Blockhead@OhYouBlockhead
I played a poker tournament and wrote about it.
There’s No Hold’ Em in Texas,
and There’s No Crying in the Casino
One thing I learned in my short career as a poker player was that Texas Hold’ Em is actually illegal in Texas. Or it used to be. At the time of this writing, it’s more of a grey area. Membership clubs have sprung up across Texas like oil derricks in a cartoon montage. If you open Poker Atlas in Texas, you’ll find over 60 card rooms in the triangle of Austin, Dallas, and Houston.
The Lodge Card Club, thirty minutes north of Downtown Austin, is directly next to the I-35 freeway that serves as the main artery for the city. For several hours, every day, cars crawl in a single line in front of the Lodge onto the onramp of the freeway. If you find a spot on the side of the parking lot, you can sit on a small, grassy hill overlooking the commuters. It’s as good a place as any for a poker player to step outside and remember the rest of the world.
Before going to The Lodge, I’d heard a lot about Texas Poker. “The blinds don’t matter.” “They just want to gamble.” There were always rumors about a return to the Moneymaker era of weak competition being right around the corner. Armies of wealthy fans discovering the game of poker, new players uncertain about the rules just wanting to put chips in the middle. Like an 1840s prospector, I set out to find truth to these claims.
That week, The Lodge was hosting its Championship Series which was punctuated by a $3,000 main event with a $1 million guaranteed prize pool, roughly $250,000 for first. Last year, the prize pool was $2 million but between the parking lot being repaved and a competing club offering their big tournament the weekend before, The Lodge ended up paying $400,000 out of pocket to meet its guarantee. The club owners didn’t want to gamble this time.
The owners of The Lodge were a group of poker geniuses that included Doug Polk, Andrew Neeme, Brad Owen, and my close friend, Mike Brady. Mike Brady was the right-hand man for The Lodge, Upswing Poker, and most other enterprises within Doug Polk, Inc. Frankly, you wanted a guy like Mike Brady running those things as there aren’t a lot of people who knew OOP 4b 75BB ranges and also showed up to meetings on time.
Mike offered me a room in an AirBnB that was six minutes away from The Lodge. I was added to a group chat with about ten people who would be staying in the house over the two weeks of tournaments. Mike asked for grocery requests and one of the guys simply asked for Goldfish crackers.
“You don’t have enough already?” Mike joked.
“It’s the only thing I could think of that’s in a grocery store,” was the response.
I hadn’t socialized with poker players in a long time.
The drive to Austin from Dallas was easy. Big open skies and a mix of ranches, Taco Bells, and Dollar Generals. The roads were empty but Buc-ee’s was packed.
Arriving at the house, there was the musty smell of men living together. I greeted Mike Brady who was graciously changing my sheets from the last resident, who had just left that morning. I tossed my bags in my room. It was recommended I bring my own towels and a comforter. Mike offered me leftover BBQ, but when it turned out the other guys had finished it in the night, I told myself I wasn’t hungry and headed straight to The Lodge.
I pulled up to The Lodge in the middle of a tournament’s break, impossible to ignore how it looked like an after-hours massage parlor— two dozen young men smoking out front, mixed backgrounds, appearances, and demeanors like you’d only find in prison or the DMV.
The building itself could’ve been a laser tag center, blacked out windows across several storefronts. Inside, dozens of poker tables filled two large rooms. The sound of poker is the same anywhere— shuffling chips mixed with chattering from the players that condensed into background noise. The lowest stakes games were closest to the door, the bigger games in the back. Satellites and tournament tables were in the secondary room, closer to the bathrooms and soda fountains. Chip runners and servers hustled between the seated players. In another side area were more overflow tournament tables, a merch store and the room where they streamed final tables, where I hoped to be playing in a few days.
I hadn’t played live poker in a while, so my plan was to acclimate with some low-limit cash games, maybe win a satellite into the tournament for cheap, while finding out what “Texas Poker” meant. I took a seat at a $1/$2 game and looked around the table to gauge the type of gambler here. Among them:
Seat 2, balding guy in a purple hoodie, hood up, sunglasses, hand-rolling a cigarette at the table.
Seat 3, a Mexican in Wranglers, a plaid long sleeve, and a UT hat, either retired or close to it. He joked loudly with regs at another table and his laughs came out in wheezy bursts.
Seat 5, an Old Indian who looked miserable and was the only player with a wedding ring.
Seat 7, a middle-aged guy who worked out, pleasant face, grey hair combed back.
I sat at the same time as a new dealer and everyone tossed in $5. I looked around, confused.
“Bomb pot,” UT Mexican said. Bomb pots were hands where everyone put in money blind, then a hand was almost completely dealt out, with additional rounds of betting. It was a glorified coinflip and it happened at every table, every thirty minutes. I was already learning so much.
The UT Mexican teased the regs at another table about joining them.
“Oh man, I’m getting dizzy just thinking about it!”
Some things were the same in every card room. There was an ecosystem of regs—regular players—who were the apex predators, or at least, not hunted by larger animals. In Vegas, the poker player is a speck compared to the tourist. But in Austin, you were only ever looked down upon if you rolled a blunt at the table, which Edwin the Dealer told us happened the day before.
“It was an 80-year-old guy. Hey, at 80 you should get to do whatever you want, man.”
A middle-aged woman sat down in Seat 1, exchanging pleasantries with Edwin.
“I didn’t come here to look at you, I wanna play,” she indicated wanting good cards. It was like jumping back into an ocean I grew up swimming in. You could enroll in this life, make $40 an hour, and never be heard from again.
A twenty-something with wild hair stormed past. He wore pajamas masquerading as sweatpants, holding a giant anime body pillow, beelining to the door. He shouted something short and abrupt, frustrated over a bad beat.
“Oh, he does that all the time,” UT Mexican told me.
After an hour or two, a lull set in. People grew quiet and became more interested in their phones or happenings outside the table. My hunger took over and I cashed out.
I met with Mike Brady and we picked up In N’ Out. On the drive, Mike commented how driving in Texas was “hard mode” as he floored the gas pedal to avoid a semi-truck navigating an 80-ft freeway onramp. I explained that it wasn’t bad design, just the infrastructure was dependent on everyone else being good drivers.
Back at the house, we watched a stream of the final table of The Lodge’s $400 tournament with $120,000 for first. Come one, come all. I regretted not playing.
But watching the stream, I recognized one of the players: Dan W. I met Dan W several lifetimes ago, when I was sneaking into the Bellagio, learning the game, and $1/$2 meant a lot to me. Dan W, along with his friend Matt Moore, were the upperclassmen to me and my best friend, Mike Neel. They played $5/$10, they talked about six-figure swings, they got into the hijinks that Mike and I only dreamed about. I remembered stories of Matt Moore spending over $35,000 on poker table massages one summer. Dan W. had a similar situation with a spiritual guru.
Watching him now, little had changed. Commentators and the internet made fun of Dan’s fashion choices: “MC Hammer pants” and a wool sweater with a giant eagle on it. He wore the sweater over his shoulders, looking more like an art critic than the best player at the table.
I ended up falling asleep when Dan had one of the smaller stacks with six players left but wasn’t surprised, when I woke up, to see that he won the tournament. Not just that, but when there were only two players remaining and he had slightly fewer chips, he negotiated the trophy for himself. Classic Dan W.
***
The next morning, I woke up early and went straight to the card room. There were fewer tables than I expected and no seats open at $1/$2, so I played $1/$2/$5 PLO. There wasn’t much difference on paper, but I sat down at a game that had been running all night— I spotted several stacks with more than $5,000, towers of black and green, topped with oversized, yellow $1,000 chips. The red-eyes and hollow looks of the other players were unwelcoming. Eventually, a seat opened at $1/$2 and I racked up while being made fun of for hit-and-running $50 in profit.
The poker table is an egalitarian place. At this table:
Seat 2, a buff, black guy in the middle of a hand. He looked like he took the game seriously.
Seat 3, his opponent in the hand, a Young Mexican kid.
Seat 5, a Man in a Windbreaker, chubby, with short, scraggly facial hair and a vacant look in his eyes. He wouldn’t have been the first homeless person I’d played against.
The Young Mexican put out a bet, making his opponent fold.
“I needed clubs,” Seat 2 bemoaned.
The Young Mexican stared blankly. Unprompted, Seat 5 translated flawlessly into Spanish. The Young Mexican nodded. He showed two pair. Sometimes I forgot I lived in Texas.
In Seat 7, next to me, was a guy with a lazy eye who greeted me with a “how ya doin?” He provided a constant level of chirp, not as much as the UT Mexican from last night, but he knew the game and knew the people here who played it. He took out old, wired headphones with padded ears, then pulled out a bulky laptop from his bag and arranged it on one of the side tables.
“I’m already an hour late for work,” he said.
I laughed and warned him that he was going to get DOGE’d. He smiled in a way that made me think he actually had a government job.
A few hands later, he raised and I looked down at 23 suited. Perfect hand to play and, if you hit, lose all respect. And that’s what happened. I called along with a few others. I flopped a flush draw, called a bet, turned my flush, and ended up getting all-in against Seat 7’s AA for more than I expected.
“Damnit! First hand, Mike!” Seat 7 and the dealer were on a first name basis.
“You always do it to your favorites,” the tattooed dealer replied.
I was immediately distracted by an odd couple sitting at the table. A sight I always hated; a woman dragged to the card room by her man. He wore a fedora and a button-up t-shirt. She was in shorts and, more noticeably, six-inch pumps. Her lip filler made me realize the cosmetic surgeons in Austin hadn’t caught up with their counterparts in LA. They were both in their late 30s, but in their heads still mature 20-somethings. They both wore sunglasses, which almost made me laugh. If they weren’t on drugs, they should’ve been.
There was an announcement for a $400 satellite to the $3,000 Main Event. A smaller tournament that let you win your way into the bigger tournament, awarding ten seats. Instead of staying with these increasingly strange cast of characters, I decided to use my winnings to buy-in.
At my satellite table, I was sat next to a guy in a Neon Green Beanie.
“What’s up, man,” he said with no eye contact, a greeting I knew well. NGB asked for a menu and the dealer slid him a QR code. I had thought about ordering breakfast but didn’t want to deal with moving tables or worse, being eliminated and dragging my food to an empty seat to eat like an outcast.
There was one waitress for the entire room, taking orders between two dozen tables. It seemed to take a while to get food but she was doing her best, although maybe I was biased because I married a waitress.
Twenty minutes later, I picked up KK and got all-in preflop against JJ. The board ran A5234 giving us both a straight and splitting the pot. The grey-haired recreational player with JJ shrugged, sheepish.
“Absolutely brutal,” NGB said. He had amassed a giant stack.
A server brought NGB his plate of food, “The American Breakfast,” potatoes, bacon, eggs, toast.
“Plan on staying around long?” I asked, gesturing to the large meal.
“I’m a fast eater,” he shot back. I smiled. This was someone I recognized, a person you saw in every poker room—the self-confident reg. NGB had his place at the top of the ecosystem, knew the other regs, might even marry his own waitress.
A few orbits later, I picked up Ace King and got all-in against JJ and 44. This was for a large enough stack that my tournament ticket would be in sight.
The flop came ATJ. There was excitement around the table at the connectedness.
The turn Q gave me a straight, but I I had a lot of pain to fade.
The river Q gave my opponent a full house. The table oo’d and ah’d. It was a very dramatic way to lose a coin flip. I wished NGB luck and left the card room, heading back to the house.
Outside, coming in to start his own session, I ran into Dan W. I was less surprised by the coincidence and more surprised he remembered me, not having spoken in years. He seemed the usual, positive Dan W., which I was glad to see given how easy it is for a gambler to grow a thick skin of cynicism. I congratulated him on his tournament win and asked if he was playing the main event, he told me he was going on a camping retreat instead. I could’ve guessed that.
A tall, lanky reg I recognized from inside approached us. Red-eyed, dopey smile, a more obvious stoner. He pointed at the sunset.
“Crazy, huh?” the Stoned Reg said. Texas sunsets, I had learned, were even more beautiful than the desert sunsets I grew up with. The same unyielding sky now came with cotton-candy swirls of orange, pink and purples. It was so beautiful, this total stranger was talking to us about it.
“Holy cow, look at that!” Dan W stepped toward the sunset, like he could get closer to it. Just like I remembered him.
***
In the morning, I did what everyone does before a tournament— a personal ritual of forced calmness— I picked a shirt I thought might bring me some luck and pocketed the yarn bracelet my wife had made for me.
Rather than sit around the house, I went to The Lodge to play cash until the main event. Maybe this was ill-advised, but I’d rather get nervous energy out for the day and be in the flow by the time the tournament started. Or as much into the flow someone could get with a $200 buyin.
Inside, there were a handful of games and I sat at one still buzzing with energy from the night before. A 40-year-old man, who looked too old to have his hood up inside at 10 am, told us how he loaned Brad Owen $200 and got a 1% freeroll in Brad’s recent High Roller win. $600 was a lot to brag about this early in the morning.
A few hands later, 40-Year-Old Hoodie let us know he was playing the tournament today, too.
“I sold 50% to my mom,” he said, proudly.
I thought about a woman, at least 60, smoking cigarettes on her sofa watching The Price is Right with what should’ve been her son. It was almost enough to make me not want to see him bust. Then I remembered there was no Price is Right on Saturdays.
Anyone can play in a $3,000 tournament, and they do.
My table had a few guys my age and some older, including one who I had played with last night and wasn’t that good. On my right was an Indian Man, sweater vest, glasses on his nose, who looked like the ideal recreational player. On my left was a Tournament Reg who mentioned playing at the Wynn and commented on a few hands in a way that told me he was only playing monsters.
Half an hour into the day, I noticed the Indian Man with the Glasses falling asleep in his chair, chin tucked into his chest, eyelids heavy.
“Long night?” someone joked.
“Played PLO all night,” he said, stirring awake. I liked my table. Unfortunately, the cards didn’t cooperate. I folded middle pairs to flopped overcards and got away from what would’ve been a tournament ending all-in against a kid in a World of Warcraft jacket. On a JQ8sss board, he showed me AsJx while I sheepishly folded my AxKs after tanking to his oversized raise. I was getting cut down but still avoiding the death blow.
I wish I could say I made a run. That I picked up blinds, took down pots, won a few all-ins. The truth is, sometimes you’re destined to not win the tournament. A few more set-up hands and finally, an hour later, I shoved with Ace King over a raise. The Tournament Reg had pocket Aces and I didn’t improve. I wished him luck and left the tournament area. I tried not to think about how I’d been outlasted by the Indian Man asleep at the table.
Losing a tournament always felt bad, but I was only afforded so much self-pity. In two days, I’d won enough to cover my buy-in. While the Moneymaker era might never come back, not since I was a 18 in the golden days of online had I seen so many people content with playing losing poker.
As I left, stopping at the front desk to pay my overdue time fees, I waited behind an old man in a faded canvas jacket with metal buttons. Some people don’t need cowboy hats for you to know they’re cowboys. He probably drove in from at least an hour away, but to him The Lodge was a home game. It was somewhere to go, away from the wife, with the same people in the same place with the same chips as last week, and if that’s not progress on the frontier, I don’t know what is.
