Eram had the button for the first hand of the tournament and, straight out of the gate, he was dealt a pair of red jacks.

Jacks. Shit.

Even though it was a big pair, jacks were tricky to play because any ace, king, or queen could beat them, so most of the time you never knew if you were ahead or behind your opponents. Eram decided he was better off trying to win the hand now, before the flop cards came down. So, when a guy sitting to Eram’s right in the cutoff seat raised, Eram re-raised him three times his original bet. Everyone else at the table quickly folded.

Eram could feel eyes on him for the rest of the hand.

Live tells are such a joke. Do people really think that life is a James Bond movie? Like, what, I’ll tug my left earlobe each time I’m bluffing?

The guy who had raised initially thought about it a lot. He tanked for almost a minute, which was a long time around a poker table, before calling Eram’s bet. It could be that that was just the way he played—real slow—but Eram didn’t think so. More likely he had been deciding whether he wanted to play a hand out of position with a smaller pocket pair or suited connectors.

The flop came down king, queen, a random five. It was one of the worst possible flops for Eram, with two overcards to his jacks on the board. His opponent checked it to him. Eram could check it back and see the turn card for free, but that wouldn’t give him any information on the other guy’s hand. So he put in a sizeable bet, about a quarter of his stack. This time his opponent didn’t think twice before calling, which told Eram that he had a hand with some equity—maybe a queen-ten, even a queen-jack—but not a king, as he would probably have re-raised with top pair in that spot.

By then Eram knew that he was behind with his jacks, and he had every intention of folding if the guy bet the turn card.

But the turn was another jack, giving Eram a set of trip jacks. A well-disguised set of trip anything is gold in poker. A stack-busting hand. His opponent checked a second time and Eram fired another two hundred thousand into the pot.

It’s a small bet relative to the size of the pot, but if this guy has any sort of a hand, especially one that can improve on the river, he’s going to put it all in now. A larger bet could maybe scare him off.

The inducement worked. The guy—maybe he was a recreational player and just had a lot of money to burn—was wound as tight as a spring. It was clear to Eram that the turn card had hit him hard, probably giving him a second pair to go with his queens. People only got nervous in poker when they made a good hand, because then they had skin in the game, something to lose.