MIKE SEXTON AUGUST 1996

Games mimic reality without testing its threat.  Children play games to learn the rules of adulthood.  Adults have sports and enjoy entertainment.  Gambling and games of chance are thought to have originated as a means to control destiny and to discover the purposes of the gods through magical means.  Poker, however, has been called the ultimate expression of capitalism and social Darwinism.  It’s a game of chance and skill based on what game theorists call “imperfect information.”  Winning requires purposely randomized behavior, or “mixed strategies,” of which your own depend on the strategy used by the other players. 

Recently, Mike Sexton, a twenty-year poker professional, winner of every major poker tournament (including Binion’s World Series of Poker, L.A. Open, Diamond Jim Brady, Super Stars of Poker, and Foxwoods World Poker Finals) as well as three best all-around player awards, came from Las Vegas, where he lives, to play in Paris.  Poker in Paris varies, but two games, Texas Hold ‘em, a variation of seven-card stud, and Omaha, a variation of Hold ‘em, are frequently played, and for many players are the most interesting.  Poker has its own language and crosses all levels of society.  (English literary critic A. Alvarez plays and wrote a book on poker – although according to Sexton he hasn’t reached the highest level of play.)

In casino poker, games are separated by betting structure: Limit, Pot Limit, and No Limit.  The house has its dealer, but a player, called the “button,” assumes the role of designated dealer, because a buttonlike object is set in front of the designated dealer.  In Hold ‘em, two cards are dealt down to each player, the player next to the button opens the betting, then more players see the bet, raise, or fold.  Then a “flop” of three cards are dealt up, then more betting, followed by cards called, respectively, “fourth street” and “the river,” with betting after each.  Best hand of seven possible cards wins.

Variations are subtle and complex owing to the five communal cards in the center of the table.  Hold ‘em has been called the ultimate game of psychology and nerve.  Bluffing plays an important role, but is subject to the structure of the betting.

Skill in poker is required to calculate odds, but a Nietzschean psychology of intensity is required to read your opponents.  “Tells,” those strange unconscious ticks of nervousness, are considered secrets of the trade.  For example, whether an opponent lights his cigarette before or after a call can reveal a bluff.  The best players know how to detect false from real tells, and play on them.  Thus evolutionary psychology is native to chance, and a killer instinct can shortcut one’s way to the aeries of high rollers.

Before turning his attention to cards, Sexton won a gymnastics scholarship to Ohio State, and worked as a ballroom dance instructor and sales rep.  (He is also founder and executive director of the Tournament of Champions, with which he plans to revolutionize poker – now growing in popularity worldwide – using corporate sponsorship and television.) 

Recently, Mike Sexton played in the Paris cercles, as they call them here – private clubs where an I.D., “proper” dress, and a doorman’s nod grants you “membership.”

He lost before he won, and then told us all about it.

JEFF:  How did you become a poker player?

MIKE:  I learned to play poker when I was seven.  The guy that sold me his paper route showed me.  I’d get up at four o’clock in the morning all week, and on Fridays, after I’d collected my money, this guy’d be sitting on the steps shuffling cards.  He beat me out of my money every week when I was first learning.  I didn’t know how to play, but I liked it.  I had a natural love for cards.  All games came easy when I was young.  I loved bridge, for example.

JEFF:  You like the competition?

MIKE:  Most card players were involved in sports, where it’s competitive to start with.  I was a gymnast, golfer, baseball player.  You have to have a competitive instinct.  You have to be able to go for the jugular no matter who your opponent is.  You’re at war at the table, but when you’re away from the table, you’re friends.

JEFF:  When did you turn pro?

MIKE:  I was living in North Carolina working a regular job as a sales rep and I’d just gotten divorced.  I was winning in poker games, but I realized that to keep playing I’d have to quit my job.  So I quit.

JEFF:  You always won?

MIKE:  Yeah. I had a better instinct than other players.

JEFF:  Instinct for cards, as they call it?

MIKE:  Yeah.  It’s about thinking and instinct.  That gets factored into every hand.  You have to decide with your opponent, whether he’ll fold or not.  Now it’s second nature.

JEFF:  Do you remember your worst game?

MIKE:  I remember a lot of them.  One of my worst was in college.  I’d lost all my money, but I told a guy that I had more, so they gave me some credit and I kept playing.  I lost like a thousand dollars.  Back then that was a lot of money.  I ended up giving them my car that I drove to the poker game that night.  I never transferred the title or anything, I just gave them the keys and never saw it again.  But I was happy, and they were satisfied.

JEFF:  At some point don’t sticky situations like that come up?

MIKE:  Not necessarily.

JEFF:  People talk about knowing what other players have.  Is that about reading players?

MIKE:  It’s experience.  That’s true of everything. You have to practice.  But you can learn a lot from books, even before you go to play.  I didn’t, though.

JEFF:  And you don’t gamble?

MIKE:  Not at poker.  Poker players consider it skill, not luck.  Certain hands, certain days, are lucky, but over time, I don’t consider it gambling.  I think it’s a lot less of a gamble than running a business.  You don’t have to be the greatest player to win, all you have to do is be better than the players you’re sitting at the table with.  That’s all.  You can be number ten thousand on a list of players, but if you’re playing against numbers ten thousand one and two you’re going to make good money.

JEFF:  Is it about making a living?

MIKE:  When I decided to quit my job and play poker, I knew I could make more money.  Being single again, I thought I could always go back and get a job.  It wasn’t that big a deal.  Life’s a gamble, anyway, although to most people it seems impossible to make a living doing this.

JEFF:  What’s the down side?

MIKE:  Taking the losses.  Unlike most people who go to work, you get a paycheck and don’t come home from work with less than you started.  Going broke is part of it.  To be successful you have to be laid back and mentally tough to not let it stress you out completely.  You learn that by going broke.  You suffer when you lose money and don’t have the rent.  When I came to Paris a month ago I knew I was ten levels above everyone else, but I lost steadily, and it started to bother me.  For me to come here and lose in side games for a couple weeks straight was mind-boggling.  It was like a million-to-one chance, but it happened.  I’d go all-in, have all my money in the pot, have ten-to-one odds, and lose the pot.

JEFF:  It depressed you?

MIKE:  Yeah. I got drunk and slept one night outside the front door of the apartment where I was staying.

JEFF:  What’s the difference between gambling and sports?

MIKE:  The public is enthralled with sports.

JEFF:  What about sports betting and bookmakers?

MIKE:  I’ve made millions playing poker in my life, and I’ve lost millions on sports.

JEFF:  So that’s gambling, but poker’s not?

MIKE:  Exactly.  But I’m a gambler at heart.  I like to bet on everything.  I like to bet on golf, on sports, everything.  Poker’s my profession, and I know over the course of time that I’m going to win.  There’s a lot of poker players that throw their money away on drugs.  Sometimes I wish I’d done that.  It’s cheaper than betting on sports, and maybe they have a better time.  What’s crazy is that I could lose all my money on sports, but I would never consider going to a casino and throwing money away on roulette, for example.  Sports is worse than roulette.  You have no control over it.  I’ll tell you how my logic works: I truly believe that over the course of a lifetime a two-year-old can pick fifty winners and fifty losers, whereas I don’t think over the course of my lifetime I’ve picked thirty winners out of a hundred, and I’m sure I’m more knowledgeable about sports than anyone you know.

JEFF:  You bet on football?

MIKE:  That’s my worst.

JEFF:  So here’s a case where your head gets in your way.

MIKE:  It must do something, because I can’t pick a winner.  Still, I feel that some time in life the scale has to balance back out so that I’ll win all my money back.

JEFF:  Isn’t that like believing good balances with evil?

MIKE:  I don’t believe that either.  I think you win with your heart.  I also think you must feel like you’re a good person, and try to be happy with yourself.

JEFF:  Doyle Brunson, poker Hall-of-Famer and “living legend,” says you have to know yourself.  I get the feeling that to win at gambling you have to have a good idea of who you are.

MIKE:  That’s true.  Gamblers are pretty smart people.  I’m sure if you put the best poker players in business suits they’d be millionaires.

JEFF:  What did you think you would do before you became a card player?

MIKE:  I never knew what I wanted to do.  Never.  I changed my major in college four times.

JEFF:  What’s your best poker memory?

MIKE:  When I lived in North Carolina there were a lot of good games.  We had a rule back then, if you could explain it you could deal it: Wildcard, Crisscross, Christmas Tree – they’re both versions of seven-card stud with communal cards on the table – you name it.  That’s why I’m so versatile today.  But hell, I came to Paris and found two new games, Aviation and Courchevel, variations of Hold ‘em.  But I promise you, once I saw one hand, I could play better than everyone here.

JEFF:  Are all poker games variations of the same game?

MIKE:  Not exactly.  For example, in the betting that goes on between No Limit, Limit and Pot Limit poker there’s a world of difference in how you play hands and how you play people.  No Limit is much more psychological.  You don’t need a winning hand to win a pot.  You can bluff.  But when you play Limit poker and there’s a bunch of money on the table, you can only play so much at the end.  You can’t bluff in the end, because someone’s going to call.  You have to have the nuts – the best hand.  In Pot Limit, you can bet however much is in the pot, so you get to see a lot more flops, more people stay, and the bluffing is better than in Limit.

JEFF:  Which do you prefer?

MIKE:  I prefer Pot Limit.  But honestly, I like all of them.  I just like the best game.

JEFF:  How do you decide which is the best game?

MIKE:  You look at the table and see where the “livest” players are – the loosest and worst.  That’s the game you choose.  Whether it’s your preference or not, as a professional, you play the best game available.  Some players look at the room.  I never do because I generally want to play the highest stakes.  All poker players think they’re better than everyone else.  We have ego problems.

JEFF:  You must play differently depending on the level of the player.

MIKE:  Yeah, sure.  As you move up to the higher games you tend to play more conservatively, rather than your normal aggressive style, which you play at the lower levels.  Not that you freeze up, it’s just that you protect your money because it goes so fast.  But that’s not the correct way to play.  You should play the higher games just as bold and aggressive.  I prefer the higher games, not necessarily for the competition, but because you can win more money.  That’s not necessarily smart either.

JEFF:  What do you think of France?

MIKE:  Mag-nee-feek.

JEFF:  Is the game different?

MIKE:  Yeah, the players are so much worse.  It’s also new here.  The Aviation Club has only been open for a year.  They play private games, but now they have casino poker.  Ten years from now there’ll probably be good players here, too.

JEFF:  Won’t that change the game?  I’ve heard that backgammon dried up because there were too many good players.

MIKE:  The problem with backgammon and most one-on-one skill games is that a really good player can’t find a game.  In poker you’ll always have a game, because you can play eight – or nine-handed, so that’s not going to stop people from playing you.  In poker, players can play against other players in the same game.  Poker has grown up, but it has an endless future.  Ten years ago the only place you could play poker legally was in Las Vegas, now you can play in sixteen states and every country in the world.  There’s poker in Holland, Germany, Austria, France, Ireland, England, South Africa, everywhere.  You can travel with tournaments and see the world.

JEFF:  But casinos don’t actively support poker, because you don’t play against the house.

MIKE:  But it’s growing, and they’re accepting it.

JEFF:  What about your Tournament of Champions?

MIKE:  Currently there isn’t a tournament that you have to earn your way into. They’re buy-ins.  Entrants into the Tournament of Champions will have won a tournament at a participating card club, or be title holders from the Binion’s World Series of Poker.  It will feature the world’s best poker players.  I’m trying to involve television and corporate America.  This will be the first time the world will see poker live like this, with close-ups of hands on screen.

JEFF:  You ever miss your day gig?

MIKE:  Never.  I like the freedom.  Freedom makes poker beautiful.  It doesn’t matter what the level is, high or low, if you’re good enough to pay the bills, it gives you the freedom to take off whenever you like, sleep all day, do what you want, and not answer to anyone.  I love that.  I came over here on one day’s notice. 

JEFF:  It seems close to an artist’s life.  It’s not the physical world; it deals with the metaphysical irreality of money as well as the metaphysics of transcendence and chance.

MIKE:  It is.  You hit it big, it changes your life.  There’s a lot of luck, too.  It’s like music.  There’re a lot of groups with talent, but only a few make it.

JEFF:  Do you ever think about the future?

MIKE:  Everybody does to a certain degree, but I don’t worry about it.

JEFF:  What happens with age?

MIKE: You get smarter but more conservative. Going broke gets scary. You also lose your zest for the game. Twenty years ago I could play twenty hours a day, seven days a week, and never get tired of it. All I did was play golf and cards. Now I’m happy to play three or four hours. I play to make money. I’d like to go back to playing bridge, but there’s no money in it. People in North Carolina used to ask me what I’m going to do when I retire, because most people sit around playing cards, and that’s what I did then and that’s what I do now.