A day in Las Vegas, where poker is the noblest activity there is

In that frightening and spectacular cathedral of emptiness that is Las Vegas – where couples of clueless riches line up to enjoy the privilege of a ride on a fake Grand Canal aboard a fake gondola escorted by a fake gondolier, of not even distant origins Italians, and for this they gladly pay out 156 very real dollars – I happened to experience one of the most hallucinatory days of my life.

I won’t bore you with the rules of the Texas Hold’em and its rigorous mathematical principles, and I will have compassion for those who declassify it as silly and dangerous cotton candy for gambling addicts; I will limit myself to immerse myself and immerse you in the mood starting from the context, the World Series of Poker Running May 30-July 18 at the Paris and Horseshoe Casinos in Las Vegas, connected by a labyrinthine network of corridors dotted with commercial establishments, designed to prevent dazed visitors from getting exposed to natural light, especially in the Nevada summer which can be brutal. So let it be all artificial, fake, a kitsch that goes around and becomes sublime, the ecstasy of the sheep as Tommaso Labranca theorized. But we said, poker.

Poker is the noblest recreational activity that can be enjoyed in the city, certainly more educational than the bright slots assaulted by an army of drug addicts at any time of day or night (concepts that tend to get confused in Las Vegas). There are dozens of tournaments and they start as often as a subway: I chose one with a $250 buy-in, on the advice of my friend Riccardo Trevisani who is a regular at the scene. Actually, I chose it just for fun, in the blissful unawareness of the rituals and dynamics of such an event. A minor event (literally side event), albeit with the official WSOP logo, yet capable of gathering 172 participants including myself, all ready from 1pm to face an entire day of poker, a few thousand hands dotted here and there by short bathroom breaks and various refreshments, hunting for a slice of the worst pepperoni pizza what they do around here. All ready, except one.

A beautiful and grotesque 1969 film by Sydney Pollack, entitled “They don’t kill horses like this?”, told the adventure of a group of desperate people grappling for money with a knockout dance marathon, in America Depression. Nothing so gory and so depressing: playing poker in Las Vegas is one of the things worth living for, not to mention thehumanity with which you find yourself sharing the table (a lively rounder closer to 80 than 70, as soon as I revealed to him that I was Italian, he began to praise the cemetery of La Spezia: “One of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen in my life”). Nothing so bloody, unless you underestimate the three key aspects of the matter, which I dramatically screwed up: 1) the icebox temperature of the poker room, even lower than those low to the ground in the other rooms of the casino; 2) unless you leave the table, the difficulty in eating and quenching your thirst if you don’t have cash on hand, and I – shame on me – didn’t have any; 3) the concentration that you have to impose, willy-nilly, if you want to try to make a good impression or at least not throw away your 250 dollars in the space of twenty-five hands. Which, trivially, makes the poker a sport: you need training, physical and mental preparation, aptitude for competition, ringworm. And I was also doing well, rather well, when I was attacked by a kind of dizzying malaise I had never experienced before, a sense of weakness, nausea and lack of appetite to be stopped with Oki and Gatorade remedied by my friends and traveling companions. And in all of this I was still in the game, and the more the migraine pierced my temples the more and better cards came to me, KK AQ 99 QQ, and my embarrassments, my bad raises, my calls instead of raises must have been unbearable to the my opponents, who had before their eyes the pitiful spectacle of this Italian pale as a sheet, folded in on himself, muttering wrong and incomprehensible terms, with a mountain of chips in front of him.

Then I recovered, and incredibly continued to win hands with impeccable logic, in short, without babbling as poor players in search of an alibi for their misfortunes complain. In Las Vegas you never really know what time it is, and if you’re sitting at a poker table for ten consecutive hours you easily lose track of the days and months as well. The faces, the accents, the stacks under the nose change; from 25 there are 20, then 15, then 10. The blinds soaring makes the tournament feel like a shootout, a crackling of all-ins where everyone silently begs for others to drop the hand (yet going all-in in Las Vegas gives you a sense of omnipotence like Robert Downey Jr. in the “Iron Man” ending). You get to the final table, you realize that the others are just as tired as you are, someone insults each other, someone insults you, others make a noise. Enter the money, that is, win money, everyone applauds, for 15 percent of the damned (25 players out of 172) the ship will arrive in port. Finally you lose, because in Vegas, sooner or later everyone loses: I lost by going all-in with AK, being called by one with AJ and crashing on the fatal Jack on the flop (sorry for the technicalities). It was almost midnight, well after ten hours of play. I collected my four rags, the crumpled sweatshirt and the Pure Leaf tea with raspberry pitifully collected during a break, I received from the hands of the floor (the floor referee) the pink card with which to collect the 1,032 dollar prize, strictly cash as tradition dictates down here in Nevada. And I felt very tired and happy, indeed it is better to say drunk, as everyone you meet on the Strip in Las Vegas is drunk on something. Like someone who has just finished the first marathon of his life unscathed and swears to himself there won’t be a second. Like that gorgeous David Foster Wallace book on a cruise, I’ve had my funny thing that I’ll never do again.