My mother and I have been playing poker together for nearly twenty-five years. For Christmas recently, I wanted to give her a gift that encompassed our shared passion. I hired a bespoke calligraphist to draw something up, all curlicues and gold foil. My mother peeled open the envelope and pulled out the note. It read, “Merry Christmas, Mom. This certificate may be redeemed for a weeklong, all-expenses-paid vacation to Las Vegas, Nevada, and $1,000 for use at a poker table of your choice. May you always catch on the river.”
She began to cry. A trip to Vegas to play cards: the one thing we had always talked about doing together.
My mother learned how to play as a teen, from a group of guy friends at her Massachusetts high school, and it wasn’t long before she began playing competitively. She moved to Houston in her early twenties and played there, too, primarily sticking to underground games. But she stopped after marrying my father, moving near her hometown, and giving birth to me and my sister, all in quick succession. My mother abandoned that aspect of her identity in the face of new responsibilities and for the rewards of family life. But she always stowed a deck of cards in our junk drawer. She taught me how to play at our dining-room table, a flash of her former life trickling into motherhood.
By 2000, when I turned thirteen, my father’s tile business was flourishing. That year, he and my mother finished building a wide-set, two-story colonial with a sunny kitchen and a deck that overlooked the broad backyard: their American dream home. Then, eight months later, my father suddenly died—a stroke on the small yellow couch in the living room. He and my mother had worked for so long to save up for that house, had managed to secure a mortgage they weren’t quite qualified for even while he was alive. And now our family had no income.
My mother realized that the best way she could pay the bills on time was to start playing poker again. She ran the numbers: She could make more money at the card table than at the minimum-wage jobs that were the alternative. She reunited with cards like long-lost best friends—passionately, longingly, both nostalgic and hopeful. She began chasing games wherever she could find them: inside basements with underground tables in our area, in regulated card rooms in New Hampshire, at high-stakes tournaments in Connecticut casinos. She played on weekdays and weekends, logging enough hours most weeks to count it as a full-time job.
My sister and I supported her eccentric vocation. Our mother was home every day when we returned from school—a small token of stability in a household that needed it. Most evenings, she left us at home, but we didn’t mind; dinner was always waiting for us in the refrigerator, our clothes were always washed and folded, the house was always clean. Most mornings, on my way out the door for school, I’d spot the previous night’s earnings spilling out of her purse. The routine became normal for me. She never spoke to us in such terms, not then, but family survival was what motivated her—to save the home that stood as a physical manifestation of her and my father’s upward mobility, to not give up on all she’d accomplished so far. And she always seemed to come out ahead, each year taking home roughly $25,000 in winnings.
My mother had first started playing poker for the fun and for the intellectual challenge. Returning to competition twenty years later, she rediscovered old pleasures. She was playing not only to make money but also as an emotional escape. At the table, she wasn’t a single mother without a steady job mourning her husband’s death. It was the only place she felt comfortable playing the villain, cutthroat and cruel, lying to strangers’ faces and getting paid for it. “I love having a nemesis at the table,” she once told me. “It gives me purpose.” To this day, at every table, she picks a player and slowly, steadily, hand by hand, tries to destroy them.
To some people, poker is just a card game, a way to pass the time. For me and my mother, it’s a window into our identity, our way of understanding a world that at times can seem unforgiving. I began joining my mother in basement games around town in 2003, when I was sixteen. Ever since, poker has formed a bond between us, a mutual love, a prism through which I can see her not just as my mother but as a three-dimensional person who carries deep heartache and immense responsibility. Though it took me years to realize it, I now understand exactly how high the stakes were each time she sat down at a card table: It was the only way she knew how to keep living.
She and I played together over the years, catching games when I visited from college and, after I moved to Brooklyn in 2009, meeting for weekend getaways to Foxwoods Casino, in Connecticut. By then, having borrowed against the American dream home shortly before the financial crisis hit—for her, a desperate bid to buy some time; for the bank, just another line of credit during the mortgage-backed-securities boom—my mother was struggling to pay her debts. Poker no longer covered the bills; she stopped paying the mortgage. The dream home’s value plummeted. Eventually, the bank took it, and she used her nest egg to buy, in cash, a tiny, very cheap fixer-upper a couple towns over.
The loss hit my mother like a swinging hook after the jab of my father’s death. It crushed me to know that she’d made the riskiest bet of her life—taking that second mortgage—and lost. When she moved out, I couldn’t bring myself to help. I’ve visited the house only once since then, in 2018, soon after I began dating my now-fiancée, on a driving tour of my hometown. I nearly burst into tears as soon as I turned into the driveway, seeing all my mother had lost.
And yet, as the years passed, we kept making the time to play cards together. That longing never left us. Poker has been the only constant in my mother’s turbulent life, and the thing that has kept us close.
My mother had been to Vegas before—one of her sisters lives there—but this was the first time she was going exclusively to play cards. To compete. We chose to stay at the Bellagio, located at the bleeding heart of the Strip, boasting a card room that many players consider to be the center of the poker universe. After landing, my mother and I took a cab to the hotel-slash-casino, handed our bags to the bellhop, and looked up at the thirty-six floors towering above us, all limestone and marble. The humidity hung in the air like thick smoke. We were drawn inside, as if the building carried its own gravity, were a planet unto itself.
Coincidentally, the World Series of Poker, the game’s most anticipated annual event, was taking place at a neighboring casino while we were in town. We’d planned to stick to the small-stakes tables at the Bellagio, but we decided to try our luck at one of the Series’ many tournaments. The next morning, we walked to the banquet hall where the event was being held, each paid a $500 entry fee, and entered. Hundreds of players packed the room. The sound of chips clattering on dozens of tables filled the space. My mother wished me luck, then found her assigned seat across the room. Maybe it was because we hadn’t played in a while, or maybe it was because of the intimidating glitz and glamour of the World Series, but we both played poorly, our stacks dwindled, and we quickly busted out.
We licked our wounds at a small taco stand, boasting about our most beautiful plays—we each had exactly one—and brooding over our worst, of which there were many. As we ate, she opened her purse and pulled out two black poker chips, “World Series of Poker” emblazoned on the front. “You took them off the table?” I asked, shocked. We both knew pocketing tournament chips was against the rules.
She had. When the dealer’s attention turned elsewhere, she explained, she palmed the chips and dropped them into the strategically placed purse at her feet. Her own personal Ocean’s Eleven. She looked at me and smiled as she reached for another taco. “Our little memento.”
I beamed. These chips were a tiny symbol of the long and sometimes reckless lengths she’d go to just to create memories for us to share.
For the rest of the trip, we played every night at the Bellagio. We fell into a groove; after just a few sessions, we each pocketed a neat little profit of a few hundred dollars. My mother quickly cemented a reputation—not as a little old lady, a tourist trying to make good, but as someone who commands respect. Since my father died, she has carried this ethos of fearlessness, even in the direst of circumstances. It’s the thing I’ve always respected about her most.
One night, I took her out to dinner at a fancy restaurant that overlooked the Bellagio’s famed water fountains. We sat at a table by the window and watched the choreographed spurts and the bright lights. She explained that while things had been rocky for her recently, she’d begun meditating to ease her internal pain. An insomnia that had troubled her ever since she lost my father—for a while, he haunted her dreams—had started abating. Through trial and error, she’d found an especially useful method: She conjured up a large box into which she stuffed all her troubles, all her regrets, all the things she wished she had done differently and the things she knew were out of her control. Into the box they went, then she snapped the lid shut until the next morning, when she awoke to start living all over again.
Just then something occurred to me. “You do the same thing when you sit down at the poker table,” I said.
She nodded, still watching the water fountains. “Yes,” she said. “You’re right.”
Playing poker with my mother has made me realize that life isn’t anything more than a series of well-timed bets, and that sometimes things don’t work out and there’s nothing you can do about it. A run of bad cards—during a poker game or in life—cannot be escaped, only endured.
Which is why our trip to Las Vegas was so special, so necessary. So much had changed since my father died and my mother resumed playing poker. Gone were the dreams of small-town entrepreneurship that she’d shared with my father, and with them the baton of upward mobility. The only thing made real for her over the past two decades was this: It was a fallacy to think that you’d be rewarded for doing everything right, that class could easily be transcended, that hard work and a plan would always pay off. Our trip to Las Vegas taught me that I play because I want to but she plays because she must. For her, money isn’t the only thing on the line; in this zero-sum game, her identity is, too.
On our last night in town, we joined a lively session. Everyone at the table bet big. By 11:00, I was up by more than $1,000 and my mother was close behind. On the next hand, my mother locked horns with two other players, who quickly raised the stakes as the hand progressed, culminating with both of them going all-in before the river, as the last communal card is known, was dealt.
My mother knew that if she caught the card she needed, she’d win. She pushed all her chips into the middle. “I call,” she said. She turned over her hand: a king and a ten, both diamonds.
The dealer peeled the river: the eight of diamonds. Which meant my mother had a flush, the best hand at the table. She jumped out of her chair, thrust her arms skyward, and yelped with joy.
After stacking her chips into neat little piles—she’d won nearly $600—she leaned over and whispered into my ear, “Just like you said in your note, honey: ‘May you always catch on the river.’ ” We smiled at each other, placed our bets, and began the next hand.
