The low stakes life in Las Vegas.
The big tour brings all the heroes and villains to Vegas, and all the tourney behaviors as well. Today it’s Bet Vomit Guy who wanders into the ring games. He’s healthy and young, probably a junior finance or banking type, based on his vigorous but indoorsy and overfed complexion. Glittering silver headphones clamp down on…
He looks ill, my opponent. He’s gulping, trying to behave like the money didn’t mean something to him. He’s distressed. He squints, trying to negotiate with the flow of time and find a reality where this didn’t happen. Our guy is thin but not tall, he doesn’t take up a lot of space in this…
Erkel breaks the game. It’s a self-awareness thing. He’d already demonstrated this particular lack of when he was ever so slightly slow rolled by a happily recreational fish with twenty big blinds. “You slow rolled me!” Erkel had protested, along with all that insincere laughter. Laughter like an alarm, laughter communicating anger through false pleasure.…
South V had been running well, so well that we merited the additional punishment of his opinions. “This game is soft,” he told the tourney star. A fuzz covered grin out of one red-faced mess emerges. Another, friendlier, fat, oily, and chin-strapped, smiled too formally; there was something else on his mind, some issue between…
“You’re a nit,” Henderson Sam tells me. My head swivels all the way left, then back to my right, where Sam sits. That’s because it takes a moment. I need a moment. I’m never sure what to say to these probing inaccuracies, but for some reason, today I’ve decided to be helpful and honest. I…