Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

Genres: Humor & Satire; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In this dead-on satire of online obsessions, a novelist with writer’s block finds a new—and very lucrative—stream of income in a virtual world that appears to give him everything he lacks in the real world.

When Frank Dixon, a frustrated writer who has seen his career crash and burn, decides to dabble in online poker, he discovers he has a knack for winning. In this newfound realm, populated by alluring characters—each of them elusive, mysterious, and glamorous—he becomes a smash success: popular, rich, and loved. Going by the name Chip Zero, he sees his fortunes and romantic liaisons thrive in cyberspace while he remains blind to the fact that his real life is sinking. His online success, however, does not come without complications, as he comes to realize that his “virtual” friends and lovers are, in fact, very real, and one rival player is not at all happy that Mr. Zero has taken all his money.

Heller’s cautionary tale is continually surprising and startlingly real, a tour de force of satirical storytelling in the vein of Jonathan Tropper and Sam Lipsyte.

Release date: March 27, 2012

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

1

Welcome to Purgatory

It is a cold and harrowing morning in the life of a man the day he wakes up, looks at himself in the mirror, and finally realizes that he is not, has never been, nor will ever be George Clooney. A magnificent, eternal ideal had been floating out there; it was a paragon of the perfect human being this man had wanted to become. He wanted to look like him, act like him, talk and think like him. He wanted to be him and shed the creaky body, cranky soul, and unexciting past of the man he was. And now he realizes: it isn’t happening and it’s not going to—Damn it, I am just going to go on being me.

Perfection will not only forever elude this broken man; it won’t even get close enough to tickle his bald spot, pinch his love handles, or tug on his double chin. If he were as much as half-perfect, he wouldn’t be here; he wouldn’t be looking at his reflection in his smudged bathroom mirror, wishing with all his might that he were someone else. And it’s too late: it won’t ever happen. He knows it now. Excellence, courage, wit, grace, confidence . . . they’ve all slipped away. The luminous spirit of the ideal man has fled the scene and isn’t coming back. It’s all over now, Baby Blue. James Bond is long gone, my friend. You will never play centerfield for the Yankees, you will never be Tiger Woods or Spider-Man, you won’t win an Oscar and own a large yacht and sleep with famous women. The closest you’ll ever get to being Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen is playing Guitar Hero. You’ve always been you and will always be you and now there’s nothing left to do but ride Life’s Moving Sidewalk Unto Death.

In these harsh terrible seconds, the truth slowly twists into him like a corkscrew, and in the mirror he sees the lights going out, one by one, on his future.

I have been that man, looking into the mirror. I have heard the strains of “Taps” tooting mournfully out of the bathroom faucet. And in short, I was terrified.

The lights were going out and I had to do something—I had to find something, anything, no matter what—to prevent everything from going dark.

Then I found poker, fortune, glory, and for the first time in my life, self-confidence, and suddenly the world was bright again.



I want to go home. Where it’s warm and cozy and where I am, I hope, still loved.

But I can’t. I’m no longer welcome there even though I, of course, was the one who sprang for the fuzzy welcome mat. (How cruel is that?) So here I am in Purgatory.

It has finally stopped snowing, but it’s still freezing out, and if the furniture inside the Purgatory Inn had teeth, they would be chattering. In all my life I’ve never seen so much snow. White as far as the eye can see. Snow covering hills, trees, roads, fields, and whatever the hell else out there that it’s covering. Underneath that rolling furry blanket of white and silver are many more sheets of it.

This motel has ten rooms but right now I’m the only guest, so mine is the only light on. From the dark, empty road outside, my one light might make it look as if something nefarious is going on, but inside there’s nothing more sinister than a humming laptop, a moldy carpet, a lot of faded plaid, and sitting on the rickety night table alongside a plastic glass (“Sanitized for Your Protection”) of Scotch, two autographed paperback books, both written by Frank W. Dixon.

Any minute now Wolverine Mommy, my cherished long-distance friend, will be joining me here. She and I have never met. Not in the flesh at least. She had no idea I was coming out to her frosty Michigan oblivion, but here I am.

I want to go home. I miss my wife and it’s killing me and I want her back. With all my heart and soul I do.

This is what all my newfound self-confidence has wrought?

The motel TV is on and I’m flipping between March Madness and the usual catastrophes on CNN and paying no attention to any of it. In two or three days I am planning to drive back down to the Detroit airport, if my rented Hyundai Cilantro doesn’t crumble on me, and return to my normal life, which has shattered into, yes . . . A Million Little Pieces. Where I’ll go from here, nobody has any idea.

It’s past six-thirty. Wolve told me she’d be here at six. Her husband teaches history at the local high school and loves to hunt and hopefully he won’t pop in on us with an Elmer Fudd cap and a 12-gauge Winchester over/under. (I assume she hasn’t told him I’m here.) She has three young boys and sometimes, when I’m playing poker with her on-line, I swear I can hear them running, yowling and knocking over things in the background.

Hell, Michigan, would have been a better name for this desolate place, but that was already taken. Only a person in transit from one nowhere to another would ever find out that such a town even existed. I had to leave New York quickly, and it is a measure of how far America’s 711,653rd most popular novelist has fallen that the Purgatory Inn is the best I can do for refuge. But there wasn’t anywhere else to go except to a clinic. And I’m not ready for that.

The problem isn’t that I’ve hit rock bottom. The problem is that I haven’t.

A few hours ago I turned on my laptop and played poker for about an hour and a half. Thanks to four miracle 3s, I finished ahead. (It was terrific: a cocky guy named Element Lad thought he had a sure winner with a club flush; while he gloated, I quietly showed him my quad 3s . . . he was crushed.) Then I saw Wolverine Mommy log on and joined her at her table. “Guess where I am?” I IM’ed her. “Where?” she said. “In Purgatory,” I told her, knowing she wouldn’t believe me, “just a few miles away at the Purgatory Inn!” She said, “No way . . . you’re kidding me,” and I said: “Wolve, I swear to God I’m really, really here. Any way you could come over soon?” She won $300 with two Jacks and, after I swore on my parents’ graves I was actually here, she told me: “Okay, I think I can be there at 6 but this better not be a prank.”

There’s a knock on the door now . . . it could either be the good-natured Sikh proprietor, who has suddenly remembered he owns and operates a motel, or Norman Bates. Or it could be . . .

“It’s Wolve!” I hear from outside.

I turn off the TV, get up, open the door. I see that she has bright red shoulder-length hair and is wearing a navy goose-down parka and Timberland boots. She’s about thirty pounds overweight, and, no, she’s not Miss Upper Peninsula but then I’m no Mr. Teaneck, New Jersey, either.

“I can’t believe this!” she says, shaking her head of all its disbelief and snow. “You’re really you?”

After I assure her that I can’t help but be me, I bid her in with a gentlemanly wave of my arm.

She dances a little jig to shake loose the snow from her shoes and pants, and I close the door. Hours and hours online chatting to each other, of winning and losing money to each other, and finally we meet.

“I can’t believe this, Chip!”

“Me neither.”

After a minute of nice-to-finally-meet you pleasantries she sits on the bed and I ask, “So, did you tell your husband you were visiting me?”

“Uh, no. He wouldn’t understand.”

It isn’t hard to see that she also doesn’t understand. And I don’t know if I do either.

“He doesn’t,” she says, “get our whole world. He just likes it that I win sometimes.”

I tell her that Wifey has thrown me out of the house, although I don’t tell her why, and that I had no place to go and so I came here. To no place.

She looks at me and I look away. What am I doing here, she’s probably thinking. I know for a fact that I didn’t come all the way here to be a cad, and I’m pretty sure she hasn’t come to the motel tonight to be an adulteress and has come only as a friend. But still, it’s awfully cold out there.

The wind wails and the motel’s walls and floorboards shudder when I hand her my two novels, Plague Boy and Love: A Horror Story, neither of which I am able to think about without being overwhelmed with pride, despair, bewilderment, and rage.

She examines the books, reads my brief inscriptions to her, and starts to cry—I’ve had some negative reactions to my work, but nothing quite like this—then dabs at her eyes with her huge purple faux-shearling mittens.

“I’m really miserable, Chip Zero,” she whimpers. “You have no idea.”

“But I’m here,” I tell her.

She looks up at me . . . her big blue eyes are her best feature, other than her chest. Many times over the course of the last year she’s told me how lonely she is, and right now, in the same way that some statues are meant to personify Perfect Beauty, Total Victory, or Absolute Piety, this woman represents Abject Loneliness.

“Are you going to leave soon? Any idea how long you’ll stay?”

I tell her I have no return ticket and no plans to either go or stay. “Right now I may be the world’s wealthiest homeless person,” I say.

I join her on the edge of the bed, which sags, exhales, and nearly gives way when I sit. You’d think that beds in motels and hotels in the American Heartland would better tolerate the heft of large people.

“Please stay for a while, Frank,” she says. “It would be nice.”

It surprises me for a second, her using my real name. Hardly anyone does anymore.

I lie and say, “I don’t want to go,” and as soon as I hear myself say it, I realize it might not be a lie at all. Maybe, I think, I’ll stay here for a week or two. Or three. It’s barren, it’s freezing, it’s on the outer­most edge of nowhere, but it’s certainly endurable. And right now in my life, “endurable” doesn’t sound so bad. I also think: I hope Cynthia doesn’t ever find out about this!

She takes off her mittens—one drops to the dismal mint-colored carpet—and holds out a hand and I take it. I expect it to be ice cold but it’s very warm.

I can stay here in this frozen-over, snow-domed limbo and start writing again. Yes, that’s what I’ll do! I’ll write! And maybe, just maybe, my wife will take me back! There’s hope!

She squeezes my hand and says, “NH.”

“Huh?”

“NH, Chip.”

Ah. I get it now. Nice hand.

I put my arm around her puffy North Face coat. She rests her head on my shoulder and I see a warped, dark gray reflection of us in the TV screen. What are we doing, I wonder, the four of us?

“You have no idea,” she says, “how lonely I am. There’s no . . .” She stops to compose her thoughts. “I really love my husband, my kids are the most precious things to me in the world . . . but none of this is any fun.”

I squeeze her shoulder tighter and tell her everything will be all right. More than anything I wish I were sitting next to my wife, on my couch, in my apartment.

“Where does your husband think you are now?”

“At the Kohl’s.”

For a second, before I realize what she means, I imagine Wolverine Mommy warming her hands over a pile of glowing coals in the evening blizzard.

She looks at her watch and says, “I need to be getting back” and then puts her purple mittens back on. They’re as big as lion paws. She really does have a nice face, sort of like Ellen Burstyn in her heyday but with a few extra pounds.

She wraps her goose-down arms around my neck and we hug for a half a minute and when we separate her face is quite flushed. No, it can’t go any further than this. A hug or two. A kiss on the cheek. That’s it. Anything more would be nuts.

I close the door and hear a car drive off, crunching through the choppy sea of snow.

This trip to Michigan—the plane fare, the car rental, the gas, the motel—is costing me about nine hundred dollars. If I stay here for a week or so, I’ll be able to afford it. Easily.

All I have to do is log on and play a few hands. That’ll take care of it.

Because, despite all my recent losses, somehow I still have to believe I’m a winner.



2

A Long Out

This journey of starts, stops, victory, loss, and reshuffles began innocently enough last March in Las Vegas at the Luxor hotel. Had I not been exactly where I was when I was, doing exactly what I was doing, perhaps I would not be here in lonely, frigid Purgatory, one year later.

I was with Wifey, our bellies full of mediocre, overpriced Vegas food—cooked by a famed New York chef who wasn’t anywhere within two thousand miles of the place—leaning over a ten-buck-minimum craps table. To my left stood Wifey—Second Gunman, my poker buddy, was the first to call Cynthia that—ever so slightly spilling out of a tight red silk cheongsam. The dress, bought only hours before on a whim, featured a long trickle of gold dahlias falling gracefully down the right side.

The stranger immediately to my right, a male about thirty years old, said, “Hey, you know who you look a lot like?”

Is there a chance, I wondered for an instant, that this guy actually recognizes me from the black and white portrait on the backs of my two novels? That would be impossible for three reasons: hardly anyone remembers author photos, hardly anyone bought my two novels, and there were no author photos to begin with.

“I have no idea,” I answered. “Who?”

But he was talking to Cynthia, not me. He elbowed his buddy, who stood on his right, and said, “Richie, who’s she look like to you?”

Richie examined, unlecherously, Wifey’s long, wavy black hair, tight Asian garment, and hint of sun-bronzed cleavage and said, “No idea. Who?”

“The Dragon Lady on the Poker Galaxy site!”

“You’re right,” Richie told him.

Cynthia and I looked at each other and shrugged. I had no idea what they were talking about.

“Who?” I asked as the dice came up a 7. “What Dragon Lady?”

There was a collective groan, chips were gathered, the dice changed hands, and I plunked a few red chips from my stack onto the pass line. I was still up over $300.

The two men—salesmen of some sort, most likely—told me there was a site called Pokergalaxy.com (aka the Galaxy) and on this site there were “characters” (or avatars): you logged on, went to a poker table, and became a character for the duration of the game, until you left or changed avatars. One of the characters, Richie said, was a foxy Asian woman in a red silk dress.

“People play for real money on this site?” I asked them. So innocent.

“Oh, it’s real all right,” the one to my right said. “Believe me, it’s real.”

“You can check it out,” Wifey chimed in to me, “back in the hotel room.”

That would be easy to do. I’d brought a laptop to write a book on, I’d brought a pad and pens and index cards to make notes for this book. I’d brought everything but a successful career, any trace of a readership, an idea for another book, or the will to ever write another one. (One thing gamblers, writers, aging athletes, and repeat victims of adultery must be able to admit to themselves: I know when I’m licked.) So for the last few days, while Wifey was working at the Convention Center at the Venetian (she’s head of ad sales at Soles, a footwear trade publication), I’d been relaxing by one of the Bellagio pools, drinking Coronas, eating lousy hot dogs, watching women jiggle in swimsuits, and cursing: cursing my (possibly former) agent Clint Reno; cursing my (definitely) former publisher; cursing the Times and Time magazine and The Boston Globe and readers the world over, except for England, where I am, for some reason, understood and appreciated. (Yeah, I know: so are Benny Hill, Robbie Williams, and cricket.) It was an unusually torrid March, even for the Nevada desert, and, after three Coronas and gazing at women in bikinis rubbing SPF 2 all over themselves, it begged the question: Is global warming really so bad? Every day I’d log on to my e-mail, hoping there would be a message from the Reno Brothers Literary Agency—I hadn’t heard a peep out of Clint for three months—telling me he’d sold Dead on Arrival, the book I’d turned over to him the previous December, to a publisher.

There was no such e-mail.

When Cynthia and I returned to our hotel room from the Luxor, I immediately went to Pokergalaxy.com. Having never been there before, it took a few minutes to navigate the site. I had to register and do this and that and, in a way, it was like becoming a citizen of a new country. But finally I made it to a poker table and saw . . .

“This must be her,” I said to Wifey. “Take a look.”

I was sitting on the corner of the bed and she peered over my shoulder, her long earring tickling the hair on the back of my neck.

“I guess,” Cynthia said, “you could say she looks like me.”

Sure enough, a sultry Asian woman in a tight red cheongsam was sitting at a table and playing cards. Although my wife is not remotely Asian, there was a resemblance. But my gaze drifted to the player sitting next to her: a portly dude in a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt with a peroxide-blond Caesar haircut and a pair of round sunglasses tinted a very hip rose pink. I watched this character, the Big Man, as he confidently made his moves, his actions controlled by some stranger in Dubai or Dublin or Durbin or Des Moines. It was No-Limit Texas Hold’em and the Big Man just sat there coolly. . . . There was no movement other than crude jump cuts and no sound other than the clacking of chips and the crisp snap of playing cards.

He won seven hundred dollars with two 2s. Real money.

From out of my mouth there slipped an elongated curious Hmmm . . .



The day after Wifey and I got back to New York from Las Vegas, I went into my study and logged on to the Poker Galaxy again and nosed my way around cautiously. There were dozens of places on the site to go to and, I saw, 30,000 other people were logged on at the same time I was. Alongside their handles or nicks (their online nicknames) you could see where they were calling in from: Sydney, Singapore, Cairo, Paris, Kiev, Baghdad, Seattle, Quito. Time zones didn’t matter here. It was midnight in Manhattan but some burly yobbo waking up late in Perth and chugging a Fosters for breakfast could get a few hands in against a tea-sipping spinster in Surrey who was just trying to win a few quid before hitting the hay.

In Vegas I had created my nick: Chip Zero. It was the first thing that came to me.

Now I went to a play-money table. Although there were no instructions on how to raise, check, fold, etc., it was easier than putting a round peg in a round hole. You simply had to move the cursor to the correct box and click—a four-year-old could have figured it out. The dollar amount rose when you clicked RAISE, your avatar (I chose the Big Man) folded when you clicked FOLD. It was easy, all too easy.

The game was Pot Limit Hold’em and I watched from the sideline, not taking part. After a while I clicked PLAY and there I was, wired in to all corners of the gambling globe.

The low blind, I got a 6 and a King for my pocket cards. Not good, not terrible. There were three others at the table, and the flop came up 10, Jack, Queen. The betting began and, even though it wasn’t real money, my hands quickly got clammy. After a raise and a few calls, the pot rose. I stayed in with nothing but a possible straight. The turn came up another 6, giving me a weak pair. Everyone was passing—they didn’t have much either, it was easy to surmise. Or they might be bluffing; someone might have the straight or two or three Jacks or Queens and be slow-playing me, sucking me in. But what did I care?: It was play-dough, not even as tangible as Monopoly money.

The river card was a 6. I had 6-6-6.

I raised. One person folded, the other called. One of them reraised and I saw it. The thought that there were two pocket Queens lying in wait for me flashed across my mind and my hands got colder, clammier. Then it was time to show the cards.

I won. Some man (I assume it was a man . . . online, you can never really tell anything) from Topeka named Topeka Tim had two Queens. But my devilish trips had bettered him.

I won over seven hundred bucks in that first hand.

The money was fake, but the pride, shock and 5,000-volt thrill were not.

“That was just too damn easy,” I said to Wifey sometime later that day.



Other than poker, I’ve never excelled at anything. And it’s not for lack of trying.

I wanted to be professional athlete. That was Plan A. If that didn’t work, then I would, I thought, become a great artist. That was Plan B.

But I was never good at sports. To observe me playing basketball is to watch a great unforgivable insult to the game itself, and generations of Naismiths have spun in their graves whenever I lofted up an air ball from three feet, dribbled the ball off a shin (my own or an opponent’s), or jammed an elbow into the temple of the man I was putatively guarding. I am still a Teaneck playground legend of sorts for not being good at it but for never giving up. Five on five games, three on three, one on one—I played them all, and I’ve shot hoops by myself a thousand times. I tried so hard but never got good, and it became as common a sight in the neighborhood as the Mr. Softee truck rolling down the street in summer, me slumping my way home from basketball courts and playgrounds, baffled, sweaty, and thoroughly distraught.

I was a third-string wide receiver on my high school football team but never got into a game and quit the team in my senior year to dedicate myself to smoking pot and chasing stoner skirt. In my twenties I played on a Garment Center softball team and once hit a ball high over the left field fence . . . but I stood at home plate too long admiring my majestic wallop and was called out at second base. It ended up just being a long out. At summer camp I was on the B team in soccer and swimming. I was lousy at golf, tennis, and ice-skating and have never won one single game of chess. I was like a clumsy third baseman who lets the ball go between his legs every time it’s hit to him, in that I never picked up the signals that the Gods of Success were sending me: some people, no matter how hard they want something and no matter how much they work at it, will forever be relegated to life’s B team. Where we belong.

A perennial mediocre student, as early as my teens I found myself staring at the ceiling and wondering: Is it really asking so much to be good at something? At anything?

When I finally came to accept that I wasn’t ever going to be a professional athlete I switched over to Plan B. My major in college had been Art History. The tests were easy, most of the students in the classes were girls, and I loved what I was studying.

So two years after graduating I flew to Paris with all my savings and found a run-down apartment in a seedy section of town and moved in. Never having studied drawing or painting, I was going to teach myself from the ground up. I would be a naïf. If I led a miserably Spartan life, which I did, I had enough money to live there for a year. There’d be no numbered ducks at Tour Argent for me, nor any Le Big Macs; my lone extravagance would be the International Herald Tribune every day and a whore on Rue St. Denis once every two months.

I needed to go to a place where I knew no one, had not one distraction, could barely get by with the language. The starving Artist-in-Paris fantasy may seem hackneyed, but perhaps there is something to that fantasy after all, which is how it became so hackneyed. To make matters even more stereotypical, I was fleeing a scarring breakup with Diane, my college girlfriend, whom I’d caught in bed one day snatching away my little brother’s virginity. I had to go someplace far away and immerse myself in something so I’d stop thinking about her.

Once there, I created a serviceable atelier out of my living room and soon the living room ceased to exist as such: it was a windowed box containing rolls of canvas, an easel, tubes of paint everywhere, brushes and pastels on the floor, and me. There was no phone, TV, or radio. Once a month I made the long walk over to the American Express on Rue Scribe to get mail.

Weeks passed without my saying a word to anyone, other than “Un vin blanche, s’il vous plaît” to a bartender. The prostitutes on St. Denis cost $40 a throw then, and I painted a nude of one of them, a bulky, crossed-eyed blonde. (I was classy enough to uncross them in the picture.) I’d begin drawing and painting at eight in the morning and some nights I’d paint until 3 a.m. Once I got going, I couldn’t stop. Even when I wanted to, I couldn’t. Looking back, this must have been my first battle with addiction and it was one I didn’t want to lose.

As I worked and struggled, I dreamt ahead several decades. My paintings would hang in museums all over the world and in the homes of the stinking rich, those despised clients of mine who saw my work as investments and not as unique works of unparalleled beauty. I had a house in Maine, a loft in SoHo. In books and monographs, black-and-white photographs of the much-younger me in Paris ran alongside the paintings I was executing at the time. In these photos my paintings can be seen hanging on the dimly lit wall and propped up on the floor behind me. My sad, lonely eyes stare out and I am haggard and hungry, my jeans and sweatshirt are splattered with paint, and a cigarette dangles from my hand . . . even though I’ve never smoked.

Needless to say, no such picture was ever taken.

The time flew by and I wanted to slow it down just so I could paint more. I would sit down at my easel and focus in on the work at hand, focusing as I’d never focused on anything in the past, and before I knew it, ten hours had elapsed. If anyone had been there to ask me how much time had gone by, I probably would have said ten minutes.

It may have been the greatest time of my entire life.

But it was time that went right down the drain. It became Zero Time, a year of my life that just did not happen. Because I wasn’t any good. I made no progress at all and was just as bad on Day 350 as I was on Day 1. I denied my lack of ability every day and every minute, I denied it even as my arm, wrist, and back ached from painting twelve hours straight. I denied it when I hung my completed canvases on the walls of my Parisian apartment and stood back to take them in. I denied it as I sketched at two in the morning, did watercolors at noon, and gouache and Conté crayon at nine at night. I denied it right up to the moment when I had only enough money left to make it to the airport and for my plane ticket home.

There was no Plan C, which is how I wound up becoming me.



Taking into consideration the myriad items on List A, which contains those things I’m not good at (sports, painting, carpentry, anything musical, cooking, being charming at parties, anything of a financial nature, crosswords, computer know-how, conversing about indie films and alt rock bands), and the items on List B, which contains those things I am good at (writing novels that don’t sell and screenplays that never get filmed and plays that never get produced, playing poker, not doing volunteer work), you would think that List A would feel sorry for List B and perhaps send a couple of things over just to boost morale. Sort of like a talent mercy fuck. But List A is merciless, takes no prisoners, brooks no quarter, and the end result is I might very well be a no-talent bum of the first order.

So that was my life the day I won that first hand of fake money: I had two books under my belt, and while they had not sold well, one (Plague Boy) had been optioned by Hollywood (the red-hot director Pacer Burton was slated to direct). I’d written a third novel but its fate was unknown and possibly extremely dire. On the plus side, I had a great job. My wife and I had enjoyed seven truly wonderful years of a yin-yang marriage. However, we had been married for ten, and lately (ever since my books began withering on bookstore shelves), my irritable and shabby New Jersey yin had been clashing with her carefree and classy Park Avenue yang. Because I could no longer bring myself to start another book and because I had so much free time on my hands, the stage was set for me to become a semiprofessional poker player.

At least I was doing something I was good at.

I refused to let all the lights go out.



A week or so after I got back from Vegas, I opened up, with Wifey’s approval, a separate account at my bank and put a thousand dollars in it. When I got home from work one day I went into the Galaxy and set the whole thing up, linking the new account to the site. In the eyes of over 50,000 winners and losers around the world, I was now Chip Zero, Man of a Thousand Dollars. I would either grow my stake into two or three thousand or fritter it away in a week. If it turned out to be the latter, then so be it. I’d have learned my lesson.

Things would be different now: I wasn’t gambling with play money. Play money was Whiffleball; this was hardball. Of course, I didn’t have to play for real money—I could shuttle between the play tables and the real ones, hone my skills in the former to unleash them in the latter.

Cynthia hadn’t come home yet, and after ten hands with the fake stuff, I made the move into Real Money World. I went to a table in “Low” with five- and ten-dollar blinds; my hands were ice-cold and my armpits were like sponges. As is possible on the site, before I took my “seat,” I observed the game and the players for a while. It was not surprising that play here moved slower, that the players deliberated longer: money really does change everything. Th