Sunday Long Read: The Mother Of All Card Games

Author Ian Frisch tells the story of his mother in today's Sunday Long Read, who took up new, old vocation after Ian's father died in order to support her family: competitive poker.

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. 

 

I will say that Zandarmom is the better poker player in my family, she's always been good at reading people. Zandardad is pretty decent, and my brother can't bluff to save his life because he always laughs when he tries to tell a lie.

Here's to the moms out there doing what they have to do every day to get by.