Those who claim that all Brandeis students are socially awkward might have learned a few things by participating in the Brandeis Poker Club's tournament on Wednesday night. As the hands were dealt and the laughing friends cupped the corners of their cards and bent them up, the players' expressions shifted into a mixture of awareness and focus that could only be described as "game face." And while the approximately 65 players proceeded skillfully through the mechanics of tournament poker, there was a distinct quality in the atmosphere that seemed slightly odd for Brandeis. Tournament coordinator Jon Rubinger '08 knows what that quality is: Assuredness.

"No one ever thinks that they're a bad poker player," Rubinger said.

Rubinger and poker club president Alex D'Anjou '08 are in charge of organizing and running these tournaments, usually two to three times a semester. The tournaments sometimes draw more than a hundred participants and can last well over six hours.

Rubinger says he has won a remarkable three tournaments ("Two-and-a-half actually," he said, subtracting a half because one of the tournaments had only twelve people in it).

Neither Rubinger nor D'Anjou were as lucky in this tournament, finding themselves knocked out before the final table. But they had no time to sulk, as their positions entailed that they then serve as chip bankers and circle around to make sure that all the tables were obeying the blind increases.

One of the privileges of being tournament coordinator is that at the end of the tournament, Rubinger gets to fork over the winnings to the champion. So Rubinger was ready with the $100 prize when Peter Vigneron '07 called Dan Suher's '07 Five-Four All-In bet with his Ace-Nine. After 15 minutes of grueling heads-up play, Vigneron watched with a poorly-concealed grin as the board fired all blanks and gave him the win.

"I played great," Vigneron said. "The first couple hours I only played five or six hands and won big pots, then at the final table I got the big stack and got to play really aggressive and hold on for the win."

With second place, Suher took home $65, a nice achievement for someone who had earlier said of his short-stacked chip level, "I feel like I'm walking into the bedroom with a small penis."

When there were five players left, the game became more relaxed and intimate. Players were flipping over their cards after they won a hand, constantly cracking jokes at one another (with the notable exception of Vigneron, who was almost completely silent). Suher explained that three of the four remaining players play once a week in a five-dollar cash game.









Of those four players, Vigneron was best able to capitalize on his prior experience.

"It was a big plus playing against [the other guys] because I knew his style of play," Vigneron said.

As the players dwindled down and the chips magnetized toward Vigneron, the players who knew him expressed amazement, saying he had only learned the game a short time ago. But his inexperience never showed from the way that he picked his spots, using his chip stack to apply pressure at the exact right moments and using his knowledge against his friends to bully them around.

"You still owe me $25 from our games," Suher said to Vigneron.

"Don't worry," Rubinger said. "He'll be able to pay you soon."

Rubinger said he considers poker a sport, even though he admitted he's never broken a sweat sitting at a poker table.

"[In poker], everything is right there in front of you," Rubinger said. "The only thing you can't see is what's going on in people's heads. What you can't see, the reads on the other person, that's what makes the really great players."

If poker is a sport, then what happened at this tournament is similar to three friends who regularly play "Horse" on their Nerf basketball rim finding each other in the final rounds of a campus wide one-on-one tournament.

But the parity of the poker tournament competition doesn't lessen the achievements of the prize-winners or finalists. Being a consistent winner on the computer or in a cash game might be more profitable, but it will never feel like winning a tournament in person. To step inside a room with over 60 other players and defeat every one of them takes a lot of luck, but it also takes a lot more of something else, something that could be best explained by a short story from Wednesday's tournament:

Two freshman girls walking around Sherman happened upon the large group of bustling card players and immediately began spewing out sarcasm as if it were a bodily function. "Oh, poker on a Wednesday night. That's cool," one of the girls scoffed.

Normally this sort of remark would have provoked a rebuttal, but in this instance, the entire room remained unfazed. It was as if everyone there had agreed to offer these girls a collective hand that they were welcome to talk to. After a few more unnoticed barbs, the girls hurried out of the room, scorned and probably more than a little intrigued.

And in that fascinating moment, the game of poker, and everyone playing it, really was cool.

-Mike Prada contributed reporting to this article from the tournament on Wednesday. This article used survey sheets to track the hands of the majority of the players throughout the tournament.