Pot Odds

Journey was playing poker. That was nothing new; unless she was at a family gathering or working her day job, you could bet on finding her in a cardroom. Journey was also the only woman at her table, one of four in the room (she counted). This wasn’t new either; there were more women playing poker these days than when she first snuck into casinos as a teenager, but they were far from the majority. At least one of the men seated at a table with Journey would make a comment about her, that never failed; the way she played or dressed or sat quietly and minded her own business. In reality, she was good friends with most of the players and dealers she encountered, she simply chose not to speak to the rude ones. Journey was willing to bet that probably had a good deal to do with why they spent so much of their energy trying to gain her attention. She did her best to ignore comments like the ones she had been hearing since the first time she won a hand against a man too proud to lose gracefully to a woman, often preferring silence to a fight. Still, she had to wonder whether these men would say the same things if she were another man instead of a woman. She doubted it.

What was unique about that day was not how Journey was spending her time, or who was there with her, but where she came to play. Journey was in Las Vegas, the heart of the poker community and one of her favorite places to travel. Players from around the world swarmed the city as the World Series of Poker launched for another summer. Journey had been to Vegas during the WSOP – she’d even played a few of the smaller tournaments and cash games – but this was the first year she signed up for a tournament with such a large prize pool. The most she ever bought in for was around two hundred dollars, for the chance to claim a couple thousand if she could hang on long enough while other players busted out. Journey had never won a tournament, but she made it far enough in a few to win back her buy-in and a little prize money on top, and she had been satisfied with that. This summer she had her sights set on bigger stakes: a fourteen hundred dollar buy-in, with a twenty thousand-dollar first place cash prize. She wasn’t ready to imagine herself winning the whole thing outright, but if she made it to the final table Journey could leave Vegas with enough money to finally put a down payment on a new home. She spent months training, playing tournaments online whenever she had the time to spend. She landed in Las Vegas feeling strong in her skills and hopeful that her training would be enough to carry her through this event.

Now Journey sat in a circle of seven, the other three already out of money and wandering dejected back to their hotel rooms. The tournament was on its second day and things were going well for her. With only two tables left Journey was already guaranteed a small prize, but she was determined to claim a seat at the final table. She knew she would need to stay focused to avoid joining the list of participants who busted and were sent away. She kept her head down as she calculated her odds and read the other players with each turn of a card, but that did not prove to be enough to keep her off their radar. They asked her why she was so quiet, told her she should smile more, and quietly cursed at her as they abandoned their chair after she put them all-in and won. She wrote every comment in her little notebook, which accompanied her during every poker session and had come to feel like her good luck charm.

The notebook was black when she bought it, though now it was more of a dusty gray after all the years of use. It had a thin elastic band attached to sthe back cover, which Journey clipped her pen to and wrapped around the front to hold the journal closed. It was thin enough to carry in her pocket, and somehow it seemed she was always nearing the end of the pages but never actually running out. She filled the pages with two types of notes: on the left she wrote down every disrespectful comment other players hurled her way, and on the right she kept a tidy ledger of her winnings, all the pots she claimed in hands against those same players. She felt a deep sense of satisfaction in the juxtaposition of the two: snarky men’s words sandwiched between the statistics of their downfall. She did not think of cards in terms of gambling or taking money from strangers; to Journey poker was a sport, pots were points, and she was a competitive athlete. She used her notebook in part to keep score, and in part to remind herself of everything she had endured to earn her seat at this table.

As the lines in her notebook filled and her stack of chips grew the number of participants dwindled, until finally she was one of ten people joining the dealer at the final table. Another off-color quote written on the left, a new entry added on the right, one step closer to owning her own home. Before she knew it Journey was looking at her last two competitors: a quiet older man who smiled in every hand regardless of whether he won or lost, and an aggressive player around her age who was quick to bully and bluff his way to winning a pot. Journey had never made it this far in a tournament before. She played her hands carefully and watched each player, feeling thankful for all her years spent learning to read faces the way most people read cards. After a few rollercoaster rounds, she found herself playing heads up against the older man. Journey was holding her favorite hand, eight nine suited, two diamonds matching two more diamonds on the board. One more and she would have a flush – she would just have to hope he didn’t have a higher one. She bet carefully and her opponent followed, neither seeming to guess at what the other had. On the river, the last card to hit the board, Journey exhaled – a diamond. The man eyed her for a moment, then flipped over his cards. He was one card away from winning with a full house, but he didn’t get there. As the dealer pushed the chips in her direction, Journey’s fingers reached instinctively for her notebook, waiting to record whatever comment would come her way. Instead, as the older man stood to leave he smiled at her and shook her hand, congratulating her genuinely. She watched him join a small crowd of busted players, nodding every time she won another hand against the bully.

He told her his name was Jimmy and asked if was free for dinner after the game, his treat. She ignored him. He didn’t seem to notice, continuing on by describing what a nice night he could afford after winning this tournament. Journey stayed quiet but her blood was boiling. She needed to win now, not for the house but to prove him wrong, to show up every page in her notebook that had eaten at her all these years.

Journey traded chips back and forth in silence with the other player, her heart sinking as she watched her stacks dip lower. Jimmy’s strategy bordered on unsportsmanlike, but it was effective; he was laying traps and she was falling for them. She had a good lead on him at first, but in the last hour their stacks balanced out until they were nearly even. Journey held her breath as her next hand was dealt. A pair of nines. Inside she nearly collapsed, knowing her odds were slim at best. Jimmy bet big, clearly confident in whatever hand he had. Journey looked up, stared him straight in the eye for the first time all day. He winked at her.

She called his bet. The flop showed the first three cards: three, four, nine. She played it cool, disguising her hand and knowing her odds still weren’t high. He bet big again, and she called. The turn was a five. He had two different ways to make a straight and beat her, and the smile on his face told her he had it. Still, she had to see it through. She bet small, he raised her. The final card – a queen. Her opponent looked at her as he pushed all in, apparently confident he had her beat. He nodded to her and told her not to feel bad, since no one really expected some girl to win a tournament anyway. The crowd around her murmured (in agreement or disapproval, she couldn’t tell) but Journey’s face was calm and unaffected as she considered the board. Finally she lifted her eyes to meet Jimmy’s and, without blinking, pushed the last of her chips across the felt. Jimmy looked more than a little annoyed at her nerve but flipped his cards, showing the hand he planned to brag about every time he told his friends about the time he beat that girl at the table.

A pair of fours.

Journey stared, wondering if she were reading things right. She looked at him as if waiting for him to laugh and say he was kidding, of course he didn’t really just go all in with a pair of fours. He didn’t say a word. Slowly she turned over one card, then the other. She thought she saw the dealer smile a little when he pushed the last of Jimmy’s chips her way.

Shoving his chair away, Jimmy swore as he stood up from the table, glaring at the dealer as he turned to leave. To her surprise, he stuck out his hand and mumbled to Journey that she had played a good game. She thought he almost sounded like he meant it. Jimmy left the room but the crowd stayed, congratulating Journey and laughing in disbelief at the way the hand played out, some even taking pictures of the board for evidence when they go home to their friends. Photographers swarmed the table and the casino staff stepped forward to congratulate her. Journey tried to take it all in but couldn’t quite wrap her head around the stack of chips sitting in front of her, hardly even hearing it when the floorman started explaining the process for collecting her twenty thousand dollars from the casino.

The excitement faded and the crowds dispersed, and Journey realized how exhausted she was. She made her way toward the elevators to head up to her room, stopping at a trash can near the elevator doors. She thought about everything it had taken to get to this point in her life, every word and number that filled her journal. She considered what she wanted for her future, what kind of foundation she wanted for this next stage in life. Propping the notebook against the wall, she unclipped her pen and wrote in Jimmy’s final comments, balancing them with the sum of the pot she won against him in the end. At the bottom of the page, Journey wrote “twenty thousand” in bold letters, underlined it, and closed the book. Wrapping the elastic band around the pages, she held the small black book in her fingers, felt the familiar weight of it in her hands. As the elevator doors opened, she paused, then dropped the notebook in the garbage and headed back to her room, back home.