Alas, once in a blue moon you go to the casino and run into a player, nondescript, taciturn, perhaps dressed in modest or sports-related garb, wearing unremarkable sunglasses, very little jewelry, and absolutely no cologne or fragrance of any kind, who doesn’t seem to signify at the table at all, who seems to cast no shadow on the world whatsoever, and who will likely leave a rather small carbon footprint when all is said and done, since he operates with very little friction and thus consumes less energy than the rest of us living in the world.

And yet you watch him accumulating chips, steadily, yet almost imperceptibly. You watch him and note nothing extraordinary about his play. He pushes his bets out in a smooth, controlled, natural, consistent and effortless manner with his lightly manicured, very clean fingers. When he announces an action he speaks in the same manner each time, which is to say in a monotone, revealing nothing other than the words he has articulated, no emotion, no nuance or motives. He rarely gets into big showdowns. He pecks away at pots with small probing raises, picks up blinds quite often, wins many uncontested pots, and if someone decides to look him up he will have the nuts. No one ever catches him bluffing or making mistakes. Rarely, very rarely does he move all-in. His game is as impenetrable as the sphinx, yet evokes neither fear, respect, malice or plain old grumbling resentment at the table. Indeed when people address him he responds politely enough but nothing is ever really communicated.

“You must have had the nuts there, eh? Put you on A-K. Did I make a good lay down?”

“Well, all I can say is I’m hitting some flops tonight.”

“Where you from, you look familiar?”

“I’m from up north. You look kinda familiar yourself.”

“I’m Emile, nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you Emile. I’m, er, Jack.”

And that’s the extent of it. That is all I will ever know about this individual. Poker is a game of incomplete information and when you’ve played long enough you can get a read on just about anyone, even if you don’t follow that read or second guess yourself out of respecting it. But now and then you run into guys or girls like this Jack dude.

These people are what I like to call natural players. They’re like those bowlers who win championships. They don’t do it with a lot of flash. But they’re consistent. And they have an economy of movement and technique that I believe cannot be altogether learned. All the bowling tips and training and practice help one improve, certainly. But some people have that smoothness that seems innate. The ball just springs off a good bowler’s fingers, and his follow through is precise and compact. The delivery is almost silent, and the ball glides smoothly down the lane. And this the good bowler does again and again. He or she is a natural bowler. The same of course applies to golf and curling and even an old timey sport like battledore. The very best battledore players in history were naturals at the game.

Anyway, Jack won quite a bundle that night at the Fallsview and yet he did not have one negative verbal exchange with anyone in the entire casino; even when he rivered someone or pushed them off a big pot they didn’t resent him; and he did not once appear to be steamrolling the table (though during one stretch he won five or six hands in a row). It seemed no one wanted to get in his way – not out of fear necessarily but because he seemed so innocuous, so unassuming. He was like a ball bearing rolling down a greased groove, absolutely frictionless.

I had to wonder why this Jack wasn’t playing in bigger cash games, I mean a Mr. Natural like him. Why was he mucking around with the bottom feeders at a $5-10 game when with innate skills like his he could probably rake down huge pots playing in high-stakes games or big tournaments. And I almost said something to him, like who are you, really? Was he a big-time pro masquerading as an ordinary Joe? Pros usually display consummate table skills. Many pros are naturals. But if Jack was a pro was he content to grind it out at this table? It wasn’t a bad game, but there were bigger games in town. But maybe he was, despite appearances, a sick gambler who had squandered his bank roll and his talent betting football games and other such things. It’s an old story, I guess. The natural who has no respect for his talent.

As mentioned, poker is a game of incomplete information. The more you probe sometimes the less you know. You can brain-damage all you want thinking and extrapolating and hypothesizing, but in the end the cards will fall as they cards will fall. The poker gods operate mysteriously, their motivations obscure. And you will meet mysterious people in this life whose motivations are obscure, who pass through without leaving so much as a footprint, taking what they need for the moment and moving on before anyone can know them.

Emile Frendo of the Honeymoon City is a semi-professional poker player and winner of the 2006 Pirate Poker Open Championship.