All In or Nothing at All

Trials and Tribulations of a Texas Hold 'Em Player

By Benjamin Ewing

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illustration by Hilary Falb
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Teenagers in small-town America are constantly on a search. According to child psychologists, this perpetual scavenger hunt is the most important task of adolescence: identity formation. Yet suburban and rural offspring who have recently made the transition out of adolescence (or are even simply far enough through it to use the term) may remember another search that, at the time, always felt far more imminent and important: the (not so) simple task of finding things to do. I am convinced that this is one of the single greatest struggles for teens raised anywhere but a large metropolis. How else do farm towns become bastions for crystal-meth labs?

As an urban transplant in Providence, the reality that there simply aren't many entertaining and socially acceptable activities for groups of suburban teens sinks in each time (a) I'm asked what my friends and I did for fun in high school; (b) I'm asked what my friends from home and I did this past summer; and (c) I return home for winter break. When one grows tired of going to the movies, renting movies, discussing movies, and occasionally indulging in some charmingly un-hip social faux-pas (e.g., Trivial Pursuit, miniature golf, or in my town, Monday night bowling) all that's left to do is sit at a Starbucks and contemplate seeing a movie. It's a sobering reality. Hollywood loves to pretend that suburbia boasts furniture-wrecking house parties replete with sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, but the truth is that such events are essentially non-existent. In my hometown of Amherst, New York, a suburb of Buffalo, a gathering of friends with the mere possibility of alcohol constitutes a party.

It's not so much that there aren't things to do in suburban America, but rather that there aren't enough activities that are what I will refer to as "comfortably dangerous." Comfortably dangerous activities derive their appeal by walking the tight rope between the two primary hemispheres of youth: safety (where most suburban teens comfortably reside) and rebelliousness (where all teens with a heart secretly yearn to mingle). Scrabble is comfortable. Methamphetamines are dangerous. Texas Hold 'Em poker is comfortably dangerous. This is why it is currently all over television, the internet and the Brown University campus (from the Faunce basement poker room to a senior seminar in applied math dedicated to Hold 'Em). This is also why poker's popularity far exceeds that of board games and hard drugs.

Poker is comfortable because teens can do it in their own homes, on their own kitchen tables, while their parents refill their Snapple and cheese puffs. It's also safe because it rarely involves heavy drinking, drugs, or sex. Even parents generally support poker games, if only because they fear the alternatives will involve drinking, drugs, or sex. To people unfamiliar with Hold 'Em, the biggest risk for a teenage poker player might seem to be losing his buy-in. The intuitive logic is that you can't lose more than you put on the table. For the valedictorian of the class behind mine in high school that buy-in was often literally his lunch money. His worse case scenario was a few days without tater-tots. Yet even if most teens aren't risking their life savings on poker games, plenty of adults are, and that alone lends all poker a symbolic dangerousness. Anyone who has seen Rounders with Matt Damon and Edward Norton knows that losing one's lunch money pales in comparison to some of the problems that can arise from compulsive card-playing. Smokers await lung cancer and playboys chance STDs, but poker players risk becoming indebted to the Russian mafia. It's exactly what young people want: a mammoth, cinematic, romantic danger that doesn't really exist.

School-Trip Kings

I began playing poker during my sophomore year of high school but it wasn't until my senior year that I actually learned how to play the game. During the formative stages of my card playing career, I was too timid to put my money on the line when I had a winning hand and too ignorant to keep my money out of the pot when I had nothing. Kenny Rogers was dead on when he said you've got to know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em. I wanted to follow his advice, but I didn't know how. My novice mistake was assuming that my book-smart intelligence would compensate for both my transparent poker-face and my general lack of knowledge about the game. Luckily, the stakes were small in those days. Initially, my friends and I played for no money at all and even when that dulled, buy-ins never exceeded $10. I'm sure I lost money over the course of that time but there were certainly no bank foreclosures or second mortgages.

My career as a Hold 'Em player didn't take off until I was on the brink of quitting the game entirely. My change jar was almost spent, and I promised myself that when it was empty, I would quit poker forever. Before I went for broke, however, I came upon a stroke of brilliance (luck) and won my first big hand. It was real, and it was spectacular. I was on a high school Model UN trip with half a dozen friends and twice as many friendly acquaintances when luck finally started returning my voice messages. The timing of the big hand couldn't have been better. I had just been deferred for early admission by the wanton gate-keeping process at my sister's alma mater, Amherst College, and I was feeling as worthless as I was shocked. This mere bad luck created for me a crisis of confidence. It was during that irrational state of despair and paranoia that was I able to finally let loose and play poker as though I had nothing to lose. As it happens, this is exactly how one must be willing to play the game in order to succeed.

And succeed I finally did. My Model UN friends and I were playing a $10 or $20 buy-in game of Texas Hold 'Em and somehow I was winning. I was probably already up to $35 or $40 when I was dealt two kings, the second best possible starting hand. On another day I might have played it safe, but I felt reckless, so I bet five dollars before the flop. Apparently my friend Greg was also feeling bold because he not only called my five dollar bet but quickly raised it $25. With the second best starting hand, I felt confident enough to call, and the $25 made up a large enough percentage of my chips that I decided to re-raise all-in. Greg called and revealed that he had also been dealt a dominant starting hand: ace-king suited. In poker lingo, the duel would have been classified as a pair versus one over-card. In such a situation my hand had roughly a 70 percent chance of winning. I did win, but not before even more significant drama. An ace came down on the flop which gave Greg the better hand. I would have lost were it not for a third king that came down on the river, giving me three of a kind or "trip kings."

I won over 30 dollars on that hand, but I didn't stop there. My momentum grew and by the end of the game, I had just about cleaned out the table. My winnings that night were in excess of 90 dollars, which by my calculations, was just enough to make up for my steady losses in nearly every prior poker game I'd played. To this day I can't help but wonder whether my good fortune at poker that night was some sort of cosmic compensation for my misfortune in the college application process. It was probably just an odd coincidence though. Getting deferred by Amherst ended up being a stroke of luck and had it not been, winning 90 dollars in poker would have hardly been adequate compensation.

Raising The Stakes

After my Model UN-trip triumph, I began playing a lot more poker and doing so with a lot more seriousness. The stakes of the games rose to as high as 40 dollar buy-ins and I gradually went from playing poker with friends to joining games of acquaintances and even occasionally people I actively despised. Now this is the part of the story where I am supposed to explain how I then began to lose lots of money and that all this signified the unavoidable fact that anyone who gets hooked on gambling will hit rock bottom. Except that I didn't start losing. I didn't always win (once I lost over 80 dollars on a single hand), but overall I did win—over 300 dollars. Not all of my friends were so lucky. Someone had to lose and someone did—although I'm still not entirely sure who, because everyone invariably claimed to have made more money on poker than he lost. I have a suspicion that a few unfortunate souls even developed life-long gambling addictions but I suspect they'll be all right. And I made out far better than all right.

I no longer play poker because I'm caught between being unfazed by 40 dollar games and terrified of even higher stakes. My two excursions into high stakes Texas Hold 'Em (at a run-down recreation center inappropriately called a casino) set me back almost 150 dollars and a good deal of my card-playing confidence. With the right amount of self-discipline and limited debit-card use, poker can be a miracle drug. It sure beats going to Blockbuster night after night. Unfortunately, like drug users, poker players develop an immunity that compels them to raise the stakes. I'm confident that if I were to start playing again, I could make good money. In all likelihood, I would make far more than I ever did in those 40 dollar games in high school. But eventually I would lose. And unlike Matt Damon, I'm not ready to face the Russian mob. I'm just like every other young person out there: I want fake danger.

Ben Ewing '08 has never had a serious gambling problem.

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