Saturday Night at River's

Saturday night, $1/$2 at Rivers. Table's full. You got your regulars, your tourists, your guy who tips $40 on a $60 pot because he read somewhere that's what big players do.

Capital One VP — let's call him that, because I'm pretty sure that's what he is — sits left of the button in a sweater that costs more than my first car. He announces every raise like he's doing the table a favor. "I'll put you in for twelve," he says, smiling. He's not playing poker. He's performing a version of himself he saw in a movie. He tips big when he wins. He tilts when he doesn't. By midnight he's down three grand and telling everyone he meant to call. The house loves this guy.

The 55-year-old woman across from me has been asking about my day for two hours. She's pleasant, she's friendly, she laughs at my jokes. She's also the best player at the table and has been for twenty years. Her sociability is her cover. Nobody reads her as a threat because she looks like someone's mom. She plays tight-aggressive, never tilts, and she collects from the Capital One VPs of the world while they're busy being characters.

The 19-year-old next to her has Airpods in and a phone on the rail between hands, watching GTO solver videos. He uses the term "solver-approved" unironically. He thinks position is about where you sit at the table, not what it tells you about the other guy's hand. He hasn't figured out that the game is about people, not math. In six months he'll be back at his parents' house. In two years, if he's honest with himself, he'll know why.

And then there's Buddy A. He sits in the small blind with the energy of a man who has done hard time — which he has, twenty years of it, for a crime I won't name. He did a lot of reading in that cell. Milton. Melville. Philosophy, history, economics. He can quote Paradise Lost better than most people who actually read it. He's calm at the table. He reads people the way the rest of us read headlines. Doesn't play many hands, but when he plays, you know it. He's not there to prove anything. He already did his time.

The loudest regular at the table is the opposite — a chef named Marty Rivers who calls every river and somehow hits the one card he needs every time. I wrote about him in a piece called The Guy Who Can't Fold.

Here's what you're actually watching: the Capital One VP is subsidizing the whole table. He's the inflow. The house takes its cut — rake, fees, room. The 55-year-old woman is the outflow — quiet, pleasant, relentless. The 19-year-old burns bright on borrowed money and borrowed confidence. Buddy A is there for the chess and the company.

The math behind the night — how the rake eats $30 an hour off the table and turns AJo into a fold — is the subject of a separate piece I wrote called The Rake Is Eating You Alive. What I do during all those waiting folds — the laptop, the anime, the paperback — is the subject of a piece called Anime and Poetry at the Poker Table. And the reason I walk there instead of drive is a separate story, in Why I Still Walk to the Casino.

So who are you? Because there's always a you. And the answer probably isn't what you want it to be.