Chapter 3: The Hero

I stumbled down the stairs into my living room, cracked open the fridge, and gulped down some sweet, sweet OJ right from the carton. Nothing like some time off, I warmly thought to myself. As I closed the fridge door, it revealed the seated silhouette of my roommate, Brad. The only movement on the otherwise-motionless figure was two eyeballs as they scanned the roommate portion of the newspaper’s classifieds section.

After one exceptionally vibrant gulp from the carton, a voice scowled from behind the newsprint: “You were out late again last night.” I quickly replied, “You know I’ve been grinding my bank roll at the GMG poker room. They were doing their lucky table promotion last night!”

“I don’t get it,” he muttered. “Isn’t poker just a game of chance?” You’re right, I thought. You don’t get it! It was so much more than that. Maybe the lucky table drawing was up to chance (although I’m not convinced their table-selecting software is truly random), but certainly not poker. Sure, there are elements of randomness, but in the long run there are winning strategies. Right?

But I suppose Brad had a point. At its core, perhaps No Limit Texas Holdem is a game of chance: the ever-present knowledge that you could be placed into an impossible position, powerless to do anything but watch the dealer slam the inevitable truth down on the felt. Isn’t that the beauty of it? The Hero’s journey is not one performed on rails. It takes me off the beaten path, into the abyss. Infinite decision trees sprout in a forest that lures me in, each beckoning root presenting paths full of pitfalls. Yet I still choose to step into the gray, not in pursuit of glory but of knowing I had the guts to shove every last chip into the middle.

In his woeful ignorance, Brad had stumbled upon one of the defining pillars of the grinder’s code: we play not for the moments of surefire victory, but for the close scrapes with ruin. We live for the all ins with equities split right down the middle: top set versus nut flush draw for heaps, an overpair against a combo draw for all the marbles, an underpair hoping to outlast big slick on the stone cold bubble. We run it once, and only once, so help me God.

Each hand an untrodden voyage, a new battle in a pristine arena free of any societal status that existed outside of our velveteen coliseum. A fresh opportunity to put it all on the line and let the chips fall where they may. There’s no greater triumph than one that’s not guaranteed. And with each pot dragged in, a feeling begins to grow. It starts as an inkling, the slightest itch of an afterthought: maybe it’s destiny. The sly acknowledgement that yes, the Villain always has a vote, but somehow I continue to out-maneuver him. The persistent awareness that I’m not employing any kind of unified strategy in my play but, as I remain unscathed after every trial and tribulation, that’s all the more reason to believe it’s fate.

Poker isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s for the sick, sick minds willing to punch the afterburner beyond the parameters anyone thought possible. It’s for those of us that push the throttle forward not for any appreciation of the limits we are eclipsing, but rather the thrill of knowing we cheated death once more. I raise my carton of OJ to you, fellow Heroes.

From behind the newspaper, a voice interrupted my thought: “Hey man, you good?” I slowly screwed the Tropicana cap back into place atop its container. “You’re right, Brad”, I finally responded. “And that’s why I have to play.” I could feel his head silently shaking behind the newspaper.

His disdain couldn’t shake me. After all, it’s always been Hero versus Villain, and I’ve been the Hero in every hand history I’ve ever written. As the burden of this title slowly sunk in, a singular thought echoed throughout my head: let’s go play some fucking cards.