Maggie interrupted. “Jack, I don’t think we need to quiz Ava. Why don’t you start by explaining to her what happened.”
She could hear him breathe, and in the sound she felt his tension. A bottle cap popped. “Have one for me,” Maggie said.
“I’ve been drinking every day for the past couple of months. I need to stop,” he said.
“Talk to me,” Ava said, pulling out her notebook. “But before you do, please understand that I have only the most rudimentary knowledge of poker.”
“I’m a pro,” Maynard began. “I’ve been playing poker for a living for the past five years, mainly online. I was putting in a minimum of eight hours a day, five days a week.”
“You use the past tense,” Ava said.
“I’m giving it a break — the losses crippled me. I need to rebuild my self-confidence, and my bankroll.”
“Where did you play?”
“On several sites, but in the past year I played primarily at The River. There was always good high-stakes action there.”
“Maggie mentioned the amount of money her father gambled. Is that what you mean by high stakes?”
“Yeah. There were about fifty of us who played for those kinds of stakes on a regular basis. And then of course people were always coming and going, testing their talent at a higher level. Those were the ones we usually took to the cleaners.”
“‘Talent’?”
“It isn’t just a game of luck when you’re playing poker for that kind of money. Maybe in the short term luck will hold, but over the long haul your ability to read people — to understand who you’re playing against and what their tendencies and habits are — sometimes matters more than the cards you’re dealt. And then there’s the mathematical element, which is one of my strong points. I can get into it if you want, but it gets complicated.”
“No, I believe you. The thing is, if talent prevails, how did you and your friends lose all that money? Did you run into someone more talented?”
“No fucking way,” he said, his voice rising.
“Is that ego talking?”
“No fucking way.”
“So who was winning when you were losing?”
“There were two of them. Their poker names were Buckshot and Kaybar. They never played together at the same table, but we never thought that was strange until we started looking back. We also never found out their real identities, which is also strange, because ninety-five percent of the guys knew each other.”
“Just those two were winning?”
“No, but they were by far the main beneficiaries of our supposed bad run.”
“Maggie tells me you believe you were cheated.”
“I’m certain of it.”
“How can you be so sure?” She heard paper rustling in the background. “Is there someone there with you?” she asked.
“No, I’m alone. I’m just going through my notes.”
“So, again, how can you be so sure?”
“I’m a math grad and so is Felix Hunter, who played under the name Felix the Cat. Like I said before, mathematics plays into this, and understanding the basic math of no-limit poker is fundamental to playing well. I mean, there are odds attached to every hand, risks attached to every bet, but let me say that the way we lost ran completely counter to the laws of probability.
“At first I wrote off my losses as just a run of very bad luck. It doesn’t matter how good you are — everyone hits bad streaks, and I thought I was just going through a particularly long one. But when it continued and I kept losing to those same two guys, I started to think that maybe it had nothing to do with luck. I talked to Felix about it first, and he felt the same way. So we backtracked. We traced the hands we had played over the past few months. When you look at just one hand, it doesn’t mean a thing; two aces can lose to a two and four at any given time, and even a number of losses like that can be rationalized. But when we looked at literally thousands of hands, we saw a very clear pattern.”
“You have all those hands on record?”
“Of course. All the hands are displayed after they’re finished, and I have software that stores and files them by date and time. I mean, this is my job, the way I earn my living — I apply myself to it. Going back and studying how you played a hand or how you played against a certain individual, that’s the only way you can improve. So, yeah, I had the hands, and so did Felix.”
“So what did you find?”
“We were cheated.”
“How?”
“We think — no, we’re convinced — that they could see everyone’s hole cards.”
“The two cards turned face down?”
“Yeah. We think they could see all the cards on the table.”
“And what makes you think that?”
“I’ll try to keep it simple,” he said. “Basically, they knew exactly when to bet heavy and, just as important, they always seemed to know when to fold. And bluffing either of them — well, it was impossible. It didn’t matter how much money you bet, they always called and they always won. I’m looking at a hand I lost more than a hundred thousand dollars on. I had an ace of clubs and the king of hearts, a great starting hand. The flop was the three of spades and an eight and nine of hearts. I raised. Buckshot called me. On the turn, the fourth card was a ten of hearts. So now there was a possibility on the board of a straight and a flush. I raised again. He called. The river card was the two of clubs, which didn’t change anything. There was fifty thousand dollars in the pot; I bet another fifty. It was a huge bet even for a bluff. He had to give me credit for having a straight or a flush, or at the very least a high pair or even two pair. He called, and when his cards were exposed, he was holding the three of diamonds and the six of spades.
“He won a hundred thousand dollars with a pair of threes. Do you have any idea how unlikely that is? He called a fifty-thousand-dollar bet with garbage, and into a board that nearly every poker player in the world would think had him beat. And let me tell you, it wasn’t the only time.”
“Yes, I can see the improbability of it,” Ava said.
“Another thing Felix picked up on was the number of hands they played. It was an inordinately large percentage, and it stuck to a pattern. They seemed to want to see just about every flop, the way Buckshot did with the three and six that beat me. They played rags — cards such as a deuce and seven of different suits, the very worst starting hand in poker — all the time. They’d call the opening bet and even call raises so they could see the flop. In reality, your opening two cards don’t mean much until the next three cards are flopped and your hand starts to take shape, but there are hands like the deuce and seven that are so bad statistically that hardly anyone ever plays them. These guys were playing them all the time, and naturally, when they got lucky, they cashed in in a big way because the other players never gave them credit for starting with cards that bad.
“When Felix pointed that out to me, I went over the data myself and found something else. Buckshot and Kaybar seemed to fold before the flop every time someone else had a monster opening hand — a hand such as two aces or two kings, which is really difficult to beat. And what I also noticed was that they folded against those hands even when the other player didn’t raise before the flop. We call that slow playing. When you have a big hand and you want to maximize it, you bet small to avoid scaring off the other players. Both Felix and I did that often enough. The thing is, when we looked at the numbers, guess what?”
“I have no idea.”
“I had pocket aces or kings more than eighty times during that losing stretch. Felix had them more than a hundred times. On nearly every single occasion, those guys folded before the flop. It didn’t matter how little or how much we bet, they folded. Can you imagine, statistically, what an anomaly that is? It’s fucking impossible that they’d fold that many hands. They had to be seeing our fucking hole cards. There isn’t any other explanation.”
Ava could feel Maggie’s eyes on her. “Jack, if you’re so certain about this, why haven’t you done anything about it?”
“I tried.”
