'Who’s going to feel sorry for a healthy, wealthy white dude with anger issues and a slew of self-destructive tendencies?'
Your reserves of sympathy for Garrett Adelstein, the polarizing high stakes poker player and author of the new memoir Beneath The Cards (available September 1), may well depend on your existing opinion of him.
Adestein’s brightest moment in the glare of poker's spotlight came during one particular Huster Casino Live streamed hand in September 2022. Holding a straight flush draw with just 8-high, he semi-bluffed all-in on the turn in a heads-up pot versus Robbi Jade Lew, who called for over $100K holding a mere jack-high with a lowly 4 kicker and no pair or draw. Adelstein missed everything and Lew’s jack was enough to win the pot.
The highly questionable call led to allegations of cheating and an ensuing war of words on social media. People took sides. Lots of them.
Whether you were on ‘Team Garrett’ or saw him as the villain in one of the more fascinating hands of the past decade, the moment captured the poker world’s attention in a big way.
That spotlight soon shifted but for Adelstein, at least, there remains more to say. The allegations were never proven and now, four years after the fact, he has put pen to paper to get his side of the story across.
Is it our sympathy he seeks? The quote above suggests he knows that’s a tall order. Another line from the book perhaps gets to the heart of his story with more accuracy.
'Pain, as every poker player intimately knows, is deeply ingrained into the human experience.'
Adelstein’s story has plenty of poker, and plenty of pain, but at its core is not about huge hands won or problematic pots lost. Its focus is the human experience itself, family, mental health, weakness, resilience and the path to inner peace.
That Adelstein aims to unpick many lies in this book is not unexpected. The surprise is that most of them are those he’s told to himself.
A man of contradictions
That his re-telling of the infamous ‘Jack-Four hand’ forms the very last of the 10 chapters in the book — coming after a deep dive into his childhood, rise through the poker ranks, and a detailed examination of his progress as both a player and a person — is also unexpected.
His part in that controversial hand is what he’s most famous for, a massive turning point in his professional and personal life, and one might assume the driving force behind the decision to write this book in the first place.
But placing it so deep into the book is not the only contradiction in this autobiography that holds together much better than anyone might expect; a cheap tell-all from a clunky amateur author, this ain’t.
Many of those contradictions are expressly acknowledged. Here’s a man who loves the social side of the game, yet prefers not to socialize with his fellow players. A former chess prodigy who fell in love with that game’s lack of variance, who then develops a costly and destructive blackjack habit. A person fiercely driven to dominate in every game he plays through pure hard work, who then follows a pattern of giving up when faced with opponents he can’t overcome.
Other contradictions appear less obvious to the author. He feels he was misdiagnosed at a young age with ADHD, yet claims he has ‘constant chatter’ in his head. He defines himself as an extrovert, yet seems to spend much of his life avoiding meaningful contact with people — in online poker lobbies, alone in darkened rooms, and his mind. Harsh self-criticism and chest-out bragadoccio are both ever-present, sometimes within the same train of thought.
And then there’s the apparent paradox of a man trained in deception, dedicated to giving nothing away, exposing his vulnerabilities to the world in the most public way possible.
But inner contradictions are an unavoidable part of being human, Adelstein’s main theme in his book. If it has a whiff of post-therapy catharsis, it’s for good reason: a practitioner of cognitive behavioral therapy, Adelstein uses his memoir to re-tell the story of his life in ways that seek to explain, address and ultimately forgive the flaws he has always seen in himself.
Self-loathing, body dysmorphia, gambling addiction, bulemia… Adelstein’s path has not been an easy one to tread. And if you find that sympathy for healthy millionaires is hard to muster, he understands. The demons he faces are of his own creation, brought into being through his muddled perception of who he is and what he wants.
He’s searching for an identity built on truth, rather than what he always felt he should be, and this book is the result. From troubled familial relationships to misplayed hands, he’s dredging the depths of his experience in a bid to find some peace.
Axes to grind
Of course, as well as new leaves to turn there are a few old axes to grind.
Those more interested in the day-to-day of a nosebleed cash game pro than one man’s journey to self-discovery will find plenty to chew on.
The early years as an online whizzkid, and the life-changing impact of Black Friday. Life as a live cash game grinder in the card rooms of Arizona and California. Shady home games with cheating mobsters, the politics of private games, flipping for six-figures with Alan Keating, and the ego-boosting public attention that accompanied his rise in livestreamed games.
All are included and explored in detail — this is a poker memoir, after all — and the light shone on these situations from Adelstein’s ground-level point-of-view is always interesting.
But despite being reserved for the book’s final chapter, the specter of ‘Jack-Four’ always looms. Foreshadowing of Adelstein’s headline moment is everywhere.
The time he gets scammed in a home game as a young pro, but the villain pays him back some of the money (as, he says, only a guilty party would do).
Confronting pros who want to ice him out of a private game with a wealthy whale, and swearing he’ll never again back down if he knows he is right.
His experiences as a contestant on Survivor, falling victim to the machinations and manipulations of female opponents, and the resultant social media battering.
His initial assessment of HCL showrunner Ryan Feldman, ‘a frail, East Coast transplant with a weasel face that always looked guilty of something’.
Perhaps the greatest contradiction in Adelstein’s book is that between his intention to forgive and forget, and the injustices he still wants to rectify in public. And chief among those, obviously, is the 2022 hand with Robbi Jade Lew.
What exactly went down that time in LA is unlikely to ever be fully understood, and Adelstein runs through the events of the day in detail to help you make up your own mind. A chunky section of appendices, A through P, are provided to help you reach the right conclusion.
The hand, and its resulting fallout, form the crux of his career, his life and his book. He’s keen to stress that he’s over it all, but water that’s already passed under the bridge rarely gets examined in such detail, and with such emotion.
J-4: The main event
In placing the crucial chapter at the book’s end, Adelstein gives himself time to set the stage for why he reacted as he did — a reaction which he is at pains to point out was fumbled.
In the aftermath, the court of public opinion was far from unanimous in backing his version of events, and he found himself at the center of a social media shitstorm that he was wholly unprepared to handle.
'The moment [Robbi] tabled her jack-four, we each had a job to do. Yes, mine was to gracefully get to the bottom of what happened. I believe her alleged goal was to cover it up. But let’s be honest: we both messed up our respective missions.'
Adelstein has always had his fans. Since 2022 he’s also had his fair share of detractors, and for an approval junkie like him it’s been a sobering four years.
Will this autobiography win over the wider poker public, or is the memoir of a ‘healthy, wealthy white dude’ only going to provide more fuel to any fires already burning?
If courting public approval is unhealthy, and one’s true identity is best forged away from the pitchforks and yells of social media, releasing this book was always going to be a gamble for Adelstein.
And while he certainly knows how to gamble, sometimes there are outside factors we can’t control that are willing us to fail.
If anyone should understand that by now, it’s him.
‘Beneath The Cards: A High-Stakes, High-Anxiety Poker Journey’ by Garrett Adelstein is published September 1 by Permuted Press, and available at Amazon and via Adelstein’s website.
