The Game Player (27 page)

It wasn't long, however, before the others knew that something was up. Brian began to push each hand, taking every raise that came his way, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes hard, with their secret lids that seemed to cover them even when they stared most directly at you. He would be raising mercilessly, and he could fold a moment later, without shame, or he might push on to reveal a good hand, but not nearly as good as the hands he used to play cautiously. Luck was his handmaiden for the first two hours: though his opponents were shocked by his raising, they called out of curiosity at first, and lost at the same rate they were used to when he played tightly. When you lose nine hands out of ten to a player taking maximum raises, it isn't long before you begin to fold and not call him.

Josh helped it along. “Stop calling him,” he would scream at the others. “The guy is practically turning over his hole card and you fools keep calling him.”

Brian sat silently during these analyses of his playing. He counted his chips and would ask who was dealing as if Josh's imprecations were the sirens of engines in the street, calls of distress that he couldn't aid. He met my glances as he would a stranger's and despite all my experience of play, I began to watch his cards, as they were dealt to him, fearfully, sure that each one would be a perfect hit, terrified that my hand and his were on a collision course. We reached the midpoint of the game with Brian up over three hundred dollars, the usual amount when someone was on the way to a once-a-year big win.

That explanation, Brian having a freaky streak of luck, captured everyone's fear of the beating he was giving the table, and calmed them into resignation. If Brian's cards looked good toward the end of a hand, and he was raising casually—with a silent, bored, and angry posture—everyone folded and his behavior, a quick, private tightening of the features as if in disappointment, seemed to justify their action. But instead of this happening once every two rounds, as in the past, it was happening two or three times a round, and Brian's winnings mounted to over six hundred dollars with less than an hour to go. With the end in sight, and Josh having taken a ghastly thrashing all night, as he desperately tried to bluff hand after hand against Brian, and then against the other losers (the theory being that they were hurting too badly to stand up to him), some of the other players stayed with Brian to the end of hands that he looked strong on, and, sure enough, they caught him bluffing five times. Each time they did, it seemed impossible he had bet so strongly on the cards he had, and when the totals were in (Brian, up six hundred eighty-five; Don, up one hundred forty; me, up forty-seven; Josh, down five hundred eighteen; the others losing amounts between one hundred and two hundred dollars) there was a unanimity of opinion that Brian had been bluffing for most of the night. He smiled impishly when accused, but he denied the charge quickly, trying to control his grin, and that convinced everyone.

In one night, he had established himself as a bluffer, in spite of twenty sessions of rigidly tight play. Josh had been hopelessly discombobulated by the few comments Brian directed at the others about his play. He had told us Josh bluffed flushes in three-sub, low hands in seven-stud, and liked to sandbag in three-sub when playing low. Indeed, the money I made that night was by calling Josh in those situations. I did so reluctantly, because I was accustomed to folding against Josh, but Brian's casual remarks were confident and never repeated, as if he knew the information was too good to waste. And Josh seemed obsessed with proving he could still get away with doing it. He was to lose fifteen hundred dollars in three sessions before changing his style to a quiet, even bewildered, defensive posture.

I hated to ask Brian anything about his maneuvers. I had vowed that his success at this game wouldn't deteriorate my lead, and I think I did well that night by recognizing immediately that Brian's sudden raising wasn't a by-product of luck. But I had to know one thing and I knocked on his door early the next morning after Karen had left. He yelled come in and I squinted, on opening the door, at the harsh sunlight flooding his unshaded windows. His black hair glistened a reddish brown as he turned to face me. He was at his desk, poker hands laid out on the table before him. “Well, that's appropriate,” I said sullenly. He looked at me with that face from almost ten years ago: the concentrated, distant face of a warrior in training. He watched me sit on his bed as if measuring my body weight. “I want to know, since you never called Josh on any of those bluffs until last night, and neither did anybody else, how you knew he did them?”

“Howard,” he said, without sarcasm or irony or, indeed, any tone other than a sincerely factual one, “I believe, if my stats are right, that you're winning two thousand, six hundred and twenty-seven dollars. I am only—”

“Brian,” I started angrily, but then I laughed. “I have very little faith in the gap between our totals.”

“I wasn't being snotty,” he said, again in a straight tone of voice. “I meant, simply, that you must have known it as well, or you wouldn't have been winning so much. You just never isolated it from your natural instincts into a statement.”

“No, thank you, but I don't think that's right. I used to believe those bluffs of his. Anyway, I'd still like to know how you did.”

He cleared his throat. “I think this is a bit premature. I haven't proved that I deserve to lecture you. Okay,” he said, forestalling me from throwing something at him. “I don't have good instincts like you. I have no feel for the way in which people's personalities relate to their game playing.”

“That's rubbish! That's exactly what you do have.”

“Oh, no, Howard,” he said, his eyes wide with surprise. “Oh, God, no. I'm amazed you think that. I have to work very hard at establishing that correlation. Of course, once I know it, it becomes like an instinct, and I think I know how to
use
it a little better than you do. I've been dealing out hands here for—uh! it seems like centuries. But there is a real pattern, unmistakable, though complex, in the way cards fall, and if you play certain styles, certain hands repeat themselves more often, especially in a game like three-sub, where the player has a substantial chance to discard certain possibilities in favor of others.”

“Oh, absolutely,” I said, as if I knew it, but it had never struck me before. “I get rid of high pairs and if I don't develop a flush or a low quickly, I fold.”

“Right. Exactly. I've observed that. And if I find you playing high when there's a chance for a low, I know that you must have another pair concealed or even triplets, because you're low-oriented. So I wouldn't buck you, right?” He smiled at me while I nodded slowly. “All right, so, if you wish to discover what sort of hand a player bluffs, all you have to do is discover what is his favorite
real
hand. You hardly ever bluff high hands, just as you hardly ever play for them. But Josh, given a fifty-fifty chance between a low and a flush, always goes for the flush. He even gives it a nickname, like the way you might nickname a lover, right? He calls a flush a bouquet. I've got a diamond bouquet, he says.” He waited while I laughed, remembering the times Josh had vainly shown off a flush. “Now, the odds against getting flushes are constant and yet he is getting twice or three times as many as is normal. He
had
to be bluffing at least a third of them.”

“But,” I protested, “he would get more flushes since he plays for them.”

“Howard, analysis depends on a certain flexibility. Absolutes are for theorists and children.” He waited for my reception of this pearl with the patience of a seer.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, he might get as much as twice as many possible flushes and fifty per cent more actual flushes, but he cannot change the morality of the cards. No amount of selective substituting is going to make three times as many flushes appear. Josh only remembers the times they come in, so
he
thinks they're his lucky hand. But don't expect, once everybody knows he is bluffing them, for him to continue just because he likes the way flushes look. Being called on them will make them ugly. But his mind will wander and he'll find another lover, another type of hand, and
that
will become his new bluff. You see, for him and most poker players, they're not really bluffs, that's why they succeed as bluffs. The bluffer unconsciously feels even a possible flush is better than a real hand.”

I found myself sitting for three hours listening to Brian's theories and observations instead of attending my favorite seminar. He seemed to know the most minute and subtle prejudices of each player; he had charted a careful guidebook to the back roads and hidden mansions of our styles.

And if I had any doubt as to its usefulness, the next weeks would dispel it. Almost every other hand, Brian would be in a showdown with a player and at some point he would terrify him with advice on how to play his hand, advice that presumed a knowledge of his hole card. “The eights are live-er,” he said to Stan when Stan took a while considering a substitution. The tone was quiet, even kindly, as if Brian were a friendly uncle teaching. Stan looked at him blankly and Don said, “I think he's paired the eights.”

“Indeed?” answered Brian. “Well, then he would have two pair and there's nothing for him to think about.” There was a touch of laughter at how obvious that should have been and someone joked to Stan that he might as well flip his hole card up. “He has triplets,” Brian mumbled, looking at his chips; and though that could have been observed by anyone, it was Brian who carefully created such moments to distract an opponent from noticing Brian's maneuvers. Stan never questioned, after the substitutions were over and his triplets hadn't turned into a full house, whether Brian really had a flush, even though it had developed suddenly and inconsistently from Brian's early play in the hand. Stan just smiled at Brian while folding, and said, “You prick, you talked me out of keeping the eight. I would have had a boat.”

Brian, embarrassed and casual while dividing the pot, said timidly, “The eights really were live-er. I wasn't lying. You should have faith in people.”

His cards never struck you until the last round, when suddenly, with a sinking feeling, you knew he had figured out that your great-looking low was really just a pair. Unlike ours,
his
bluffs weren't the haphazard result of a hand going bad underneath while appearing strong up top;
his
bluffs were schemed to catch us in the one or two hands a night that we were unsure of;
his
bluffs always came when you had decided that you had to cut back on your losses and stop playing two pair to the end when facing a straight. Everyone hesitated over substitutions, thereby announcing weakness, or, worse, implying a particular hole card, but Brian's decisions and betting were instantaneous. He would look at his hole card at the beginning of the hand and never have to look again to check the suit or simply from the anxiety that the great hand he had might not really exist. His betting, whether he was up five hundred or down two hundred, was always the same: a maximum raise if he looked stronger, a kill raise if weaker. He might know, in fact, that he was stronger, but he still would play it as weak; and even with a ghastly bust card down, his raises were calm and indistinguishable from confident ones.

For twenty weeks we had exposed our idiosyncrasies in front of him, while his laughably tight play had taught us nothing about how he behaved when the frayed edge of a tense mind meets the mathematical and psychological teasers of poker. In a month he broke every record we had: he won fifteen hundred dollars in one night, almost double our previous record win; on the other two nights, with his luck not running a fourth as well, he still won eight hundred and five hundred respectively—a total of thirty-four hundred dollars in four weeks. I lost a thousand dollars during that stretch. He was crudest to me, smiling contemptuously as he stood pat on an eight low while I raised and raised on my four-card perfect low, sure that with three chances to come, I would get an eight or better and beat him. After I went bust three times, but stubbornly tried to bluff, only to throw my cards across the room when he called and won, he said, “It was silly to raise, Howard.”

“You raise in that situation! The odds were with me.”

He leaned back, his white teeth and pale face flashing amid the black of his clothes and the harsh light of the overhead lamp, and spoke in a disgusted drawl, “The odds are against
any
hand developing, my boy. No matter that any of four cards would help you. There are nine others that hurt you.”

Once or twice a night he would be caught bluffing when a player decided to ignore his better instincts and call Brian anyway. Even when caught, we admired his performance so much, that it was a kind of victory. For the next hour he would be called on everything, but then, of course, he would never bluff. Only when we began to
not
call would his bluffing begin again. And while the table became obsessed with switching from one strategy to another, Brian's countless hours of study, and incredible memory of the cards that had been played, guided him smoothly and consistently to the best chances, to play against the most vulnerable hands, to substitute for the livest cards, and seemed to give him another ear with which to listen to the faint rhythm of the cards' patterns.

Josh insisted during the month that it was a nutty streak that would end and Brian agreed freely that his winnings were bloated by fortune. But after that immediate hurricane of his birth as a poker player, though there was a lull during which he won little, every other week he would break loose from our massive effort to divert his gigantic powers from the population of our chips.

Josh's winnings were reduced to nothing and mine would have been as well if I hadn't resorted to a strategy I learned playing Diplomacy with Brian at age twelve. I avoided any confrontation with him that I could and never took my maximum raises when forced to face him. I played for second, a vulture swarming over the leavings that Brian scorned. At the end of our senior year, our graduation from Yale, Brian had won five thousand dollars and I another two thousand, with Josh winning a little over two hundred, and everyone else a loser. From the twentieth session on, Brian averaged three hundred dollars in winnings a week, a figure, especially since I have continued to play poker at those stakes with many people, that I consider more than staggering or unbelievable; any of the clichés of the sports world are inadequate to describe so long (ninety hours), so complex (six opponents) a dominance in a game laced by the poison of capricious Luck.