LittleWyvern.com

I briefly closed my eyes as I laid down my chin upon my folded arms as they rested on the padded table edge. Opening them once again, with a new-found purpose and intensity, I stared at the deck as the dealer flipped up the final card.

The Queen of Spades.

The first player checked quickly.  The second player casually tapped the table as well, clearly eager to get to showdown without any more of a fight.  Instinctively I reached for my chips. Without looking at the stacks before me, I grabbed what felt to be about 80 dollars worth.  As I moved my hand forward to bet I suddenly felt a wave of guilt.  This was pointless.  No, not pointless… this was something worse.  This was mean-spirited.

Game rules wouldn’t allow me to change my mind and check at this point; I had to bet something. And so, in a wholly meaningless and failed effort to feel less dirty, I only bet 60 of the 80 dollars.  I put the remaining chips back into my stack.  It didn’t matter; both of the players immediately folded their hands.  Eighty dollars, sixty dollars, or twenty dollars, they were not going to call any river bets.

I then turned to the man sitting next to me, an older fellow that I had played with many times before, and said, “Hey.  You want to see something cool?”  And with that I flipped over my hand.

The final board read: Jack of Spades, King of Spades, 9 of Diamonds, 4 of Diamonds, and now the Queen of Spades.

I held the Ace of Spades and Ten of Spades.  I had made a royal flush.

What happened next happened very, very quickly, and thinking back on it now still comes in foggy.  The man next to me literally yelled “Oh My God!” and jumped up out of his seat.  The dealer said “Wow!” and shook her head in disbelief.  Most everyone else at the table yelled, clapped, gasped, or some combination.  Within a few seconds the players at other nearby tables had crowded around us to see what happened.  Somebody patted me on the back, while somebody else came over and shook my hand.  The poker room manager came over, congratulated me, and then told me “that’s not supposed to ever happen.  Something like one in ten million…”

See, it wasn’t merely that I had hit a royal flush.  I had hit THE royal flush.

That night the casino had been running a jackpot promotion in an effort to drive up interest in their poker room.  Casinos do these all the time, and like all such promotions they are structured to tease their customers, but never go too far.  There is one large grand prize that is nearly impossible to win, and then a lot of much smaller prizes that people win all the time.  It’s like playing the Monopoly pieces at McDonalds.  You “could win $1,000,000!!” they say, but nobody ever does.  Instead, you win a free hamburger.   Nobody is ever upset to not win the million dollars, because nobody ever expects to, but winning the hamburger makes you feel happy and that’s what McDonalds is going for.  Of course, nobody would bother choosing McDonalds over Burger King simply because of the chance at winning a free hamburger, but they probably would make that same choice for a freeroll on a million dollars.  The million is the carrot; the occasional hamburger is the reward for trying.  Casinos work the same way.  You will sit in front of the progressive slot machine because of the enormous ever-increasing jackpot number it displays above your head.  You don’t expect to win big, but given the choice between the machine with the big numbers over it, and the one in the corner with no numbers, the choice is obvious to most.

Poker room promotions typically change from month to month, but on this particular night the jackpots revolved around the always sexy, ever elusive royal flush.  If you made a royal in hearts, diamonds, or clubs the casino would pay you $1000.  If you made the royal flush in spades the casino would pay you $20,000.

The carrot was the $20,000 jackpot, but in a manipulative (and intelligent) move to further decrease their risk the casino said that the 20k only applied to spades.  What’s more, the player had to make the royal flush while holding two of the five cards in his hand, and one of them had to be the ace.  If you made a royal flush holding the jack and queen, it wasn’t worth anything.  If you only held the ace, and then the 10-J-Q-K came on the board, congratulations… you don’t win anything.  You had to hold one of four exact hand combinations (suited AK AQ AJ A10), and then you needed the board to come with a perfect three out of five.  Oh… and then even if you do make a royal flush holding two cards including the ace, there was a 3 out of 4 chance that it was only worth the $1,000.  You had to do it in spades to win big.

Even so, the casino was still able to run an ad campaign stating “Make a royal flush, win $20,000!!”

I make it sound a bit dishonest, but in Vegas these things are so common that nobody is ever fooled anyways.  I still go to McDonalds for the Monopoly pieces even though I assume (without evidence) that there is only ever one printed Park Place piece in the entire world.  Winning the million dollars is never going to happen, but why would I pass up a freeroll?

Well, when that queen of spades rolled off on the river my freeroll came in.  I had made a royal flush.  I had done it using both of my hole cards.  One of them was the ace.  And most importantly of all, the suit was spades.

For my dazzling display of pure luck I was rewarded with $20,000.  Everyone else at my table won $1,000 just for being there.  Although they knew about my 20k, not everyone at the table realized they won a thousand because of it.  When I told her about it, a lady two seats away leaned over the table and kissed me.

The room around me went completely apeshit for about five minutes.  For my part, I just stayed in my seat, watched these people lose their minds, and alternately smiled and said “thanks” as strangers congratulated me for my win.

It took me a while to write this post because I wanted to put some emotional distance between the win and the account.   More than that, I needed some time to find a way to accurately describe the win without sounding like an asshole.  It’s been about a month now, and I still haven’t found that way.

Sitting in my chair at the end of the poker table, people screaming all around me, I instantly became excessively self-aware.  Everyone was looking at me, all with their own motivations and judgments, and I felt bizarrely obligated to somehow reward their attention.  I felt like I was supposed to be overtly celebrating more than they were, even though I didn’t feel like yelling, clapping, or even smiling too much more than usual.  I shook peoples’ hands, but only because they offered me theirs and I didn’t want to be rude.  When the people at my table said congratulations, I said congratulations back, reminding them that they had won too.  It was all very weird.  Maybe it was shock, but I didn’t feel like celebrating at all.  I actually felt bad because I knew that everyone in the room was watching me, expecting a crazy reaction that I wasn’t going to give them.  I smiled a lot, but that was it.  I didn’t jump, I didn’t dance. I don’t think that I even got out of my chair for at least ten minutes.

Outwardly I mostly stayed my same composed self, but internally the adrenaline had taken full effect.  I picked up my cell phone with hopes of taking a picture of the cards, but my hands were shaking so badly I nearly dropped the entire thing.  I asked one of the other players to please take a picture with my camera, and he was kind enough to oblige.  He took three pictures, all of them blurry, but at that moment I couldn’t possibly have done better myself.

Perhaps fifteen minutes later it finally occurred to me that I should tell somebody what had just happened.  It’s strange, but I didn’t know who to tell or how to tell them.  With still shaking hands I awkwardly texted my brother.  “Just hit the jackpot.  Won $20,000.”

Simple and to the point.

I texted Lukas and Matt something similar, and then got up from the table to call my parents.  Over the next half hour I made half of a dozen calls, all of them with the same awkward intro: “Hey… so do you want to hear something cool?…”  I wanted to tell people what happened, but didn’t want to sound like I was bragging.  I was playing poker, they dealt me a royal flush, and oh by the way now I get twenty grand… just wanted to let you know.

I won’t pretend like my reaction to the jackpot was normal, but I also won’t pretend to know what a normal reaction looks like.  A few years ago a man sitting at my table hit a jackpot for $45,000.  He sat there in seemingly stunned silence for a short while, but about ten minutes later his wife came in to check on him and he finally spoke out loud.  She literally fainted when she heard the news.  It was pretty hilarious, actually.

I can’t imagine ever fainting in a poker room.  I never clap, cheer, yell, jump or curse either.  I don’t taunt people when I win and I don’t throw cards when I lose.  I occasionally roll my eyes or shake my head, but I make a strong effort to keep my emotions flat whenever I’m in a casino.  When I lose a big hand I force myself to say “Nice hand.”  When I win a big hand I force myself to say nothing at all.  Everyone hates a bad loser.  Everyone hates a bad winner even more.

I suppose that I’ve been actively suppressing my emotions for so long now that I apparently can’t turn it off, even when it’s both expected and encouraged.  Whether I win a $20 pot or a $20,000 jackpot, I don’t feel much more happiness.  It’s gross, and probably unhealthy, but it’s also the reason that I don’t play poker very much anymore.  I’ve probably written about it here before, and definitely talked about it IRL: the ups never feel as good as the downs feel bad.  Although I’ve thought about the concept a lot, before my royal flush I didn’t realize the extent of my complex.

Barry Greenstein, a famously successful poker player, wrote a book called Ace on the River.  Within the book is a section where Barry provides a personality self-quiz to help determine whether you have “what it takes” to be a professional poker player.  Not surprisingly, almost everyone fails the quiz.  The problem, as the author explains it, is that a poker player requires a very specific combination of personality attributes in order to succeed.  Finding that combination within the same person is exceedingly rare.  Lukas and I both took the quiz, and he failed it on multiple fronts.  As I remember it, I failed the quiz too, but only on one point.  At the time I thought that basically meant I passed.  It took me a long time to realize that the seemingly dumb little quiz was right.

Most people can’t handle gambling because they can’t detach themselves from the value of money.  I see this all the time, and it almost always makes me laugh.  People who lose $100 playing blackjack and then whine about how much they lost.  People who are afraid to double down a $5 bet when they are showing an 11 against the dealer’s 6.  People who buy into a $2-4 limit poker game for $20, get dealt pocket aces, and don’t raise.

I will never, ever, ever understand those people.

It’s not fair of me to judge people who are risk-adverse (or simply poor), but I can’t identify with a person who gambles with money that they can’t afford.  Worse, I can’t identify with a person who lets the real-world value of their chips affect the way they play a particular game.  If you can’t handle losing the $5, then don’t sit at the blackjack table.  If you do sit down, you better bet the $5 like it’s already lost.

Anyways, long story short: I don’t have that problem.  Concerns about real world money are important when buying chips in the beginning, and cashing them out at the end.  In between, the chips are nothing but clay pieces acting as a scoreboard.  If you ever play blackjack with me you’ll probably hear me saying things like “plus 2” or “minus 4 point 5.”  I’m not counting cards; I am just tracking my bets.  I sit down at a table with a particular multiple of my bet size, and then track wins and losses based on that.  If I am betting $10 per hand and am up $50 then I am “plus five.”  If I am playing $25 per hand and am ahead $125 I am also “plus five.”  The particular bet size is irrelevant.  Before I even show up to the casino I would have decided, as an example, that I am comfortable losing $500 and that I want to play $25/hand.  That gives me twenty bets to play with.  Not five hundred dollars.  Twenty bets.  Hours later when I’m driving home I will convert back to real world money and feel happy or sad about the dollars won or lost, but from parking lot to parking lot real money does not exist.  The abstraction of money and chips is easy to write about, but extremely difficult to practice.  It is the number one “flaw” in most wannabe gamblers, but I actually do very well with it.

The second major personality trait that most failed poker players lack is a true sense of empathy.  You have to be able to put yourself in your opponent’s position and understand enough about them to understand their motivations and actions.  As a skill it is non-obvious and impossible to either measure or explain, but it is something that is easy to notice when players can’t do it.  Without empathy you are forced to play reactively.  You can only respond to what your opponent actually does instead of exploiting the reasons for why he did it.  I feel like my sense of empathy is well above average, but I would argue that it is also the most wildly overestimated ability in poker.  Everyone thinks they are good at it, almost nobody is.  In an effort at humility I will admit that I used to be much better at using my empathy than I am right now.  It used to be fairly easy for me to just understand what somebody was going to do at a poker table before they did it.  Now that sense of total control is much rarer.  That isn’t what’s holding me back though.

The third important aspect of a poker player’s personality is sympathy.  To be a professional poker player, you have to be able to turn it off.  That is what I lack.   That is why I stopped playing.  Empathy means that you understand your opponent.  Sympathy means that you care about your opponent.  It is crucial to have one, but not the other.  I need to know you well enough to find your weaknesses, but not care about using those weaknesses to hurt you.  I have spent a lot of time trying, but I can’t seem to turn off my sympathy.

When I say that the highs don’t feel as good as the lows feel bad, it is sympathy that is to blame.  When I lose a lot, I feel the pain.  I acutely feel the loss of money, but just as bitter is the understanding of my personal failure.  I HATE losing.  Meanwhile, I like winning… but I don’t LOVE winning.  Poker is generally a zero-sum game, meaning that for somebody to win somebody else has to lose.  When I win a big pot, it necessarily means that somebody lost a big pot.  I feel good about my win, but the sympathetic part of me feels bad for the guy who lost.  So when I lose, I feel the full force of the misery.  But when I win my joy is offset by the pain of having hurt someone else.  I can’t truly celebrate my wins because I am too aware of the other player’s loss.

Hitting the jackpot didn’t have this problem of course.  Not only did none of the other players lose for my gain, but they all won small jackpots of their own.  The only loser was the faceless mega-corporation that owns the casino.  I obviously don’t feel bad for taking a corporation’s money.

So then why wasn’t I happy?  Why didn’t I scream or yell or jump out of my chair?

Eight days after hitting the royal flush I found myself back in the same poker room.  While waiting for a seat one of the floor managers came up to talk to me.  “Oh man, so what was it like when you hit that royal?!”

The man was smiling in eager anticipation of hearing about how fucking rad it clearly must have been to win.  What came to my mind when he asked me that, though?

Guilt.

The first thing I thought about was how I had tried to bet eighty dollars on the river.  The casino was about to give me $20,000 and I was still trying to coax just a little bit more cash out of these two genuinely nice other players.  What an asshole.

At that point the jackpot money didn’t mean anything to me yet.  I had conditioned myself too completely for any amount of money (apparently even 20k) to significantly affect my emotions.  Hours and days later it would matter, but sitting at the table it was nothing more than a number to me.  Twenty thousand may as well have been two hundred million; the number was purely a hypothetical.

Still, my empathy allowed me to understand what other people expected from me.  They expected celebration.  They expected shouts of “Drinks are on me!” and a display of raw joy appropriate to twenty grand.  I understood that they were also all judging me, deciding whether I was worthy of the jackpot in some ambiguous way.  Nobody wants to see the asshole win.  They were all watching, trying to decide whether I qualified.  A bit of paranoia definitely set in, but it wasn’t my dominant emotion.

My sense of sympathy would not allow me to get past my river bet.  After the initial eruption, but still in the middle of the mass hysteria, I actually leaned across the table and apologized to the other guys for betting on the river.  They didn’t care of course; they had just won $1,000.  I couldn’t seem to let it go though.  By making that bet I was actively trying to inflict pain on these guys for absolutely no reason.  What did that say about me as a person? In that moment I truly hated myself for what I had instinctively done… and that’s what I remembered most clearly about hitting the royal flush.

The floor manager was still smiling at me, still waiting for my answer.

I smiled back at him and lied to his face.  “Yeah… it was pretty great.”