On the last day of September 2005, three friends sat on a worn out mattress in a one-room basement apartment in Brooklyn. It was still warm outside, but had any of them gotten cold there were at least three jackets among the clothes strewn across the bare concrete floor along with what had to be about a month’s worth of unwashed laundry. There were no windows and no lights in the room, but the glare from the six computer monitors kept it from being too dark to see. <READMORE>Besides the mattress and the computers, the only other thing of note in the room was a huge hookah water pipe with eight hoses, nicknamed by its owner, “the Octopus.” The smoke in the small room was as thick as early morning fog, but it didn’t stop any of the three from seeing the screens. Between the three guys, seventeen different poker games were on those screens including two MTT final tables.
There was a knock on the door momentarily startling one of the three so he folded a hand he was thinking of raising and then fell off the mattress. “I’ll get it,” he said good-naturedly, the slip of the mouse already melting into the haze.
At the door was a well dressed older man with short hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He stuck out his hand but the guy who opened the door was already back in his spot, so he stepped around the larger piles of clothes, garbage, ashtrays, and assorted crap to a fairly clean area.
Inexplicably, he opened his mouth and inhaled forcibly, clearing the room of all the smoke. It was as if the haze lifted from the three young men and they looked at the older man and said together, “Who are you?”
Stroking his pointed beard the man in the suit said simply, “Don’t you know? I’m Mephistopheles, the Devil.”
"Yeah, right,” said the guy who opened the door as he drew deeply on the hookah. He blew a thick stream of smoke at the stranger, “Prove it.”
Mephistopheles snapped his fingers and the smoke stopped moving. In point of fact, everything stopped except for the four of them.
“My computer’s froze,” said the guy on the far end of the mattress, and the other two guys nodded in agreement.
“I stopped time so the four of us can talk. Proof enough?” The three friends kept nodding so Mephistopheles continued, “Last night the three of you made a pact. You all agreed that you would do anything to be the best in the world at poker. Were you just talking or were you serious? Do you really want to be the best?”
The two guys nearest the door almost fell over each other talking about how that was all they wanted and they were ready. The third guy waited until they were done and said softly, “I’d like to be the best, but I’m too religious to think about making a deal with the Devil. You guys do what you want but I’m happy right where I am.”
With that, Mephistopheles and his two new disciples disappeared in a puff of smoke and time moved on. The religious guy sat alone on his mattress and quickly folded a hand before he timed out. He said out loud to nobody there, “I’ve got to slow down on the hookah a little,” and then he took a long drag and forgot everything except his poker games.
Two weeks later he was at a final table with one of his old friends. He kind of remembered that his friend had moved down to Costa Rica to play poker full time, so he asked him how things were down there. His friend typed back, “Well, it’s hot all the time, but there’s lots to blaze and the poker is great.”
“Well, gl 2 u and grats on the number 1 ranking,” he typed. And then he added, “One day you have to tell me how you do it.”
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