Poker Face

It is 10:15 on a Tuesday morning in November and Kenneth Adams sits in the cafeteria of Dickstein Shapiro, shoveling down a breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage and a banana. He looks tired. The skin around his blue eyes is puffy. When he walks, he plods down the hall. He’s feeling blue because two days ago, he lost early in the World Poker Tour at Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut. Texas Hold ’Em is a huge part of Adams’ life, and this fresh loss burns him up.

“I’ve spent the last few days trying to figure out what happened,” he says with the kind of soreness you might expect from someone whose dog just got hit by a car. “I played great for about an hour and a half and then lost patience and discipline. I made two terrible plays that there was no excuse for making. It cost me all my chips. And it’ll take me another two weeks to forgive myself.

“It’s always difficult to bust out of a major tournament. It’s upsetting when you play great and the cards are cruel to you, but it’s much worse when you’re the architect of your own disaster.”

One of the top antitrust lawyers in D.C., Adams is best known for representing more than 40,000 plaintiffs in the Exxon Valdez oil spill. He is obsessed with details. It’s a trait that has helped him in his career and at the card table.

Adams’ poker career began in the mid ’80s. He won a trip to Alaska during an auction event at the Capitol Hill Day School, where his daughter attended primary school. The following summer, while his family was on the Anchorage vacation, he paid a visit to a famous trapper’s furrier shop. There he noticed a picture of two men, a crowd and a huge pile of chips. As his wife purchased a parka, he discussed the photo with the shop’s owner. He was regaled with stories of high-stakes poker. The characters were a motley parade of geniuses, misanthropes, con men, cowpokes and desperados. Adams was spellbound.

Back in D.C., he organized monthly games. Soon, he was playing in tournaments and visiting Las Vegas to watch the World Series. A few years later, Adams began winning enough to get into the games himself. Now he’s on the pro circuit, which means he plays in a serious Texas Hold ’Em tournament almost every other month. His biggest year was in 2005, when he came in second at the World Poker Tour and won $87,430.

Adams knows his strengths and weaknesses as a player. He bases his decisions on factual analysis, and does not let his emotions guide him. At the recent tournament, he disregarded the cards in his hand and placed an ambitious bet. He got caught up in the idea that if he acted aggressively, he could intimidate his opponents. “If I had not listened to my emotions and slowed down the other day,” he says, “I wouldn’t have made those bad decisions. That’s a flaw in my game.

“But the great thing about poker is there’s always another tournament and”—a smile momentarily flickers across his face—“there’s always a new chance to apply the lessons you’ve learned,” he says.