This is not a poker topic per se, but this little work of semi-fiction was published in UNO magazine as a POV piece from a poker geek...
I am a professional poker player. I play cards for a living. You might think of me as a tall guy in a black hat who sits down with the local badasses and cleans them out while speaking only sparingly and in gravelly low tones. You might think I walk out of a room full of stunned and emasculated men who can only watch as I get on my horse and ride off into the sunset, leaving behind a Legend …and a brothel full of satisfied women.
The only truth to that image is that I am tall. And I do own a black hat.
The ugly truth is that I sit down in front of my computer with a screenful of graphics in my face. I do try to clean out the credit cards of the parents of the kids who log on to play internet poker after watching “The World Poker Tour” on television. While it is true that I do speak sparingly, it is not in low gravelly tones – try to say the next few sentences out loud, and your tone will probably match mine:
“Of course, OF COURSE he has a flush!”
“Another King?!? COME ON!”
“Straight on the flop? You gotta be kidding me!”
Also, I almost never leave my room…But I HAVE left behind me a trail of satisfied women. When I leave them alone, they are satisfied. To add to a popular slogan: I am single by choice, and that choice seems to be made for me over and over by every girl I meet.
I am a Geek, and while we Geeks are good at many things, we are not good at getting Girls. I often wondered why we don’t make a serious effort to get better at it – heck, we spend countless hours googling for the best way to powerlevel our World of Warcraft toons or figure out the best setup for Plants versus Zombies Survival Mode, why can’t we be bothered to type “how to get da girl” in the search box?
Are we epic failures because we truly lack interest in them (hah!), or is it because we stubbornly lead with our brains as we charge into the territories of the heart…or perhaps we just can’t be bothered because we are so good at finding free porn…?
A girlfriend of mine once cornered me for an investigation into the matter. She refused to believe we were hopeless. “Geeks do get Girls,” she would say, “look at Ashton Kutcher and Bill Gates!”
Yes. Look at them. Then, uhm, look at the rest of us.
Also, she was not actually my girlfriend, per se. She was a friend, and she happened to be a girl.
“Okay, so tell me how you try to get the Girl,” she asked.
I fell silent as my eyes moved up and to the left – a sure sign that I was accessing the part of my brain used for remembering things I have seen or done before using a primarily visual representation…Anyway, you get the point, I was composing my answer…
“I treat her like an unfamiliar gadget that I am handling for the very first time. I try to figure out what’s in her hard drive so I know what stuff she likes and what activities she does often. Then I figure out a way to piggyback onto those activities or things she likes – it’s like finding a port of entry that she might have open. For example, I might attach myself to her gym schedule or her jogging trail. Each time she runs, I run in the background. Or I might get her something she can get excited about and sneak it into her mailbox one morning.”
I realize I had just answered the question: “How does a computer virus work?”
“Like a virus,” I answered my girl-friend. And I told her the story I will tell you now.
PREFLOP: I am at the cinemas, and I notice the hot girl on the Button.
The first time I saw the hot girl – whose name will be withheld in this article as per the stipulations of a court order – I was only concerned with how I could see her better. I moved to an angle where I could stare without her noticing. I silently judged her and decided that yes, she was a hot girl. And yes, I was interested. And yes, she was looking at me looking at her.
The best defense when you are caught staring is to make sure she sees you staring at someone else with the exact same stalker-like lust – just so she thinks “oh, it’s not me, he’s just a bigtime starer” and you are off the hook.
So when I was done staring intently at the sixty-two year old paraplegic a few feet from her, I got back to work. I had to formulate a plan. I had to talk to her. So I leapt from my dark corner and walked towards her…past her…to the popcorn stand behind her, so I could eavesdrop on a conversation she was having with her friend while I bought random items from the snack counter. If I listened long enough – and if I was both sharp and lucky – I would get her name. I did not know how long I could hold up the snack line, so I would have to get what I needed and get out of there.
I walked away from the snack counter a big SUCCESS! I did not get her name, but I did hear about a facebook event she was going to. Geeks just need a tag or a keyword to proceed, so this was good enough! I gathered up my purchases – four bags of popcorn, two large drinks, a plate of cheesy nachos, and a real-estate agent’s flyer – and ran home to do some easy cross-referencing.
It only took four mouse-clicks before I was staring at the picture on her facebook profile. Add hot girl as a friend? No. It was too soon. Ninjas do not stealthily climb to the roof of your house to blow a hole in it with a bazooka.
One more mouse-click led to her blog, and I soon had everything I needed to craft my virus: hobbies, preferences, a brief history of her life, her past and current occupation, the schools she went to…
Hmm, her contact number was on there, I could just call her and….NO! I am a ninja! Ninjas do not call hot girls!
Comment on this blog. Click! I left her an attagirl and a link to one of my own blogs – no, not the one with my collection of grotesque sports injuries and easter eggs from popular Hollywood movies. From what I read about this hot girl, it would have to be the link to my travel journal.
When I got the email notification informing me of a visitor to my travel blog, I knew I was ready for my first real big move. I clicked her facebook profile on my bookmarks bar. Send hot girl a message. Something very articulate but not overly eloquent. Something friendly and casual but not too jejemon. Something that showed interest in what her job was.
“Hi, I randomly landed on your blog the other day and couldn’t help but notice that you work for a company that supplies shower-curtain rings to hotels all over the world…”
And now the Geek and the hot Girl had contact. It was not something to be overjoyed with – it wasn’t as if she had let me plug my flashdrive into her USB port to upload my favorite files, but she had called my preflop raise, and we were definitely going to see the flop.
“Enough with the poker analogies and metaphors,” my girl-friend interrupted, “what happened next?”
“Well, the Flop comes, of course…”
THE FLOP: Well, I had raised preflop with Ace-King (suited), but the flop was a ragged rainbow, and none of it was my suit. Now that I was first to act, do I fire a continuation bet or check to see if she checks behind?
The rising height of my girl-friend’s left eyebrow indicated that I had better translate to plain English immediately.
I had established contact, but as it was under the guise of a guy interested in shower-curtain rings, my only recourse was to continue telling that story, and hope I would have the opportunity to somehow twist it to resemble something closer to reality. The purpose of contact was to give her an opportunity to see what a great guy I could be.
Establishing contact was easy. All a Geek had to do was make some pretense to need the Girl for something external – work-related, business-connected – anything that wouldn’t give away that I was calling her just because I liked her, and just her.
The bigger challenge for me was to figure out how to keep the connection going. The longer it went, the less likely my initial story would hold up, and the closer she would get to figuring me out. The challenge was to reverse the situation and create a scenario where she would need me. Then she would have to call me, and instead of continuing to use 90% of my brain to continue lying to her, I could just use 10% of it to simply respond to whatever she would be saying.
So I told her I owned a small chain of Hotels in Northeastern Europe and I would like to receive some quotations. We were going to see the Turn…
THE TURN was a blank, but I bought myself time, and there was always the hope of pairing up on the River…
We had begun to regularly exchange emails. She would send me price quotations and images of the product, while I would pretend to suddenly encounter something funny that I had to share with her. Each email from me ended with “Oh, and I still owe you an email regarding your quotations…”
We set meetings where I was supposed to show her swatches of the imaginary bathroom tiles I used in my chain of non-existent hotels. Each time, I crafted convoluted but convincing reasons for forgetting to bring the swatches. But since we were in a coffee house, we might as well have coffee. I am a Mountain Dew drinker myself, but I had to learn to drink coffee if I was going to sit with this hot girl long enough for me to tell her the amusing anecdotes I had prepared for the meeting.
She thought I was funny. This was everything to a Geek. You have to understand: we know where to find videos that teach us how to give a woman an orgasm, but when it comes to making a Girl laugh, we were on our own. If I could make her laugh, I could make her want to be with me more! She was laughing.
I closed my eyes, and I could see the Ace on the River!
THE RIVER was a final fatal blank, and she was calling down my final bet. She had gotten tired of the nonsense emails, and I was running out of reasons to forget bringing the swatches to our meetings. She had that look – the one that said “I am on to you, little boy!”
There are two variants to that look. The first variant was the one where she just stares at you and smiles a lot regardless of what you are talking about. That meant she was on to me and didn’t care because she liked me too much. From that point, it would only take a few more days till the virus I had programmed took full effect and she wouldn’t be able to take it anymore. One of these days, she was going to start a conversation with the words “I have to talk to you about something…” and she would somehow pose the question “What the hell are we?”
Then I would be screaming “I WIN!” in my head while I say something incredibly smooth, like “We are two souls who have been separated during creation, and now we have found each other.”
Up music, lean towards each other, roll credits.
That was not the look she had. The variant I was seeing was the one with the furrowed brow and the arms crossed over her chest. She knew something was not adding up, but what she did not know was that there were so many things to add up, she would need a scientific calculator to make sense of everything.
I do have a panic button for these eventualities, and I was pathetic enough to use it: I
suddenly “confessed” to hot girl that I secretly liked her friend. This button is designed to be so utterly confusing that she would have to choice but to accept it as something that makes everything suddenly make sense. (Another panic button “reveals” that I have a life-threatening but non-contagious disease, if the need arises).
Of course, there was no “friend” – and she would know it soon enough, because I would not be able to give her the name of her friend that I like so much I had to take the long route to get to her. When Geeks panic, we look for a reset button or a previous save-point. I thought I was doing so well, I did not save this game at any point. And I was down to just a chainsaw in a big-boss fight.
ALL-IN or FOLD: I could come clean and tell her the simple uncomplicated truth – that I like her and want to be around her, but was too stupid and clueless to know how to be incredibly honest and endearingly vulnerable – something I could have (SHOULD HAVE) done from the get-go…
…Or I could take that business trip to Northeastern Europe to inspect every last one of my Polish Hotels.
Hey hot girl, how have you been? Sorry I haven’t replied to you in the last week. You wouldn’t believe the snow storms here. One of my apartelles has major structural damage, and it looks like I am going to have to stay here to oversee the renovations for at least another month…
“So wait,” my confused girl-friend jumped in, “this is what you call getting the Girl…?”
Doh, she asked me how I TRY to get the Girl.
And as I sat in my apartment in Alabang, I clicked Send and alt-tabbed to my online poker games. I rode off into the sunset, leaving behind me a Legend …and yet another epic fail.
