The Old Poker Player

TUNICA, Miss., February 25 (UPI) -- Do gamblers lose their gambling muscles?

I was asking Derek Webb, who made his living as a professional poker player for 15 years, whether gamblers, like athletes, have peak years, or whether they can play for their entire lives.

"We talk about that," he said. "I think you tend to hit a wall at the age of 50. You can continue to play, and you can do well, but you start to burn out. You start to move down in class. You have to search for games you can win."

Webb doesn't have to worry about it anymore. After inventing Three Card Poker, one of the hottest new casino games of the past ten years, he's an established games purveyor known to casino managers coast to coast. If you've played Twenty-one-Plus-Three or Two-Two-One, then you've played a casino game owned by Webb.

But others aren't so fortunate. I see them at the Horseshoe Casino, with its famous poker room, the old guys with the pot bellies and the worn leather jackets, still putting in marathon sessions at age 60 and beyond. They usually have a long-suffering wife and hundreds of friends, all poker players, which means of course that they have one or two friends and a lot of people they've traded money with.

The old poker player always strikes me as a lonely guy, even though his loneliness is self-imposed and, if you asked him about it, he would call it freedom. All of them tend to have the same goals: never take a day job, and never ever show anyone your true feelings.

That's why an old gambler can lose, say, $20,000 on a single hand of Hold 'Em, and his most likely reaction--assuming he doesn't simply play the next hand--is to stand up, congratulate the winner, straighten his cuffs, and go to the bar for a little hiatus. Far from drowning his sorrow, he's actually steeling his psyche for the next session.

An old gambler is the same man regardless of whether he's flat broke or a millionaire--and he's probably been both at several times in his life. He reached a point, at 45, or 50, or 55, when it briefly crossed his mind that he should take the winnings from a big pot and use it to set up a retirement fund, or buy a farm, or start a stock portfolio. But the thought passed quickly, and the next day he was back at his favorite table.

Technically, according to the conventional wisdom, the old gambler is an addict. He's the kind of personality the casinos claim they're trying to help with "problem gaming" programs. But the most likely response of a real gambler is, "My only 'problem' is that there aren't enough people putting enough money on the table."

The old poker player can remember specific hands he played in 1972--both winners and losers. He can tell you how the game has changed, but you're not likely to understand him, because he'll be describing changes so subtle that they couldn't be detected by anyone who was not intimately familiar with all the personalities and casinos of the past 40 years.

His storehouse of knowledge is, in fact, so esoteric that it constitutes a one-man library of names, playing habits, physical tics, personality quirks, mathematical combinations, obscure odds on rarely played hands, and a deeply embedded system of "stop" and "go" signs that are relevant only to his own playing style and the good and bad experiences he's had playing against others.

He spends a lifetime building this mental library--and then, piece by piece, it flakes away. A regular player retires or dies. His preferred game becomes too popular, which causes an onrush of gamblers he doesn't have time to scope out in advance. The natural progress of the game causes it to become more and more balanced among the top players, harder to win, more difficult to crack. Plays that worked in 1997 don't work in 2002. The difference between a man who bluffs too much and a man who folds too often becomes minuscule--and yet he's too old to change to a new game.

Conversely, his game can wither away. Gamblers who played Lowball in California card rooms in the seventies couldn't find that game anywhere in America today, at least not at a level that would provide a living income.

Meanwhile, the old gambler has developed the narrow tunnel vision of a man who spends his whole life inside casinos and card rooms. He's been doing it for so many years that he doesn't even hear the slot machines anymore; they're like Muzak. He takes every meal at a casino buffet or coffee shop, or, increasingly, he just has the waitress bring a tray to the poker table. He's pasty and bloated from the sedentary indoor regimen. He rarely sees a newspaper or a TV broadcast. In his way, he's become a monk.

All these guys tend to be personable but reserved. They study you when you speak to them. After all, their whole life consists of studying people in an effort to take money from them. They'll talk poker, but they always hold something back. They'll talk about casinos and private games they like, but they'll hold something back there, too, if they think you might gain an edge by crashing their game.

And there's nothing else you can talk about. You can't even talk about the weather to an old gambler, because his life is spent in a windowless building. You wonder if they've ever read any books--other than Doyle Brunson's "Super/System" or similar poker volumes--because books might be a way to remain isolated and yet have some contact with other minds, other times.

They don't. It's time away from poker. Spending time reading a book would be wasting your life.

*

© Copyright 2003 United Press International and Joe Bob Briggs

Return to the Column Archive