The game consisted of the same players: a lawyer, a realtor, a couple of army officers, an English professor and myself. We played dealer’s choice, pot limit table stakes, with a $5 ante from each player. That meant that someone could bet the pot, and be raised the pot, but could not bet more than was in front of him. This made for side pots, and pots that could run into the thousands of dollars.

During those years I became intimately familiar with these men and they with me. I knew whether they had the courage to risk much, or the caution to wait for the moment. I knew if they allowed themselves to mourn a loss, or if they would celebrate inside themselves in victory. I knew if they could control their facial expressions in order to appear as they should if they were hiding weakness or strength. I knew how they walked out the door when crushed, and how they walked when they triumphed. In knowing these things, I knew each other more intimately than did some of their wives, who were content to imagine they knew them.

It was an unashamedly masculine game, and we couldn’t then imagine a time when men would be ashamed of their masculinity. The poker game is far more manly than a football game. There is no equipment to protect the poker player from pain, no dancing in the end zone, no spectators to give you solace. The players were alone, and the game was not about the cards that were dealt. The game was about managing your own feelings and letting none of them show, and seeking to manipulate the greed and fear of others. Poker played for small stakes is playing cards. At the stakes we were playing it was about managing ourselves and others.

It is difficult to think of us as friends. Yet we were, and what made us friends was that we confronted each other in combat, facing fearful losses and glorious wins, and never showing anguish or delight but at most taking another bite from your sandwich. We were able to measure ourselves against each other. On occasion, we invited someone else to fill the seat of someone who was out of town. Inevitably he would discuss his job, or that he’d had it with his wife, or things that were violations of all that was holy, or how lucky he felt. He could not grasp that this was not a social event or a game, but a place where men experienced the sacredness of the male soul. For six hours each week, there was only the sound of the dealer calling the cards and an occasional grunt that was meant to signal defeat — or to lay a trap for the simpleminded.

We each approached the game with our own strategies. Mine was to be underestimated. Early in the game I would make foolish bets, forget that it was my deal or call a locked hand. I waited for the right hand, aware that this might not be the night it came. As I slowly built the pot, my reward was the contemptuous look of other players, and the knowledge that I was dragging them to their doom. Over time looking incompetent became more difficult. But the predilection of men to look down on the strength of other men allowed me to carry on.

Could women be good poker players? I have heard of many but seen few. I would not want to play with one. A man in the presence of a woman cannot bear to appear clueless. He needs her approval, and my strategy was to disdain approval in seeking the defeat of my friends. I also find it difficult to be merciless toward women, where being merciless among men is most praiseworthy. To the extent that poker is a card game, women can excel. To the extent that it is a confrontation of the things that men set out to possess, they can’t. It has nothing to do with equality or justice. It has to do with the fact that men and women are both linked and different, and that Tuesday night was men’s night.

The game broke up as we went our way in the world, on new assignments or new lives. We do not remember each other’s birthday, nor care about each other’s children. I have not seen them since those days, and heard only from one once, who proposed an action too dangerous to contemplate, or so my wife ruled. The friendship we forged remains in my soul, each time I have to make a bet. I came to recognize that we make bets every day, and then give in to our fear and triumph. I did not become a man at my bar mitzvah or on the streets of the Bronx. I became one at the poker table with men about to take the measure of other men.

I have never found another poker game worthy of the name. Playing Hold ‘em with strangers in Vegas is a version of roulette, not poker. You can play poker online (before it became illegal), which is the equivalent of watching porn rather than making love. There used to be many such games, but they are gone along with the men I loved and sought to crush, and they me. Part of the reason is that the gathering of people has declined, and the gathering of men even more. Men love combat and risk, and they love the wives and girlfriends who gladly serve sandwiches while men accept them and gaze enviously — another moment of triumph for one of the players. This is how we felt in the game, and it was commonplace for the time. Today, some may be offended. But it is how we were, and I will not betray my past. Undoubtedly today's young will be condemned by their grandchildren for something seen as utterly reasonable today. Since the founding, each American generation condemned the past and called it progress.

The aesthetics of poker run counter to the moral principles of our time. This doesn’t mean that either men or women have changed. They are simply more circumspect in their behavior. Yet being circumspect undermines the core of serious poker: It is a game that takes no prisoners, asks for no mercy and above all bows to no propriety but cutting the cards. In the midst of this virus we need to think of how loneliness has become routine, and trying to shape your soul to the dictates of the moment so natural. Poker helped me become a man, and I will not abandon the things I learned and became.

Here I stand.