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The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death Kindle Edition
In 2011, Grantland magazine gave bestselling novelist Colson Whitehead $10,000 to play at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. It was the assignment of a lifetime, except for one hitch—he’d never played in a casino tournament before. With just six weeks to train, our humble narrator took the Greyhound to Atlantic City to learn the ways of high-stakes Texas Hold’em.
Poker culture, he discovered, is marked by joy, heartbreak, and grizzled veterans playing against teenage hotshots weaned on Internet gambling. Not to mention the not-to-be overlooked issue of coordinating Port Authority bus schedules with your kid’s drop-off and pickup at school. Finally arriving in Vegas for the multimillion-dollar tournament, Whitehead brilliantly details his progress, both literal and existential, through the event’s antes and turns, through its gritty moments of calculation, hope, and spectacle. Entertaining, ironic, and strangely profound, this epic search for meaning at the World Series of Poker is a sure bet.
Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto!
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAnchor
- Publication dateMay 6, 2014
- File size2781 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2014: Every year, thousands of card players converge in Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker, all hauling varying levels of hope and skill with them into the southern Nevada desert. As a regular in a neighborhood game, Colson Whitehead didn’t harbor that kind of ambition—until Grantland.com staked him $10,000 for a seat at the WSOP. Whitehead goes all-in with a Rocky IV-worthy regimen, hiring a personal trainer to prepare himself for the long, grueling table hours and a tournament-hardened coach to navigate the mysteries of Texas Hold’em. When he arrives at the tournament, he navigates using a set of laws essential to any aspiring card sharp: which casino restaurants provide poker-appropriate nutrition; how to hit the bathrooms ahead of the mad rushes of the game breaks; and, of course, the necromancy of a successful Hold’em hand. With its cast of poker-universe luminaries and aspiring misfits, the tournament stuff is fun, especially to this gambling rube. But Vegas is Vegas, and between the notes of the Wheel of Fortune slot machines, one can hear the suck of entropy. Whitehead--whose previous books landed him on the short-list for the Pulitzer, as well as a MacArthur "Genius" grant--has the wry sense of humor to observe the twisted reality of the “Leisure Industrial Complex” without mocking it; he’s the kind of writer who can see the human condition reflected in the windows of a failed Vegas market that sells only beef jerky (and other jerky-like products). Buy the ticket, take the ride.--Jon Foro
From Booklist
Review
“Astonishing. . . . Witty. . . . Tom Wolfe crossed with Tom Pynchon.” —The Washington Post
“The Noble Hustle is fierce, funny and totally worth the buy-in.” —New York Daily News
“Whitehead proves a brilliant sociologist of the poker world.” —The Boston Globe
“The Noble Hustle, part love letter, part dark confessional, captures perfectly the mix of neurosis and narrative that makes gambling so appealing.” —Mother Jones
"Whitehead goes to the table himself, and like a reporter on the front line of battle, he files stories as the action heats up...[Whitehead] uses poker to expand our sense of how human beings work."
—The New York Times Book Review
“[A] trenchant, ruefully funny memoir of one man’s attempt to dispel the banality of living with the anxiety of chance.” —USA Today
“Fascinating. . . . Funny. . . . It’s hard not to root for the underdog.” —Chicago Tribune
“Mordantly funny from the first sentence. . . . Mr. Whitehead may not have gone home in the money, but he has a way with upstanding sentences.” —The Economist
“Hilarious. . . . Equal parts philosophical and farcical.” —The Seattle Times
“Clever and entertaining.” —The Miami Herald
“[Whitehead’s] reporting on the grimy glitz of casinos and competitive gambling has a funny, tragic, loser-chic sensibility.” —The New Yorker
“A literary guide to the often bizarre world of casino-poker tournaments.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Whitehead captures the sketchy and zombielike nature of poker tournament play well enough to leave you wishing this book came with a free bottle of Purell.” —Entertainment Weekly
“A sly, shambling, self-appraising riff on how he—a fervent amateur (and newly divorced father)—braved a Las Vegas World Series of Poker tourney.” —Elle
“From the first sentence to the last, Colson Whitehead never stops being clever. . . . If Whitehead played poker as well as he writes, he would have made the final table.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Part memoir, part satire, part meditation on the fractured state of contemporary culture.” —Los Angeles Times
“A masterpiece of sportswriting.” —The Rumpus
"Shares with [David Foster] Wallace's work the close attention of a wry, sharp intelligence to a populist pastime, a mix of casual and highfalutin diction, a self-deprecating voice that you're never sure is totally truthful in its deprecation, and a fondness for broad cultural pronouncements."
—The San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside. My particular combo of slack features, negligible affect, and soulless gaze has helped my game ever since I started playing twenty years ago, when I was ignorant of pot odds and M-theory and four-betting, and it gave me a boost as I collected my trove of lore, game by game, hand by hand. It has not helped me human relationships–wise over the years, but surely I’m not alone here. Anyone whose peculiar mix of genetic material and formative experiences has resulted in a near-expressionless mask can relate. Nature giveth, taketh, etc. You make the best of the hand you’re dealt.
This thing draped over my skull and fastened by muscle is also a not-too-bad public-transportation face, a kind of wretched camouflage, which would come in handy on my trip to Atlantic City. Flash this mug and people don’t mess with you on buses, and this day I was heading to training camp. I had six weeks to get in shape. I was being staked to play in the World Series of Poker for a magazine, and my regular game was a five-dollar buy-in where catching up with friends took precedence over pulverizing your opponents.
There was no question about taking a bus. I’m of that subset of native New Yorkers who can’t drive. Every spring, I made noises about getting my license and checked out the websites of local driving schools, which as a species embodied the most retrograde web design on the internet, real Galápagos stuff, replete with frenetic logos and fonts they don’t make anymore, the HTML flourishes of the previous century. How could I give my money to a business with so incompetent a portal? My wife and I owned a car, and she drove us everywhere, which came to be a hassle. I used to joke that I was afraid of getting my license--that I was at a point in my life that the first time I got behind the wheel, I’d just keep driving. The first couple of times I made this joke, people laughed. Then maybe my delivery began to falter, there was a change in tone, and they’d look around nervously, peek over my shoulder for another person to talk to. My wife had the car now. We got divorced four days prior.
I’d been looking forward to a descent into some primo degradation to start my trip, a little atmosphere to match my mood, but of course the Port Authority was cleaned up now, like the rest of the city. In the daytime, anyway. Across the street, the shining New York Times tower watched over the entryway, a beacon of truth and justice and Renzo Piano, and inside the terminal corridors the stores were scrubbed nightly, well-buffed, the reassuring and familiar places you’ve shopped at plenty. Duane Reade, Hudson News, the kiosks of big banks yet to fail. I could be anywhere, starting a journey to anyplace, a new life or a funeral.
I rushed to make the 3:30 bus and thought I’d have to gulp down a hot dog from a street vendor--fearing a grim return of said frank hours later at the table--but had time to pick up an albacore tuna sandwich with dill, capers, and lemon mayo on marbled rye, plus an artisanal root cola, all for ten bucks across the street at Dean and DeLuca. Estimated Probability of Degradation: down 35 percent.
I waited to board and saw I didn’t need a public-transportation face. The other passengers queued up for AC were exfoliated and fit, heading down for Memorial Day fun, not the disreputable lot of Port Authority legend. Their weekend bags gave no indication that they contained their owners’ sole possessions. Where have all the molesters gone, the weenie wagglers and chicken hawks? Whither the diddlers? The only shabby element I registered was the signage at the Greyhound and Peter Pan counters, still showcasing the dependable logos remembered from the bad trips of yore. Returning from a botched assignation or misguided attempt to reconnect with an old friend. Rumbling and put-putting to a scary relative’s house in bleak winter as you peered out into the gray mush through green, trapezoid windows. Greyhounds were raised in deplorable puppy mills and drugged up for the racetrack, I think I read somewhere, and Peter Pan used to enter kids’ bedrooms and entice them, so perhaps there is a core aspect to the bus industry that defies rebranding.
The bus was state of the art, like it had wi-fi, and even though I sat two rows up from the lav I did not smell it. It was two and a half hours to AC, plenty of time for me to graze on my inadequacies. Poker eminence Doyle Brunson called Hold’em “the Cadillac of poker,” and I was only qualified to steer a Segway. In one of the fiction-writing manuals, it says that there are only two stories: a hero goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. I don’t know. This being life, and not literature, we’ll have to make do with this: A middle-aged man, already bowing and half broken under his psychic burdens, decides to take on the stress of being one of the most unqualified players in the history of the Big Game. A hapless loser goes on a journey, a strange man comes to gamble.
According to the two crew cuts in the row in front of me, the weekly pool party at their casino was killer, but I wasn’t going to make it over there. I hit my poker book, cramming. “Big raises make big pots.” “Before you enter a pot, think about who the likely flop bettor will be.” The highway bored through miles of Jersey’s old growth, as if the forests had been mowed down specifically for passage to our destination, a tunnel to the Land of Atrocious Odds, and then we broke off the expressway and the big gambling houses burst up, looming over the gray water. We passed the one- and two-story buildings of downtown Atlantic City--clapboard homes, broken chapels, purveyors of quick cash--that seemed washed up against the casinos like driftwood and soda bottles. Then we pulled into the Leisure Industrial Complex.
Growing up in the city, I never went to a lot of malls, so I didn’t have the psychological scars of my Midwestern friends, who cringed at the thought of all the adolescent afternoons spent mindlessly drifting across the buffed tile. I like the Leisure Industrial Complex when I can find it, those meticulously arranged consumer arenas. I don’t care if it’s a suburban galleria sucking the human plankton into itself from the exit ramps or a metro-area monolith stuffed with escalators to convey the herd to the multiple price-pointed retail outlets, food court stalls, and movie screens.
Gimme a red-brick pedestrian mall reclaimed from urban blight and dolled up to commemorate some location of inflated historical import--I love those guys. There is the multiplicity of diversion, sure, but more important is that a sector of human endeavor is diligently trying to improve itself and succeeding spectacularly. Consumer theorists, commercial architects, scientists of demography are working hard to make the LIC better, more efficient, more perfect. They analyze the traffic patterns and microscopic eye movements of shoppers, the implications of rest room and water fountain placement, and disseminate their innovations for the universal good. Even if we fail ourselves in a thousand ways every day, we can depend on this one grace in our lives. We are in good hands.
Anyone who’s gambled in the past twenty years knows that casinos are high rollers in the LIC. The contemporary casino is more than a gambling destination; it’s a multifarious pleasure enclosure intended to satisfy every member of the family unit. Reimagined as resorts, there’s moderate-stakes blackjack for Dad, a sea-salt spa scrub for Mom, the cortex-agitating arcade for the youngsters--or the Men’s Mani-Pedi Suite for Dad, Pai Gau Poker for Mom, and Highly Supervised Kidz Camp for the little ones (once you sign the liability waiver).
A mall with living rooms. The concept of such a thing, to eat, drink, and play, and then dream inside its walls. No windows, for what sight could be more inspiring than your true self laid bare, with all its hungers and flaws and grubby aspirations. Stroll past the high-end shops with accented names, recognizable theme restaurants owned by TV chefs, indoor Big Tops, man-made wave pools, and find nourishment for any desire zipping through your brain. If there’s a gap in perimeter through which an unfulfilled wish might escape, it will be plugged by your next trip.
They even have bus depots. Some casinos are equipped with snap-on bus depots, an optional component for the base model. Like the Tropicana. Today’s outpost of the LIC was the Tropicana, local franchise of the famous Vegas standby, where James Bond busted heads in Diamonds Are Forever. Methinks he did not arrive on Greyhound. You might escape if the bus didn’t pull directly into the building itself, so the depot was a worthy investment. Some of the passengers stood and funneled to the door, causing a scandal. “Where is he going?” “They’re not waiting for their bonus?” Meaning the twenty-dollar voucher they give you to play upstairs--it’s worked out between Greyhound and the casino (they really want you to stay). For what kind of inhuman monster didn’t wait for their bonus--it’s free money.
I jumped up and joined the apostates. I was vibrating with newly acquired poker knowledge and couldn’t wait. The smell of ancient cigarette smoke and the mellow undertones of men’s room disinfectant were an intoxicant. I checked in, chucked in some buffalo wings for fuel, and soon I was in the Tropicana Poker Room.
I found my degradation. You can rubble the old Times Square and erect magnificent corporate towers, hose down Port Authority and clean under its fingernails, but you can’t change people. I was among gamblers.
I sat down at a $1/$2 table with types I would encounter with some frequency during my training. Like Big Mitch. Big Mitch is a potbellied endomorph in fabric-softened khaki shorts and polo shirt, a middle-aged white guy here with his wife, who was off dropping chips on the roulette felt according to her patented system. Fully equipped with a mortgage, a decent job, and disposable income. The segments of his thick metal watchband chick-chicked on his hairy wrist each time he entered the pot. Your average home player. What Big Mitch wants the most, apart from coming home to see that young Kaitlyn hasn’t had a party and wrecked the house while they were away (she’s really been acting out lately, but Pat says all girls go through that stage), is to brag to his home-game buddies and certain guys at the office of how much he won tonight, with a breakdown of a Really Big Hand or two. He will be less vocal about his failures, as we all are.
Next to two Big Mitches was a Methy Mike, a harrowed man who had been tested in untold skirmishes, of which the poker table was only one. If Methy Mike had been hitched, the lady had packed her bags long ago, and if they had spawned, their parenting goals probably ended with making sure their kid didn’t get a tattoo on her face, and they did not always succeed. Often locals, Methy Mikes are on a first-name basis with the bosses and dealers and cocktail waitresses, and you can count on hearing a little catching up. “Haven’t seen you in a while.” “I’ve been . . . had some stuff come up.” So I see. Iggy Pop takes a look at these guys and says, “Wow, he’s really let himself go.”
They are weathered by the sun, by their lifestyles, which you can only guess at, the underlying narrative of their decay, and resemble unfortunates who have been dragged on chains from the back of a beat-up van and left to desiccate in the desert, like one of the down-and-outers in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Undone by their hardwired inclinations and undying dream of a new start. “Can you help a fellow American who’s down on his luck?” Luck--they believe in luck, its patterns, its unknowable rules. They will, seeing pocket Jacks demolish some weekend punter, tell the table, “Let me tell you a sad story about a pair a Jacks.” A sad story for every hand, every one of the 1,326 possible starting combinations.
And then there was Robotron, wedged in there, lean and wiry and hunkered down, a young man with sunglasses and earbuds, his hoodie cinched tight around his face like a school shooter or a bathroom loiterer. Weaned on internet play, Robotron is only here tonight because the Feds shut down all the U.S. online poker sites a month ago. Black Friday, something about money laundering. Here with the humans. Otherwise the Robotrons would be back in their childhood rooms, eight pixelated tables open on the screen; he can play eight games at once, zip zip. It’s not so hard once you retrain those pathways in the brain, cramming decades of poker experience into eighteen months. Why leave the house at all, between the poker sites and the porn sites? What are other people for, but for robbing or fucking? (The goddamned Feds, breeding a new generation of libertarians in the subdivs.) Real people, talking, breathing, it must be so weird to them. Their earbuds help keep ’em out, playing music, self-help manuals, If I’m So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single? as read by Edward James Olmos, or the latest invasion plans transmitted from their home planet.
There was one woman at the table, a quiet sixty-something lady with bright red hair, the follicles of which it was perhaps possible to count. Five percent of commercially available hair dyes actually match a color that occurs in nature. Hers was not one of them. I liked her.
I will now take a moment to explain Hold’em to the lay reader, I don’t mind. In my home games, I often assumed the mantle of the Explainer, laying out the rules for the newbies--the indulging girlfriend, the language poet in town for the weekend, and, maddeningly, people I had played with dozens of times before. I wrote the hand rankings on a little piece of paper for them to keep by their chips, reminded them it’s “one or two or none from your hand, and three or four or five from the board.” I stopped being so amenable once my kid started talking because I was explaining shit all the time now. “Daddy, why is the sky blue?” “Daddy, how do fish swim?” “Daddy, where shall I keep my secret fears of the world, and tend to them like my private garden?” Nowadays my poker neophytes are on their own.
Product details
- ASIN : B00GL3OJQQ
- Publisher : Anchor (May 6, 2014)
- Publication date : May 6, 2014
- Language : English
- File size : 2781 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 258 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0345804333
- Best Sellers Rank: #707,011 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #135 in Poker (Kindle Store)
- #440 in Poker (Books)
- #687 in Humor Essays (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Colson Whitehead is the author eight novels and two works on non-fiction, including The Underground Railroad, which received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Carnegie Medal, the Heartland Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Hurston-Wright Award, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. The novel is being adapted by Barry Jenkins into a TV series for Amazon. Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys received the Pulitzer Prize, The Kirkus Prize, and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
A recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship, he lives in New York City.
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The subject of this book is the world of very high stake and very low stake poker. The book is funny and very insightful. A very enjoyable read.
However, it's not as much about poker as it is about the author trying to find some meaning and joy in his life. Which is fine, if that's what you want. And it would even be better if he did find some meaning and joy. But, the author seems to be categorically incapable of finding any joy whatsoever in anything he does. Quite frankly, by the end of the book I was sick of his negative attitude about everything. He stated that he suffers from anhedonia, which Merriam-Webster defines as "a psychological condition characterized by inability to experience pleasure in normally pleasurable acts." And if this is really his problem, then I do feel for him. I'm just not totally convinced, because it seems that he is mostly whining and being negative for the sake of being witty and funny, and after awhile, it just got on my nerves.
Anyway, if you want to read about some poker from a different perspective, then this book is an option. I think, though, there are better choices out there. Unless, of course, you enjoy reading negativity and whining, but you can find that for free on Tumblr.
I wish there had been a little more on the poker coaching at the beginning and a little less about his younger self going to Vegas somewhere around the book's middle - that just seemed like filler. Did I get a sense of what the WSOP Main Event is like? Yes, I think so. It lacked certain Texas Hold'em details I was hoping for, but oh well.
All in all, I was pleased with The Noble Hustle. Will you be? It's hard to say...
Go Luck!
Top reviews from other countries
PS: If you have any interest in zombies, read his book ZONE ONE, the most intelligent, scary, gripping book ever written about the undead!
Well, write about it he does, in a rambling, self indulgent style that tries to be clever but winds up being a pretentious bore. In a total of 235 pages, he doesn`t get around to playing in the tournament until page 177. The rest is taken up in describing his trips to Atlantic City to practice casino Texas Hold`em. which was really not the supposed point of the book.
For those who watch the Series on TV every year, there are some interesting facts and observations; too bad they couldn`t have been written in a straightforward manner.
Pass on this one.
Will recommend to anyone as a gift or for your own