The Seven-Card Stud

The Scene: A smoke-filled room in a downtown Manhattan poker club called the Mayfair. Sitting at a felt-topped table, I am trying to best nine strangers at seven-card stud. But I'm playing as sloppily as an inebriated teenager, and my skyscrapers of chips are being reduced to shabby hovels. My opponents - including a grandmotherly woman with a killer knack for figuring odds, a high-strung Chinese guy who flips his chips into the pot as if he were making a pregame coin toss, and a pale, bookish dude with a Yeshiva University logo on his T-shirt - are having a good night at my expense. Tossing away another failed hand, I recall an old poker proverb: "If you can't recognize the biggest sucker at the table, then you are it." Disconcertingly, there's not a sucker in sight.

Minutes before midnight, a playable hand slowly forms before me. I start out with pocket sevens (two sevens, face down) and a six showing. Bookish Dude bets $5 with his king on board (that is, with the king showing). I pay for another card: It's a six, which improves my hand twofold. I bet into him, he raises, and I see the raise. Everybody folds except for Dude, myself, and two others. My fifth card is a seven, giving me a full house, so I raise Bookish Dude. He raises back with a pair of kings showing. I raise again. The other two players fold.

I look at Dude's kings and ponder the situation: What can he be betting with? Two pairs? He hasn't a clue that I'm sitting here with a full house. I've nailed him. We keep raising into each other, and I have a grand old time schooling this rube in things they don't teach you at Yeshiva. After the seventh card has been dealt, the betting ends. More than $100 rests in the pot.

We're about to show our cards when Grandma looks at Bookish Dude and asks sweetly, "Kings full, right?"

Say what? Full house with kings? Players around the table nod in agreement. She's right: He shows his cards, soundly beating my hand. As Dude rakes in a pile of my chips, a suit-and-tie next to me remarks, "I saw him fill up, and I knew you were in trouble. I folded with a flush."

Why didn't I see it coming?

Meeting the Master

Two months later, I grab a seat at a Binion's Horseshoe poker table in downtown Las Vegas. Across from me is Tom McEvoy, a legendary pro whose photo hangs in the Horseshoe's gallery of World Series of Poker champions: He won the Series in 1983, taking in $540,000. The author of four books on the game, McEvoy is a former accountant who ditched number crunching for the life of a Vegas card shark. When he's not trumping the high rollers at the $30-and-$60 tables, McEvoy gives one-on-one lessons to intermediate players intent on taking their game to the next level.

Recalling my dismal night at the Mayfair, I complain that I felt as if I'd been mugged. "You were outplayed," corrects McEvoy, a gray-haired guy with a boyish face that masks a predator's patience - and an executioner's timing. "On Third Street [when three cards have been dealt], if a player has a pair, there's always a two-thirds chance that his window card [the card showing] will be one of them. That's simple mathematics. When the guy made his first bet with a king window card, you should have assumed that he had a pair of kings, and you should have folded your sixes."

"How did everyone know he had kings full?" I ask.

"When a guy with a big pair showing raises back at your low pair, you've got to assume that he has a serious hand. Sure, you had a full house. But having the second-best full house is no different from having a pair of deuces: Either way, you lose."

So begins the education of a poker player. I'm a passable player in kitchen-table games with friends. But I've come to Vegas to see whether McEvoy can coach me into beating strangers at casinos and clubs.

Shark Bait

McEvoy wants to see me in action. We each take out $40 in chips and sit down alongside each other in a $1-and-$5 game (in which there is no ante and the low card makes an initial $1 bet). The Horseshoe, long popular among in-the-know gamblers, holds the annual World Series of Poker and is one of the last casinos in Vegas without a ceiling on betting. But it's mid-afternoon on a Thursday, and the crew at this table is downright motley. "None of these guys is any good," McEvoy assures me.

As soon as we sit down, a Tony Bennett look-alike spots the World Series-champion bracelet on McEvoy's wrist. "What are you doing in a $1-and-$5 game?" asks the look-alike.

"I have my reasons," McEvoy grumbles, as he looks over a hand with zero potential.

At the head of the oval table sits a muscular fellow, wearing a gimme cap, his face split by a wise-guy grin. Caught in a hand with this guy, McEvoy turns to me and remarks, "He looks like he's been playing for about 36 hours straight." The implication is that Wiseguy is too tired to think clearly -- and ripe for filleting. McEvoy goes to work on him. With two medium-sized pairs against Wiseguy's king-high showing, McEvoy makes a string of modest bets -- just to keep the guy in. Right before the two players show their cards, McEvoy correctly reads aloud his opponent's hand: two kings.