The next day after he dropped the girl at school he sold the car and the few other trinkets he had left. Taken all together it was just enough to buy him a seat in the game, the one game, the biggest game in town: the Giant. Now, the Giant is a story all on its own. Legend has it that Bugsy himself started the game and that it’s been going ever since, day and night for better than eighty years now, twenty-four hours a day, the grand high mother of all underground games. Sometimes it moves from place to place, when a building is demolished underneath it. Sometimes half the seats are filled with bodyguards marking time while their bosses catch a nap. There are always nine seats. The game is always no-limit Texas Hold’em. There are always men at the edge of the room, waiting for a chair. They say Phil Helmuth waited three days for a seat once and then lost a quarter of a million dollars in ten minutes. They say Richard Nixon was given a seat out of courtesy when he was president and held his own for three hours against some of the best in the world. They say a lot of things. It’s the Giant, the closest thing this blasted desert has to sacred ground.
Who knows why Jake wanted in? He’d never played in the Giant before, and selling the car gave him enough of a stake to get into plenty of safer games. Of course, it was those safer games where he’d been losing his shirt, and a desperate man does funny things. Something got it in his head that the Giant could save him, that the sheer Vegas legend magic of it was the way to turn his long backslide around. So he left a note for the girl and found the game and put his name on the list, and then he spent fifteen hours leaning against a wall, sipping ginger ale, watching, and waiting. And finally, close to three in the morning, a guy from Ontario who hadn’t been in a pot for hours looked at his watch and stood up and walked away, and the dealer beckoned Jake in.
Every player at the table watched him with flat disinterest as he took his seat. His hands arranged the chips in front of him without conscious thought. For the first time in years he felt like an amateur. He wanted to take a deep breath, roll his shoulders, set himself to the task, but showing nerves like that to this table would have just been a slower way of opening his veins. He gave the smallest of nods to the dealer and two cards whispered their way over to him. He cupped them reverently in his hands, not looking until his turn to act came around. Pocket jacks. He was off and running.
For two hours Jake held his own in the game of games. His stack grew, not spectacularly but satisfactorily. His breathing got a little easier, his shoulders a little looser, though out of long habit he didn’t let any of that show. He began to think he’d turned the corner when he took down a nice pot on a pure seat-of-the-pants bluff, and it was as he was gathering in those chips that the man he’d just beaten stood up and the Pole sat down.
Several of the men at the table shifted uneasily.
Jake had seen the Pole before, of course, even sat at a table with him for a hand or two back near the start of his Vegas run. He knew as well as the others what it meant when the Pole sat down. The Pole — his real name a mash of harsh consonants nobody could decipher — was the pro’s pro, a poker playing machine who’d ruled Vegas for a decade. For the last five years of that he’d lived in a penthouse at the Star with a private elevator and eleven rooms and a rotating cast of hookers. As far as anybody knew he never left town, and he didn’t even play that often. Twice, maybe three times a month he descended to sit among the mortals, always wearing a rather cheap brown suit and the darkest pair of sunglasses anybody had ever seen. He rarely talked, almost whispering when he did have to say something, and he never stood up from a table with less money than he’d had when he sat down. He played slowly, simply staring down at the cards neatly lined up between his hands until the moment he was called upon to act, at which point his head would swivel up toward his opponent and he would simply stare, silent and still as a gargoyle, and with the glasses it was impossible to tell if he was staring at you or behind you or maybe just dozing off These days half the people at a poker table wear shades, but back then it was a rarity. A lot of people with ice-water blood got nervous when the Pole’s lenses swung in their direction.
Jake probably should have stood up. Just as he’d brought himself back to life somebody had gone and tossed a rattlesnake on the table. Still, it wasn’t a tournament, winner take all. There was no reason he had to get into it with the Pole. The two of them could just harvest what the table had to offer, a couple of predators among the prey. Professional courtesy. That’s how high Jake was flying: He imagined that the Pole would see him as an equal. He almost nodded at the man. If the Pole had the faintest notion who Jake was, though, he gave no sign. He simply bought his chips, put his hands flat on the table, and waited. Bear traps do that too — just wait until somebody comes along to spring them.
It was like somebody flipped a switch. As soon as the Pole’s first hand was dealt, Jake’s luck died. He was getting good cards, but any poker player will tell you that the cards are the least important thing. What matters is how you play them — and how the table plays you. Sometimes a good hand is the worst thing in the world because you have to play it, knowing all the time that a better hand is out there. Time and again Jake looked up from his cards to find the utterly blanks lenses of the Pole’s sunglasses turned his way, and every time it happened the Pole did exactly what Jake didn’t want him to do — called if Jake was bluffing, folded if he had the goods. He was doing it to everybody else at the table too, of course. Maybe Jake just imagined that the lenses were turned his way more often, that every pot he coveted ended up in the Pole’s hands. Paranoia, born of better than twenty-four hours of little food and no rest. Maybe it was just that.
There’s a thing that happens to gamblers, sometimes, when they start losing. Jocko calls it the death spiral. It’s the same thing that happens to some people when they look down from a high place and hear the little voice telling them to step out into the air. By the time the Pole had been at the table for an hour Jake was in a death spiral. In this state a gambler sheds all his years of experience, everything he’s learned, and starts playing more and more wildly, leaving behind discipline and logic, hoping to hit that Hail Mary. Past a certain point he no longer wants or expects to win, even. On some level losing has become inevitable. Losing fast, maybe, at least won’t hurt as much.
Let me cut to the last verse of “Stack O’Lee.”
Jake was down to a quarter of what he’d sat down with when there came a hand that only he and the Pole bought into. The Pole had been the big blind, in the hand already before the cards were even dealt, and Jake called, holding a suited ten and nine. The flop came out three aces. The Pole’s long middle finger tapped mildly against the table — he was checking. Jake immediately went all in. From a pure poker point of view this was absolutely the right move. He was down to a very short stack and by representing the fourth ace he could take this pot, which was small but would keep him going a little longer. The only way the Pole could possibly call was if he was holding either the missing ace or a pocket pair big enough to risk against a bluff. It was a chance Jake had to take. He pushed in his chips and looked across the table, his face sculpted marble.
Once again the Pole’s head swiveled up, the lenses pointing at Jake, and as they locked into place Jake felt a sucker punch land in his midriff. The thought slid into his mind like a blade: He knows. He sees. Jake suddenly knew, as certainly as he knew his own name, that the Pole knew he was bluffing, knew he didn’t want a call. And this knowledge was followed by another thought, just as cold, just as certain: It’s the glasses.