Black Magic

God may play dice with the universe, despite Einstein's last hope, but serious gamblers, scorning metaphysical crapshoots and the casino's house edge, prefer no-limit Texas hold'em. Each hold'em session comprises a miniature global economy laid out on a baize oval table. Taking part satisfies not only our atavistic desire to play but our more modern urge to keep score. As Jack Binion, the Texas-born host of the World Series of Poker, told the English poet A. Alvarez back in the heyday of the Cold War: "In the free enterprise system, you have to assume that each guy is the best judge of what he does with his own money... So if a guy wants to bet twenty or thirty thousand dollars in a poker game, that is his privilege. Society might consider it bad judgment, but if that is what he wants to do, you can't fault him for it. That's America." A skeptical Alvarez commented: "That, too, is Las Vegas-the only place on earth where they justify gambling as a form of patriotism."

The fact, however, is that financial markets around the planet continue to authorize gambling for vastly higher stakes, and national economies founder or flourish with the net results. And what better metaphor for democratic free-market risktaking than poker? Like national security advisors or stem-cell research teams, poker players make educated guesses under radically uncertain conditions. That a few of them wind up with most of the chips is what makes the game terrifying, ugly and beautiful. It's what makes it work. As Walter Matthau dryly observed, "The game exemplifies the worst aspects of capitalism that have made our country so great." Because in no sense is poker a socialist or totalitarian enterprise. Instead, the game is a stimulating arena in which money-management, pluck and intelligence combine to determine who will get hacked limb from limb. Wealth gets created, egos deflated, blood spilled. Not for nothing are poker tables shaped like the floor of the Colosseum -the better to concentrate the butchery, the better to observe it up close. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Thumbs up or thumbs down on the river.

No-limit hold'em has also been called black art, requiring players to broadcast and decipher fake tells, master complex (mis)information and amoral psychology, all of it illuminated by bolts of hideous and beneficent fortune. Folding, the thoroughly passive gesture at the heart of strong play, can be understood in religious or spiritual terms-as humble acceptance, for example, of a metaphysical order beyond our comprehension, sometimes known as the shuffle. While to not fold then backdoor a flush on the final card after your all-in opponent fills a bellybuster straight requires voodoo theology and titanium nerves to get your mind around, not logic or math prowess. Thank Shango or Oloddumare as you rake in the pot, or perhaps your lucky stars. As my daughter Bridget has been known to explain rare phenomena: "Whatever whatever, okay?"

Despite poker's nonrational dimension, philosopher John Lukacs was moved to call it "the game closest to the Western conception of life, where life and thought are recognized as intimately combined, where free will prevails over philosophies of fate or of chance, where men are considered moral agents, and where-at least in the short run -the important thing is not what happens but what people think happens." With everyone's hole cards lying facedown on the table, the hand perceived to be the strongest in effect is.

Poker is also a game in which freely willed decisions prevail over class, race or fate, since the cards your opponents believe you are holding makes everything else quite irrelevant. Above all, the game requires each player to account for deceit by the others. "Owing largely to the bluff," writes A. D. Livingston, "poker has influenced our thinking on life, love, business, and even war." Bullfighting, by contrast, better expresses Spain's traditional gaming spirit, as futbol does for Brazil and Go for Japan, just as Dostoevsky argued in The Gambler and elsewhere that "Roulette is a preeminently Russian game." Dostoyevsky believed that go-for-broke betting, whatever the game, was more "poetic" than frostily measuring the odds "like a German."

More recently, the American poet Stephen Dunn observed: "Good high-stakes poker players are neither noble nor greedy. They've sized up their fellow players, know a good deal about probabilities and tendencies, and wish like poets that their most audacious moves be perceived as part of a series of credible gestures." Dunn also points out that, "The great gamblers, and there are not many, don't need anything. They simply wish to prevail. And we know how dangerous people are who don't need anything" As Cool Hand Luke handsomely drawled, "Sometimes nothin's a pretty cool hand."

To feel this dangerous ourselves, even for only a couple of minutes, can be severely intoxicating. It makes both erotic and emotional sense to say that we love it, and sometimes we love it too much. "When I'm rushing on my run / and I feel just like Jesus' son" is Lou Reed's (and, later, Denis Johnson's) blasphemous apotheosis of going too far. Another menacing quality of the rush is to make us want more of it, and getting more makes us want more. At the poker table, this can be good. Feeling both endangered and dangerous, we tiptoe barefoot along the business end of a scalpel and never get sliced, and it quickly becomes possible to imagine that our state of grace never will pass. Players use expressions like "playing my rush" or "having a horseshoe up my ass" to describe surfing a wave of big hands and successful bluffs, and they often report the experience to be more stimulating than amphetamines, barbiturates, alcohol, music or sexual intercourse. Certainly synapses fire at the poker table, and serotonin drips faster-or slower. Electrons and corpuscles rush to the pleasure centers of the cerebral cortex, and others rush lower. We blush. Pink and orange chips and green money, foot-thick wads of it sometimes, flood our burgeoning coffers. To moderate our breathing becomes a pivotal challenge, but surely we're up to it. Right? We haven't renounced all control of ourselves. Far from it, in fact. Dunn defines intoxication as: "That sensation of `fine excess' Keats wanted from poetry, the adjective gracing the noun, keeping it alert." Focus, grace, poetry, black magic, fucking, too-- muchness-the feeling that I am invincible. Even if you kill me I'll come back from the dead, just like Jesus. And if Jesus made love, I'm His son.