Paradise, Nevada

Prologue

Everything was at once extraordinary and dull.

Dazzling and quotidian.

To the visitors, it was exotic and tantalizing and new and as inebriating as advertised. They were dizzied by the lights, addled by the sounds; the city had them in its thrall. But it was ordinary to us. Mundane and unremarkable. We’d grown accustomed to the lights, blinking out of darkened aisles. We were deaf to the digital treble of the machines, the laughter of the drunks. A visitor’s once-in-a-lifetime was our everyday.

This is the first paradox about Las Vegas: the Positano Luxury Resort & Casino was the beating heart of Friday-night euphoria, and it was our home. It sat center-Strip, the city spreading round it like a widening spiral of magic and commonplace, strip clubs and college dorms, shooting ranges and Walmarts, private jet landing strips and bus stops to quiet distant hopeless suburbs. We can’t explain about the fire without establishing this, that a town can be both fiction and reality, both paradise and home. We all here have to come to terms with it, sooner or later.

Then there was the money.

Inside the neon-lit darkness of the Positano, herds of visitors roamed our halls, chasing it. They bounced from wall to wall, from distraction to distraction, letting the room slowly guide them to its center, its raison d’être: the gaming pits. The colors of the playing chips turned money into a fantasy: blue for $1, red for $5, green for $25, black for $100, purple for $500, yellow for $1,000, beautiful white flags for $5,000, their edges striped in patriotic red and blue. We still long for them after all these years. Behind glass cases on the tables’ chip banks, in the hands of pit bosses and dealers, in the satchels of the high rollers. We look at them. We ache for them.

Everything here is about money; when it looks like it’s not about money, then it’s definitely about money. This is the second paradox. That the money too is both fictional and real, both exhilarating and tragic, both there and not there. The town itself embodies this, glittering and triumphant, but hidden away from prying eyes in the middle of an unforgiving desert. The one truly free market in America. Free of guilt. Free of shame. We cannot think of the fire without asking ourselves what role money played, how much of the night had its roots in those silly little disks of color-coded clay. The crowds in the casino hallways. The conversations in the cocktail lounge. The deals struck in elegant offices on the highest floors. The high-stakes Texas Hold’em in the upstairs poker room. You don’t spend as many years in Las Vegas as we have, treated daily to the sight of fortunes changing hands, without learning to question the nature of these things. We can’t help it.

Finally, there are the stories. The third and hardest paradox. Because the more Las Vegas seems but a loose collection of unrelated individuals—the more its inhabitants, both temporary and permanent, look like isolated segments of life that don’t link up together, disparate narratives incapable of producing any meaning—the more the city demands that they connect. A city that wasn’t built to be lived in, perhaps the only one in America, defined for us by the memories of pen-happy visitors and weekend drunks. The idea of a town. It’s in the stories of those who stay that Las Vegas exists, in the low constant hum below the chiming and music, in the real city they created, against all odds, at the heart of a glorified theme park.

We cannot begin to explain the night of Friday, May 1, 2015, at the Positano, the bomb at the Scarlatti Lounge, the sound of the alarm, the blackout, who made it out and who, tragically, did not, without trying to summon, at least in fragments, the stories of the ones who were there. Their stories are part of our story, and ours is part of theirs. We wish we could do more.

This is not going to be easy.

PART I

FALL 2014

1

Ray

On the pinkish backdrop of Google Maps, the blue dot of Ray Jackson’s car trickled down coastal California like a teardrop on a puffy cheek. Or, photographically, the car being white and the actual surface of California sometimes yellow and sometimes green or brown, more like a drop of milk foam flowing down a paper cup. But to the driver inside—who was about as far from sentimentalism and designer coffee as a native Californian can be—the whole thing resolved only into a suboptimal situation, the result of a string of suboptimal decisions yielding undesirable outcomes at every turn.

First of all, he disliked driving. Given the set of all plausible vehicles, the set function of his ability to enjoy the journey showed a conspicuous dip at the independent variable car. To make things worse, in the aftermath of two weeks at home for Thanksgiving, he had accepted his uncle’s advice to take the long way round from Marin County to Vegas, through Big Sur, without giving it much thought. This wasn’t like him, but he’d told himself he could use some time to go through things again re: his moving-to-Vegas plan. Yet now that he was on it, the 101 to the 1 instead of the 580 to the 5, he could see how this scenic detour had been a mistake: he was a nervous driver, eyes firmly on the road at all times, too focused to take in the reportedly breathtaking colors of the Pacific streaming to his right. All he’d accomplished was turning a nine-hour straight shot on the interstate into a twelve-hour oceanside ordeal.

Secondly, while there was no doubt he would need a car in Las Vegas, he was not so sure that taking his dad’s had been such an EV+¹ deal after all. True, his father no longer drove it to Sacramento twice a week on account of: (a) he didn’t do career counseling for CSUS anymore, and (b) he had gone partially blind due to two successive retinal vascular occlusions in the last couple years. Also true, while Ray could technically still afford to buy a car, a large expense now didn’t sound like a great idea, given his situation. Still, taking the white Chevy SUV provided his parents with an excuse to suggest visits that, coupled with how much closer to home he would be now as opposed to Toronto, could easily backfire.

The main issue, however, remained Las Vegas itself. When he’d moved out of his apartment in Toronto, Las Vegas had been a vague idea motivated mostly by a desire to get the hell out of there, asap. He’d figured his stay in Marin County ought to give him enough time to evaluate his options and derive the optimal living solution, but fourteen days of his parents, an incredibly old dog, and a fierce ping-pong opponent had ended up draining his computational stamina. He had been, he had to admit, unacceptably lazy. And now he was moving to Vegas without a real grasp on the mathematical landscape of the decision and with what a less analytical mind would probably call a bad feeling.

For years, as a professional online poker player, Ray had regarded live poker and the world of brick-and-mortar casinos pretty much the same way a neurosurgeon would regard the game Operation: they were all very cute, with their chips, their drinks, and their serious faces, but let’s be honest, they had no idea what they were doing. Ray’s world, the world of high-stakes online poker, was a specialized haven of advanced math and tracking software, and the idea of moving to Vegas to play in casinos felt like an insult. Not to mention what his online peers would think. Was he maybe just overreacting to this whole thing, just running away from his problems without really thinking things through?

Surrounded by an excess of nature, he kept looking at the axis of the road ahead. It really had been naive to think time at his parents’ could help: the house had a way of muddling his thoughts, stirring up a fog of prolixity and bad logic he was only now starting to come out of. He decided to concentrate on the new episode of one of the machine learning and AI podcasts he’d listened to nonstop during his last weeks in Toronto. That always made things clearer.

Two weeks before, Ray had arrived in Marin County at night. Having spent the cab ride home looking at his phone to discourage the driver from talking to him, and having had to wrestle his father for control of the heavier, more wobbly-wheeled bag on the way inside (so that "Seriously Dad, let me do it" had been his first words), he’d had no time to gradually reacquaint himself with his childhood town, neighborhood, and house. At the periphery of his vision, familiar shapes gave in quietly to the sameness of the night. But as soon as he was inside, the yellow glow of the low-energy light bulbs on the cherrywood bookshelves awakened him to his obvious mistake: he was home.

It took Ray a few days to readjust to the place where his precocious talents had been first noticed and nurtured. In the quiet jazz suffusing the rooms he knew so well, he could still hear the whispered expectations for his future his parents had gone to extreme pedagogical lengths to hide. It was in the living room, where they had insisted on throwing him house parties and, worse yet, surprise parties with the other, non-mathematically-gifted children. It was in the kitchen, where he had been recruited in all manners of commis activities by his French-cuisine enthusiast mother ever since he had been tall enough to reach the countertop, drawing him away from his desk and his calculus. It was in his parents’ bedroom, where secret pillow talk about Ray’s limitless potential must have taken place for years. The secrecy, Ray knew, was some hippyish hokum meant to alleviate the pressure and allow him to organically develop his dispositions. But behind the smiles and the encouragements to go out and have some fun, Ray never doubted for a second the narrative his parents had always wanted from him. For him.

At the root of his problems with the house was a familiar and much more tangible contrast: the Jacksons’ was a house of Letters. It was, in fact, in response to this axiom, transparent and irrefutable for anybody who traversed their labyrinthically bookshelved corridors, that young Ray had derived his own clear-cut identity as a man of Numbers. In the late 1980s, only a few years before his birth, Howard and Victoria Jackson had opened the Satis House Bookshop in San Rafael, a so-called independent little hideaway for the literarily inclined. Throughout Ray’s childhood, the bookstore had been the object of his parents’ endless profusions of love and endeavors, and had hosted readings by some of the most celebrated writers of the time. Ray himself, cute and well-behaved, had soon been a welcome guest at both the readings and the postreading dinners with this or that novelist, which accounted for the wealth of unnecessary synonyms and flowery phrases that still clogged his mental storage centers. And now that he was back, and corridors were once again something you traversed, and cutting a potato was called batonnet-ing or allumette-ing (two different things), and decisions were made because of how they felt, regardless of their optimality, Ray found himself utterly incapable of the very rational thinking that the future of his poker career demanded.

The days leading up to Thanksgiving became an elaborate game of domestic chess. Ray’s king, who only wanted to castle short and mind his own business in a corner, was assailed by opposing forces from both flanks. His father, a short, thin, gray-haired man whose face had developed a kind of puffiness with old age and whose eyes had narrowed to small horizontal slits, haunted both floors of the house like a slow-moving, legally blind ghost. He had a way of walking into whatever room Ray was in, hands joined against his lower back, like a Parisian flaneur (his words), that always managed to drive Ray up the cherrywood-paneled wall: he had no reason to come in and made no attempt to hide the fact, he just walked in and sort of loitered. It would have been quite better, honestly, if his father had started chopping wood right there in the room—something Ray pointed out with the disgruntled "What?" that opened most of their conversations throughout the two weeks.

If sitting in one place, evaluating different answers to the question that kept vexing him (he simply could not stay in Toronto any longer, this much he knew), made Ray vulnerable to his father’s loitering, moving around the house exposed him to his mother’s own traps: simply running into her, the tallest and strongest-looking Jackson, entailed a project (usually kitchen-related) that would tie him for an hour in a collaborative activity he knew was only an excuse to have a chat.

It wasn’t that Ray didn’t want to talk to his parents (as much as he felt like talking to anybody at all lately). He was, he would have been ready to admit, acceptably fond of them, after all. It was more that he really didn’t want to talk to them now, now that his impeccable decision-making had frozen, his future wasn’t loading, and there were signs of an imminent internal personal OS crash.

And of course, as if on cue, his father started announcing that they needed to have a talk before Ray left, just whenever you have five minutes.

Ray mentally outlined two possible scenarios: in the first one, his father having been a career counselor for decades + Ray having chosen professional poker as a way of employing his gifts + his being in the process of moving away from Toronto and (maybe?) reconsidering his career path, all suggested the heart-to-heart about his life choices and how they made him feel that he had so far miraculously managed to avoid. It wasn’t anything personal, he just really didn’t want to talk about it.

The fact was, the son of the career advisor had never really needed any career advice. Ray had been seventeen when he left home for parental-chest-swelling Stanford, and nineteen when he scandalously dropped out and moved to Toronto to pursue his online poker career. By then he had already been VF1nd3r, online poker prodigy and heads-up cash game² specialist, for quite some time to pretty much everybody he knew (except, of course, the people he knew in person). But while he had stayed enrolled through the early stages of his phenomenally fast ascent to poker stardom, the 2011 ban on online poker in the United States, known among initiates as Black Friday, had brought him to a crossroads. Stay in school, or follow the international diaspora of American poker pros? Stanford, or Pokerstars.com? It was the first time he had been able to apply his EV computations to a real-life problem, and it had been a simple, reassuring victory for math-based decision-making. Less than two months after Black Friday, he was signing the lease to an apartment in Toronto—sight unseen, based on an elaborate neighborhood scoring system of his own creation—by far the most rational way of playing the hand he’d been dealt.

It wasn’t easy to determine how his parents had taken the move. What for years he had called their being chill, he knew, was really a byproduct of their inability (his and theirs) to discuss anything of importance with each other. He knew they worried, suspected they worried a lot, but could never figure out how much the fact that their son was making nontrivial sums of money playing cards on the internet bothered them (the Jacksons’ being one of those rare American households where moneymaking was not considered of value in and of itself). Still, their support had stayed unwavering. As for him, if the DoJ ban that had made him an exile had taken an emotional toll (as it seemed to have for most of his poker friends on Skype and Two Plus Two Poker Forum), he did not care to know: introspection was a guessing game he had no time for. His public persona displayed no doubt, having left only one lapidary comment in the Black Friday/F*** DoJ/where next? Two Plus Two thread: "Worry only about what you can control. Whining is for result-oriented fish. This is poker, adapt or die. (This had been quoted and commented so much this" by lower-stakes players even more fervently than his posts usually were.)

And so online poker had become his life: the monetary upswings and downswings caused by a capricious mathematical goddess called Variance³ less and less capable of causing comparable swings in his mood; the validation he received from his graphs more important to him than the actual money he made (his words); the fact that his friends’ names were sauce123 and OtB_RedBaron and that poker was quite literally all they ever talked about absolutely ordinary and fine to him. In the poker world, he was a pioneer. He was one of the first to systematically apply advanced game theory to real in-game decisions. He filled notebooks with decision trees before any software was developed to do it. He was even one of the four Brains selected to represent humankind in the historic Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence poker challenge in Pittsburgh last spring.

The second possible topic his father might want to broach scared him even more. Wasn’t it possible, Ray considered, that what his retinally occluded, philosophically inclined father wanted to discuss with his only son was the issue of his own aging and mortality? Wasn’t it possible that he wanted to talk about his health, open up about his feelings, even sort of preemptively counsel his son through his future grieving? It would be entirely in character. Ray shuddered at the prospect. When had the human race gone so collectively wrong that they started to value the noise of the psyche over the signal of the brains? Where was all this sharing coming from? Introspection, again, was better avoided, a luxury application for underutilized servers.

Introspection got the best of Ray by Overlook Point #2. It was the second cliffside rock he had felt compelled by the Big Sur road-trip ritual to stop at and sit on; he wasn’t sure how long he was supposed to sit there by himself, or what kind of emotions he was supposed to experience in the process, but once there, he was dead set on doing it properly. Cobalt waves turned turquoise before dissolving into whispering spumes against the shore, the shallow waters shining in gentle light from the cloudless sky. The sea was underneath him, striped with brown algae, and from his protruding rock he could see the highway curling up like smoke around the cliff, like in that song Dad used to play in the car. Unable to shake the residual sentimentality of his weeks at home, he decided to allow himself a frank assessment of his thoughts and, well, feelings on the subject of his father’s deteriorating health. Ray did not consider himself a cold person, immune to human emotion. He was just by nature very careful not to let any of it corrupt the linearity of his decision-making.⁴ But now, his decision-making being on a dismaying hiatus, bluish waves of feeling found no rational cliff to dissolve against and there he was, looking at the ocean, thinking of his dad.

He had been dealing, he had to admit, with a certain anxiety about mortality lately. It had started the day of his father’s first retinal vein occlusion, and had gotten worse with the inception of the treatments, the periodic injections, and the grim vascular landscapes described by several well-respected MDs. It was a sort of irrational inability to accept the precariousness of existence: a childish rage at it, and a black, unspeakable fear of the going-away of life. The realization suddenly hitting him that he would one day have to face mortality as mere lifelessness, the lifelessness of objects; that at some point he would be in a room where his father would lie on a bed like a book on a shelf or a rock on a cliff, bound by gravity and propelled by no sentient will. A thing. It scared the living shit out of him. Not the loss, nor the painful getting-used-to-it and recalibration of his perception of a world that no longer included the man who had driven him to school and taught him ping-pong. That was okay, as long as it didn’t get in the way of his personal plans. But no, as hazy as his decision to move to Las Vegas seemed, he was quite sure that being closer to his aging father had nothing to do with it. Thankfully.

Stanford would be lucky to have you, Matthew, said Uncle Raymond. Matthew was the seventeen-year-old son of the Wongs, longtime neighbors and friends of Ray’s family. Together with Ray’s parents, Uncle Raymond, Aunt Lynda, and the twins, they made up the ten-handed full-ring table of their Thanksgiving dinner, filling with digestive conversation the interval between the deconstructed holiday turkey and the pumpkin Gruyère gratin with thyme and the salted chocolate caramel tarts everyone was too full for. In the corner, Uncle Raymond’s old albino boxer Pushkin looked up toward the table, too old to walk around and nag for food; his strategy involved sad eyes and people’s natural sense of pity.

And when are you thinking of going back, Ray? said Aunt Lynda. Ray’s mother’s jerked up her chin, detecting External Pressure being projected on her independent, free-thinking son. Ray would have found it funny, had he not resented the question.

Ray is an extremely successful poker player, honey, said Uncle Raymond, apparently sans condescension. (It was commonly accepted that Ray had been named not after his uncle but rather after Northwest native and Jackson household all-time hero Raymond Carver, in the wake of whose untimely death and consequent parental sadness he had quite possibly been conceived.) He will go back when he feels it’s time.

"If he decides to go back," said Ray’s mother.

He’s moving to Las Vegas tomorrow, said Ray’s father, in a purely factual tone. Just offering information. I’m giving him my car.

A full-ring table, typically nine- or ten-handed, is the standard setting for a live poker game, the higher players-to-dealers ratio being more cost-effective for casinos. Online games have over time shown a marked preference for shorthanded tables, six-handed usually. But to Ray, one of the purists of true one-on-one poker combat, anything more than two was a crowd. As a matter of fact, something could be said about one person being really all that was needed to …

You know I just remembered, I read about you online some time ago, Ray, said Mr. Wong, out of the strategic blue. You played against that supercomputer, right? Where was it, Philadelphia?

Pittsburgh, said Ray.

The computer gave you quite a beating, huh? said Mr. Wong, proving that people nowadays have access to way more information than they are able to comprehend.

The experiment was not well conducted—, began Ray, formulating an answer he’d repeated a few dozen times since last spring.

This artificial intelligence thing is really scary, said Mrs. Wong.

We had to play twelve hours a day for twenty straight days—

I mean, what happens if computers become more intelligent than us? said Mrs. Wong.

—also, considering standard deviation and the effect of variance over the sample size, we had—

AI is the future, Mom, said Matthew Wong.

—you could say my individual results against the bot were a statistical tie—

Whether we want it or not, Mr. Wong said, agreeing with his son.

—although there’s no question that the work the scientists have done is really remarkable, conceded Ray.

I do wonder, said Ray’s father, after a beat, "whether our blind faith in science and numbers is leading us somewhere we didn’t mean to go. Obsolescence."

With his last word, he knocked over a half-empty wineglass, which rained to his left across the white tablecloth. There was embarrassed silence for some time, while Ray’s mother got up and dabbed a napkin against the spill, looking apologetically at Mrs. Wong, who sat next to Howard, seemingly unstained.

You know what you should do? Uncle Raymond said to Ray, after clearing his throat. You should drive through Big Sur on your way to Vegas. I bet you’ve never been. It is quite the place for a man grappling with such weighty concerns.

But that’s not what I—

That is a wonderful idea, said Ray’s father, who seemed eager to put the incident behind them. He was balling up some bread crumbs between his index finger, middle finger, and thumb, a sort of nervous tic Ray associated with squirrels, and houseflies, and himself. There’s nothing like sitting on those cliffs, watching the ocean.

Like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes …, began Uncle Raymond.

… he star’d at the Pacific—and all his men …, said Ray’s dad.

… look’d at each other with a wild surmise …

… silent upon a peak in Darien.

In the study, Ray sat on the sink-in juniper-green armchair and rested his feet on the coffee table, which was covered in sheaves of paper. There were even more books in here, categorized by some inefficient, esoteric criterion that wasn’t alphabetical, or by size or color coding. Books he remembered the cracked spines of, many books he had tried and abandoned after a chapter, sometimes after a paragraph, whole libraries of fictional beginnings that had contributed nothing to his knowledge or intellectual abilities. It was uncanny how little he had in common with the cult his childhood home was a sort of temple to, and still they had never pressured him into it, his mathematical inclinations always encouraged, cultivated, boasted like a trophy around friends. The little math whiz Jackson boy, who’d have thought?

The bot had beaten him. Badly. About eight months before, Ray and three other top-ranked No Limit Hold’em heads-up specialists had been invited to Pittsburgh to participate in an experiment, a twenty-day-long match between four human Brains and Artificial Intelligence, funded by Carnegie Mellon. The bot was a new and updated version of a poker-playing program developed by the Computer Science Department, always interested in testing the limits of artificial intelligence through complex games (the thousand-year-old game of Go had recently and famously been taken over by a computer that had defeated—as in, pulverized—the best players in the world). The twist was that the new software hadn’t really been programmed by anybody: the scientists had simply taught it the rules of the game, after which the bot played trillions of hands against itself (self-play), experimenting all possible mistakes and solutions, refining itself into near-perfect performance. It was called reinforcement learning, and for the past eight months it had kept Ray awake in the morning.⁵

He hadn’t been lying at dinner: it was true, his own personal results, however losing, had not been bad, and qualified as what mathematicians called a statistical tie. But that didn’t fool him. He had been there, sitting in a room where technicians who could have easily been classmates of his at Stanford looked on as he made small mistake after small mistake, one trivial human imperfection after the other accruing hand after hand to an unbridgeable gap. He couldn’t beat the bot. Not if he studied every minute of his life until the air left his lungs, he just couldn’t. He was human. He miscalculated. He misclicked. He got tired, and grew frustrated, and needed sleep.

That was his problem. It was stupid, really: the scientists at Carnegie Mellon couldn’t care less about using their software to win money in online poker. As a matter of fact, they couldn’t care less about poker in general. Poker to them was just a blank set of rules, a case study in the field of game theory, exactly like the prisoner’s dilemma or tic-tac-toe. Nothing was going to change in the world of online poker, at least for a while. And yet, getting back from Pittsburgh, Ray had found himself haunted by an inability to make the simplest decisions. A hesitation he couldn’t seem to recover from. That’s how it had begun.

The dog Pushkin entered the study with the dragging limp of old age. He reclined sideways in that peculiar way of dogs and Greek deities and stared at Ray from the depth of his placid pink-rimmed eyes. Ray grimaced. For this dog, mid-single-digits-year-old Ray had once contracted an ardent fondness, like an extramarital affair made stronger by infrequent encounters and the heartbreaking awareness that Pushkin was, in fact, someone else’s dog. There had been tears, he now recalled, blushing.

His sentimentality, his flawed decision-making—all his problems were rooted in his past. There was no escaping them. They were in these bookshelves, and in the way he’d been raised. Yes, he made mistakes. Just that morning, after two weeks of failed reasoning, he had finally told his parents he would be driving to Las Vegas the next day, committing himself to the decision on an impulse. On a fucking whim. How hopelessly suboptimal.

Recursive thoughts and emotions overpowered Ray’s processors all the way past McWay Falls and Ragged Point and the tourists posing for Instagram pics. It was the day after Thanksgiving, the other Black Friday. Regaining control had been the whole point of agreeing to this scenic detour on the way to the desert: he knew he’d find himself alone with no phone reception, sitting on a rock above the turquoise waves or on the sun-roasted beaches of California, and what else could one do in such situations but parse decision trees? Yet now he just sat there, looking at the sea lions lying sideways on the beach in San Simeon like a whole pack of senescent albino boxers, admitting computational defeat. Waving the old white decisional flag. Yesterday’s ping-pong had been the last straw.

Do you want to play when they’re done? the Wong kid had asked, appearing at the top of the staircase.

While their parents were watching the postdinner football game in some ironic intellectual way, Ray was downstairs in the basement, watching his little cousins perform a parody of a ping-pong match. Both boys too short for the table, they had come to Ray to ask for permission to remove the small heap of correspondence resting on it and play. Now they were taking turns hitting the ball in the vicinity of the table and (in the impossibility of an actual back-and-forth rally) chasing it around the yellow-lit space cluttered with boxes of xeroxed, stapled files. Ray could see how Matthew Wong would predict this incredibly boring game to be short-lived. Yet he thought that if Mike and Doug, these kids he barely knew, were anything like him—if, that is, Jackson blood was a thing that extended beyond pale skin and short stature, and reached the nodes in the brain in charge of obstinacy—then there was a good chance this could go on for hours. At any rate, he’d given them the lousy paddles with the rubber pimples and no sponge between the wooden blade and the hitting surface, hiding the pro-level Killerspins he had bought in high school, in the heyday of his ping-pong career.

Sure. Are you any good? Ray said.

I’m not bad. What about you?

I’m okay, like, average.

And then the kid had said something incredibly irksome: I don’t want to bet money, though.

Who knows what the Wongs had told him about Ray. The conversations they’d had. A standup neighborhood kid turned bad, poor Jacksons, imagine how hard it must be on them. And with all the problems they have, what with Howard and his eyes, and Vicky always there to take care of him, the thought of a son going around doing that! What bothered Ray wasn’t the tarnish on his neighborly reputation, but the wild inaccuracy of depicting him as the gambling type, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, he strongly disliked gambling. Hated it. What he did for a living, the way he looked at it, had absolutely nothing to do with it.

The kid turned out to be annoying. For starters, he moved weird: he squatted down to return serve in a strained, unnatural position, and then crab-walked sideways along the baseline during rallies, twirling both arms in odd, liquid gestures, like his body had more than the normal percentage of water in it. And on top of that he wasn’t good, but he was flat-out nightmarish to play against, his whole left-handed repertoire consisting of odious little chops and fiendish backhand spins that sent the ball flying a mile away from the table as soon as you so much as got near it to return them. His serve was a balletic backhand number involving a weird crossing of the arms in a wide scissoring motion that looked like he was trying to wipe something off his right forearm, or hurriedly swatting away a spider that had managed to crawl up his right elbow. As awkward as it may have looked, the first three times Ray approached the resulting weakish ball, his forehand returns landed on a stack of Calaveras Station Literary Journals in an open cardboard box several feet behind and to the right of the playing surface.

Ray, on the other hand, was legitimately good. Like most ping-pong table owners, he had over the course of years of crushing amateur opponents developed an extremely aggressive, predatory style, his own centered around a lightning-fast inside-out forehand topspin that had taken him years of practice to master, and that had been the undoing of dozens of neighborhood kids. A stroke that, of course, just couldn’t seem to ever go in tonight. Whatever he tried, it seemed like the table was at least a foot shorter than he remembered; even his backhand floaters finished out long. He was already sweating profusely during warm-up rallies and particularly aware of the fact that the Wong kid had very casually said Ready when you are at least four or five rallies ago. His cousins, who had given up the game but stayed in the basement, were now sitting on boxes of French cuisine magazines, annoyingly rooting for him to win the warm-up.

Okay, last one, and then we play. Best of five, sets to eleven, two serves each?

The truth was, Ray hadn’t played ping-pong in years. Not after Stanford Table Tennis Club. Not after it turned out that the level of play he faced at home was an unreliable test of his ability with a paddle, and that the number of players who could render him a sniveling idiot in uniform-mandated short-shorts was indeed considerable, and weirdly concentrated in the Palo Alto–Menlo Park area. The realization that his years of undefeated streaks and cavalier handicap offerings had been a textbook case of the big-fish-in-small-pond scenario had not been a painless one. Despite what the Wongs would have guessed, it hadn’t involved substantial money loss in misguided bets against stronger players (the idea of putting money in a situation the EV of which was unclear and potentially wildly negative was simply incomprehensible to him), nor had it been achieved after a stage of excuse-making and self-delusion; it had been a quiet landing on an island of small sadness. Weird as it was to admit, he had been forced to accept the loss of a source of validation and self-worth he’d somehow relied on for years. A thing people liked and at which he had been unquestionably good. The best. He had soon started to overcompensate, to exaggerate his assessment of himself: when somebody asked, Are you good? he would now shrug and say, Average, I think. This was a transparent lie, and yet he felt that it would do him good to frustrate his ego in something he had really cared about. He perceived there was a lesson in it to be learned.

But this kid he could beat. This kid he had to beat. It was fine losing against really good players at Stanford, players who had put in the hours and trained more and better than him and simply deserved to win. But this kid wasn’t good. This passive, risk-averse nit⁶ with his chops and spins, Ray couldn’t lose to him. Back in high school, he had beaten hundreds of kids like this. And yet today it seemed like nothing would fall in. All of his returns wandered off on unpredictable vectors, no matter how carefully he hit them, so it was like starting with a handicap, because he could never break serve unless the kid missed. After missing long a couple of topspin forehands, the first set was gone, 7–11. He smiled tensely in feigned disinterest as the twins cheered him on.

The Wong kid, though, seemed genuinely not to care: he was standing in his awkward kyphotic slump, long fingers fiddling with the rubber of the paddle, his bespectacled stare vaguely concentrating on one or two small areas around the curve of the racket, where over time the glue had started to give and the rubber was beginning to detach from the blade. He was wearing a white shirt with a yellow-and-gray pattern that reached far down his thighs outside his gray pants, and black Converse high-tops in an advanced state of decay. When the second set started and a focused, perspiring Ray found a way to return his serves more consistently, the kid complimented him with oohs of admiration every time an impressive forehand attack would go in, after which he would take an absurdly long time chasing the ball around the basement, much like Ray’s cousins had done, oftentimes dropping it after having retrieved it or tripping and knocking over stacks of files. Ray hated him.

The dog appeared in the rectangle of light from the door above the stairs. He lingered, visible desire to join the downstairs scene contending with an old man’s fear of falling down the steps. Ray had just won the second set, 11–8, and was getting ready for his first serve in the third, but the Wong kid seemed suddenly more interested in the children’s efforts to help the stupid dog down the stairs. They played the third set amid the twins’ cheering and patting Pushkin for having made it to the basement, and while his opponent had resumed normal play, it felt to Ray that his attention was still elsewhere, incredibly. Ray won the set 11–4, the only points he conceded having been mistakes of his on attempted attacks.

Ray had a 2-point lead in the fourth set when the parents arrived. It must have been halftime in the upstairs game, or maybe it was over—how long had they been down there?—but now Ray’s mom and dad (who probably couldn’t see much, to be honest) and Mr. Wong were standing at the head of the stairs, watching from above without coming down to join the kids and the dog. The weirdness of the situation was not lost on Ray: a grown man (which he was, wasn’t he?) drenched in perspiration playing ping-pong in the basement of his childhood home against a smiling, distracted high-school kid, respective parents spectating at a distance and talking like their sons were on the swings at the playground; the dog still staring at him, a red triangle of tongue permanently sticking out from his resting face; Ray’s little cousins shouting in encouragement. He missed a serve, badly.

And why was it that the people who turn out to be good at ping-pong were always these kind of like fake-nerds? Like this kid here. Clearly obsessive, but not cripplingly anxious; weird, but nonchalant. The kind of people who will stay at the table and play another game when everybody else has moved on to beers and mingling, but also the kind social enough to be around humans to play often. Essentially well-adjusted geeks. And, wait, did he think this guy was good now? This kid who was now doing his stupid oohs of admiration mid-rally? With the set tied at 8 after a missed return on another spin-heavy serve, Ray found himself so scared of losing and having to play a deciding fifth set that he started simply defending, sheepishly sending the ball over the net without trying to attack, just hoping his opponent would make a mistake. But the Wong kid did not attack, not even when provoked to. He just kept working his spins, switching his angles, hitting it short and then long, left and then right. And then Ray missed. And again. A lucky shot kept him in the game on his last serve, but now the Wong kid had a set ball on his serve, 10–9.

One thing anybody who has played any game with a strong mental component will know is that planning and strategizing is one thing, but executing, going through with it in the heat of the moment, is a whole different enterprise. Ray, who was known in the poker community as one of the best thinkers-under-pressure and keepers-of-one’s-cool, did not understand why he was suddenly so aware of the joint in his right wrist, stiff, frozen as he tried to put weight on his forehand. He knew he needed to attack the loopy floaters the kid kept offering him, and yet he kept returning weak and flat, just to keep the rally going, just trying not to miss. As the rally got longer and longer, he felt himself drifting out of it, becoming aware of the dimly lit basement and the rhythmic sound of the ball and the smell of the dog, aware of being watched, of his parents, and the children, and felt sure he was going to lose it, he was going to miss the next forehand, or the next one, or the one after that. But he didn’t. He somehow found his focus again, and all of a sudden his wrist was fine, loose and responding to his commands, and the next forehand was a strong inside-out topspin to his opponent’s forehand side, right on the corner between baseline and sideline, perfect. And that’s when the Wong kid stretched awkwardly and with an ugly move managed to chop a lame lob that just shaved the side of the table on Ray’s left sideline and caromed away and landed on Pushkin’s moist snout. Set Wong.

The uncontrollable shouting of the children, the excitement. Fifth set. Crucial not to look up toward the stairs, toward his parents, maintain some kind of dignity. The Wong kid taking forever to rest and get ready, all smiles and dorky voice-over bits, It all comes down to this. This is where legends are born. Tonight we dine in hell. Ray shrugged, then did the thing holding the ball under the table in his right or in his left hand and asking his opponent to guess to assign the first serve. He showed the ball, holding up his right, nonguessed hand, then crouched down to serve.

Portions of scenic Pacific coast ran along the windows of the car like a hastily put-together music video from the ’90s. Like someone from LA in charge of location had been lazy and just decided to go with the closest pretty sight available. The landscape equivalent of elevator music. So maybe Ray wasn’t a well-adjusted nerd, he wasn’t nonchalant. Maybe that was why he couldn’t just let things go like everyone else. He couldn’t play a game without caring like Matthew Wong, or make mistakes and suboptimal decisions and just be okay living with the consequences. Ray thought about things, and about the details of things, and about the reasons and advantages and disadvantages of every decision, and he cared, he knew that about himself. It was what had made him so good at the game. But now everything was confusing, slippery, and after Pittsburgh nothing had been the same. Back home, he had faced the worst downswing of his career, a vast, frightening amount of money lost because of his human flaws, and after a while he’d just stopped being able to play a single hand anymore, unable to live with another mistake. He’d stared blankly at the tables on the dual screens in his room in Toronto and waited, waited as the days went by, and the same fear that had frozen his wrist playing ping-pong had pervaded his whole body and taken residence in his brain. Waited without sleeping and without eating. Waited until he simply couldn’t take it anymore. Until he just had to leave. And now the lease to the Vegas condo was already e-signed, the career of VF1nd3r effectively ended by law the second he’d crossed the border. A new chapter of his life about to begin. And when the blue dot of his car started trickling eastward on the map, swept sideways like a teardrop in the wind, and his father’s white Chevy gained momentum through the Mojave Desert on the traffic-free I-15, and the sun set and the road ahead was darkness and silence and distant lights, Ray found himself hoping he could just get the ball over the net one more time, hoping he was not making a mistake.

1 Expected Value, meaning the long-run average value of theoretical repetitions of the examined decision would yield a positive outcome, as defined by E[X] = x1 p1 + x1 p1 + · · · xk pk; where variable X can take value x1 with probability p1, value x2 with probability p2 , and so on up to value xk with probability pk.

2 One-on-one poker played with real money, as opposed to tournament poker, the entry-fee-type sportified version of the game made popular by ESPN2 coverage featuring overweight insurance salesmen repeatedly saying All in.

3 Defined as the expectation of the squared deviation of a random variable from its mean and calculated through: Var(X) = E[(X − μ)²] where μ = E[X] or, in layman’s terms, how far spread out a set of individual observations can be from its theoretical expected value. Meaning for how long and how much a theoretically winning poker player can lose and vice versa (the answers being: a long time and a lot, which is the reason why poker has stayed popular with amateurs for years, the only game where a novice can beat the best player in the world pretty often and for heaps).

4 An asset that happens to be to professional poker what a quarterback’s innate throwing arm is to football.

5 No self-respecting online poker player sleeps at night proper—closed-curtaining mornings are to pros the middle of the REM cycle.

6 In poker jargon, a nit (adj. nitty) is an extremely careful, conservative player, whose winning strategy is to take no risks and just wait for really good hands. The term is mostly used as an insult among professionals.

Interlude I

(the story of a hotel)

In the eighteen full spins of the seasonal roulette wheel between the laying of the first stone and the fire, the Positano had been through a lot. It had opened, on prime center-Strip real estate, in 1999, at the tail end of an era of wild Las Vegas expansion centered on a single outdated and spectacular architectural concept: the theme resort. Legend has it that Al Wiles (né Alan Michael Wilinofsky, already owner of three of the ten biggest hotels in town) had dreamed of a monumental token of his undying love for his second wife, Swiss model and singer Sophie Heidegger-Fourier, with whom he’d spent an unforgettable honeymoon on the Costiera Amalfitana at the beginning of the 1990s. On a street that in a matter of ten years had already sprouted a black Egyptian pyramid, a fairy-tale castle, and ambitious large-scale replicas of the towns of Venice and Paris (complete with canals