How Our Story Begins
Two best friends, one dog, and a town where everybody makes terrible decisions. Some of them play poker.
Rocky Rivers is a small mountain town with one water tower, one river, one poker room and a sign at the city limits that gives the founding year as a question mark. Nobody has corrected it. Nobody in Rocky Rivers corrects anything.
The town's commercial district runs down a single street called Broadway and consists, in order, of Ray's Poker Room, The Muck Dive Bar, the Lucky Stop Gas and Liquor, the Gutshot Cafe, which sells coffee and regret, and the Waterfront Patio, which sells fish and bad beats. Locals describe this as everything a person could need. Visitors describe it as a route.
Bill has lived here his whole life. He wears a blue cap and a pressed shirt, and he has studied enough game theory to know exactly what the right play is. He has never once made it. His post-hand analysis is detailed, organized and wrong.
Bob is Bill's best friend. He wears a backwards cap and the same grey hoodie in every season, and he has been trying to trap Bill at the poker table for years with a success rate of zero. Bob can see trouble coming from a long way off. He considers that a head start.
Larry is Bob's dog. Larry calculates pot odds in real time, reads the table better than anyone seated at it and is correct about nearly everything. Nobody has ever asked him. He has stopped volunteering.
Taken together, Bill and Bob make up one reasonably competent person, split down the middle and handed to two men who do not share a bankroll. Bill has just enough awareness to know better. Bob has just enough confidence to ignore that. Larry knows how this ends.
Chapter 1 follows the three of them out of town for the first time, to Las Vegas, during the World Series. It went about how you would expect. It went somewhat worse than that.
All of Chapter 1: The Vegas Trip →