A Gambler For Life

The martial arts have always stressed spiritual control based on physical and mental accomplishments. Cards lend themselves wonderfully well to this process.

--Ricky Jay, "Cards as Weapons"

For a while I played cards every day. The game was held in an old junk store on the North Side of Chicago. The store was a front for a fence, and he ran a game every day of the year from noon till eight P.M., and I was there every day.

One morning, before the game, I'd gone downtown on some errand and thought to stop in and visit my dad and say hello. I did so, and we drank coffee in his office. As noon approached I said I had to go. He asked where I was going. "Gambling," I said. "You still using cards?" he replied.

Now, at the time, and for some time thereafter, I found his remark recherché. It was quite overmuch the comment a wise, tough man--and he was both--would enjoy making to his son. "Are you still using cards?" That is, "Do you still require the artificial constrictions of a self-delimiting game? Do you still need a circumscribed arena, and can you not see that the game goes on around you all the time?"

•

I got my brains beat out in a lawsuit about a decade back. There's an old Yiddish curse: "May you be involved in a lawsuit when you're in the right." This case taught me the viciousness of that curse. The other side was wrong. It was a real estate matter. They broke our contract, they cheated, they lied and, had the case gone to trial, I knew and they knew that I'd win. And yet they wouldn't settle. Not for half of what they owed me, not for a quarter, not for a tenth. They hired lawyers to sit, three at a time, in a room to depose me, day after day. They spent sickening amounts of their and my money demanding the production of obviously useless documents and testimonies. Their strategy was: Anger, bleed and weaken him. Which they did. One day I threw the case up and walked away. I shook my head for several years over their--and my--behavior in the case. Why would they not settle? Their legal fees cost them several times what I'd have settled for. They knew they had a loser. And yet.... But there were two kickers in the case. The first was this: Their principal felt offended by me, which I knew when the case began. The second, which I did not realize until the end of my travail, was that she was not paying for her own defense. Her real estate company had just been purchased by a huge conglomerate, which, as part of the bargain, had given her substantial funds for legal fees and claims outstanding. One of which was mine.

And upon that discovery, my mind recurred to a book, the existence of which I inform you of reluctantly. It is Super-System: A Course in Power Poker, by Doyle Brunson, twice world champion of that most excellent of games, Texas Hold'em. The book's section on seven-card stud was written by David "Chip" Reese, who describes a cleansing he once took.

Chip was in a game with a drunk. He held a pair of aces, and the drunk, after the fourth card, held four diamonds. Chip was an 11--10 favorite to win the hand; the drunk wouldn't go home. They raised each other 36 times, the drunk caught his fifth diamond and Chip retired broke. Chip writes, "I learned then that the mathematically correct play is not always the best play." And I add: You can neither bluff nor impress someone who isn't paying attention.

I first came across the Old Cat in Poker According to Maverick, a charming and anonymous work of the Fifties supposedly penned by Bret and Bart Maverick, those rambler, gambler television heroes of my youth.

As I recall, a stranger sits at a game and is dealt a royal flush. He bets, and all the money goes into the pot. His opponent lays down 2--4--7--9--jack of no particular suits and starts to rake in the money. Our friend, incredulous, points to his own royal flush and protests. The other man says, "I held an Old Cat," and points to a sign on the wall that reads, An old cat beats anything.

Well, our man goes out, replenishes his bankroll and, later in the night, finds himself holding that same Old Cat, the natural lock. He once again bets everything he has. They both go right down to the green. Comes the showdown, our man lays the Old Cat down. His opponent shows a pair of deuces and starts to rake in the pot. "Ahem," our man says. "You ain't got but deuces, and I've got the Old Cat." At which time his opponent points to yet another sign on the wall, which reads, an old cat is good only once a night.

I found the same story in Gamblers Don't Gamble, by Michael MacDougall, where the Old Cat is called a lalapalooza. My friend Ricky Jay, arbiter of all things picaresque and arcane, drew my attention to an earlier reference, the 1900 Jack Pots, by Eugene Edwards, in which the Cat goes by the cognomen of a Looloo.

What have we in the tale? A conjunction of two pretty good first principles: (1) Know the rules. (2) When something looks too good to be true, it is not true. And, perhaps, a third, a Talmudic opinion by George Bernard Shaw: "All professions are conspiracies against the laity." When you play in the other man's game, you're most likely going to have to pay the other man off. And I here cite, in support, those postmodern ronin, the attorneys, and their cash cow, the client, and their milking pail appurtenant thereto: the contract.

•

All of us have had at least one Old Cat in our lives. For many it has come under the contractual moniker of the security deposit. Times may have changed--though I doubt it--but when I was a lad the landlord, on renting an apartment, demanded the first and the last month's rent and yet a third month's rent as a security deposit, held against what were jocularly referred to as liquidated damages. This meant, as we all know, that when one moved out one was entitled to play out the following charade:

(A) "I'd like my security deposit returned, please."

(B) "Well, you'll have to wait until we've inspected the apartment to determine...."

(A) "Fine. Let's go up there now. You will see I have left it in much better shape than...."

(B) "No. In due course our inspector will...."

(A) "But I painted it, I replaced the...."

(B) "I'm sorry, but you'll have to ..." etc.

I once had an apartment on a building's top floor. There was a two-foot setback outside my windows--tar paper littered with trash. I spent much of a summer cleaning and painting it. I fitted it with a wooden slat floor, and you have beaten me to the punch line in your correct surmise. Come fall the landlord tripled the rent for what he said had become a penthouse with a terrace. I fumed and sputtered in the approved fashion, but it was his game and he was pointing to the contract and the clause, which was just the Old Cat, and it's not for nothing that the story'd been around awhile.

As we speak there is an agency in Hollywood that handles some rather desired talent. Its agents negotiate hard in their clients' interest, in a style that might be described as "One more thing: I get to kill your daughter's dog." I was doing business with that agency and I desperately required the services of one of its clients. The agency demanded a recompense I thought exorbitant, and said "take it or leave it." I did the world's quickest slow burn until I thought back to Poker According to Maverick and realized the Old Cat had just recrudesced, and I paid off and got on with my life. Old Cat.

•

There we have two stories about humility--a theme to which Doyle Brunson constantly refers, a theme on which much of the gambling literature seems to dwell; in modern renditions of the scriptural suggestion that he who conquers a city is as nothing compared with he who conquers his own nature.

But what of the other component of that which Kipling (and my father) understood as the Great Game? What of aggression? The poker sages, if I may distill them, inform us that the game is legitimate prosecution of one's own interest. That we should, therefore, shun the questionable position and employ the time and energy (and money) thus saved in pursuit of any and all real advantages; that, at the table, these advantages may rest in superiority of cards, bankroll, position, information, attitude and education, and that pursuit and employment of such advantages must eventually prevail, whereas reliance on chance or arrogance will invariably come to grief. Tight but aggressive, Herbert Yardley informs us in his classic Education of a Poker Player, in which he distills poker wisdom to three irreducible adages: If you've got nothing, get out. If you're beat, get out. If you've got the best hand, make 'em pay.

Which of us has not stayed on, flogging the now-beaten straight in the face of the assured full house? And is (continued on page 238) Gambler for Life (continued from page 180) this not "staying together for the sake of the children"?

Tight but aggressive.

I walked into an apartment on the Upper East Side of New York. It was overpriced, but I thought I'd give it a look. I opened the door and there before me, down the corridor, was a magnificent and unexpected view of Central Park. So I paid the man off. One year later, when circumstances required me to liquidate the place, I jacked up the price--on spec and against a falling market--and listed it, and it sold to the first prospect, who, like me, walked in the door and saw the view. But first he pointed out that the market was falling and the price was much too high. He suggested a reduction, and, heart in my mouth, I said "No" and waited, and he paid me off. Tight but aggressive. I had the best hand, and I made him pay. With thanks to Yardley.

•

There is a stunningly vicious book called Poker: A Guaranteed Income for Life Using the Advanced Concepts of Poker, by Frank Wallace. He writes that the purpose of play is to win money, that the educated player should school himself to win all the money and that to do this one must take every legitimate advantage. A legitimate advantage is anything that is not patently illegal.

The author, like Sun Tzu in his noncard-oriented The Art of War, exhorts us to treat our adversaries as if they were our employees and to control and motivate them to do our bidding at all times. The advanced concept being sold by the book is super game-control. The reader is advised to make himself the linchpin of the home (or "friendly") game--to maneuver himself into position to choose the venue, the time, the food appropriate at the game. To develop a reputation for service, to create an appearance of impartiality. If, we are advised, the game forms the habit of referring small decisions to one man, they will be ripe to heed his request to refer large decisions to him and will, in fact, be inclined to so act without his request, through simple force of habit.

The practitioner, we are told, should, for example, bring the food, inquire as to the particular likes and dislikes of each player and supply them. The players will feel gratitude toward this man. He can, for example, say, "Dave, I'm going to get the cigars you like, so I will be late. Could we not play at nine rather than eight?" Who could refuse him? As this man becomes, in effect, the game's "parent," decisions as to conduct of play will be referred to him. Why should they not? Everyone else at the table is out for himself. Our hero is the only one who has demonstrated that he can behave magnanimously and impartially. This person can now, from "cover," as it were, exsanguinate the home game. And the way to do it, we read, is like the old saying about boiling the frog: Don't put your frog in hot water, it'll hop out. Put it in cold water, and turn the heat up real, real slow.

If the behavior described above seems transparent, I, having once been that frog, can only report that, correctly practiced, it is effective in the extreme and, as Job's messenger said, "I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

I played over many years in a rather high-stakes home game. One day a stranger, young Lochinvar, came out of the West all smiles and service. He asked if he could sit in. He told a good story, he brought the groceries, he went out of his way to bring so and so's favorite cigarettes. Quite soon we, members of the old home game, were deferring to him. It took more than five years and an amount of money both sickening and embarrassing to remember to face the fact that we'd been had. And then all that money was gone and we'd been shown up to ourselves, and the 20-year-long game broke up.

Why did the game break up? Lochinvar had revealed to us that we were not playing poker, which, like war, can have but one legitimate aim. No, we'd been engaged in a most enjoyable club and calling it poker. Lochinvar had most assuredly read the book on the home game and had practiced it by the numbers, and it busted us out. Near the end of our game he called me and said that he was concerned about my style of play and worried about my losses. He asked if we could get together, and we did. He coached me for the better part of an afternoon and made suggestions that, in fact, did improve my play. At the end of the session I thanked him, and he said I was most welcome. Now, my play improved. But what, I ask you, was my attitude at the table toward this man, this mentor, who cared enough to seek me out in my disgrace?

Pretty smart fellow.

So Lochinvar's lesson in the Great Game was: Call things by their names. That was the Advanced Concept of Poker. A further lesson might be: If you're going to be in charge, be in charge. I here refer the reader to what may be found to be a good book on poker: Home Dog, by Richard Wolters.

His observations on the retriever are, I think, applicable to behavior at the game. While teaching the puppy to sit and stay, he suggests, walk away a few feet. After a short while the pup will become fidgety and want to come to you. Just before it does, say "come."

One trains the dog by being smarter than the dog, by anticipating its needs and using its pursuit of them to accomplish one's own goals, and, thus, both triumphing and avoiding that least thrilling of family observances: finding out who's boss.

Yardley says, Look around the table. Find out who's the victim. If you can't tell, it's you.

And so I recommend the literature. It will inform you to be humble, be aggressive and, in the book by that genius who may or may not have been named S. W. Andrews, be wary.

In the small game, and in the Great Game, the wisdom in these books will, unfortunately, only be appreciated after one has suffered sufficiently to acquire it independently, but there you have it.

Businesspersons got all giddy in the decade now past over Musashi, Tesso, Sun Tzu and other Asian strategists and warrior-sages. But I cleave to the books above. To which I add that of Thomas "Amarillo Slim" Preston, who tells of a game in Arabia. He was asked and he went. But before the game the Big Boys came to his hotel and asked for 25 percent of his take in exchange for protection and for insurance that his winnings would be collected and paid to him. I remember reading about this bit as a child, and I expected the next paragraph to reveal his rage and indignation. But Slim tells us he thought not at all and accepted their terms. His lesson, that one hand full with quietness will beat two hands full with vexation of spirit, has served me well every time I remember to remember it.

My last citation will be from that Mr. Andrews who, at the risk of blowing the gaff, was the premiere card manipulator of the Victorian age and, perhaps, of any other age:

"In offering this book to the public the writer uses no sophistry as an excuse for its existence....

"It may caution the unwary who are innocent of guile, and it may inspire the crafty by enlightenment on artifice....

"But it will not make the innocent vicious, or transform the part-time player into a professional; or make the fool wise, or curtail the annual crop of suckers."

I personally belong or have belonged to several of the groups referred to above. I am now close to my father's age at the time he asked me if I still was gambling with cards.

I, in fact, seem to have stopped gambling with cards.

I think back over those years when poker was, if not the most important, arguably the most exigent thing in my life. I recall some few instances of triumph and many of its opposite, and I reflect that "learning the hard way" is a lead-pipe tautology. Trust everyone, but cut the cards.