An amalgam of interviews conducted with one, radiologists with machine fetishes, and two, gambling/risk addicts.
J. Majjestic: Thanks for taking some time out of your tournament play. How are you doing so far?
Nigel Mars: Actually fantastic. I’m $5,000 in the money. I’m looking to even double that. It looks good for the World Series of Poker later in the year. You need $10,000 just to sit with 2,500 other players for that you know.
J. M.: Then I better not keep you away from the tables for long.
Nigel: It’s our midday break when the dealers go to lunch. All the players are over next door at the Pisces Buffet. It’s the crab feast today.
J. M.: I saw the line. Are they all nearly as successful as you are at your profession?
Nigel: The majority of them are amateurs, business owners, teachers, housewives, blue collar workers. Only a few have made the leap to turning poker into a lifestyle, and that’s probably the way it should be as the risk and uncertainty isn’t just for anyone.
J.M.: But the risk and uncertainty is for you?
Nigel: I try to play in a way that will minimize all risk. My experience as a pro helps me do that, but I would be lying if I said poker, high stakes or low, is mostly skill and not as much luck.
J.M.: How long have you been playing poker to make a living?
Nigel: It will be two years in February.
J.M.: And how did you get into it?
Nigel: Well, I fell into professional poker quite accidently. Of course, I worked in another profession before taking on poker. I was a doctor of nuclear medicine and radiology.
J.M.: A doctor?
Nigel: Yes, I was the assistant clinical director of positron emission tomography at Harborview Medical Center - you know the hospital that Grey’s Anatomy modeled Seattle Grace Hospital after? Before that I had worked in a radiology fellowship at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
J.M.: Interesting. I detect an accent though?
Nigel: Oui [laughs], I’m French Canadian from Quebec. I came across the border to study at Penn - the best school of nuclear medicine in North America [pointing at his red and blue U Penn neck tie].
J.M.: I see. I imagine you’re one of the highest educated professional poker players on the circuit?
Nigel: I’ve never thought about it, but the game attracts quite a few players with quantitative abilities above the norm . . . engineers, computer scientists, people that are comfortable with figures. There are several players with Ph.D.s.
J.M. : But why did you leave that line of work behind?
Nigel : Again, it was quite accidental. I was quite good at my job except for one simple thing. This became very apparent once I started working at Harborview. I had to work more closely with patients than before. Usually, patients who are having scans never meet me, they only meet the PET tech . . .
J.M.: PET?
Nigel: Positron Emission Tomography. It is a technology in which a radioactive sugar is injected into the blood stream. Cancer is growing and is very hungry for sugar so it metabolizes the sugar at a higher rate than surrounding healthy tissue. This radioactive sugar emits photons which are registered by the PET scanner. It’s the most accurate imaging technology to diagnose cancer. This is a very simple description for a layperson.
J.M.: Of course.
Nigel: As I was saying . . . I would sometimes have to interact with subjects who were being put into our PET scanner. It is basically shaped like a big donut. The subject lays totally immobile for up to an hour as we slide them into the donut and conduct a full body scan - lips to hips as we used to say. Unfortunately, my meeting with patients seemed to be having a negative impact.
J.M.: Negative?
Nigel: Every one of them without fail would cry upon looking up into my face. Of course, the procedure itself can be a bit stressful, especially for more claustrophobic patients, and naturally many of them are not visiting radiology because they feel too good. They feel like shit most of them.
J.M.: I still don’t understand how this leads to you becoming a professional poker player.
Nigel: I’m getting there [laughs]. So I’m making everyone cry. I don’t even have to say anything. Patients just look at me and start to tear up and sob. This doesn’t seem to happen with any of the other techs. This is quite perplexing as even though the chief part of my job is scan interpretation, I still have to come in contact with patients ever so often. This issue gets around the clinic’s . . . how do you say . . . water cooler . . . and an associate of mine who worked in the MRI lab talks to me one day over lunch and says she has a friendly suggestion. I should go every Wednesday to the Muckleshoot Indian Casino for free poker lessons. You see, my associate had the same issue too, and she had someone else tell her about this unconventional training regimen just like she was telling me.
J.M.: So you got into poker as a means of becoming a better doctor, or at least one with a warmer bedside manner?
Nigel: In a sense . . .yes. Somehow the patients were reading my thoughts right off of my face. This still amazes me to this day. I would do a preliminary read of the scan in the control room, so I had some idea of the morphology of the tumor. You could see where the cancer had metastisized - spread to the lymph nodes and different parts of the body. You just knew from looking at the scan, who would live and who would most probably die. It’s funny [looking off into the banks of beeping video poker and keno machines] but in a sad kind of way, it is usually the individual who looks the healthiest and most fit that dies the most rapidly. Their bodies have never experienced the shock of systemic trauma. Cancer hits them like a wall of solid steel. It is the person who has been hardened by multiple reoccurrences and remissions, the ones whose bodies are just hardened rawhide leather from all of the offenses, these people will survive because that’s all their body knows how to do . . . [looking back] Well, I would enter the scanner room and reposition the patient with the help of the tech for a second scan. This is when the patient would try to speak to me, and this when they usually began to cry. It was as if they could read my thoughts through my expressions, even though I didn’t think I was expressing anything other than general caring.
J.M.: So in essence your patients could read your tell?
Nigel: I see you did some background research.
J.M.: Not a whole lot, but I’m familiar with tells. That’s why most of you pros half the time are wearing sunglasses or brimmed hats so as to not give away the strength of your hand.
Nigel: Or the weakness . . . it’s all relative.
J.M.: So you don’t do anything in medicine these days after all that school?
Nigel : I like to be around people that are generally happy, and I find most poker players are, even when they are losing. It isn’t quite the same in a hospital. There, you see people when they are at their most miserable and fearful. Here, the worst that people fear is losing a few thousand dollars or being the last in the buffet line.