Units of Something

The money. Ah, the money. That thing that I, too, regret losing at the end of my Reno poker night and that Jay, disconcertingly, seems increasingly unconcerned with.

Indeed, the change I notice most in Jay is not inconsistent eating habits. ("I forgot to eat lunch today.") It is not an increasing amount of time spent thinking, talking, and playing poker (engaging in a lengthy philosophical debate over email about the importance of math versus intuition in crucial hands). It is not the adoption of a colorful poker lingo. ("And that really opened the table right up. It was like the wild fucking West.") It is a change that makes me answer authoritatively "yes" to number 14 of Gam-Anon's Twenty Questions: "Have you noticed a personality change in the gambler as his or her gambling progresses?" The most profound poker-related change in Jay is a shift in the way he talks about money. Or, at least, his poker money.

"Look at this," he says one night, rummaging through a drawer by his bed. He moves aside a package of batteries and two juggling balls, and emerges with a thick wad of $20, $50, and $100 bills. He tosses the cash onto the bed with a self-conscious lack of ceremony. "I haven't been to the cash machine in six weeks."

This from a man who owns a shredder to dispose of unwanted credit card applications. He asks me if I think it "strange" that he keeps his bankroll haphazardly stored in his nightstand drawer. I tell him no, I think it's all right. Which I do, mostly because he has bothered to ask.

"In general, people with gambling problems usually spend a large portion of their income on gambling," states the Harvard Medical School Division on Addictions website. Not so for the healthy gambler, who keeps a gambling bankroll separate from "family money" or money for expenses. Even if it is arbitrarily stuffed in a drawer.

The "moralist" Bill Bennett, when asked to reconcile his books preaching virtue with his gambling practices, used the existence of a separate bankroll to defended his behavior: "I don't play the milk money," he told reporters in May. And his wife, Elayne, put in: "All our bills are paid."

A key difference between Bennett the so-called moralist and Jay the poker enthusiast is that Jay is upfront and candid about his gambling. To Gam-Anon's question number 15 -- "Does the person in question consistently lie to cover up or deny his or her gambling activities?" -- I can resolutely answer "no."

As can Rhonda Ruby. In fact, John's poker stories, of great wins as well as huge losses, are unguarded family lore, colorful and oft-repeated.

"Tell her about your law school game," Rhonda prompts during our interview, and John begins describing his regular game in law school, "fairly big-sized, with two faculty who always played." John had extra money to gamble with from a well-paying part-time job.

"So it's the last hand, I have all my money in the pot, and I'm sitting on four 10s. No magic card, real poker, I had four 10s," John says. "I bet my entire stack. If I could have bet my shoes, I would have taken them off and put them on the table."

His law professor proceeds to lay down four queens. John lost $1,400 in the hand.

"And I look at him, and I go, 'This isn't right,'" John says. "All he said to me was, 'Oh, my God.'"

Here his wife Rhonda interjects, incredulously, though she's heard the story many times before: "But he didn't offer to split the pot with you?" John just looks at her. "Oh, no."

"See, I can't understand that," Rhonda muses. "I would have split the pot." But here is where Rhonda-the occasional-blackjack-player differs in attitude from John-the-longtime-poker-player. During the game, the money is irrelevant to John and the entire point to Rhonda. In fact, at the table, the healthy gambler is far less preoccupied with money than the pathological gambler, who risks what he does not have.

"When pathological gamblers lose money they try to recapture their losses very quickly," Looney says. "Social gamblers don't do that."

So it should be unsurprising that Jay is developing a brazen casualness about tossing around sums of money that would have made him uncomfortable even six months ago. Far from being dangerous or irresponsible, the higher-stakes poker players insist that this attitude is simply necessary.

"In order to be a good gambler, the money that is on table has to represent nothing to you but a unit of something," John Ruby explains. "And Rhonda will tell you because Rhonda's seen me, I can lose $500 and have a great time, because the money doesn't upset me because I don't need that money; it was there to gamble with."

Which is why neither John nor his law professor even thought about splitting a $1,400 pot on an impossibly tough hand. And which is why I shouldn't be alarmed about a poker-related "change in personality" when I hear Jay say one night at dinner, a quiet pride in his voice, "In the Friday game, I took my best friend for all the money he had on the table. And didn't feel a thing."

It makes me cringe slightly, but maybe it shouldn't. What is at stake for the healthy poker player is not a friendship or a mortgage payment, but mere impersonal "units of something." Just circular discs to play with, manipulate, toss around with bravado, fold to with respect.

And the more units you have, the grander your possibilities. So it was that Jay missed glimpsing his best friend's reaction to the defeat because he was busy arranging his newly acquired chips, building towering stacks of units.

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