In a former life I was a poker player. A fairly serious one, at that. For a decade I made a profit at the table, year in and year out. I could have turned pro, and for short stretches of my life, in between jobs, I was a pro.
I thought I’d never stop. So I put as the logline for this T. R. Napper website: ‘Writes / Plays Poker / Smashes Poverty With His Bare Hands’. It was certainly true, and a not unreasonable summation of the obsessions of my adult life.
(Click the PDF icon, upper right, if you prefer reading a black-on-white script)
What I didn’t realise was this: around the time this blog began seven years ago, I was at the tail end of my poker career. I didn’t throw a cup of hot coffee in poker’s face and scream: I Quit! I didn’t go broke, begging for a spare change in the casino parking lot. No. My interest simply faded until one day I didn’t play anymore. Didn’t play anymore and had no intention of going back.
But I loved the game. God I loved poker. I studied it. Thought about it. Wrote about it. I was a poker columnist for various poker magazines way before I was a science fiction writer.
And played, a lot. God I played. Online and live. I preferred the latter, but when I was overseas I had to settle for the former. Poker is the most intellectually complex and psychologically challenging games known to human history. Computers solved Chess. Decades ago. Few years ago they solved 
Go, as well. The ancient Chinese game mastered by the Japanese that has more permutations across the board than there are atoms in the observable universe.
But they still haven’t solved poker. They won’t for a long time, I think, because it is the most human of games. It is a game of incomplete information; a game of lies, whereas Chess and Go have to have all the information out there on the board, 100% of the time.
I quit the game for two reasons: one, I was overseas, Laos and then Vietnam, three years each, and I lost touch with live play. Two, I had a son. This, I suspect, was the main reason. Poker consumes a tonne of intellectual and emotional energy. It is a game that requires close concentration for hours on end, a talent for reading body language and human behaviour, endless logical deduction, mathematics, and psychological resilience to deal with the inevitable swings of a game where luck is a short term (and short-term only) factor. Mate, I just didn’t have the fucking energy anymore.
So I stopped. And I didn’t even miss it.
Recently, I’d begun to feel funny about having ‘plays poker’ up there, at the top of this website. I was thinking: time to change my subtitle. And writes some more, I could say instead, or, raises two young children, or, imbibes whisky, or, tries to survive in the gig economy. Any of which would be a far more accurate representation of how I spend my time.
But then something strange happened. I played again. The PhD was done, my boys were at day care or at school, and suddenly I had large parts of my brain matter requiring stimulation.
So I played. A shitty 100 dollar tournament on a Thursday night at my local casino. Ran terrible. Flopped a full house to a guy who turned a higher full house. Managed to not lose my whole stack, but was still crippled. Went out soon afterwards.
Reader: I fucking loved it. Poker is all those things I said above. But it is also a giant fucking rush. That feeling, as you push your chips in the middle on a giant bluff, of your heart trying to pound its way out of your chest. That feeling, of flopping a set against a pre-flop aggressor, and watching him put his stack in the middle nearly dead. That feeling of dragging a big pot. That feeling, that ultimate poker feeling, of winning a big tournament.
That feeling of losing a giant hand. Thunderstruck, as the other guy gets lucky and your hard-earned ends up in someone else’s pile.
Trying to keep it all together, to not go on tilt, one must possess the self-control of the stoics. At the poker table the soul is stripped bare. The true self emerges, under that pressure. As playwright David Mamet said: “Poker reveals to the frank observer something else of import. It will teach him about his own nature. Many bad players do not improve because they cannot bear self-knowledge.”
I’m back in the game, and I’m going to be telling poker stories again. The triumphs and the tragedies.
I’ll tell you stories about my local card room. It’s a small room, of the type a Sydney or Melbourne player – let alone an American – would laugh at. But it’s my home ground. The terrible table service, the slow-rolling old Greeks, the griping regulars, all run by a barrel-chested pit boss able to beat misbehaving players into obedience with his booming voice.
I’m going to tell you about taking shots in the big game in my local casino, and further afield as well. In Sydney, in Melbourne. Maybe even in Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker in 2020. I’m going to tell you about a sub-culture of the game: the pure gamblers, the maths geniuses, the hoodlums and the drunks, the small-timers and the high-rollers.
The poker world is another world entirely. Some of it ain’t pretty, that I can attest. But it’s always colourful.
But before I get to any of that, I should, like a good writer, start at the beginning. The beginning for pretty much every poker player (Generation X and younger, in particular) is a movie called Rounders (1998). Starring Matt Damon and Edward Norton before they hit the big time, John Turturro in a 
fine-tuned supporting role, and John Malkovich as a Russian mobster in the most gloriously overacted part in his career – Rounders is the classic cult poker movie (if a movie can be both a classic and cult, this is the one). Rounders had a stylish, even noirish aesthetic that introduced poker at a time when it was still very much out of the mainstream, back when the game was played in illegal underground games in New York, when no-one had heard of Texas Hold ‘em, and when the stereotype of smoke-filled rooms populated with desperados, card-sharps, and gangsters still had an echo of truth to it.
The movie begins with a voice over from Mike McDermott (Damon): “Listen, here’s the thing: if you can’t spot the sucker in the first half-hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”
This, and other such shining gems of poker wisdom lace the film. You sit down at a poker table now, twenty years later, you will still hear people quoting the film (or, more commonly, imitating John 
Malkovich’s absurd accent). But here’s the thing, before Mike McDermott gives us the great opening line, we see him quietly moving around his apartment. He take a thick wad of greenbacks from behind a painting, hidden in a book, from a cigar box. This is his poker roll, the money he has put aside for the game. Poker players (sensible ones, anyway), keep a poker roll separate from life money, and play within that roll. That is what I once did.
Anyway, this is not the point. The point is that I wanted to be Mike McDermott. All of us young grinders did, at the beginning of the 2000s. So like McDermott I hid my money in books. Doyle Brunson’s Super/System to be precise, just like the movie.
So I’d quit poker, remember? Quit poker and hadn’t thought about it much since. Quit poker and 
was moving all my books into the huge new section of bookshelves we’d had built. All my poker books were going to a couple of shelves, partially hidden down in one corner next to my desk, out of sight of polite society. Rather the curious visitor admire my literary collection or marvelled at the expanse of science fiction filling the shelves, than see the grimy, down-low section of books with titles like “Harrington on Hold ‘em” or “Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time,” or, perfectly: “Shut Up and Deal.” Moving my books and holy shit, if isn’t there five hundred dollars sitting between the pages of Super/System. Five hundred dollars, just like Mike McDermott.
So I took that five hundred dollars reader, and I put it out there. Put it out there and wouldn’t you know it: after one month it had turned into six grand.
I’m back, baby.
