At the start of the hand, when you get your first card, the pocket card, some people don't look at it immediately. Some will eye their opponent, trying to intimidate them. I've seen men stare each other down for minutes before either took a glance at their card. Others like to steal quick looks. I've seen some perform rituals that involved every totem in the world. One day, a bad day, I decided to stay back and watch some guys play. I had to learn from somebody, or else, I was gonna end up like my father and my grandfather before him. Broke, in my 20s.

The guy who took over the table played a 100-200 game. He was extremely thin, so I'll call him the thin man. But 100-200, that's a lot of money. It was like, the first anyone had seen of him. And this, this I'll always remember. The devil hands the deck to the thin man to be cut. So he cuts the deck. The devil deals the first hand. And the thin man doesn't look at the card. He's playing blind! He just looks back at the devil and pops a hundred dollar chip on the table. All of us thought, "A madman. He's gonna be dried up under ten hands. Playing 100-200, no less! And every time he threw in another chip, I secretly expected him to peek at his pocket card but he kept it faced down. Didn't even want to touch it. His left hand was placed on the table, his right hand on top of his chips. Like he couldn't wait to pop another piece into the pot.

What happens is, when the devil lets people hang around to watch him play, you don't get to stand right up there and see the cards. Everyone stands a few feet from the table. All you see is where the money goes. But we could all see what the thin man wasn't doing: he wasn't looking at his pocket card. So, as the first hand draws to a close, there's a thousand four hundred in bets, plus two hundred in starting bets. All the cards are dealt. Still, the thin man has not peeked at his pocket card. He throws in another two hundred dollars to see the devil's hand. The devil follows in. Two thousand dollars on the table. They pop open their pocket cards and none of us can see what's going on. Actually, no. All of us can see what's going on. The devil smashes his fist on the table, and starts cursing at the thin man. Every curse in the book, in every language.

We all laughed! I don't ever remember anyone laughing in that place, but everyone, all the guys like me who lost, we all started laughing and cheering on the thin man. For some reason, the devil allowed us to keep hanging around. I think he wanted to show us he could turn it around. He couldn't. In five hands, the he lost close to thirty thousand; the bulk of which came in the last hand, when the devil and the thin man kept raising and reraising each other. It was crazy. After that, they closed up for the day. No one else got to play until the den reopened a week from that night.

That was the longest I ever went without playing poker with the devil.