Mastering the Universe

Rolled in around 3:30 in the morning last night, and didn’t fall asleep until after 5. There’s only one activity that keep me awake that late - poker. I’ve been playing cards since I was a kid. First, around the kitchen table. Later, at a NYC private game hosted by the comedian Eddie Brill. When I briefly moved to Los Angeles, I discovered legal poker rooms like the Bike, Hawaiian Gardens, Hollywood Park, and the world’s largest poker room, the Commerce Casino in the area of East Los Angeles known as the City of Commerce.

I’ve always liked that Sovietesque municipal name - The City of Commerce. There’s never a question of what goes on there. If you’re unsure, I’ll tell you: commerce. The area is chockablock with industrial concerns, tractor trailer parking lots, and an outlet mall.

And The Commerce Casino.

I used to love that place, which combined the thoughtful aesthetic of a Wal-Mart with the clientele of a methadone clinic. Plus, for years, their floorman looked exactly like a youngish Dan Aykroyd. To this day, I’m not sure he wasn’t Dan Aykroyd.

You could show up at the Commerce any time of day, any day of the year, and find it filled with sallow, grumbling men from across the globe, with an emphasis on Armenia, Vietnam, and the Middle East. The Commerce attracts a low-rent kind of sad sack, the kind of people Tom Waits might write about. Their style trends towards Affliction t-shirts and jeans with too many extraneous rivets. None of them wear wedding rings. But no matter where they hail from, they all love one thing: cheap leather jackets.

Also, I guess, poker.

I remember an Asian guy who used to play there called Michelob Mike. He’d play low-stakes games, always with a Michelob in his hand, his face growing redder the longer he drank. And the longer he drank, the worse he played. Michelob Mike was always broke.

The Commerce is filled with guys (and it’s 90% guys) exactly like Michelob Mike, guys you wouldn’t think twice about if you passed them on the street. Guys who work in cell phone stores and flip cheap houses and bet on sports. Just guys doing guy shit. There’s rich guys who grind the Commerce right alongside the rest of us punters. The actor Don Cheadle used to make regular appearances, for example. Nobody paid him any mind because poker is like that.

He looked exactly like this, which is how everybody at a poker room should look.

Last week, I played in a much more upscale venue, the Valiant Lady cruise liner, operated by Virgin Cruises. This was a poker cruise sponsored by the World Poker Tour. One night I got to hang out with Adam Pliska, CEO of the WPT. During his remarks at the cocktail party I attended, he talked about how poker brings people together from every walk of life. People who never would ordinarily interact sit down at a poker table together and can have meaningful interactions over a game of cards.

And that’s true. Strangers can become friends at a poker table, at least for a few hours late on a Wednesday night. Guys who would have nothing to say to each other outside of a card room might spend an entire evening chatting and never even learn each other’s name.

Although the poker world is trying its best to bring more women into the game, it remains a predominately male activity. It’s been a challenge. I think there’s a few reasons for this; one of the overlooked reasons, though, might have to do with the way men typically interact with each other.

For us, sitting in companionable silence can be as enriching as having a long conversation. Poker tables are great places for companionable silence. Hours can elapse without people saying more than a few words to each other. Nobody thinks it’s weird. Nobody finds the quiet unsettling.

In fact, it’s the opposite. The silence is one of the reasons I love playing. Hours of meditative contemplation interrupted by the occasional poker hand.

The game itself has a stoic quality that appeals to a certain kind of man. What is a “poker face” other than a demonstration of self-control? When a player loses all their money, there’s rarely any whining. Just a quick double tap on the felt as the player walks away. “Nice playing with you fellas,” they might say. Or they might not say anything as they head for the doors. I’ve made this walk, empty-handed, many times.

During my time living in Los Angeles, I met a poker pro named Jason. He played in all the high stakes game. Once when we were in Las Vegas for a friend’s bachelor party, he let me sit behind him at the table and watch him play. I knew a couple of the other players from television: Huck Seed, the 1996 World Series of Poker Main Event champion, and Jennifer Harmon, one of the few female pros at the time. It was so cool watching him play for tens of thousands of dollars without so much as biting a fingernail.

The game, he explained, was fundamentally an attempt to create order out of the chaos of the universe. So much of our lives is out of control, but in poker we can simplify life to a series of choices based on imperfect information, each of which produces either a positive or negative expectation or outcome.

Was his explanation a touch overblown? Sure. But for a certain kind of person (me), it made perfect sense. Because it speaks to what I love about the game. It’s not the money. I’m never going to win or lose enough to make an appreciable difference in my life. It’s about the meditative focus required to play well. One has to keep track of a hundred different things at the same time: which player is up, which player is on tilt, who’s been chasing too much, who will call a big bet on the river, what does it mean when that dude jiggles his leg, noticing that the guy over there is opening too wide in early position, which causes me to make adjustments in my 3 betting strategy. Oh wait, the guy next to him made the same observation I did, so that means I now have to adjust my 4 betting strategy. And on and on. The game is simple, the variables infinite.

A card room is the most meritocratic place in the world. Anybody is welcome to play. Best hand – or best bluff- wins. In the long run, the best player – regardless of age, race, sex – will make the most money. That’s it.

None of us will ever master this game any more than we will master any of the forces beyond our control in this life. People have gotten pretty f’ing good at the game, but nobody has ever mastered it. Nobody has ever even played a perfect session. We all know that. But it doesn’t stop me or the guys with whom I was playing last night from trying. Poker holds many lessons. Lessons about patience and humility, risk and reward. The most important lesson, though, is that the cards are indifferent to the person holding them. What matters is what you do with them.

(An addendum: I’m a very mediocre poker player.)

(A second addendum: I don’t play any other games in casinos. No slots, craps, roulette, or any other bullshit. The difference between those games and poker is that, even when played as well as they can be played, these are games of luck in which the house almost always has an edge ((there are occasional instances in blackjack when the player has the edge, which is why blackjack which is what makes card counting profitable)). I only play poker.)