“I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That’s what I call a liberal education.” — Tallulah Bankhead
I played poker tonight for hours. Not the clean, carpeted, regulated kind – though I do that too now – but in my mind I was back in the rooms where I first learned the game. Houston, before it was legal. Dim and loud and full of men who thought they could read me. Most of them couldn’t.
It got me thinking, somewhere around the third hour, about how thoroughly that education has served me. Not just at the table.
The Charm Offensive.
There’s a skill I developed early, in those smoky back rooms where you either learned to talk to strangers or you sat silent and lost money faster. I learned to talk. More than that – I learned to encourage. To make a person feel seen, interesting, worth knowing, even when I’d just met them ten minutes ago. What surprised me was how much I genuinely enjoyed it. It wasn’t performance, or not only performance. There’s something in the act of drawing someone out, of making them feel at ease, that gives me a particular kind of pleasure. It works at the table. It works in my life as Sydney. It works, honestly, everywhere.
Charm isn’t flattery. Flattery is blunt and people feel it like a shove. Charm is more like an invitation – I see you, come a little closer – and it requires you to actually mean it, at least in the moment. I usually do.
Reading People.
This is the one. This is the thing that poker gave me that I could not have gotten anywhere else, and it is the beating heart of what I do.
At the table, you are watching. Always watching. Not the cards – the cards are almost beside the point. You’re watching hands, eyes, breathing. The way someone reaches for their drink. The tiny moment of stillness before a bluff. You learn to hold the read loosely, to revise it, to stay curious rather than certain.
It’s the same with me and the people who come to see me.
So often – more often than most would guess – what a person asks for and what they want are not the same thing. Sometimes they don’t know. Sometimes they know exactly and can’t quite say it. My work is partly to sit with that gap, to watch and listen, and to gently find my way to what’s real.
I saw a client recently – fourth visit, maybe fifth – and somewhere in the middle of an evening I understood something I hadn’t before. He wanted to be lightly dominated. Not the theatrical kind, not chains and commands and a persona built for the purpose. Something quieter and more specific: a permission slip to stop being in charge. In his daily life, I gathered, that particular weight never quite lifts. Decisions, authority, the expectation of command – it follows some men everywhere. What he wanted in that room was to set it down. To let someone else hold the reins, just for an evening, without apology or explanation required.
What he offered in that willingness – the trust of it, the relief I could see moving through him – I found genuinely, unexpectedly sexy. Not despite the softness of it. Because of it.
Patience.
I want to be honest: patience is not naturally my virtue. I am quick. I want things to move. I get restless when they don’t, and I have spent no small amount of my life trying to outrun that particular quality in myself.
But poker taught me – is still teaching me – that patience isn’t passivity. It isn’t sitting still and waiting. It’s knowing when not to act. Knowing that the information you need will come, that forcing the moment often costs you the hand. That there is a kind of intelligence in restraint that looks, from the outside, like calm.
I find that same patience in the work. Not every evening reveals itself quickly. Not every person opens easily. Sometimes I am waiting – watching, listening, staying curious – for longer than feels comfortable. And almost always, that waiting is where the real thing lives.
Tallulah knew what she was talking about. The education that matters isn’t the one that announces itself. It’s Shakespeare and dice. It’s the room where you learned to hold your face still while something moved underneath it. It’s the slow accumulation of knowing people – really knowing them – until you stop being surprised by anything, and start being delighted instead.