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is determined and/or determinable by fortune, fate, kismet, destiny, the cosmic pattern, the outlay of the
universe, the will of Allah, or the great unknown, he is aloser . Dalquier was not a loser.
The second thing which makes any man a great card player isfeel . The great card player, like Luis, is
never a thinker, a calculator, a concentrator. Poker is the toughest game in the world on a man who tries
to rivet himself into the game. No one has perfect concentration. You can have everything in the world
going for you and still shit out through simple tiredness. But not Luis Luis didn't ever need to figure the
odds in his head. He didn't need to debate the chances inside his head once a showdown was reached.
He didn't need to make his consciousness monitor his betting. It flowed through him like an electric
current. He knew it all by feel. It didn't come naturally to him, by any means. It wasprogrammed into
him by hard math and hard practice and hard psychology. It came to him slowly, that feel, but it came.
He won it.
Nobody ever told Luis that the cardinal principle of card-playing is that to bluff is to conceal, not to
deceive. He discovered that himself, built into his growing understanding of the game. He was an
automatic concealer. He never lied because he had a wholly natural in-built total disregard for the truth.
He never knew the meaning of truth, never even thought that it might have a meaning. To him, truth had
just as little referent as luck (or God, or kindness, or altruism, or heroism, or humanity Luis disbelieved
an awful lot of things).
I don't mean to imply that Luis never lost a game of cards in his life. Even pinball machines could beat
him eventually, for all his perfect timing and magnificent butterfly-flipping. He was a joy to watch playing
pinball (it was said), because he was practically in there with the ball, with the circuits and the
clickety-click of the score. But the machines always got the better of him in the end, because that's what
they were designed to do. They just kept boosting up the replay score until it needed a miracle to make
it. Luis didn't deal in miracles, only in practicalities. He was no wonder worker.
And so it was with packs of cards and racehorses. You can never know it all. The ultimate judgment
and control is always beyond you. That's what keeps a poker player playing. No man has a God-given
right to win; he can only come out so far ahead relative to the cards. It was that theory of relativity that
kept Luis in the game, getting better and better, without end.
Luis made some small fortunes in his time, but he was only a player, never a hustler. The game isn't
life it's an excerpt from life. After the game, win or lose, you have to come back to living. Luis was a
master strategist at that, too; but, as everyone in the world knows, the human race is fixed the deck is
well and truly stacked. Not only can't you win them all, you can't win, period. Dalquier had the talent to
clean out the world, but that in itself was self-defeating, because his talent told him he couldn't do it.
He made competition for himself simply by telling the truth about how good he was. People hated him
for that, and they longed to see him proved wrong. Crowds rejoiced every time Dalquier lost a play.
They had a warped idea about what sort of thing constituted proof (and wrongness). Most great artists
can win themselves any amount of respect and admiration, but Luis went a little short of that, and made
himself more enemies than another man (with a different temperament) might have done. Luis was always
one to put the screws on a bit too hard. He didn't just beat a man; he beat himgood . He didn't go
around rubbing people's faces in the dirt and stomping them, nor did he sneer and laugh. But he was a
hard, cold man, not a hustler he was too clear-sighted, too great a player, for that.
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He was an alienated man, was Luis. The world was on the other side of the fence. A lot of men would
have paid good money to watch Dalquier crawl, but he never did. Even when he was beaten through and
through, one way or another he'd always walk away. No one ever saw him crucified. They all loved to
see his money slide across a table. They all hungered for his blood to follow it. Many men were so
hungry for that blood money that they convinced themselves God and luck were going to give it to them.
That kind of man always gave Luis his money back and a lot more besides. They were the easy ones in
the game. They were absolute hell outside of it.
Dalquier won, if anything, too much on the table. He left himself without sufficient cards to play outside
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