Bluff Page 7

“Oh, the usual nonsense,” Ethan said. “Husband’s an ass but wants custody. Just your typical awfulness. She needed a night away. Her mother’s watching the kids.”

  “She’s gonna play, though, right?” Ace asked.

  “Yeah, I’m gonna cover her,” Ethan said. “I taught her to play years ago. She isn’t half bad.” He smiled. “Okay, maybe half bad.” He gestured toward the food and drink. “You guys help yourself. Natalie, what’s your line of work?”

  I told Ethan the story Ace and I came up with in the car. “I’m an events coordinator for a couple of hotels.” I’d performed in enough venues over the years to talk coherently about this.

  “She hired me for one of those one-night poker courses,” Ace chimed in from the food table, “for a bunch of Merck executives. When she told me she had a regular game in college, I knew we’d be friends.”

  I wished he hadn’t said “college.” I wasn’t ready to improvise a whole undergraduate experience. But no one asked. As we chatted and poured drinks and filled our small plates with cheese and bread, I couldn’t help taking note of the diverse agendas at the card table: Carlo’s need to recoup his losses; Ace’s need to make the trip to A.C. worth his while; Ethan’s desire for an entertaining night, to play host, and to take his niece’s mind off her domestic problems; Ellen’s need to escape her life, and her kids, for a few hours; my own need to see Ace in action, to gather the raw material for my magazine article. We had only one thing in common. We would all try to win.

  But Ace would win, because the game would be rigged.

  He was the first to sit down. I didn’t want to sit immediately to his right, because then I’d be the one cutting his cards. I didn’t want my presence to affect what he did—to make it harder or easier. So I sat down opposite him, where I could watch his play head-on.

  Carlo sat to Ace’s right, and then Ellen asked, “We just sit anywhere?” After being told by Ethan that anywhere was fine, she sat to my left. His guests situated, Ethan took the last spot at the table, between me and Ace.

  Ellen’s hands, I noticed, were dry and cracked, no doubt from being washed a hundred times a day. Her fingernails were ragged and bitten down. She caught me watching her hands, and I looked away.

  “Do you play euchre, Natalie?” she asked.

  “Euchre? No.”

  “It’s such a great game,” she said. “If everyone gets tired of playing poker, we could switch to that.” She glanced around at the other players. “I’ll teach anyone who doesn’t know how. It’s not hard to learn.”

  “I think we’re probably gonna stick with poker tonight,” Ace said in a voice that I suspected was him trying not to sound utterly condescending.

  Ellen’s head lowered. She had come all this way, and now there’d be no euchre.

  Fortunately, I knew how to make everything right again. “How old are your kids?” I asked.

  They were three and five. And such rascals! She found a picture on her phone of the two of them and passed the phone around the table. We learned about Jenna’s recent fear of earthquakes and Nathan’s love of bugs.

  “His favorite lately?” She lowered her voice as if telling the punch line of the world’s crudest joke. “It’s the dung beetle.”

  Finally, the game got under way. We were playing $2/$4 no-limit Hold’em. A generation ago, the popular game was seven card stud. Now everyone played Hold’em. First you were dealt two cards, facedown. Then came three community cards—the “flop”—followed by another community card, the “turn card.” The last community card was the “river card.” You try to make the best five-card hand out of all seven cards.

  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 such artless technique. And even more chutzpah to invite me to witness it. Maybe all this chutzpah, I briefly considered, could become the focus of my magazine article—how this cardsharp whose skills were dull, dull, dull was nonetheless able to come out on top with nothing but misdirection and nerve.

  Still, he was swimming in unsafe waters. With a bottom deal that bad, someone was going to catch him. Maybe not tonight, but someday. And what then? It didn’t matter if the buy-in was four hundred or four thousand. Nobody liked to be cheated.

  This storm seemed to brew nowhere else but in my mind, however, because suddenly the deal was done, and Ace set the deck down, and we each peeked at our two hole cards, and Ellen, sitting left of the big blind, made the first raise, and everything was so damn ordinary.

  My cards stank, which was just as well. I folded and sat in quiet disgust. I thought about the money I had already paid Ace. I thought about the hope I’d invested in this trip and how it was all for nothing. Even if Ace won some money tonight, my cardsharp was a disaster. Which made me a disaster by association.

  I decided to get very drunk.

  The booze was free, and I liked booze, and so I would drink some of my losses back, and the best part was that no one would notice how inebriated I became, because no matter what I did—shout incoherently, strip naked—my drunkenness would be less obvious than Ace’s bottom deal.

  I got up and poured myself a generous refill of whiskey, neat. By the time the river card was laid on the table, it was clear that Ace wasn’t going to win big. He’d missed his three-of-a-kind, and the pot of chips on the table never got very large anyway. I laughed inwardly (and perhaps a little outwardly—the whiskey was hitting me just right) at the poetic justice.

  Then came more poetic justice. He lost the hand to Ellen—Ellen—who’d stayed in the betting and taken the pot with two pairs: jacks and threes.

  “Wow,” she said. She seemed embarrassed by the attention. “That was … wow.”

  Watching her collect the chips, I wondered if Ethan had undersold his niece’s “half bad” poker skills. I set down my drink and kept a closer eye on her. Not for any reason. I knew she was only a kindergarten teacher. Maybe I was hoping to be surprised by something, anything, now that my cheat had exposed himself as a fool at the card table.

  When it was Ellen’s deal three hands later, she shuffled the cards with the stiff hands of a beginner. Her fingers were small, and they strained on the riffle shuffle, the bottom card flashing a little. She squared up the deck and set it to her right. I tapped the deck, same as everyone had been doing for at least a dozen hands now.

  She picked up the cards and began to deal, and everything changed forever.

  10

  When did you first get interested in magic?

  I’m often asked that. I was eight when Victor Flowers handed me my first magic kit, thirteen when Jack Clarion gave me my first sleight of hand lesson. Sometime between those two events I remember watching a magician turn a cobra into a duck on TV. I don’t remember who the magician was, but I clearly recall the brain-twisting feeling of seeing something that simply could not be.

  That was how it was now. I was seeing what I couldn’t be seeing. Only this was so much better, so much more, because there was no TV and it happened two feet from my face.

  Without the distraction of Ethan’s sourdough lecture or the benefit of large hands, Ellen quietly dealt herself the ace and seven of spades while dealing Carlo the king and five of spades, while also dealing three additional spades to the board. They both had flushes, but hers was the winning hand.

  Here’s the thing. I never saw her cull the cards. The culling was so invisible, I would have thought she’d swapped in a cold deck, except if she’d used a cold deck then she wouldn’t have needed a false deal. And the false deal was what I detected, and why I suspected Ellen’s winning hand was more than big luck.

  I barely detected it, though.

  It was more a sense than a sighting. My position, on her immediate right, was the easiest place to catch a false deal, yet I saw nothing. Her deal was inaudible, the pacing perfect. I knew she wasn’t dealing from the bottom, because I kept snatching glimpses of the bottom card. So what was it, then?

  By the time the hand was done and she had collected the chips, I realized it wasn’t the deal itself that had put me on alert. It was her face. How she wasn’t watching the cards as she dealt. That was her error. Beginners watch the cards as they deal. Or maybe it wasn’t her face. Or maybe I was imagining everything, though I didn’t think so. I began to suspect that Carlo Desoto’s financial woes weren’t a well-kept secret. And that Ellen was specifically targeting him as she played, same as Ace was—only she was doing it a thousand times better.

  She won the largest pot of the night, over three hundred. And the way she smiled awkwardly through it all, seemingly embarrassed to be gathering up so many chips—it was Oscar caliber. Her outfit—that sweater, those shoes—I now saw it for what it was: a costume. Even her posture at the table, hunched over, making herself small. And the bitten-down fingernails. I had driven to Atlantic City with an amateur, but sitting at my table was a pro.

  She could act, she could play poker, she could control the cards, but the deal had my brain at war with itself. A cobra turns into a duck. Impossible. But it happened. So easy, so pure. I didn’t see the move when Ellen dealt, and I always see the move.

  She held the deck in her hand like an amateur would. And with this ordinary grip she dealt three regular tosses around the table followed by a flawless false deal (A center deal? Good lord, was she center dealing?) to Carlo and another flawless false deal to herself. And then, when she had my undivided attention, she somehow still dealt three more false deals, the other three spades, to the table for community cards. Hell, maybe she false dealt all five community cards. I just didn’t know anymore. Understand, I was a master card handler. This was my area of expertise and lifelong obsession. And yet. A cobra. And then a duck.

  Was I obligated to tell Ace?

  Should I tell him about the expert at the card table who was fleecing him right along with everyone else? My relationship to Ace went back all of four days, but we had come here together—on a less-than-honest mission, true—but we were a team, and maybe that meant something. Or maybe he of all people ought to have been on the lookout for people like him.

  Except that Ellen (Ellen! What a name. I’d been so gullible) was nothing like him.

  My dilemma didn’t last long. Ace soon found himself low on chips and was becoming noticeably irritated. He made my decision for me.

  “Get me a drink, Natalie,” he said when it was his turn to deal. I understood he was asking me to be his misdirection. Still, I didn’t appreciate the rudeness. His flush loss had stunned him and made him a passive bettor but an active asshole. I would get him the drink but let him lose his money.

  He won that hand and took a small pot, but it mattered little, because soon Ellen was cleanin
g up. Her cheating was amazing, but her poker play was obviously very strong, too. Every time she won a hand, she glanced over at Ethan as if she were astonished by her luck. Was he in on it? I didn’t think so, but I no longer trusted my instincts. I bet a little, won a hand or two, but all I really did was mark time until Ellen’s next deal.

  Once again her manipulations were undetectable. I kept my eyes on the deck while she dealt the cards, and Carlo went all in on two pairs, kings high, and soon everyone was out except for him and Ellen, who beat him with a straight, and suddenly Carlo’s chips were gone.

  “Jesus,” he said under his breath, and cashed in for four hundred more dollars’ worth of chips. Unfortunately for the cheaters in the room, he started cutting the deck again, which meant no more false deals.

  By eleven o’clock most of Carlo’s chips were gone again. Thanks to decent game play, a little luck, and the knowledge to stay out of Ellen’s way, most of my chips were still in front of me. Ace was down to a small pile. He slumped in his chair and shot me glances. He was down maybe three, three fifty for the night, not a nightmare loss unless you’d traveled a long distance and supposedly had the game rigged.

  “We have a big drive ahead of us,” he said after yet another losing hand followed by a rude, theatrical yawn. I ignored him.

  “It’s getting late, Natalie,” he said after the following hand. “We need to get going.”

  I told him I’d like to play a little longer.

  Carlo had said almost nothing for the last hour, his face getting paler. He checked his phone. “Yeah, it’s time for me to call it a night,” he said with little inflection. He cashed out his few remaining chips and after perfunctory good-byes hurried out the door, presumably directly to one of the casinos.

  The four of us played a final hand, and then we cashed out and helped Ethan carry the leftover food and drink to the back counter. By now Ellen, the big winner, was laughing and saying to all of us how this was just so, so amazing and just crazy, and then she was saying good-bye and telling us that it was so great to meet us, and that this was just what the doctor had ordered. She kissed Ethan on the cheek and thanked him again.