Wednesday, November 8, 2017 // The Statement 
 
7B

ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY KOFFSKY

stacks of chips and sit down at the oval-
shaped table to which we are ushered. I peek 
in at a different game at the table behind me. 
There are eight people playing, a middle-
aged man leans over his backward chair as 
a woman — presumably a resort employee 
— massages his back. A young woman 
wearing a “MAKE AMERICA GREAT 
AGAIN” hat sits across the table. Holding 
a glass of wine in one hand, she’s prone to 
loudly commenting on peoples’ moves as the 
rest of the players stay silent; I notice she’s 
currently the table leader, with an enormous 
pile of chips at her disposal, and I begin to 
suspect this brashness might be a strategy of 
some kind.

Turning back to my table, I try to formulate 

my own game plan, but I’m reminded by the 
sobering reality of my small, $40 stack of 
red chips that a strategy is futile. I will be 
relentlessly bullied by the others, no matter 
what I try. As the dealer sets up the table, I 
survey the rest of the players. There’s an old 
man to my right and an old man to my left, 
both with headphones on. I would think this 
to be some form of cheating, but I notice it’s 
a common trend; many people around the 
room do the same, unnervingly silent and 
their hands covering their mouths as they 
watch the dealers. Edward sits across from 
me, and next to him is a young, well-built 
man in a military haircut. He has diamond 
stud earrings, and he wears the hood of his 
gray Nike sweatshirt over half of his head. 
Sitting beside him is another young guy in 
a gray hoodie, his hair in dreadlocks. He’s 
scrolling through his phone with one hand 
and flipping his formidable stack of chips 
in the other. Rounding out the table are 
older men, each one wearing earbuds and 
slyly sizing up the other players out of the 
corners of their eyes. It’s a dispiriting, but 
not unsurprising, fact that I have the least 
amount of chips at the table. I sigh as the 
dealer begins to deal.

For the first few rounds, I fold, pre-flop. 

It’s a horrible way to play, I know, but I am 
deathly afraid of putting my money on the 
line against complete strangers. I can hear 

my parents’ disappointed sobs as they cry 
somewhere in the metaphysical ether over 
the fact that their son has been lost to Satan. 
“But I haven’t even bet anything yet!” I cry 
back to them, but they don’t respond; the 
damage is done, and they begin to divert all 
the necessary funds toward my sister.

When I do finally receive a good hand, 

I cautiously throw out a bet: $15. It’s a bit 
high, but I have pocket jacks, and I’m feeling 
decent about this one. My heart is racing, 
nonetheless, as I see my own money in the 
pot, up for grabs and susceptible to the worst 
of fates. Unfortunately, the other players 
are not complete idiots, so they all fold, 
leaving the scraps of big and small blinds 
for me to embarrassingly slide into my pile. 
Still, I begin to understand the appeal — I’m 
indescribably happy, even at the smallest of 
returns, that I’ve actually won something. I 
am filled with cheap adrenaline, ready for the 
next hand immediately.

“No way I was going to play that, my 

man,” the guy with the crew cut says to me. 
I’m surprised, since no one has said much of 
anything up to this point.

I smile, unsure of how to respond. Edward 

looks at me, laughing silently. He’s the better 
poker player between the two of us, but so far, 
he’s employed the same strategy as I have.

“Man, Chris, you really don’t screw 

around, do you?” says the other man in the 
gray hoodie. He’s addressing the dealer, 
and it seems the sphere of conversation has 
opened.

Chris, whose nametag is quite small, is 

a balding man who looks to be in his late 
30s. He’s seen it all before, I can guess, and 
players chirping at him are nothing new. 
Ever unflappable, he smiles and mutters, “If 
you don’t mess with me, I don’t mess with 
you.”

The man laughs and tosses him a chip, 

for which Chris thanks him and promptly 
slides into his secured tip repository 
underneath the table. Theirs is now a joking 
and playful relationship, and the game 
continues.

“Man, I’m not even supposed to be here,” 

Crew Cut sighs a couple of hands later. 
He sounds somewhat remorseful, but he 
remains at the table. The other players, with 
their earbuds still firmly jammed into their 
ears, look at him but don’t say anything. 
“My boy OD’d on some shit yesterday and 
his funeral’s tonight.”

Edward and I shoot each other confused 

looks as conspicuously as possible, but no 
one else at the table seems to register the 
shock value of what he’s just said.

The man with the dreadlocks responds: 

“Oh, yeah? What’s up?”

“Yeah, heroin or some shit. And he was, 

like, my cousin, too.”

“I feel, man.”
At this point, I completely forget about 

the game. This is fascinating, riveting, and 
I am enthralled, in the way that a museum 
patron gawks at a particularly interesting 
painting. I had never heard something so 
shocking be delivered so casually. Needless 
to say, I fold for a few hands.

“You smoke weed, Chris?” Dreadlocks 

has returned to his affable banter with the 
dealer. Chris smiles but doesn’t respond.

“How about we smoke a blunt after this? 

You gotta smoke weed, Chris. When I got 
shot in the arm, who was there for me? 
When my mom kicked me out of the house, 
who was there for me? Mary Jane’s been 
the only girl I’ve ever loved, man.”

Crew 
Cut 
laughs, 
nods 
and 

enthusiastically gives him a knowing 
handshake. A cynical thought creeps into 
my head: This all sounds so outlandish, 
so implausible, so what if it’s some sort 
of genius strategy? I haven’t even paid 
attention to the last few hands. Perhaps I’m 
being played.

But I can’t deny the genuine rapport 

that’s been building between the two of 
them, even between Dreadlocks and the 
dealer. I smile at Edward, one of my oldest 
friends, and shake my head at the absurdity 
of it all.

A few rounds later, I’m dealt pocket kings. 

Thrilled and overconfident, I place larger 
and larger bets, until the only two players 
left before the river — the final community 
card — are me and the man sitting to my 
right. I don’t have much betting power 
left, so I go all in with reckless abandon. 
Based on the cards on the table, this guy 
probably doesn’t have much better than 
pocket kings.

He has pocket aces. I lose $40, and I 

leave the table. In one fell swoop, I am now 
dejected and in possession of a slightly 
smaller net worth. The world, once again, 
is cruel.

I learn that Nishanth has accrued an 

absurd amount of chips. I walk over to 
their table and happen to come upon a hand 
in which he goes all in. It’s him against a 
man sitting at the end of the table. He’s 
talking a bit of trash, but nothing big. The 
dealer asks them to show their hands, and 
Nishanth wins — and wins big. I notice a 
flash of sadness in the other man’s eyes 
before he continues laughing and jawing 
at him. Nishanth, now sufficiently well-
stocked, decides to cash his chips — $340 

worth — and leave.

As we make our way out of the poker 

room, I look back at my old table. 
Dreadlocks gets up to go to the bar, but 
not before asking Crew Cut, “What’s your 
drink?”

“Bud Light,” he responds.
***
As I lie to sleep that night, on a futon that 

is indescribably uncomfortable, I should 
be angry about my loss, but all I can think 
of is the two men from our table. I’m still 
amazed by the confessions they spouted, 
but I’m even more impressed by the quick 
friendship that was so easily formed. The 
two of them have, very likely, endured 
tragedies of which I would never know, 
but simply the enunciation of these was 
enough to initiate a relationship formed 
across the table of a casino.

It is not, I surmise, the thrill of gambling 

that drives people to casinos, but rather, as 
Edward hypothesized, it may be nothing 
more than a chance at belonging. The same 
hope that drives me to wander into coffee 
shops unprovoked, the desperate pull of the 
unknown, buried relationships that we may 
never excavate — this may be the identical 
motivation that leads them to spend their 
Saturday afternoons risking their money 
in statistically futile fashion. We are 
nothing more than creatures that yearn for 
a sense of community. Yet there is no true 
happiness without the chance of sadness, 
no true satisfaction without the possibility 
of emptiness; these states of being are 
defined by what they are inherently not. 
Human relationships are not rich if they 
are not colored by the shadow of loneliness.

I realize, then, that I have been massively 

hypocritical. For the duration of my 
afternoon, I simply projected my own 
presuppositions onto the people I saw, as 
if they were characters I could manipulate 
and bend to my own condescending will. 
I took no time to speak to them, to reach 
out into the void of human existence and 
offer my own hand. This is my burden: this 
inability to connect. The blank stares into 
slot machine screens, the silent murmurs in 
the Bingo Room, the easy back-and-forth in 
between folds and calls and raises — what’s 
the difference? What are they searching for 
that I am not?

There is so much uncertainty involved 

in reaching out. I am but one of millions 
of people out there like me: perpetually 
alone and constantly complaining about it. 
But while the reasons for complacency are 
innumerable — fear of rejection, low self-
esteem, etc. — aren’t they all subservient to 
this one ideal of connection? An ideal that, in 
practice, is infinitely harder for people who 
are symptomatically predisposed to avoid 
it. We crave it, though. We yearn for what 
we can’t do, what it seems everyone else 
can. The casino, then, is not some abstract 
environment through which I aim to focus 
my true critical interests — it’s a place where 
the dreams of one man brush up against the 
hopes of another. It’s a place of futures bet 
and chances lost. It’s a place of, for better or 
worse, communal risk.

