Tonight’s initial buy-in was four hundred dollars. My initial buy-in would also be my final buy-in. If I lost all my chips, I would nurse a drink and snack on good bread and olives and watch the game without the distraction of my own play.
The first hands played out with no one betting large and nothing remarkable at the table. Lots of calling, lots of folding. Then I got lucky on a turn card with a third queen and raised to come away with a nice pot of chips. Whenever the deal came around to Ace, I gave him no more than a casual glance. But unless I missed something, he was playing it straight.
Who was the best player at the table? Who was the best bluff? I didn’t know. I was faring better than Ellen, whose chips were steadily dwindling. Ethan had fallen behind, too. The rest of us were all slightly ahead of where we’d started.
After about an hour, things got interesting. It was Ethan’s deal, and Ace’s cut. But Ace had gotten up to replenish his drink. When Ethan finished shuffling and set the deck down for Ace to cut, Ace quickly stepped over to the card table, holding his glass with ice in it. Instead of cutting the cards, he simply tapped the top of the deck and went back to making his drink.
It was very beautiful, what had just occurred, and I smiled inwardly and thought: So maybe you are an ace after all.
The key to taking Carlo Desoto’s money, I now understood, was Ethan’s hospitality. Ethan was a retailer with a desire to be a magnanimous host. Ace forgoes the cut, opting for a quick tap instead, under the guise of wanting to finish making his drink before the next hand starts. He’s simply keeping the game moving along. Plus, forgoing the cut sends a subtle message of goodwill. We’re all friends here, it implies. There’s no need for these anti-cheating formalities.
It all happened so quickly and subtly, this deft bit of misdirection, that I could have imagined it. Yet the following hands proved me right. On my deal, I set the deck to my right, and Ethan, probably without even thinking about it, followed the pattern established by Ace. No cut—just a tap. The following hand, when it was my turn to cut, I continued the pattern.
And just like that—presto!—we had become a poker table where nobody was cutting the cards any longer. Which meant that next time Ace had the deal, he could control a couple of choice cards to wherever he wanted in the deck.
Three hands later, as he started to gather the cards from the table, I awaited the distraction I knew had to be coming.
“So Ethan,” Ace said, “what exactly is sourdough anyway?”
Right on cue.
And with all eyes but mine now on our host, who was more than glad to hold forth about his bread-baking secrets, I watched Ace shuffle the two black aces from the previous hand straight to the bottom of the deck. The move was so unsubtle, it was barely a move at all. He more or less just stuck the cards where he wanted them. Then he did a couple of overhand cuts and riffle shuffles that left the bottom cards in place. He set the deck on the table to his right, never once looking at Carlo, whose turn it was to cut.
Carlo was intently listening to the merits of using filtered water to feed the sourdough starter. He tapped the deck.
Ace picked it up again with his right hand and transferred it to his left. As he prepared to deal, his left index and middle fingers curled around the front of the deck.
Two fingers in front?
Oh, Ace, I thought. How could you?
I was appalled that he would hold the deck this way. His two fingers were out front to reduce friction on the bottom card, but there was no reason to use this grip unless you were bottom dealing. Ace was holding up a giant sign that read: “I’m going to bottom deal now!”
Yet no one seemed to notice. They were learning about sourdough. Did people really put up their hard-earned dollars only to be this inattentive to the game?
“… the key is to not overwhelm,” Ethan was saying. “If you wait for peak rise, you’ll overwhelm the palate, so I never wait for peak rise. That’s my trick. Plus the yeast. You’d be surprised how many kinds of yeasts there are. But when we’re talking sourdough …”
Ace started dealing: Card to Ethan. Card to me. Card to Ellen. Card to Carlo. Card to himself.
The second disappointment overshadowed the first. Watching Ace deal himself his first card, I saw my Men’s Quarterly article going up in smoke. I had traveled to Atlantic City, put hundreds of miles on my decrepit car, and invested way too much money, and all for nothing.
Ace dealt a second card to Ethan, me, Ellen, Carlo, himself.
I could have written an entire book on the flaws in Ace’s bottom deal. Here would be the chapter titles:
—His bottom-dealt cards made a noticeable scraping sound coming off the deck
—The bottom half of the deck wedged outward
—His left wrist visibly tightened whenever he dealt himself a card
—His deal to himself was a beat slower than his deal to everyone else
—Two fucking fingers stuck out from the front of the deck!
Fact was, I was witnessing one of the worst displays of card manipulation of my not-so-brief career. Bottom dealing wasn’t even that hard. If there was one rule of legerdemain worth abiding, it was that you never do a move in public until it’s ready. And Ace? Not ready. And this was his livelihood? Maybe Brock McKnight was right. Maybe I had chosen the wrong career.
It took chutzpah for Ace to sit down at the poker table with
