Good Beat Stories

A hundred forty-one men could draw faster than he,
and Irving was looking for one-forty-three.
--Frank Gallop, "The Ballad of Irving"

Narrative is a magical thing, plain and simple. Even highway patrol cops love a good story. That's why my latest book purchase, Jay Greenspan's Hunting Fish: A Cross-Country Search for America's Worst Poker Players, managed to push itself to the front of my queue, even though I was already trading off between Harrington on Hold'Em and Gulliver's Travels. Greenspan deftly blends poker history and strategy, personal life, good beat stories, and some very entertaining  table chatter.

I have to confess that I was compelled to buy the book in the basement of the Strand when I saw that chapter two was a trip to Philadelphia. Simply put, even if I were to wear nothing but Brooklyn Cyclones caps for a year, the Philly's still never coming out of this girl.  I read Greenspan's quick tale running over a couple Mummers in a tiny Restaurant Row club while standing in the bookstore. The book left with me, and I planned to read it as soon as I was done with Harrington and Swift.

But as I was reading Harrington's tournament theory and exercises, the recent memory of Greenspan's sly storytelling kept calling to me. And as for Gulliver's Travels, well, I can be as much a whore to the contemporary as any other ESPN viewer. Is it any wonder why I'd identify more with a guy who left technical writing (which is still my bread'n'butter gig) to become a poker journalist than an 18th-century ship's surgeon? Greenspan had me at yo.

Hunting Fish begins at Foxwoods and heads to the Taj after Greenspan's $1200 win on or near Walnut Street, but much of his cross-country trip is made up of visits to carpet joints and underground clubs from Manhattan to Texas. (Don't tell me they can't compare in size.) He stops in Vegas, but his real destination is the great legal poker rooms of California. His quest: to build a $20,000 bankroll in order to play the $10-20 no limit game at the Commerce Casino in L.A.

On the first leg of the trip, Greenspan negotiates on multiple levels of paranoia. First he has to establish enough trust and collect enough contacts in the games he's playing to have another one waiting in the next city. Meanwhile, he's worrying about his Tunica tablemates' anti-Semitic comments, trying to tell the difference between a small-stakes G-Vegas kitchen game and a crack house, and just feeling deep-guano unsafe about the amount of thuggery and firepower behind guys who can seal off one wing of a condominium in Atlanta. Doyle Brunson and his road buddies may have settled down in Vegas, but the illegal poker circuit is still not for cowards.

A couple years ago, it didn't seem that way, at least not in New York. On my two trips to the Players' Club on 72nd Street (where I got a very expensive lesson in flopping top set when someone else hit the nut straight, then came back and schooled a bunch of Columbia boyos in 5-10 limit), it had all the comfort and paranoia of a tanning salon. That is to say, lots of the former and very little of the latter. Greenspan's New York games were at the Play Station on 14th Street, where there were a couple of colluding players and others who needed to collude with a bottle of Dr. Bronner's soap, but nothing terribly scary. Now, it's a different story, since both those clubs were shut down the same weekend last May by the NYPD. The club scene that inspired and was  in turn popularized by Rounders has been, for all intents etc., wiped out by the Bloomberg administration.

Importantly, Greenspan never shies away from the ethical problems inherent in his title and his ambition. A good poker player is far less of a good sport than a vicious predator, smiling and smiling, yet being a villain. Nobody gets to be as rich as Johnny Chan by constantly playing against guys who are as good as Johnny Chan. Job one of a middle-stakes poker player is to engage in battles of wits with the unarmed, for money. "More than once I had asked myself," Greenspan writes, "Is this a way for a decent person to make a living?"

Or to phrase the question more harshly: Can someone who continually exploits the comparative ignorance and stupidity of those around him be considered a good person? I've raised some version of this question with my peers, other pros and semipros. They dismissed me as foolish. The fish, they say, know what they're getting themselves into. They're aware that they may be at a skill disadvantage, but they come because they want to compete, and we're doing nothing wrong by offering the competition.

This reasoning is unconvincing. Compared to some fish I'd played against on this trip, the differences in skill were so great that there was no way our interactions could be viewed as competitive.... In any other test of skill--bowling, chess, tennis, Trivial Pursuit--a similar disparity in ability would be obvious to all participants in minutes. In boxing, there'd be a death. But in poker, with its prolonged sessions and swings and short-term luck, a lesser player can convince himself that he can come out ahead. Of course, I know better, yet I let the fish stay ignorant. So even if I assume that the people I'm playing against are fully cognizant of their risks, what am I to make of my willingness to engage in these lopsided matches? Is this the sort of battle a noble person seeks?

Canada Bill Jones, meet Rabbi Hillel. By questioning his own ethics, not just at the table but in subjecting his fiancee to obviously stressed-out phone calls when he's tilting from a big loss, or when attempting to hide his losses from her, Greenspan elevates Hunting Fish above the level of a brag book or yet another Artichoke Joe's trip report.

Of course, the "how I landed that fish" stories are still plenty entertaining. Like when he got that Broad Street strutter to bet the nut flush into the boat Greenspan had flopped....

Comments

[Gambling Pharaoh]

It's a very interesting story! I enjoyed it.