Chaos and the Art of the Deal

Gotcha!

Digital collage art by Stella Kalaw

Every once in a while, when the name of a thing or person gets off leash and goes missing, I think of a quip made by an architect friend: “There goes our grey matter, back into the great swamp of chaos.”

Chaos draws ever closer with the passing years, and for me, nowhere is its presence felt more than at the poker table. A gang of us has been at the game, specifically Texas Hold ’Em, for more than thirty years. Players have come and gone, dropped out, or more frequently, moved away. Replacements are recruited.

Only one has died, but what a blow that was. He was the writer Joel Yanofsky, our most ferocious competitor, frequent winner and games keeper. Before he left the table in 2020, he bequeathed me the poker chips and, with them, the responsibility for organizing games. A mixed blessing if there ever was one.

We are writers and editors, translators, filmmakers, an actor and a professor (retired). We have books, movies, plays, performances and much teaching to our credit. We are all still active at what we did, but now, for most of us, for less money.

What we don’t have at the game is women. A woman friend of mine wanted to join the group and I was for it. But our democratic assembly voted down the idea. We play for laughs, gossip, bad puns, and tomfoolery. Guy talk would be inhibited, several said. I suspect the wife of one of us voiced another pertinent reason: “I don’t want him playing with other women.”

Poker is a game of aggression, but we are a pretty tame bunch. Domesticated. We play what I call “an old man’s game.” That is, instead of bold bets meant to drive opponents out of hand (this is how Hold ’Em is supposed to be played), we rely on cagier tactics that seek to keep players in until the hammer is dropped at the end of a round when undercards are revealed. Gotcha!

It’s also an old man’s game because, well, we’re old. All but two of us are in our sixties or seventies, with one in his fifties and another rounding eighty. A younger guy, still in his sixties, exhibited his still-nimble intellect by solving a problem we were having. The poker chips come neatly arranged by colour in a shiny metal box with snaps on it to keep it closed. If the box is opened the wrong way up, the chips scatter all over the place. This happened a few times until the youngster said, “Just write ‘top’ on one side.” No more flying chips, except for once when someone failed to read the instructions.

Our deficits are implicated in when and how we play. It used to be from 8 p.m. until two in the morning or so. Those heady evenings in the last century included glasses of whisky, cigars and cigarettes. Nobody smokes anymore and a couple of beers, increasingly non-alcoholic, are the limit. We set the start time back to 7 p.m. and are ready to wrap up by around midnight. And we’ve initiated some day games, in part to save some of us from a long drive home in the dark. It is also a relief to others who find night driving more challenging these days.

Another challenge is the one I ascribe to chaos theory, which, the Internet tells me, is “the qualities of the point at which stability moves to instability or order moves to disorder.” That sounds like a pretty fair description of where the game is heading.

Some of it is manifested by confusion at the table: “Hey, you bet out of turn.” “Whose bet is it?” “You forgot to ante.” “How much was that raise?” Etc. With seven or eight minds more or less engaged, these problems, so far, are sorted out before disorder sets in.

Money is more of a problem (isn’t it always?). Our game is low stakes—a $60 buy-in—but somehow the funds in the kitty rarely come out right at the end when players cash in their chips. We’ve even started counting the money at the beginning of play. Ominously, at a recent game, the amount didn’t add up there either.

That was a day game, and one of the players had to leave early, at the same time my wife was going out the door, which was lucky as she caught him carrying her boots down the stairs. The next day, when I was about to go out, I noticed a pair of my shoes were gone, someone else’s left in their place. Surely, he couldn’t have done it twice. Well, no, I discovered when I called another player and mentioned the lapse. Turned out he was the guy who had ended up walking an uncomfortable mile in my shoes. The world briefly went tilt.

All this would be dispiriting but for something I learned from another fumble. A fellow who was supposed to have shown up for a day game rang the doorbell at 7 p.m., having misread several emails. I invited him in for a glass of wine, we chatted, and he admitted such things were happening more often these days. But, he said, “it doesn’t seem to affect my work. I’m able to do that as well as I ever have.”

I puzzled over the comment and mentioned it to a science-writer friend outside the game. “I guess most of his executive functions are still intact,” she said. This sent me back to Dr. Google, where I read that executive function is “the higher-level cognitive skills you use to control and coordinate your other cognitive abilities and behaviours,” and that they come as a set. Some flag while others continue on the job.  

That gave me hope. As long as the boss is still at work in the executive suite, we’ll keep playing.