Bitterness and Denial
Shut Up and Deal, by Jesse May
I’ve played over 100,000 hands of limit hold’em so far this year. There have been ups, and there have been downs but always Jesse May’s story of a struggling professional player continues to inspire. Shredded nerves and drained emotions are part and parcel of limit hold’em, where everyone, I mean everyone who plays, sees more swings of fortune than even the toughest person should have to deal with. It’s a brutal game.
As May says, “Poker is a combination of skill and luck. People think mastering the skill part is hard, but they’re wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck. That’s philosophy. Understanding luck is philosophy, and there are some people who aren’t ever gonna fade it. That’s what sets poker apart. And that’s what keeps everyone coming back for more.”
Mickey Dane is a streetwise kid playing the high-stakes poker rooms in the mid 1990’s. The book is his story, and the stories of dozens of the low-life and high-rollers he is up against. It’s not an old-fashioned novel in the way that novels used to have beginnings, middles, and ends. After all, poker is not like that, it has no end. You win a hand. Deal the next. Lose it all. Borrow a dime and buy-back in. Life is just one big poker game and money the way of keeping score.
Session after session, the book meanders along, building towards its denouement as the great East Coast blizzard of ‘96 sweeps into Atlantic City. Mickey Dane is left sitting in his chair, stuck almost everything he ever had, with no one interested in playing him any more. But this book is not a bad beat story because when we finally leave Mickey, he understands better than anyone ever before what it’s all about.
bitterness and denial aren’t
realistic ways
to deal
with something that happens again and again
never to know exactly when
but that the only stop is not to play.
but to play
that’s thing.
shut up and deal.
A streetwise poker pro writing poetry? Maybe it’s meaningless. Maybe it is to somebody who hasn’t tilted off a month’s expenses in a hour of madness; to those who haven’t been on the wrong side of the last 18 river cards; to people who don’t know what it’s like, not to crave money, but to crave the bankroll to play that super-loose aggressive high-stakes game going on in the corner, right there.
Those 38 words of the poem are quite simply the best possible expression of the inhumane nature of the game, as well as its attraction, and the only possible credo for those who want to play it.
Buy Shut Up and Deal from amazon.co.uk