The deck feels wrong. That’s the only way to describe it. The edges are too slick, the weight in his palm a fraction off from the twenty-three years of muscle memory screaming that this is an imposter. He’s trying to learn Big O, a five-card Pot Limit Omaha variant that’s been pulling in crowds for the last 13 months, and his brain feels like a locked box. The information is all there, sitting in a $43 book propped up against a coffee mug, but it won’t go in. Or rather, it goes in and rattles around before falling right back out, like a coin in a jammed vending machine.
He pitches the cards, a reflexive, perfect arc that lands them silently on the felt, but the motion feels hollow. For more than two decades, his hands knew more than his conscious mind. They knew the subtle bend of a card about to be dealt from the bottom; they knew the exact pressure to release a single card from the deck, not two. Now, learning a new set of rules, new hand rankings, new betting structures… his hands are useless. They’re just waiting for instructions his brain can’t seem to formulate. The frustration is a low, hot hum under his skin, a feeling I know too well, like the pins-and-needles tingle in my arm this morning from sleeping on it wrong. It’s your own body betraying you, refusing a command it
