In Transition
The switch between television and tournaments is getting harder to make
I wrap the final episode of Out of Practice. Tears all around. Who knows if we will be back. If the show gets picked up, I have a secret plan. I will hand the producers my tournament schedule: all the WPT and NAPT dates, and hopefully they can work around them.
The next morning the phone rings. A producer in London is calling. His movie has suddenly got financing. Can I be in London next Tuesday to begin filming? There is a pause, as I mentally scroll through my mind. “Sorry,” I say reluctantly. “I’m not available.”
I can hear his distress crackling through the overseas connection. “Your manager said you wrapped your show!”
“Yes,” I say defensively, “But he only has my acting schedule. He doesn’t know my poker schedule. Next week is Bay 101!”
After I convince the producer of the importance of Bay 101, and gently urge him to find another actress, I hang up and wonder if Chuck will strike me from his roster. I already passed on the lead in a major NBC pilot last week, because it shot in New York. The reason seemed perfectly logical to me, not so much to my manager. There are no casinos in New York.
That night, I have a dream. I am trying to get Entertainment Tonight on the TV, but it’s coming in all fuzzy. As the images fade to snow, I flip around and find the only channels coming in clearly are ESPN and the Travel Channel. Poker.
When I wake up, I don’t need to reach for the dream dictionary to find out what it meant. The trades are piling up unread in the corner. I don’t bother to return my agent’s phone calls. For the first time in ten years, I will not be going to any Oscar parties. I will be in Las Vegas instead, filming the NBC National Heads Up Championship.
I find myself on The View explaining my transmogrification to a puzzled Barbara Walters. “I know how to act,” I pontificate. “I’ve been doing that for 20 years. But I don’t know how to play poker. It’s more of a challenge.”
I win the Celebrity Player of the Year Award, a new category that has been hastily cobbled together to accommodate the legions of actors attracted by the burgeoning popularity of the game. I accept the award in a skintight low-cut dress, still uncertain whether to be a starlet or a pro.
“Next year, “ I announce, “I hope to come back as The Most Feared Player!” It gets a big laugh, but deep down that’s what I aspire to. I don’t want people to perk up as I approach the table; I want them to be horrified.
I don’t like the implied caveat that comes with being a “celebrity player.” It’s like being a “model/actress.” But how long does the moniker stick? Gabe Kaplan has been a poker player forever, and while respected, to most people he is still Mr Kotter.
LA Poker Classic. I am sweating profusely. I feel like I have a big target on my forehead. The table is full of sharks. The dead money has been dispatched, and I’m next. Every time I enter the pot, people practically knock each other over trying to get involved. “I’m a terrible player,” I say mournfully to anyone who will listen, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Finally I get an A-K. I raise; one caller: Ted Forrest. The flop comes ace, rag, rag; all hearts. Ted stares at the flop, quickly checks his hole cards again and throws 1,500 in the pot. I recognize this tell. Last weekend I was playing with Joe Graziano’s kid. There were four clubs on board, he checked his hole cards and went all in. I folded to the obvious flush. In this case I’m thinking Ted has top pair, and the nut flush draw. I have to shut him down before he gets there. I raise to 5,000.
“How many chips do you have left?” asks Ted.
“Not much,” I say blithely, trying to act unconcerned. I push them out. It looks like 3,600. He puts me all in.
Now, I know something has gone horribly wrong. He obviously has me beat. There is something going on that is not apparent to the naked eye. The odds of flopping a flush are 118 to 1. Even with my current run of bad luck, I don’t think that’s happened. If he has two pair, I can maybe catch up. I’ve seen him make huge bets with nothing before; that’s probably what he’s doing now. He’s just targeting the small stack! He thinks I’ll fold.
“I call,” I say. Ted has a set of sixes.
I trudge over to Phil’s table, and grimly recount the hand to him. “The flop came ace, and two small rags…” I say.
Bill Gazes is getting a massage and listening in. “That’s redundant,” he interrupts. “Rags are always small.”
“Oh, right,” I say, laughing a little. I can’t even get my poker vernacular right.
I describe how Ted checked his hole cards before he bet, and how I thought that was a tell. Phil laughs. “Honey, Ted is not some kid from Portland. Do you think for an instant he didn’t have his hole cards memorized?” Of course. I feel stupid. It was a fake tell.
Once I was playing with Mike Matusow; he had just gone all in, and while his opponent was deciding whether to call, Mike nervously adjusted his glasses. It was an odd, vulnerable gesture.
Later on (being Mike) he was crowing to the guy whose stack he’d decimated. “Do you think I didn’t know you had aces? Everything I did was calculated to crack you, even down to pushing my glasses up on my nose!”
And I realized, in retrospect, why the gesture had struck me as odd. Because his glasses were not sliding down his nose at all. They did not need to be adjusted. Someone not wanting a call would remain motionless.
The subconscious is a powerful weapon. It notices things all the time that our conscious mind is too busy to pick up. With Ted, I knew I was beat. And I chose not to believe it.
I go to the Celebrity Invitational determined to have fun. The greatest party I ever attended was The Invitational two years ago, where I met Phil. I busted out in twenty minutes, but I hung around until 1:30 in the morning, doing shots, meeting people, and table-hopping. Every time I saw an empty seat, I would sit down and pretend I was still playing.
Mimi Rogers and I ended up sitting behind a very drunk Dave Foley, peeking at his hand and giving him advice. A spectator in the crowd plucked at my sleeve, appalled at the level of play he was witnessing. “If you’re a friend of Dave’s, tell him to stop calling,” he urged. “Tell him to either raise or fold.”
I relayed this information to Dave, and he just laughed. We were all still laughing when a burly man drew a red velvet rope around the table, effectively cutting Mimi and me out of the inner circle. We took this as a hint to leave. I went home and wrote in my journal “How much fun was that?!” and underlined the entry. My pocket was full of phone numbers. I couldn’t remember who any of these people were, and threw them all away.
This year it’s the same faces, but I feel like the other celebrities are tourists. I wear my gold bracelet and the girls ooh and ah over it, like it’s a bauble I picked up from Van Cleef and Arpels. I’m not wearing it to show off. I feel like it might be good for my self-esteem to have a visual reminder of my prowess.
The game starts genially enough, although I am a little perturbed to see there are no celebrities at my table. The only recognizable faces are pros: Mark Seif, Phil Hellmuth Jr, and Arnold Spee. In less than ten minutes, Mark and Phil have felted two unfortunate souls, and doubled up. Now they are the only ones laughing. Jollily they toss huge bets in the pot, while the rest of us mutter under our breath, and grimly try to retain our chips.
There is a picture of me online, holding my aching head, my mouth turned down, sadly fingering my tiny stack. “Jennifer, looking very serious, at the Invitational,” reads the caption. Among all the pictures of the happy schmoozing celebrities, I stand out like a sore thumb. I guess I should have had more fun. I just didn’t. To me, poker is not a game anymore; it’s a metaphysical journey, a chance to prove the existence of God in a barren landscape.
Phil and I both bust out early. Unlike years past, watching other players continue to play a tournament that I am no longer involved with holds no charm for me.
At this juncture we are forced to endure a small vacation. We are very peeved about having to leave the bustle and juiciness of the Commerce Casino to go float on a boat. We argue about who agreed to the trip. But we promised our friends, so off we go to Mexico for three days.
While everybody else snorkels, and rides the wave runners, I lie below in the gently rocking boat, and read. I read Mike Sexton’s Shuffle Up and Deal, I read Erik Lindgren’s Getting to the Final Table, and I read a book called The Psychology of Winning.
And suddenly I have an epiphany. My attitude is all wrong! Instead of focusing on winning, I worry about losing. I constantly write about what a bad player I am, and complain that I don’t know what I’m doing. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So I’m not going to put myself down any more. I do know what I’m doing! And I’m going to start doing it. As soon as I get off this damn boat…
