was nearly as long as that for Lakers season tickets. She did have some seats, however, at the 2-4 tables upstairs.
On a busy night, sometimes you’ll get stuck in the overflow, a partitioned conference room on loan from the adjacent Crowne Plaza Hotel. It could have been used earlier that week for a home-equity loan officer convention, or maybe a really sad low-budget wedding. But now it was twenty tables of cheap poker, with decent coffee and tea service and complimentary plates of Chinese food on the hour. I had a five-minute wait, and then they sat me down, throbbing toe and all.
I had a pretty good night too, until the Russian showed up.
At 11 p.m., I found myself up a hundred, maybe 140 bucks. That represented a good night for me, even though I would have had to work a seventy-hour week before it started to resemble anything close to the equivalent of a decent living. Still, I’d drawn the perfect table mix of sour middle-aged Korean ladies, old dudes who bore the perfume and hairstyle of late-era William S. Burroughs, a couple of Persian frat boys from UCLA, and a pockmarked
The Russian sat down three players to my left. I call him Russian, though he easily could have been Ukrainian, or maybe from Georgia, something post-Soviet breakup, vaguely Caucasian. I never got a chance to ask. Regardless, he wore a red two-piece tracksuit and silver-tinted sunglasses, and a big gold chain with a Mercedes medallion around his neck. His tight-trimmed beard made him look particularly ridiculous, since he obviously got his fashion tips from a mid-’90s hip-hop magazine. He slapped down double what he needed to buy into the first hand. This, I knew, was a sure sign of a fast player; you should never, ever gamble until you understand your odds.
The dealer sent me a jack-ten, suited, worth playing if you’re near the button, which I was. The Russian, who was way out of position, raised when it came to him, probably not surprising given his brazen opening bet. I called. The flop showed a king and queen, off-suit. This was a great straight draw for me. Before I could raise, though, the Russian beat me to it, immediately folding the other two players who remained. I re-raised. He saw me, and raised me again. I called.
A nine came on the turn. My odds at winning stood at about ninety-seven percent. Yet still he raised me. And again. And then twice again on the river. He turned over his cards to reveal pocket threes. I sucked up his chips like a coin reclamation machine at the supermarket.
“Lucky man, Dodger,” he said to me, apparently referring to the Dodgers cap I always wear to Commerce, to augment my chosen posture of regular guy.
“Not so lucky,” I said. “Unlike some people, I just know what I’m doing.”
The other players at the table moaned and shifted a little. This wasn’t what they wanted to hear. But it was undeniable.
“We’ll see,” the Russian said.
I smelled profit in that conference room. My watch showed 11:15. One more hour, I told myself. I’ll milk this cow, and then it’s off to bed.
By 1 a.m., I was up several hundred bucks, no mean feat at a low-stakes table. But the Russian knew no play other than the check-raise. He may have folded one in ten openers. Other players tried to take advantage, but I had them read as well. Finally, the old dude to my right got up, cracked his bones, and mumbled off into the sooty night. The Russian immediately stood up and plunked himself in the chair.
“Now I will show you, Dodger,” he said. “Now we will play poker.”
And poker I did. His aggressive play dug him deeper and deeper holes. He did win a few hands, getting me to fold when I had bupkus. But he folded nothing himself, and I just kept adding plastic trays. By 2:30, I had nearly a thousand bucks in front of me. Karen had been buzzing my cell phone since midnight, and at one point left me a text message saying,
I stood up, taking my trays with me, sliding the dealer, another anonymous, semi-attractive Filipina, a ten- dollar chip.
“Where you going, Dodger?” said the Russian.
“I’ve got a big meeting tomorrow.”
“So when do I get my money back?”
“Ain’t your money anymore,” I said, and the table exploded with laughter.
As I turned away, I didn’t see the Russian seethe, and I was too busy making a joke to the cashier about unmarked bills to notice him picking up the phone. Maybe if I’d skipped going to the can, I would have made it home that night.
I was making my way past the plaster sphinxes when a 310-pound side of Slavic beef slid into my purview.
“You took boss’s money tonight,” he said. “And boss doesn’t like to lose at poker.”
Somehow I guessed the identity of his boss, and tried to pull together an instant plan of escape in my mind. I mumbled, “Sorry,” and turned on my heels, angling toward where I thought a security guard might be seated. Instead, I whirled into another side of beef. Briefly, I felt my arms getting pinned behind me, and then something heavy on my head. A vague sensation of green digital numbers, blinking in random succession, passed before my eyes, and then I said goodbye to consciousness.
I woke with John Henry pounding rocks inside my head and the impression of dusty sunlight on my eyelids. A tentative opening revealed that I was in a hotel room, and a whiff indicated that smoking was allowed. Instinctively, I felt for my wallet. It was there, but pretty thin. My cell phone was also still with me, in my front jeans pocket. I removed it to find it out of juice. I turned my head. The clock beside the bed read 10:45 a.m. Less than five hours away from my meeting.
I sat up, and then stood, and found that the pounding wasn’t bad enough to prevent me from walking, or from taking a piss. In fact, the mirror showed me not looking any worse than usual, even a little better. Eight hours of sleep was eight hours, even if it was artificially induced. The sound of bad hotel porn was coming from beyond the attaching door. I opened it.
The Russian sat with six other guys, placidly watching some girl-on-girl action. Cigar smoke suffused the room like toxic waste. A poker table sat by the window, silently waiting to play its part. He turned to regard me.
“Our princess has awoken,” he said.
“Can I leave now?” I asked. “My wife is worried about me. You’ve proven your point, whatever that is.”
“We’ve got some poker to play,” he said.
“Haven’t we played enough?” I asked.
“Let me explain something to you,” he said. “I don’t lose. Ever. And especially not to guys like you.”
“But you did lose.”
One of his cronies stood, walked over to me, and smacked me across the mouth, drawing a little bit of blood from my lower lip.
“The game isn’t over yet,” said the Russian. “You took $1,000 from me, and I intend to win it back.”
He explained the rules to me. We’d each get $500 worth of chips, though my chips were, essentially, air. He got to keep the money, which was rightfully his. If I won his chips, I got to go home. If he won mine, he got to shoot me in the face. Those were higher stakes than usual, and I started to sweat.
A knock came at the door. It was a Filipina, not surprisingly, pushing a cart stacked with orange juice, eggs, and smoked salmon. If these guys were thugs, at least they were generous with the buffet. The Filipina would also, the Russian informed me, serve as our dealer for the day.
“But first,” he said, “we eat.”
I figured it wouldn’t help me to say that I was in a hurry, so I dug in. By the time we were done eating, it was nearly noon. As the first hand was dealt, I felt more jittery at the table than ever before. His cronies were playing with us, but it was obvious from the beginning that they were decoys, there to win small pots that neither the Russian nor I had a shot at; it was a two-player game, with props.
