This story is for Mike Tooley, the embodiment of a
classy, full-time professional gambler, long before
it became an “in” sport. He was not only a top card
player, he was a philosopher in the fine arts of risk
and chance. The object, he always said, wasn’t to
beat your opponent,
it was to lure your opponent into beating themselves. In gambling,
Mike was a true Tai Chi Master.
Las Vegas, March
Bethany James, a twenty-eight-year-old Vegas poker phenom, stared at her quarry with a hunter’s gaze as he riffled his chips, little columns neatly folding between his fingers. The tempo grew faster. It was one of his “tells.”
“So you want to gamble,” he said when she pushed her bet in. “Did you hit the river?”
“Jump in and find out.”
She ignored the familiar buzz on her PDA for the fourth or fifth time as she studied her opponent’s face, her unflinching stare boring into him like a surgeon’s scalpel, cutting away the outer layer, seeing the tightened muscles beneath his expression of calm.
He was bluffing all the way and she was going to take him down.
“One way to find out.”
When he was weak, he had the habit of putting his card protector, a small gold skeleton, down on his cards with authority, and he’d done that.
I’ve got you now, she thought. To needle him a little more, she said, “I should put the clock on you.”
“I think you have fours with an over card.”
“You wish.”
The other three men, all under thirty years of age, had already been small-stacked and eliminated one at a time.
Truth, as her gambler father once said—quoting his hero, the great billionaire gambler Kerry Packer—is what is left when all the lies and secrets, those little “tells,” have been revealed and your lie is the last lie standing. That is the moment when you take control of the game.
She waited for her opponent to play his mind games, knowing he was already looking to come over the top, maybe even go “all in” after she’d set him up by limping in with a small bet to look weak, enticing him into believing he could buy the pot with a bluff.
Through the window to the right of the dealer’s head, over the empty flower box, beyond the patio of this estate on Sunrise Mountain, Beth stared for a moment to rest her tired eyes, her gaze lingering on the shimmering sea of orange that was the neon metropolis of Las Vegas.
Someone once said of her that she was just like the city she grew up in. A chameleon, a changeling, an impostor.
Yes, true. Survival demanded it.
“You checked on the opening bet. Played slow. What do you have?” he said in a low whisper.
He was searching, hoping to see something. All night she’d been building the fake tell for him to see. Three times she’d bluffed and when she did, she’d pulled her bottom lip in between her teeth and chewed lightly on it. If he picked that up, he would jump all over her.
She pulled her lip in and gnawed away.
Beth could see nearly all the casinos from where she sat and she was outlawed from just about every one of them. Because of her card counting days, she was forced to use disguises when she did attempt entry. Now she mostly played in high-stakes private games like this one.
“You didn’t hit a set, did you?” he teased.