Ethan Watters – on why he gambles.

San Francisco, California
August 4, 2000

Dear Paul,

Richard-the-shrink came with me to Lucky Chances last night, but he wouldn’t gamble. He just sat behind me at the table and whispered that the air in the place was so filled with despair that he couldn’t imagine why I would come.

Why would I come? I looked around at the room full of poker tables, hundreds of serious men sitting behind stacks of gray, red, blue and black chips. Why would I leave?

You played enough when you were up here in the spring to know part of the reason I play poker. You’ve felt the injection of adrenaline when you’re sitting on a sledgehammer hand (let’s say kings over queens full) with $250 in the pot, and you’re trying to look bored while your muscles twitch and the guy down the table, who clearly made his flush on the river card, considers whether to bet into you. That is poker’s most obvious thrill – it’s the coke high of the game. I can’t imagine anyone not liking that.

But given that you were able to walk away from the table after an hour, down only a hundred, it’s clear that you aren’t as devoted as I am. (Richard has used another, more clinical term – but to hell with him.)

Maybe there are things I see in the place that others don’t. I like the food (especially that Filipino Chicken Adobo) and being able to eat dinner while I play cards. I like the flat, no-shadow lighting. I like the affectless faces of the dealers and the fact that you can sit down at a table of eight men and go a whole night without saying a word. I like the little mirrored bubbles on the ceiling that hide the cameras, and the notion that a team of sharp-eyed men – men who have seen it all – are watching over me. I even like the physical location of the casino, surrounded by cemeteries on all sides, out on the edge of the city. If you stood in the parking lot of Lucky Chances and spun a ace of spades out into the darkness in any direction, it might land on a gravestone (with a little luck). How cool is that?

Last night, with Richard-the-shrink moping behind me, I found myself at a great table. There were two excellent players, who I thought I could learn from. A couple guys were at my intermediate level. There was an middle-aged man with such bad vision he couldn’t make out the cards laid out on the table two feet in front of him. He kept calling his hands wrong. To my right, there was a guy who was so tired from gambling twenty or thirty hours straight that he had to be poked in the arm each time it was his turn to bet. (I kid you not; I did the poking.) There was also an elderly man clearly suffering from a debilitating Alzheimer-like disorder. At the end of each hand he would roll his cards over and wait expectantly for the dealer to tell him whether there was any pattern.

Richard asked me how much time I’d spent at Lucky Chances, total, but given that I have no sensation of time passing when I’m playing, it’s hard to tell. I know I’ve played enough hands to have hit two royal flushes, one in diamonds and one – my favorite – in hearts. The odds of turning a single royal flush are 60,000 to 1. So estimating three minutes a hand, that means I’ve spent 3,000 hours playing poker – or, put another way, a year’s worth of working days. I honestly don’t think it’s been that much time – I think I’m just lucky – but I don’t know for sure. Some people will never hold a royal flush. I feel like I could turn another one tomorrow.

Why do I go? Here’s a notion: I think a man should know how to gamble. And I don’t mean know the rules or even the strategies to win. To truly know how to gamble is to know how to lose more money than you intended to and not flinch. Poker is to your finances what boxing is to your flesh. You have to learn not to let the other guy know that you are hurt, which, in our day, is an under-appreciated and seldom-taught skill.

Or maybe it’s because the trance I enter playing cards blocks out every other thought in my head – and those thoughts have not been so welcome recently. Richard-the-shrink thinks it’s no coincidence that I started playing regularly two years ago, right after my father got sick. Although you know that I am loath to accept such psychodynamic explanations for behavior, he’s probably right. The trance I enter, like a narcotic haze, cheats even the anxiety of loss and death. This is why they can build the place literally surrounded by monuments to grief. Can you imagine doing that with a restaurant, or even a bar?

Also, with my father gone I am freer now to do ill-advised things with my life. Not because my father would have disapproved – I could never do anything to disappoint that man – but because he would have worried for me, and now he can’t.

I’ve just thought of another reason, one that suggests the opposite possibility: My father never gambled, never took substantial chances with his life, but this was as much out of timidness as adherence to any moral code. He was thrilled that I was less frightened by the world than he was, and so maybe I gamble because on some level I know that he would have gotten a kick out of it.

Of course, like a drug, playing poker blocks out not only the bad thoughts but the good ones as well. Like a man treading water at the edge of a monster whirlpool, I can see the rest of the ride down. You gamble to block anxiety, but the gambling also keeps you from accomplishing other things in your life, like keeping your career and relationships intact – things that might naturally bring you back to even. At the narrow bottom of the whirlpool, you keep playing because you need to avoid the anxiety that you are gambling too much. Then you go under, into a darker, colder world.

Last night Richard and I were supposed to meet friends for drinks, but it was such a good table that I kept angling for one more round. I swear they were giving money away and I was hitting flushes and straights like the deck had never known a shuffle. By the time we got back to the city, our friends were nowhere to be found and Richard was clearly unhappy with me. I gave up trying to explain to him why I love the game. You’d think with all his therapy training he would understand that gambling is the essence of hope and hope is the essence of man. What could be more compelling than the turn of a card? If he had ever seen, as I have, a ten of hearts turn over to anchor a royal flush, and felt his brain as it stumbles to process the shapes and colors of the card (red, 10! hearts!), he would understand that this random world can yield beauty and perfection. How much time and money do people waste in therapy and walk out never knowing that?

Your friend and partner in crime,

Ethan