Cards

By Jonathan Maxwell

Well I’ve only written a couple reviews in my life, but when I asked The Poker Web webmaster if there was any reviews on the new poker novel Cards by Jonathan Maxwell, he suggested I’d be the first. So here it is.

The main reason I’m writing this is because this book moved me. I guess that’s a strange thing to say about a poker book, but this book is different.

It’s a story about a burnout 28 year old poker player that barely makes enough money to pay his rent, and although the author depicts the character in a funny way, clearly the character hates his poker life. Here is the opening few paragraphs which I got off the publisher’s website…

“4-8 of clubs, and it looks good right now. What a piece of garbage-- 4-8 of clubs. I throw it away. The flop comes 9-9-3. Good, it missed. I look up and enter the nothing. I dream and the dealer shuffles. When he passes me the first card the dream is over. I can never remember the dream. It doesn’t matter because now is the first card. I wait. It’s too painful to look one card at a time. The second card slides in. I shuffle against the felt. I look: 4-9 offsuit. This happens sometimes-- one or both the cards ascend one rank from hand to hand, and each time is equally meaningless. I toss the cards, lean back, prop up my knee to balance. I hear an argument at another table, then return to the nothing.

The female Filipino dealer tosses me one card, then the next. I shuffle and look: 5-3 offsuit. I wait my turn then throw away. A waitress serves chicken strips at a game across the aisle. The tables, the rugs, everything within the huge square room glares fluorescent teal. Slits in the plastic walls hide neon yellow lights. This surely is one of the ugliest rooms in the history of mankind. Someone wins the hand. The dealer collects the cards, shuffles again.

I shuffle then look: 4-8 offsuit. I toss it and look up. I think about my age. Is this what I want for myself at twenty-eight? I thought a lot about ending my life but decided to ride it out. Thus I lie to myself. I say I have a right to have fun. I say my intelligence separates me from society. Zen has taught me to just be natural because everything really is perfect at all times. This satisfies my head, but the knot in my stomach never goes away. The acid knot is there from the first moment I wake till the last moment before sleep.”

In order not to spoil it for you, I’ll just say he goes on a type of poker adventure.

The first great thing about the book is how real and unfiltered is the writing. There’s a ton of profanity, which I usually don’t need, but with this writing you feel that it’s natural, as if you’d know the words would be missing if they were omitted. I never thought a talented writer would also be a professional card player. The author admits in the Afterword that he was a professional player, but iit’s obvious that he knows what he’s talking about because of the technical description of the hands, and the real life casino descriptions.

The writing is dense and lean. I get bored quickly with books, but in each page of this novel you feel a big intake of information. It moves very fast, but after a while you have to put it down because it’s so intense because the story is intense, but also because of the quality of the writing. That’s part of what I was saying about how it moves you.

The writing is very good, but also there’s so much gritty information at the poker table and away from it! First here’s an example of at the table where the main character is playing in a game too big for his bankroll. (I took from the website also. P.142)…

“Big blind: A-Q spades. Adrenaline sprays. My pulse pounds in my chest and ears. Jesus, should I raise preflop? Let’s see what the others do. If I hit the flop I’m gonna lead. If they raise I’m not backing down. If someone holds A-K I will lose all my money. Fold, fold, the white haired bearded man calls from seat eight, the chubby Frenchman next to him raises to 500, CEO calls, fold, fold, I call, call. The dealer gathers the chips. Fear buzzes my flesh. I hope she puts out a queen. I almost don’t want to see an ace. Not only would I fear A-K, but ace-anything could hide two pair. The verdict races forth: burn, one, two, three, flip: 6-Q-A with a spade. Oh my God. I check, the beard guy bets 1500, chubby man calls, fold, I call. The dealer pulls the bets to the center. Jesus please put a rag out there. Burn, turn: 9 of hearts. I check, beard checks, check. ****, I missed a bet. No matter, I’m winning this pot. Put anything out there. The pot is ****ing mine. The river comes a 5. I slide in two red and two blue chips for a 2200 franc bet. I don’t think they’re calling any more than that. Man, that’s almost $500 right there.”

Technical stuff like this is great, and makes the book a fine instructional book too, but I like most when the character talks away from the game…

“I’m going to walk the boardwalk to the Tropicana. The long walk through the morning sea air will turn things around.

I descend the steps to the scape of brass and wood and black- vested servants. Electric lollipops scroll yellow and red digits. Shouts of joy and pain reflect the obdurate verdicts dispensed by dice, balls, and cards to the guiltless condemned. I will never again play these table games seriously. That’s one stage of evolution I’ve reached, albeit through thousands of Darwinian dollars. I’ll play stoned with friends and women, but as long as I expect to lose I’ll be OK. By the way, there’s nothing wrong with blowing money on gambling. Some blow cash on women, some on toys, some on travel, others on the casino. Snorting a rail of Peruvian flake then pressing the pass line with a quarter on hard six is worth every cent.

I push open the glass doors to the salt bath, and sun shower. The weathered wood feels noticeably soft to my knees. The boardwalk has just begun to wake. Latin shopkeepers crank down awnings. Sparse senior couples stroll through memories. Wind blows the knotted hair of a homeless curled in a dream. A wiry Chinaman solicits me for a ride in his three wheeled bicycle. To the left lies two hundred yards of sand. The ocean stretches forever.

Like a lighthouse the distant Tropicana sign signals me. It wont move closer for a very long time, and half way there I’ll wish I had taken a cab, but I need to clean my mind. The Atlantic Ocean reminds me of my trip. Tomorrow I’ll see the end of this ocean, then the land beyond.

Sometimes I wish cards were never invented. I would be something else, maybe a carpenter or a banker or a musician. Every few months I have the strange wonder if I would be a good painter, if people would love my paintings and pay me $20,000 for each one. At high-powered dinner parties others would ask me what I did. I would tell them I was a painter, and have no need to explain further. A beautiful women would marry me if I was a painter, and I’d have children and teach them how to paint. But I’m not a painter. I’m a card player. I appear, read others, work percentages, then I vanish.” p.96

It’s parts like this that get under your skin. Then the more you read, the stranger you feel. At first I didn’t like the main character, but as the story continued I liked him more and more, even though he’s such a negative guy. Maybe that’s how the author, Maxwell, wanted me to react, but how many poker books have you read that made you ask these kinds of questions?

Then at the end there’s a speech on luck…

“Luck exists. It’s a fact like gravity. People laugh at that statement, but that’s because they haven’t spent their lives at poker tables. Now what is luck? It’s energy. The way I see it is the universe is a giant waterslide park with tubes twisting and turning through space. Instead of water flowing through the tubes it’s energy. The point is when you drift into a tube you ride the energy. That’s when you’re lucky and repeatedly get K-Q and pocket 9’s and so forth. You can ride the tube for ten minutes or a couple days. Of course eventually for some reason, I wish I knew, maybe the waterslide takes a sharp turn and you fly off, but for whatever reason you fall off the tube. Then you’re floating in space again. And depending how far away from the tubes you are, or depending on if the other players have found tubes, that’s how cold the cards get. Now listen up because this is the point: No amount of willpower will pull you back onto an energy tube. No amount of discipline will reward you. Patience is used for waiting, not for seeking. The point is that if you’re ice cold and getting garbage and not connecting with anything for a couple hours, just because you’ve been patient doesn’t mean the universe will reward you with a slew of ace-kings. No, you must wait until you arbitrarily slide into an energy tube. Do you see the difference? You don’t wait because you’re trying to deserve it, you wait because there’s no tube around. The distinction is important because if you think your patience is making you deserve to win, like it’s being put in some bank accounted by God, then you become frustrated that your growing account isn’t buying what it should. Then you go on tilt and lose all your chips. If on the other hand you appreciate that you’re actually in a void, then you wont go on tilt no matter how long you wait because the truth of your situation is clear. You might get depressed,” He starts laughing. “You might think about changing jobs, which isn’t a bad idea at all, but you wont tilt, and there is all the difference.” P.279

This speech goes further too. I find this and many other passages in the book very enlightening. A lot of the ideas in here I’ve never heard before, and that’s saying much in USA’s present poker craze.

On the negative side, I think I would have liked a little less technical play and more of the character away from the table, especially in the middle of the book. Also I wanted the character to play against a certain very aggresive player named “James.” And the book has a lot of typos. The publisher needs to fire their proofreader.

The bottom line is that I expected to read some simple poker story, and got way more than I bargained for. I’m not even sure how I feel yet. I think I’m seeing poker and the whole poker scene differently. I checked around but couldn’t find any reviews on this book. I guess it’s too new. I’m very eager to see what other’s think about it.

I found the book by clicking on a Google ad for www.cardsnovel.com. The site says the book will be out in stores in December, but you can get it over there like I did. I’m not a very good writer, but I hope this gives you a good idea of what to expect.

Mitch Ingrisani / Freelance writer