Poker Nation

A High-Stakes, Low-Life Adventure into the Heart of a Gambling Country

Andy Bellin

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780060958473
• eBook ISBN: 9780061842429
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

“Poker Nation is a travelogue to the quirky world of competitive poker, an exploration of poker obsession and addiction (not necessarily the same thing) and a primer on mathematics, poker lingo and technique. Entertaining and accessible.” —USA Today

Journalist and poker fanatic Andy Bellin takes readers on a raucous journey into the shut-up-and-deal world of professional poker. From basement games to the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, you'll look over his shoulder as he learns to count cards, read a legendary player's body language, hang in there when the chips are down, and take his beatings like a man. Even if you don't know the difference between a flop and a river card, Bellin keeps you in the game with his portraits of the colorful players, dreamers, hustlers, and eccentrics who populate this strange subculture. Along with learning what goes on behind the scenes in illegal poker clubs, you'll get great advice on how to play Texas Hold'em, today's game of choice for big-money players.

WANT TO BET ON IT?

Man, Gamblers Anonymous must be desperate for new members. I just read their twenty questions to see if you’re a compulsive gambler, and they make it too easy to qualify.

—CHRIS,
poker player

Early in the spring of 1999, Sal the Bookie, affectionately known as “Sally Books,” was scheduled to be released from the Rikers Island penitentiary where he was completing an eighteen-month sentence for the promotion of gambling. Two welcome-home parties were simultaneously planned. The first was to take place at his house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. There, Sal’s wife of ten years had been busy preparing for his release all week. She had cleaned the house meticulously, cooked his favorite meal, and invited over a few family members for a small dinner. Their three children, who had not seen Sal once during his year-and-a-half incarceration, had been bathed, brushed, and groomed within an inch of their lives and were instructed to be on their best behavior.

About four miles downtown another party was being planned. This one was at the Winchester Poker Club on Cortlandt Street in New York City. The owners of the establishment—all old friends and business acquaintances of Sal’s—had put together an impressive spread for his return. There was pizza, a nine-foot submarine sandwich made with imported Italian cold cuts, refreshments and an elaborate dessert buffet. It created a festive mood in the club that night.

Most of the people there had never met Sal, or even heard of him for that matter. Their high spirits were due more to the complimentary food and drinks than anything else. Gamblers love free stuff. It’s a universal truth. Doesn’t matter what is being given away or what the reason is—some guy could drop $300 at a blackjack table, and on his way out, a casino host could put a hat on his head with the name of the casino that just took his money embroidered on it, and he’d suddenly feel fantastic about what had just transpired. It’s a psychological abnormality essential to functioning as a gambler.

The evening of Sal’s party I remember watching a man, easily $4,000 in the hole from a game of stud, line up at the buffet, giddy and wide-eyed like a kid on Christmas morning because he was about to get a complimentary slice of pizza. He didn’t seem to care that he was essentially spending about $500 per pepperoni.

Most of the conversations across the poker table that night were about Sal. People were wondering what he was going to do on his first night of freedom. Even though there were two parties being thrown for him, no one knew what his first stop would be. It was a given, said those who knew him best, that his first stop would be the uptown brothel that his brother had an interest in. The evidence for this conclusion was that Sal had specifically asked his wife not to pick him up at Rikers.

All of the bookmakers and shylocks in residence that evening thought Sally would definitely come to the club straight from the brothel. After all, many patrons of the Winchester owed Sally money, and he would want to collect some of his debts so he could see his family with more than the $45 bus fare that the city gives you when you leave prison in his pocket.

The patrons of the club who had themselves done some time in prison held a very different opinion. They were willing to give Sal the benefit of the doubt. Amir, a fifty-three-year-old video store owner with two stints at Rikers on his résumé, had his own thoughts on Sal’s pending activities. “Sally just spent eighteen months surrounded by guys with nothing better to do than play cards. You think he’s gonna come here and do the same thing? No fucking way. One hooker, two cannolis, and a couple of pats on the head for each of his kids. That’s it. Three to one he’s in bed with his wife by ten.”

“I’ll take that bet,” said a poker player sitting across the table from Amir.

And then it happened. A chart was drawn on a poster-size piece of cardboard. Columns were labeled with times and places, and odds were set. Action was placed all over the board before the chart was even finished being drawn. The proposition of home vs. the club was set at 50–50. Arriving at the Winchester before midnight regardless of where he had been prior was a 2 to 5 endeavor (meaning that for every $50 wagered, you would receive a $20 profit). The longest odds on the board were for something they called a Force Majuere, which was spelled incorrectly. It was a 20–1 bet that some act of God (flat tire, hurricane, car bomb) would keep Sal away from home, the club, or the whorehouse past midnight. Knowing what I did about Sal, his brother, his kids, and his wife—which was absolutely nothing—I bet on the “Force Majuere,” as it offered the best odds on the board.

Inherent in the act of gambling is the ability of the participant to perpetually omit the notion of natural truth. Once that is done, a person is able to look beyond the practical applications of math and reason and achieve a consciousness that resides in the place where statistics hold less relevance than rabbit’s feet. And then, when the gambler has no choice but to be immersed in reality—when he loses, as almost all gamblers do, and has to pay up—then he must be able to dismiss the entire experience from memory. If he pawned his television the day before, he has to be able to act as if he never owned one. That way he can get out of bed and do the whole thing over again. The irony that we were taking time off from a poker game to wager on the whereabouts of a convicted bookie seemed to escape everybody.

By 10:00 P.M. Sal had not arrived at the Winchester yet. The odds of him showing at all at that point had dropped to 3 to 1. At midnight a voice came over the club PA system announcing that the party for Sally was going to be postponed for three to six months.

Apparently, just hours before his release, Sal had been caught placing bets with another shylock on the prison phones and subsequently had all his good-behavior time revoked. So that was the end of the party. All bets were voided at that point except one. No one could figure out whether or not being rearrested in prison constituted a force majeure. We began to wonder, was his continued incarceration an act of God?

Every prison has its own architectural identity. The newer ones are sleek, cold, efficient, and sterile. The older ones, like Rikers, look like huge, haunted houses encircled by razor-wire-topped brick walls.

The Baltimore County Correctional Facility—where I spent a bit of time in the early 1990s*—looked like a hybrid bomb shelter / public school. With its low ceilings and yellow cement walls that led in every direction, its interior seemed to have been designed to inspire teduim. There were signs everywhere—instructions on where to stand, directions to different parts of the jail, and reminders to the prisoners about every conceivable subject.

Baltimore County Correctional had a wall of public phones near the dining hall where inmates were allowed to make calls to lawyers or family members during certain hours if they had not had the privilege revoked. Above the phones was a giant sign, roughly two feet by ten feet, that in huge black type read,

EVERY OUTGOING AND INCOMING PHONE CALL IS BEING TAPED

When I first saw the sign, I suggested to a guard that they would probably profit more from eavesdropping if that sign wasn’t there. He agreed, but pointed out that the warning was present for legal reasons. “It’s against the law to secretly tape your conversations. That sign is above every public phone in every joint across America.”

When I heard that Sal had been busted making bets on the phone, I thought about what that guard had told me. Here was a man, incarcerated for almost a year and a half, so thrilled about getting out of prison, so juiced up about getting back to his regular life, that on the day he was to be released, he walked up to a phone situated below a sign that said his conversation was being taped and placed a bet on a baseball game. Clearly this man had a problem. His actions seemed way beyond his control. The way I saw it, what happened to Sally Books was an act of God. And I wanted to collect on my 20-1 on the force majeure.

Most people ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Author's Note
• Contents
• The Rank of Hands...
• It's My Deal
• Theoretical Poker
• Probability, Statistics...
• Benny Binion and the World...
• I Think That Guy...
• Tells
• Want to Bet on It?
• Taking It Like a Man
• Cheating
• Big-Time Pros
• Small-Time Pros
• What Card Did You Fold...
• Sex, Lies, and a Deck...
• The House of Cards
• I Call
• Appendix A:
• Appendix B:
• Appendix C:
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Praise
• Copyright
• About the Publisher