I’LL CALL THAT
She brought down a Ponzi schemer. So why not bluffing poker players?
Jane Hitchcock stares at her cards in disgust. Another bad hand. She tosses them at the dealer, frustrated.
“I feel the cards, and this table’s no good,” she says, shaking her head.
An hour earlier, 151 poker players had walked into the Maryland Live casino to compete in the final day of a $215,100 (U.S.) World Poker Tour tournament. More than 550 people had already been eliminated. The remaining players hunched around the poker tables are primarily young and male. Only eight are women, and Hitchcock is one of them.
Hitchcock started playing seriously just eight years ago. It was an unlikely hobby for a Georgetown socialite, but the game quickly became an obsession, a balm, an entry into a new and fascinating world. She’s still not great, she admits, but she’s wily and has won almost $40,000 over the past four years.
Few of her opponents ever know that she was once a Park Ave. debutante, a close friend of Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s. They probably don’t care about her bestselling murder mysteries or a lifetime of jet-setting with the rich and famous. And most have no idea she’s 70. “When anyone mentions my age at a table,” she says, “I say, ‘Darling, I’m not old. I’m a vampire.’ ”
Now she studies a young player two seats away. The two are locked in battle, and he has made a huge raise. Hitchcock looks at her cards, considers, and calls the bet. Her rival flips over an ace and a jack. Hitchcock shows an ace and a nine, losing the hand and about half her chips. She awaits two new cards. “Poker is like life,” she says. “At the poker table, everyone makes mistakes, everybody plays hands wrong. It’s a game that teaches you about not dwelling on the past, but also learning from your mistakes. You play the next hand as it comes.”
Every poker player has stories, usually about a great hand they won or should have won. Hitchcock likes the one about the dealer who joked that she couldn’t be intimidated. “Yeah, she’s aggressive,” he told the table. “She put a guy in jail.”
That guy was Ken Starr, the New York accountant-to-the-stars (not the Lewinsky scandal prosecutor) who defrauded clients out of millions over three decades.
Hitchcock introduced her parents to Starr in the 1980s. Her mother was a former actress; her stepfather, Arthur Stanton, earned a fortune as a Volkswagen importer. They recommended Starr to all their friends. When Stanton died in 1987, he left his wife about $80 million, and Starr took over all her finances.
It was many years before the family suspected that something was amiss. By the time Hitchcock went to the New York City district attorney, Starr had bilked clients such as Lauren Bacall, Sylvester Stallone and Uma Thurman out of millions. Hitchcock estimates her mother alone lost tens of millions.
Starr eventually pleaded guilty to running a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
Hitchcock’s mother died in May 2009. Mortal Friends, Hitchcock’s fifth novel, came out a month later. It was her first set in Washington, a roman à clef skewering the city’s social pretensions and nouveau riche. Married since 1995, to Washington Post contributing editor Jim Hoagland, Hitchcock was both part of the Washington A-list and a scathing critic of it.
“Money is a matter of luck, and class is a matter of character,” she likes to say. Some people loved the book but in the end, Hitchcock was dropped by a number of her social friends.
It was a hard summer. Hitchcock found herself in her home office, staring at an online site called Poker Stars.
She found an escape in Texas Hold’em, the game that spawned the poker boom of the past decade.
Online, Hitchcock created a persona to intimidate other players. “I wasn’t an old bat in curlers and fuzzy slippers,” she says. “I was a 24-year-old, out-of-work, disaffected guy who was mad, bad, dangerous to know and more dangerous to play with. I was very, very aggressive.”
She played for hours a day, having a blast and spending up to $100 a week. She won some, she lost some. But the money wasn’t an issue — despite Starr, she’s still a wealthy woman — or the point.
“I did that instead of going to buy shoes,” she says. “It was either shoes or poker. And poker was more fun.”
In 2011, the feds shut down the biggest online poker sites for illegal gambling. Hitchcock was depressed for a while, then tried playing live games as a mad, bad, dangerous sexagenarian.
Women are still a rarity in poker, less accustomed to the naked aggression and strategic deception required of great players. Of the top 50 poker professionals, only one is a woman.
Poker, says Hitchcock, has made her braver and more focused. She was always competitive; now she takes more risks. She bluffs more. She uses the stereotypical image of older female players — cautious, patient, only betting premium hands — to her advantage.
After online games were shut down, a friend invited Hitchcock to a home game a year later.
At the end of the night, one of the men told her that she had wonderful card sense but didn’t know anything about betting. After a few lessons, she was playing with lawyers, accountants, even a Supreme Court justice. She polished her skills at a film noir version of the game: a seedy space above a restaurant just off Pennsylvania Ave. To get there, she had to walk down a dark alley and up a flight of stairs, where her name was on a list. She loved the guys, who were very protective of her, but the game disbanded after an armed robbery.
On Day 2 at Maryland Live, Hitchcock’s heart skips a beat when she looks down to see two queens — a great starting hand — and she pushes all her $30,900 in chips toward the middle of the table. The opponents fold.
The end comes soon after. Hitchcock finds herself with a short stack and a pair of nines. She bets it all and is called by a player with two kings.
The dealer turns over five cards, but no nines. Hitchcock’s tournament is over, and she hasn’t won a cent.
But there’s no time to dwell on the loss. There’s another tournament starting in 30 minutes.
“Next hand,” she says.