Quest of a Closet Poker Player

The grandmother of Sweetie’s mountain friends passed away last week, so she went to the mountains north of G-Vegas for part of the weekend. I was home alone with my three boys for the first time in two months.

Seven weeks away from these three is a significant chunk of life for them. The Big Guy and All-In haven’t cut their hair since school was out, so now they look alot like I did when I was their age. The Little Guy has changed the most as each few months add new complexities to the life of a three year-old. He and I went to the bagel place on Saturday morning, both of us basically in our pajamas as we sat and had a bite to eat together among strangers.

Sweetie and I got to catch a glimpse of what a single mother goes through regarding discipline and behavior with the boys. She wasn’t heading off to a full-time job like most single moms do, but it was enough. The Big Guy moved further and further toward becoming a normal child filled with backtalk and eye-rolling without me around. All-In, who has been a near-perfect second son when it comes to respecting Sweetie, also took a few steps toward normalcy. She spent most of my time at the WSOP away from the house, either in the mountains north of G-Vegas or Hilton Head or visiting my family in Memphis.

I think it’s less that I’m a perfect father and more that I’m a father who is around with them. I have expectations of how they will behave; not too terrifically strict, I don’t think, but a minimum level of respect and action when asked. Sweetie’s read some of the infinite number of parenting books, but my gut is that a bunch of boys aren’t too different than a pack of dogs: you just need to make sure they know who the Alpha male is in the house.

We went to church yesterday morning. I didn’t go in Vegas, my aspirations of heading to a 8:30AM service I found running headlong into the reality that I was fast asleep when that time came and went. I missed Sweetie by my side, but it was great being there in worship. A neighborhood friend hailed me as I walked into the sanctuary, so I joined him on the second row of the cavernous auditorium.

For Christians, Las Vegas is the epicenter of the World, the evil secular existence that many try to live apart from. A friend of my friend was taken aback when I told him I’d been in Las Vegas at the World Series of Poker for seven weeks. “What a difficult place for a Christian to be,” he said. I smiled as I reflected on my time so far away, walking among all of the top pros, the grinders trying to hit a big score that could solve all of their problems, and the dreamers taking their shot at big-time poker. On the contrary, what a peaceful place to be for me.

Granted, being apart from the boys and especially Sweetie is something I didn’t like at all. Putting that aside, the people of poker have always held a special fascination to me. Each of them is so different from me yet so like me in so many different ways. The eight or nine players at the felt are a microcosm of the real world. James Van Alstyne sat on the opposite side of me during the WSOP event, as well as Joe Brandenburg and the nameless players who came and went. Some of them live in Suburbia with me, while others work three jobs in Suburbia to give their kids a chance at something better. Some of them live from paycheck to paycheck, taking their last hard earned dollar then donking it off on the felt.

The people in poker are more like each of us than we might want to admit. I’m not better than them yet identical to each man and woman there, the frailties of the human existence starkly before me rather than hidden in the deep recesses of my psyche. Am I better than the people here in Suburbia because I know I’m more like the people I saw each day in the Amazon Room than those I see getting their papers each morning? Maybe it’s the better term in the first place.

The Amazon Room was a battle zone regardless of who you were or why you were there. Yet the reality was most of the men and women who left each day left on the losing end of the battle, bested by better cards or better players or better luck or better patience. The best of them had combined self confidence with practical humility, understating their edge and capabilities with strange regularity.

Yet when I interviewed or spoke to poker players, many of the best talked more about their interests and pursuits away from the felt. The emptiness of the poker addict was clearly visible, that person who measured their self worth in terms of hands per week and bb per hour. This seemed especially true for the tourney specialist, that strange beast that must finish in the top two or four of an event to make all the other failures worthwhile.

What made those seven weeks worthwhile for me? It wasn’t the work or the writing certainly. Hardly anyone read most of what I wrote, although the occasional email or kind word to me was the scrap of bread that kept me going each day. No, it was the personal connection that made it important for me to be there. It wasn’t about finding my new best friend, just about becoming intertwined with a stranger for a random instant or a lingering moment. The daily smile, the occasional touch, the intimacy with someone who’d been talked at and questioned umpteen times over yet let a stranger in to listen a bit. The encouragement from a new stranger to persevere through a run of bad everything, it was a reason I was there.

It’s the second time I’ve returned from the WSOP, and I’m still not quite right. I was up late last night, unable to sleep yet, so I popped open four $0.50/1 NLH 6-max tables on PokerStars. Included in the session was a $100 misclick ($45 instead of $4.50 raise that I then called off another $50 when he shoved; I caught my flush which made his boat). I ended up $350 or so on the night.

Hopefully tonight will be a night of normalcy. Sweetie will be back around 4:00, and we have dinner and a movie lined up tonight. I’ll take it for sure.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 11:37 am and is filed under Uncategorized.