quarters quietly applauded.

Poker players whose bald mendacity garners admiration and respect from the targets of their untruthfulness remind me of certain corrupt Louisiana politicians whose satisfied constituents faithfully return them to office for consecutive terms of institutional thievery, even after the rascals have been indicted for numerous breaches of the law, not to mention common sense. It’s all part of the game, goes the thinking. The advantage in poker is that there’s never the threat of some do-gooding special prosecutor to ruin the party. If you lie often and well enough at a poker tournament, you won’t end up sharing a prison cell with a large man named Bubba who has an unseemly interest in the way your posterior fits into your Department of Corrections workpants. No, you’ll eventually be handed a pile of cash and an engraved gold bracelet from Neiman-Marcus.

I’m hoping the Viper will rise to the bait and reveal what in fact he had. It won’t lessen the sting of losing more than $6,000 on the hand, but at least I can kid myself into thinking I’ve purchased a morsel of information, albeit at a price that makes black truffles seem as economical as lima beans.

“Yes, I’m lucky,” the Viper replies, with just a bit too much vitriol for my sensitive ears. “Very lucky man.” He flips over the two black aces that have brought him the mound of chips he’s now stacking into perfect pillars of accomplishment. “Always lucky.”

The subtext of his proclamation, for those not well-versed in the peculiarities of English as a Second Language Filtered Through the Mind of a Poker Player, is this: You can call me lucky all you want, but it’s skill—skill, you ignorant fool—that wins me chips, not random good fortune.

He’s right, and I don’t disagree with him. I’ve often heard aggrieved losers sincerely accuse winners of being “so fucking lucky,” as if extracting such a confession from the victor will somehow dull the pain of losing. All this noise is simply code for, “I played better than you did and so by all rights I should have won,” which suggests a naïve belief that poker, or any other realm of this universe, is a smoothly efficient meritocracy. I have a two-word refutation for anyone still harboring this juvenile illusion: Kenny G.

But accusing the Viper of being the fortunate recipient of dumb luck is not what our exchange was really about. At least not to me. He got what he wanted out of our brief colloquy: a chance to defend his unassailable honor. And I got what I wanted: a “free” peek at his cards. It all goes under the heading of Bluffing Your Way to the Truth.

I continue to mutter, sounding vaguely like Yosemite Sam without the accent, but it’s only because I’m mad at myself, not the whims of fate or whomever or whatever decides which cards an expectant poker player will get to work with. I could have saved $5,600 by immediately folding when the Viper sent me the message (entirely clear in retrospect!) that he had the goods. Now I’m back down to $8,500 and officially steamed.

Poker chips are like a reputation: difficult to earn and easy to lose. When you’ve spent six hours diligently building up your homestead one crusty brick at a time, only to see it crumble to its foundations in one hot gust of ill fortune or bad judgment, the result can be as demoralizing as having your nearly completed Great American Novel lost to a power surge. If the World Series of Poker is the Olympic marathon of card games—and no other tournament requires four days of heroic effort—then an early catastrophic loss feels like the 26-mile race has been cruelly amended to 31 miles of brutal moraines.

It’s one thing to give a weak player a few extra chips to play with; it’s entirely another to subsidize world-class mendicants. Though legendary stories of some determined soul coming back from the dead, grinding his single remaining chip into a championship title, inspire tournament competitors never to give up, the odds against are overwhelming. After losing all my winnings-and-then-some to the Viper, more than my bankroll feels crushed.

My spirit aches, too.

But I don’t quit—not yet. My stubbornness, I suppose, could be attributed to the never-give-up ethos instilled in all young boys weaned on Rocky movies and Joe Montana two-minute drills. Even poker players who know they’re going to lose tend to pugnaciously adopt the Jake La Motta response to getting his face pulverized by Sugar Ray Robinson, immortalized in Raging Bull: “You didn’t knock me down, Ray. You didn’t knock me down.”

That’s how I feel at the moment: bloodied, bruised, damaged, but still standing.

Plus, the J impostor seems to have been joined by a cute friend I catch staring at me every time I look her way. (Of course, it could be my contact lenses again.) That great inspirer of folly and achievement, the male ego, won’t allow me to go gently into that neon night.

Rather than allowing a destructive moment of self-hatred to wash over me like so much battery acid, I channel the steam I envision seeping out of my ears into pleasant standard-issue aggression. Since the poker table is one of the rare places in our “civilized” society where precisely directed rage often produces benefits, not lengthy prison sentences, my angst manifests in a short but profitable blind-raiding mission, and I churn my stake back to $9,500 as the session ends.

During the one-hour dinner break, while the majority of the remaining field (about 350 players) descends on the Horseshoe buffet to gorge on fried pork chops and trade unimaginably dull stories about how unlucky they got (or variations on this general theme), I retreat to my room and attempt to visualize how I’m going to double through two or three times and get back in contention. The problem is I can’t see it.

The only images in my mind’s eye are of loss. Lost love. Lost dreams. Lost poker chips.

You don’t need a sports psychologist or a late-night-television motivational coach hawking overpriced self-realization videotapes to know this is a sure way to self-realize yourself into failure. Images of my pocket queens holding up all-in against Ned’s A-10 should be dancing in my head; instead, I envision T doing unmentionable things with her new boyfriend.

I take the bouquet of herbs I brought for N and throw them in the trash.

Something wonderful must happen during Level Four if I’m to remain in the 2000 World Series of Poker. Well, that’s not entirely true. I could pay my blinds and antes (at this level, there’s a $25 toll every hand to accompany the $100 and $200 blinds), never get involved in a hand, and die a prolonged emphysematic death, wheezing and gasping down to the felt. But one of the first lessons a successful tournament competitor learns is that there’s practically no difference between finishing in 53rd or 453rd place; one looks more impressive than the other, but neither pays any money. The idea in gambling tournaments, be they conducted with dice, dominos, or 52 cards, is to quickly amass hordes of ammunition or quickly go down trying. Some players claim they’d rather be the first eliminated from a tournament than finish one out of the money; it feels less painful, less like “so close yet so very far,” and the many hours wasted earning nothing could be better used beating up on weak live games or making a return visit to the buffet.

Now, a seasoned tournament player keenly avoids senseless kamikaze missions, particularly those bombing runs whose misguided purpose is to capture the chip lead from the moment the tournament begins. It’s a long war, after all. But to purposefully dodge conflict merely to “survive” a few hours before you perish is antithetical to the point of playing a poker tournament. You want to be the last man standing. Or in the case of the 2000 Main Event, one of the last 45. And the only way to do that is to win a few fights.

When you’re relatively short-stacked, as I am at this point, you should, in fact, be actively seeking conflicts. This does not mean brashly provoking the unwanted ire of the table bully, goading him into a position where he has no choice but to smack you upside your impudent head. The “trick,” if you can call something so obvious by that name, is to get your chips—all your chips—involved in a gruesome conflict in which you have some sort of demonstrable advantage, no matter how small.

Experienced players might read the preceding passage and wonder, “Isn’t that what you’re always trying to do in no-limit poker?”

I don’t think so. Watch the great champions early in the Main Event. They assiduously avoid letting a lesser player have a shot at all their chips, even if they, the champions, have a small short-term edge. The great ones seem to figure (correctly, in my estimation) that their long-term edge is even greater. From what I’ve seen, early in a long poker tournament like the World Series of Poker, superior players prefer to win a bunch of small decisions rather than engaging in a coin flip for all the money. Mathematical types call this “reducing volatility.” Good ol’ boys who grew up playing in the back rooms of West Texas saloons refer to this concept as “not giving a sucker a break.”

When you’re up against someone who plays better than you, particularly after the flop, you’re usually better off forcing an all-in confrontation before the community cards hit the table—even if you suspect you’re at best 50-50 to have the stronger hand. Chris Ferguson, who, despite the machinations of myself and 510 other earnest contestants, will go on to win the 2000 World Series of Poker (and the $1.5 million first prize), employs this tactic against the runner-up, T. J. Cloutier, during the largest poker pot in tournament history. Realizing Cloutier, the all-time leading money winner at the World Series, is the superior player, Ferguson calls his opponent’s all-in raise holding only A-9. Having played in numerous tournaments with Mr. Ferguson, who is popularly known as “Jesus” because of his long tresses and facial hair, I can tell you he knows he doesn’t have the best hand. When T. J. Cloutier re-raises all-in (with two players left holding an almost equal amount of chips), Chris Ferguson fears he might be drawing dead to three cards. (In fact, he is; Cloutier has A-Q.) But he knows he might plausibly have stumbled into a 50-50 proposition—two “over cards” versus a smaller pair. Reducing the World Championship of Poker to what amounts to heads versus tails may seem wanly unpoetic. But Ferguson accurately assesses the circumstances and discovers, ironically, that the optimal way for him to win at this point in the tournament is to gamble.

I once happened upon Amarillo Slim and nine other hopeful punters playing showdown poker for $1,000 a hand. The winner of this game, in which the only skill is counting out ten $100 bills from your bankroll, instantly had a large enough stake to buy into the Main Event. “What are you doing?” I inquired, amused that so many ostensibly sophisticated poker players would reduce their World Series dreams to this.

“It’s called gambling,” Slim replied. “You ought to try it sometime.”

I remember Slim’s advice when, on the ultimate hand at the 2000 World Series of poker, a nine falls on the river. Chris Ferguson’s underdog A-9 suddenly seems like an excellent hand. What appears upon first consideration to be a lousy call is, upon further investigation, a particularly wise call—especially from one who is able to see beyond an isolated battle and understand the larger campaign.

With this ethos in mind, I’m looking for a spot to slide in my whole stack—sticking it in, according to the evocative parlance—in hopes of having it slide back to me with a like amount of chips piled beside it. And preferably the sooner the better. Doubling through when you’ve got $9,000 is a lot more meaningful than when you’ve got, say, $3,000.

My problem is I have neither the cards nor the position to make a stand. Either the Viper or Carlos (and, of course, Ned) seem to be involved in most of the hands before the action comes around to me. Like one who is forced to endure “Falcon Crest” reruns when he’d rather be reading Jim McManus in Harper’s describing his once-in-the-history-of-Western-civilization march to the World Series of Poker final table, I’m an unwilling voyeur. I mean, I like to watch as much as the next guy. But what I really want to do at the moment is dive in and get messy.

What I see next is both horrifying and magnificent, Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa realized in cards and chips. I can hardly believe what I’m seeing, so ineffably beautiful is the image. But I am dismayed, too. Because once again I’m witnessing a poker hand that proves beyond a scintilla of a doubt that I will not, cannot, should not, win the 2000 World Series of Poker.

The Viper, in early position, raises $800 with a few of what used to be my dear departed chips. Ned (naturally) calls. Carlos, slumping slightly in his chair, calls. Everyone else folds.

The flop comes 9-7-3 of various suits.

The Viper taps the table twice and says, “Check.”

Ned looks at his cards to make sure they haven’t changed in the past 15 seconds and says wearily, “I check.”

Carlos frowns slightly, nods, and shuffles a stack of hundred-dollar chips in his café con leche fingers. He puts them down and switches to black-and-yellow $500 discs.

“Bet,” he says, stacking $3,000 in front of him.

Ned, out of turn, throws up his hands in frustration.

The Viper draws deeply on his cigarette and mimics his Latin opponent’s chip-shuffling prowess. “Call,” he says, pushing forward several minarets of money.

Ned folds and says something irrelevant. Carlos blinks languidly.

“Two players,” the dealer says, laying down a jack. Though this card fills an open-ended straight, I figure it’s highly unlikely (though not impossible) that one of these good players is holding something like a suited 8-10.

The Viper, first to act, checks. I look him over: nothing. I can’t tell if he’s got a pair of aces or rapidly dying dreams.

Carlos, staring across the table, hesitates for a few seconds. Then he says, “I bet,” and flips a $5,000 chip toward the pot.

Interesting. If Carlos has the best hand he’s clearly not worried about letting the Viper get a cheap draw, or else he would have bet at least the size of the pot. If he himself is drawing—which I strongly doubt—he’s wasting money. And if he’s got a monster—three-of-a-kind, for instance—he’s milking it for all it’s worth.

The Viper looks over at Carlos and considers his options. Though he appears to the rest of the table—and particularly Carlos—perfectly calm, from my seat adjacent to him, I can see his leg pumping furiously beneath the tabletop, the manic energy bleeding out of his sandal-clad foot into the ash-stained carpet.

“Call,” he says.

No one says anything, but all of us are thinking, “Wow, this is important.” I mean, not in a Human Genome Project kind of way. But everyone sits up a little straighter. Everyone starts to mentally reconstruct the action. Everyone begins theorizing about what each of these titans actually has hidden face-down on the table. And, as gamblers are wont to do, everyone silently “predicts” what will happen next.

Which is this: The dealer peels off another three, pairing the board. The flop now reads 9-7-3-J-3. The Viper chews his lower lip, lowers his left hand from where it has been scratching his ear, and taps the table with his forefinger. “Check,” he says flatly.

Carlos tucks his chin to his chest and surveys the pot. If he were wearing bifocals, Carlos would be peering over them. “Bet,” he says, stacking out $7,000.

The Viper looks at his opponent with what can only be described as malice, as though this mild-mannered Spaniard had somehow insulted the rice vermicelli and beef tendons the Viper’s mom has prepared for dinner. He fondles his chips, looking from Carlos to the pot, the pot to Carlos. Neither object moves.

“I raise,” the Viper says, allowing just a hint of music to color his usual monotone. He matches the original $7,000 with $7,000 more.

Now Carlos is the one who looks mildly perturbed. He rubs the back of his head, mutters softly to himself in Spanish, and shifts in his seat, as though the plush cushions supporting his ass have suddenly turned to slate. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, he begins to shake his head “no.”

I look at the Viper. His leg has stopped pumping.

I look back at Carlos. He sighs. He shakes his head. And then he smiles. “Good hand,” he says, showing the two sevens he is folding.

“Folding a set?” Ned asks, incredulous.

“No good,” Carlos says.

“He play with me before,” the Viper says, showing the table his two nines. “He know I don’t raise with nothing. He know I only raise with the nuts.”

I’m stunned.

Set over set. You rarely see three-of-a-kind versus another three-of-a-kind in Texas hold ’em, and when you do in the no-limit variety of this game, someone invariably loses all of his chips.

The Viper had the courage and vision to check and call, check and call, and check once more on the end, certain he would have the opportunity to raise.

Carlos had the courage and discipline to fold a huge hand that could have won him an enormous pot, certain he was beat.

I have previously had to confront the awful knowledge that I will never sing like José Carerras, compose poetry like John Donne, or look even remotely like Brad Pitt. These are all disappointing realizations. But none of these small remorses feels quite as depressing as knowing I cannot play poker well enough to do what Carlos and the Viper just did.

And they’re not even World Champions.

I officially give up after the epic Carlos versus Viper hand. Oh, I’m still in my seat, and I still mechanically put chips into the pot and generally conduct myself like someone who has played in a poker tournament or two. But my heart and mind, and probably my soul, have long since left this iniquitous gambling den. I’m somewhere far away, somewhere in the past, when I had a sweet auburn-haired lover who taught me to be true, to always be blessedly true.

A cocktail waitress asks me if I’d like anything to drink. I stare at her cascading red locks and try not to smile or cry.

“Nothing,” I hear myself say. “I’m done.”

She grins professionally and opens her mouth as though she’s about to say something. I imagine those lips, her lips, the ones that were once mine, kissing me.

And then she’s gone.

I look down at my cards. Three days before Jim McManus will steal my dream for himself, three days before Chris Ferguson will get paid $1.5 million, three days before these two unrelated cards will make history, I see an ace and a nine staring back at me.

I put in my last $4,400 and feel my shoulders twitch with an involuntary shudder of pleasure. Until next year, no one will be able to bluff me again.