Jack of all trades.

13 December 2001, South Las Vegas Boulevard, 9:30pm—It was about 50 degrees outside, crisp but not uncomfortable for someone in a sweater and jacket walking from the Mandalay Bay to the Bellagio, as I was, wondering what had gone wrong in two short hours.

Walking in Las Vegas is a strange concept. When you see the Strip for the first time, flying in at night, it’s manageable. It’s pretty in its own way. You can conceive of walking from one end to the other, taking in all the oversized, overbright gaudiness. But your conception of walking, based on how you walk past shops on the street, is that you will somehow zip past each casino like you’ve seen in countless movies and television shows.

This conception is wrong. As you walk down the Strip, you set landmarks like a large casino down the road, and it helps you estimate how long it will take you to walk where you want to go. In reality the casinos are like mountains, which seem to grow no larger as you walk toward them, as if you’ve made no progress at all. It can actually take you something like ten minutes to walk past each large casino without stopping even once, depending on how easy they’ve made it for you to simply walk past.

If you’ve been there before, of course, you’ve already learned this lesson, and if you have to go a distance of more than three casinos away, you’ll probably end up hailing a cab. On the other hand, if you’ve just lost the money you came prepared to lose, and you need to meet someone at a hotel five casinos down the road, the walk may do you some good.

I’ve been playing poker in some way or another for about twenty years. When I was 13, I accompanied my parents to Vegas, where my friend Craig and I played a lot of video games at Circus Circus. We stayed in our tent trailer in the Circus Circus RV lot. It was kind of fun, but at that time there weren’t a lot of things for kids to do, so we just hung out a lot. We did sneak into the casino a couple of times, though, because they had these cool poker machines, and it seemed to me then, as it apparently still does, that poker is the best thing you can play at the casino because there’s a certain amount of skill you can use to offset the randomness of chance draws. Yeah, we got caught and thrown out, but it was still fun.

For the most part, since then, my occasional forays into poker playing have been almost purely recreational, home games played for small antes. Some nights I’ve won, some nights I’ve lost. In the end it basically evens out, and this is good because none of my friends wants to consistently take money from each other.

Yeah, wusses. I know.

In the past couple of years, however, I’ve gotten better in the home games, winning more than I’ve lost. And I would have won more had I not entered a number of hands just to keep the game going. It’s odd, but as much as I dislike losing, I’m also self-conscious about winning too much. (Is that a Jewish thing? Perhaps a topic for another time.)

Anyway, peculiar hangups notwithstanding, I began to think it was time to take my game to the next level.

In June 1999 I found myself back in Vegas for the first time since my Circus Circus exploits. I was there on business, assessing the state of graphic design on the Strip as research for a project that ultimately went awry, a futile attempt to upgrade the look of a particularly cheap casino on the cheap end of the Strip. In eighteen hours I criss-crossed the strip twice, no mean feat, and saw what there was to see of graphic design. (It was surprisingly nonexistent, actually; all the money is spent on the facades of the casinos. No care is taken on design once the tourist has been reeled in.) The taxi bills, once I learned the futility of walking, were enormous.

I found myself on the ritzy end of the Strip at midnight, checking out the Mandalay Bay. Nice place, well-appointed without being gaudy about it. Still nothing to write home about as design was concerned, but I wandered through the casino just the same. And there, in the back, by the sports betting, was the poker room.

They were playing seven-card stud, a game I had played plenty of. This is how stud works: You get two cards face-down and one face-up to start. Then there’s a round of betting. Once all bets have been called, those who are still in the game get another card face-up. Then there’s another round of betting. It continues like this until each player who has stayed in so far has four cards face-up. After that betting round, the seventh card is dealt face-down, and there’s the final round of betting. That’s five freakin’ rounds of bets and raises. In the end, you make your best five-card hand out of the seven you’ve been dealt, and you show down against your opponents.

This is the beauty part, however: On the initial deal of two down, one up, only the person with the lowest-ranked card face-up is required to ante. Everyone else can fold. So if you don’t like your three cards, you can muck them and it won’t cost you one penny. It’s possible to sit there for quite a long time with all the money you came with.

The game at the Mandalay was about as low-stakes as it gets on the Strip, a spread limit of $1—5, meaning that you can bet and raise anywhere in that range. Once I understood that I didn’t have to ante every single hand, as we’re all used to in our home games, I thought, well, why not. And I sat down and traded $40 dollars for 40 chips. "Good luck," they say as they hand you your chips. Every single time.

Despite a particularly nice hand in which I got dealt two aces face-down, had a pair of nines show up in my face-up cards, and then got a third ace on my seventh card, a hand which I took to a very nice win, I eventually ended up losing $39 of my original $40, with one chip taken home as a souvenir of the experience.

It took me three hours to lose that $40, however, and I was pretty psyched I had made it stretch that long against more seasoned players.

The next time I went to Vegas, in February 2000, I was going strictly for fun. That time, however, I had invested in a book that taught me something about stud strategy.

Poker strategy books, at least those aimed at relative beginners like me, tend to focus on two things: cards and position. I’m not going to get into position strategy here, as it’s cumbersome and likely boring for most people who aren’t interested in playing poker at a casino or card club, but card theory is fascinating.

The basic gist is this: most opening hands are worthless, and they absolutely should not be pursued. It is true that your crappy little cards may turn out to be something quite special by the time you have seven cards, but by that time, you have paid a lot of money to chase that hope, which is so often unfulfilled.

There are marginal opening hands, to which, depending on your position, you may want to give a little shot, but you should get the hell away from them as fast as possible as soon as they tell you they’re going nowhere in this hand. Again, hope is often your undoing.

And then there are strong hands, aces, kings, queens, ideally in the same suit, big pairs, maybe even a three-of-a-kind. These, the strategy books say, you should play aggressively, but even those can turn south on you, and you have to let them go as soon as you see them go south, ’cause they ain’t coming back.

We’re coming back to the part about being aggressive in a little bit. Hold on.

(An aside: At the risk of sounding reductive – or worse – poker theory is remarkably applicable to other situations in life. You find yourself in countless situations where you have to make decisions, and you often know in your heart that the correct decision is to let go of something that (or someone who) once seemed quite promising, but as you invested more of your time and energy, contraindications began to arise. Hope is, again, often your undoing. Let me be clear: I am by nature a hopeful person, an idealistic person, and I encourage it wherever I go, but you have to be willing to bear hope’s cost. The worst starting hand can turn into something wonderful, but not that often. Even the most promising situations can go sour, but it’s often the right decision to put your energy into them until you know it’s wrong. And you will know, even if you don’t want to admit it to yourself. The best poker players reegularly throw away pairs of aces – with a small amount of regret, probably, but also with the confidence that they know they did the right thing in that situation.)

Anyway, armed with this newfound philosophy, I sat down once again at a casino, this time the Luxor, and played $1—5 stud. I lost slightly more that time, $50 ($49, really, considering the chip I still have), but I made it stretch four hours that time.

In some sense, losing money in those situations wasn’t so bad. I was disappointed that my deeper knowledge of the game hadn’t served me as well as I’d hoped it would, but I still somewhat considered it payment for the entertainment of playing in that environment.

Then I learned to play Texas hold-’em. In this game you get two cards face-down, and eventually five cards are placed face-up in the center of the table. Every player who stays in until the end uses some combination of their two cards plus the five on the table to make their best five-card hand. (Sometimes the five cards on the table are the absolute nuts, i.e., the best hand possible no matter what anyone has in their two cards, such as a four-of-a-kind or a royal flush, and then everyone just splits the pot.)

In one sense this is a better game than stud because you don’t have to look at everyone’s cards to try to figure out what they might have. You only have to worry about one set of community cards and what your opponents might make out of them. Plus there’s one fewer betting hand than in stud, which makes it potentially less costly.

The challenge with hold-’em in the casino is twofold: one, the game goes pretty quickly, and it’s hard for a beginner to suss the nuts, as it were – to know the best possible hand and how likely anyone is to have it; and two, betting structure is a bit different. Often, instead of getting to choose what to bet, the betting amounts are set for you. In a 3-6 game, all bets and raises are $3 the first two rounds, $6 the last two. This can get expensive real fast. And that’s just the low-stakes game.

This week I found myself in Vegas once again, here first on business but then staying an extra night to play. I had already played hold-’em in Reno this past summer, which was something of a learning experience in its own right: people don’t go to Reno because of the kitsch and the conventions, they go there to play. And they’re good players. So although this business trip began in Reno, I was happy to pass on the opportunity to play there.

I figured I would fare better in Vegas.

Well.

Back to me walking down the Strip, done playing two hours after I had begun, having lost what I came prepared to lose, which was $200, I was wondering what had gone wrong. I had studied the game seriously in the past couple of months. I had learned which cards I could reasonably play in which position, I had taken to heart the idea that it is often better to raise than call if the situation warrants it, and I understood that I would throw most of my hands away with nary a second thought.

I even had somewhat learned the concept of pot odds and implied odds in terms of deciding what I could and could not chase, though the game goes pretty fast for a novice to figure out. But really, that wasn’t the problem.

There were a few problems. The first was that I had allowed myself to enter a game that was higher stakes than I was really prepared to play. The conventional wisdom is that realistically you should be prepared to play the equivalent of fifty big bets. In a 3-6 game, that’s fifty times six dollars, or $300. In the game I actually played, which was 2-4-8-8, that would have been $400. I brought $200. In my impatience to play and show what I could do, I went in essentially half-staked for that game, and thus I didn’t have enough of a cushion to get me out of any holes in which I found myself.

The second problem was that there was a good player at my table who was in a position that was somewhat bad for me. Generally speaking, you don’t want someone who plays well and aggressively too close to your left at the table. It didn’t take him too long to realize how I was playing, and by the time I’d been at the table for an hour or so, there was little I could do to scare him out of a hand I didn’t want him to play in. In poker parlance, my table image had been shot.

My third, albeit a minor problem, was that I didn’t get a lot of good hands, hands I could do anything with. Again, you expect to throw away a lot of hands, but I threw away more than I expected to.

My fourth problem, fairly major, was that the game went too quickly for me to have a solid idea of how much money was in the pot, which would give me an idea of the correct odds for continuing with a particular hand. The speed with which things happen at a casino or card club table is staggering, even when you’ve done it a couple of times before. Home games, being at least partly about socializing, are probably a tenth as quick as a casino game.

My most significant problem, however, was that I lacked appropriate aggression. Part intimidation about being at a table with a higher limit than I wanted, part not having the correct amount of money to play at that table, and part simple overall lack of aggression in my usual personality, I just didn’t look like a serious player. I looked like the novice I was. I understood that I needed to play aggressively to win, but except in limited circumstances, such as when I knew I would probably end up with the best hand, I was probably more timid than I should have been.

Here’s an important caveat: playing aggressively before you’ve completely made your hand is not the same as bluffing. It’s acting on the knowledge that you probably have the best cards at the moment. You’d like the hand to end before that’s no longer accurate. The only way to achieve this is to raise the bet, not to call it. Bluffing is when you’ve got no good reason to stay in, and to be honest, bluffing really should be left to more advanced players who can expertly read other players at the table and know when a bluff will get them somewhere.

And finally, here’s the thing: it seems to me, after considering all the problems I had at the table, is that I simply didn’t want it enough. For all my preparation, I didn’t spend time practicing odds calculations so that I could do them quickly at the table. I also haven’t been practicing noticing traits people give off or remembering who does what. It’s something I’ve long noticed about myself in hockey, and I really need to work on it.

The aggression, however, is not something I’m especially interested in working on. It’s not a trait I want to creep over into other parts of my life, and that may be my poker undoing. I may have to be content with simply being a decent player in low-stakes home games, enjoying barbeque and root beer as we pass the cards around the table playing dealer’s choice.

It seems to me that there are essentially two levels of skill for any activity – hobbyist and artisan. The hobbyist enjoys a pursuit generally as a form of entertainment or relaxation, whereas the artisan takes the pursuit seriously as a craft, learning its intricacies in order to be considered a master of the pursuit. Hobbyists have interests; artisans have passions.

(A less elegant form of the dichotomy would be amateurs versus professionals, but those words have taken on a connotation of those who don’t get paid for their skills as opposed to those who do, and that’s not what I’m after here.)

And walking down the Strip with all that time to examine my errors, I finally came to the realization that I would never rise above the level of poker hobbyist.

Then I began to think about the other pursuits in my life, and I realized that I’m basically a hobbyist in all of them, too. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t go for false modesty; I think I’m fairly knowledgeable about (or skilled at) a number of things: cooking, theater, tutoring, playing hockey, writing (at least at grammar), to name a few. But by no means am I remotely an expert at any of them. Even in my profession, where I have more advanced skills than probably 75% of all currently working designers and probably 85% of those in the nonprofit world, I’m still probably a hobbyist there, too. The reason: I don’t want to spend the time learning all the mundane minutiae that would kick me up to the artisan stratosphere. It’s not fun enough; I don’t care about it enough.

In some sense, I’ve always been okay about my hobbyist status; it’s allowed me to have a certain amount of knowledge about a fairly wide range of topics, which in turn helps me relate to a lot of people, which is important to me. I always feared that fixing on one pursuit to the exclusion of others would render me antisocial except with those who are stuck on a similar interest as well.

Games are a good example. I enjoy Scrabble – I know a good number of words, and I love spatial and linguistic challenges. But I would die in a tournament because I don’t know every single two- and three-letter word. I don’t care about the mathematical layout of the board. I have no desire to memorize arcane words that, despite their high letter-value, I would never use in my writing. God bless the tournament devotees, but I never want to join their ranks. Same thing with chess: I enjoy the challenges it presents, but at a certain point the game becomes all about openings and thinking ten steps ahead. That’s no longer fun for me.

I never fell so in love with any one pursuit that I felt I needed to know all there was to know about it, that I felt I would still enjoy it at that level, doing it as well as its best practitioners. A friend who was discussing this topic with me recently declared that I lacked necessary passion, and she may be right. I wonder, though, whether it’s simply a matter of shedding a prior reluctance. It simply may be time to pick something I love and develop my passion for it.

Take writing, for example. While I love to write and am excited about working on my novel, even as I’m sometimes deeply scared of it (that’s another essay), I don’t know whether writing itself is something I will always need to do. I know I need to finish the novel. I’ve also had a great time working on this journal, even though it competes a bit with my time for the novel. But once the novel is done, I’ve long felt that I don’t know whether I have another one in me. It’s possible that that will be my sole contribution to literature. I don’t write primarily to fulfill a personal need to write; I write so that I can be part of the world. About ten years ago a friend asked me why I write, and I responded that I wanted to disturb people. I think that’s still fairly accurate.

It may be time to make a more passionate commitment to writing, to let other pursuits fall a bit by the wayside, to see if I can become an artisan in the craft I love best, to see if it’s still fun for me at that level. Poker has its merits, and its best practitioners have a deep knowledge of human behavior, something that suits writers well. But fuck it – if I’m going to be an artisan at only one thing, it sure as shit ain’t poker.

Hey, if all else fails, I still make the best challah around.