But he couldn’t. Just as he got ready to get up, the dealer dealt him his next hand. His hands instinctively reached for it, making a little hut or shield around the two cards so that he could lift them up by a corner and look at them. Two black kings. There was no getting up now. After the first two players folded, he took a few seconds to fake-think about it (he thought acting too quickly might give away the strength of his hand), then announced “I’m all in.” Immediately, the player to his left called. No suspense there, but a long wait before the cards would be turned over and his fate decided. Five more people had to act. Four of them folded more or less quickly, but the kid in the big blind didn’t move. He was a young professional—or at least looked like one—an Asian kid in black Nike clothes and white Apple earphones who had spent the first orbit of hands barely looking up from his phone. He didn’t move a muscle, just stared intently at the chip stack of the player to Tom’s left, a young, blond, foreign-accented pro (as in most tournaments, the demographics of the field shift dramatically in favor of young wizards in later stages of play). The big blind took what felt like an awkwardly long time, then reached for chips. A lot of chips. More chips than were necessary to call. He slid them past the betting line with deliberation, and the dealer announced “Reraise.” The potential Swede went in what in pokerspeak is known as the tank, the identical, silent state of thinking about a decision that his opponent had only just come out of. Tom felt like an interloper. His measly, hopeless stack, a stack that had no ambition of making it to the money, let alone snatching a good prize, had triggered a clash of the two biggest stacks at the table. Two pros, two great players who had the skills and the chips to see this through to the national-anthemed, eighteen-carat end, were fighting and endangering their tournament life over his sacrificial bet. He wanted to apologize, somehow, for putting them in such distress. For eliciting such deep, clearly complex, and (for him) inscrutable thoughts. He had completely forgotten the fact that he had a great hand, the second-best hand in No Limit Hold’em, in fact, and could be in great shape to not just double but more than triple up his short stack. None of that mattered. He just hoped he hadn’t caused too much trouble, is all.