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Shut Up And Deal
Welcome to the world of "Hold’em Poker and guys with names like Kamikaze Will
Poker was once a game played behind closed doors away from the eye of law enforcement and the uninitiated. In Buloxi, Mississippi, I grew up watching it played in peoples’ houses. The breed of men who played were what my grandma called reprobates, men unwilling to work an honest job. Instead, they spent their time trying to get rich quick. I found them fascinating then and now.
In his book Shut Up and Deal, author Jesse May gives the reader an insider’s view of one of these fascinating men, Mickey, as well as a view of the world in which he plies his trade. However, don’t expect real insight into the forces that compels someone to be a gambler. What you will see is how a gambler feels, how he views himself in this profession, and how he reacts to the adversity that this profession deals out with each shuffle of the deck.
Mickey describes his entry into this world. "It’s almost two years since I dropped out of college. I had classes on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and our poker games were on Monday and Wednesday nights. Irreconcilable differences. Now I live in an apartment two blocks from the Mirage…I’m a professional poker player just like I wanted to be, finally I’m here in the Mirage at one in the morning with a pocketful of money and a game I’m getting proud of. Too proud."
The language is raw and filled with its own inside jargon. "The game is 100-200 Hold’em," says Mickey the narrator. "I look around the table for the umpteenth time and ask myself how it’s possible for me to be stuck in this game. To the tune of eight thousand dollars, no less. It’s the Taj Mahal, Atlantic City, where poker’s been legal for about a year. The lineup is somewhere between nine monkeys and ten goons. Setting in the two seat is Vaughn—some guy who just popped in from Canada for a few days…"
The life that Mickey describes is one of a nomad with members of the profession moving from one poker playing venue to another: Atlantic City, New Jersey; Las Vegas, Nevada, Foxwoods Casino in Southeastern Connecticut, and Vienna, Austria. And in this nomadic tribe, there are the regulars that frequent all the stops, John Smiley, Uptown Raoul; and Hot Mama Earl. The story even has its own villain of sorts in the form of Bart Stone.
The story is made more compelling by the tension between Bart Stone and John Smiley, two archrivals in the book. Of the former, Mickey says, "There was this guy from Ohio, his name was John Smiley. All I can tell you about him is that some people say he’s the best poker player in the world…. John went out to Vegas and he played everybody head up, one on one which is his specialty. And he turned nothing into a quarter of a million dollars in no time."
Of the latter, he says, "…Bart strives into the room, comes over to the table, crashes down into the one open seat, and bangs down onto the table…a seething mass of money.… Bart slams this wad…down on the table and the message is clear. Fuck you all. I’m a mean motherfucker and I’ve got so much money and I couldn’t care less about it or care to count it and let’s gamble, boys!"
Shut Up and Deal will open your eyes to a hidden world of men living by their wits and cunning. The reader is drawn to these characters because they dare to live in a world of complete uncertainty, where their talent and luck are the only safety net between them and complete and total impoverishment. They live a life that for most of us has been forbidden by years of social conditioning.
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