Ship It Holla Ballas!

by Jonathan Grotenstein

  Raptor and TheUsher have traded messages on AIM, but they’ve never actually met in person before. Raptor’s relieved to discover that TheUsher’s only twenty years old—a contemporary who speaks the same language and gets the same cultural references. The two hit it off, strutting around the Commerce Casino as if they own the place, getting so caught up in the moment that they put their names on the waiting list for a $100/$200 limit Hold’em game. It’s by far the biggest game Raptor has ever considered playing, but he has $12,000 in his pocket and he’s feeling plenty confident, especially after seeing how awful—“terribad” in his vernacular—many of the players are.

  While waiting to get in the game, they drift into the adjoining room, where a group of Asian gamblers are whooping it up. Whatever strange card game they’re playing is clearly the most entertaining activity in the world.

  “What the heck is that?” Raptor asks.

  “Pai Gow,” TheUsher replies. “You know you can play as the bank here?”

  “So what?”

  “So, the bank has like a two percent edge.”

  “Wait a minute. You can gamble here plus EV?”

  “EV” stands for expected value, gamblerspeak for the amount of money that any given decision will win or lose over the long run. When you talk about the house having an edge, what you’re really saying is that casino games like craps or slot machines force players to make decisions with negative expected value—you may enjoy some short-term success, but keep betting a dollar and, once the law of averages has a chance to work its magic, you’ll only be getting back ninety-eight cents.

  Savvy gamblers live for opportunities that carry positive expected value. Blackjack card-counters aren’t psychic; they don’t have any way of knowing exactly which cards are going to come out of the shoe. What they can do, by keeping close track of all the cards that have been played, is identify moments where the odds have shifted subtly in their favor, creating “plus-EV” situations. Seizing these opportunities, they suddenly increase the size of their bets, hoping to take advantage of the winds that are, however briefly, blowing their way. Winning poker relies on a similar ethic: nearly every move that a knowledgeable player makes at the table is governed by the hopes that he’s making a plus-EV decision.

  Raptor, having committed himself to the life of a savvy gambler, can’t believe that this casino is going to give him an opportunity to gamble plus EV.

  Or rather, he totally believes it. He sidles up to the table and pulls out his bankroll, quickly bringing himself up to speed on the rules of the game as it progresses.

  Less than an hour later, a floorman calls his name for the poker game, but Raptor isn’t around to hear it. He’s back in his hotel room with TheUsher, feeling terribad, trying to figure out how much grinding at the poker tables it’s going to take to win back the $12,000 he just lost at Pai Gow.

  9

  Once I came upon Two Plus Two, I saw all these people who were playing poker on the Internet for a living. In the Midwest you’re told you have to finish high school, go to college, get a corporate job or whatever. It gave me confidence that there were actually people living outside of that system making a living playing poker. That it was more than a crazy idea.

  —Good2cu

  OKEMOS, MICHIGAN (Fall 2004)

  In addition to allowing him to buy beer for half of underage Okemos, Good2cu’s fake ID turns out to have another benefit: access to Soaring Eagle, an Indian casino an hour’s drive north on Highway 127.

  Here he finds the kind of poker he sees on TV. Real felt tables. Professional dealers. Interesting characters. The hypnotic clickety-clack of hundreds of players simultaneously riffling their chips. In this seductive environment Good2cu’s desire to become a professional video gamer comes to an end, supplanted by the fantasy that’s been prickling his imagination for the past year. He wants to be a professional gambler, a well-heeled scoundrel living by his ingenuity and wits, a “balla” in the parlance of the rap world. Good2cu understands that he’s not a natural fit, that to be a true balla he’s going to have to overcome his social awkwardness and find a girl who’s actually interested in him, but there’s no reason he can’t embark on the gambling part right now.

  His first few sessions at Soaring Eagle teach him that his dream job comes weighted with certain harsh realities. The wait-list to get into a $6/$12 or $10/$20 limit Hold’em game often exceeds an hour, plenty of time for a bored gambler to lose all his money playing blackjack. The poker games themselves aren’t quite boom-or-bust—“boom” is much too strong of a word to describe his piddling success. Good2cu tends to string together a few decent wins, only to wipe them out in a single bad session, sending him all the way back to square one. Or, rather, to the YMCA, to scrub a few more toilets, and to Two Plus Two, to search for ways to clean up his game.

  While lurking on the site, Good2cu picks up some valuable information. The conventional wisdom among poker players is that, in the long run, solid play can reasonably be expected to net around one “big blind”—the betting unit that dictates the size of a game—every hour he plays. In other words, even if Good2cu plays flawlessly, the kinds of games they’re spreading at Soaring Eagle probably won’t earn him more than $10 or $20 an hour. It’s certainly better than the $7 an hour he’s making at the Y, but not exactly a path to riches.

  Internet poker presents an interesting challenge to this long-maintained belief, offering an accelerated version of the game. Live poker is riddled with all sorts of tedious conventions that prevent swifter play. Human dealers have to collect and shuffle the cards. Bets have to be counted out and confirmed. Players ask other players for chip counts, dealers to change the decks when they’re running bad, and floormen to resolve arguments over even the most trivial of slights.

  According to Two Plus Twoers, the Internet has redefined or eliminated many of these hurdles. Where in a live game you can expect to be dealt maybe twenty hands an hour, in an Internet game you might see a hundred or more. Online players have discovered that they’ve been driving the car in first gear. With the emergency brake on.

  Taking the logic one step further, it stands to reason that a player who can make $10 an hour in a game where twenty hands are dealt can make $50 an hour in a game where he’s dealt five times as many hands.

  And if you can handle playing four or eight or twelve of these tables at the same time …

  Reading this inspires seventeen-year-old Good2cu to take the leap and make a deposit online. He chooses PokerStars, the site where Chris Moneymaker started his miraculous run to the world championship. He doesn’t have a credit card, so he uses Western Union to wire some of the money he’s won playing home games to his new online account. When prompted for his date of birth, he enters the same one that’s on his fake ID—if this is going to present a problem when he goes to cash out his winnings, well, he’ll worry about that when the time comes.

  Turns out he doesn’t have to worry—in his first few days on the site, Good2cu learns another important lesson about Internet poker: you can lose your money a lot faster too.

  He returns to Two Plus Two to learn a few more tricks. One is bankroll management, the discipline to choose games you can actually afford to play without fear of losing all your money in one sitting. Another is a form of bargain shopping specific to online poker—the competition among virtual card rooms is so fierce that most offer special deals to attract players, like cash bonuses for new deposits and “rakeback,” which rewards loyal players by refunding a portion of their rake. After comparing sites for the best deal, Good2cu makes another deposit, vowing to stick to a lower-stakes game he knows he can afford.

  He also has a goal to keep him focused. Spring Break is only three months away and some of his friends are going to Mexico, a trip that promises epic drunkenness and, possibly, drunken hookups with drunken girls. His parents are willing to pay for college, but they’re not interested in subsidizing this particular aspect of their son’s education.

  T
o go, Good2cu needs to make $2,000, and with margaritas and bikinis serving as a carrot, he manages to do just that. He flies to Playa del Carmen, drinks a thousand Coronas and half as many tequila shots, and comes awfully close, on one or two occasions, to hooking up with girls who are every bit as drunk as he.

  Upon his return to Michigan, Good2cu can’t wait to get back to the tables to begin funding his next adventure. He parks himself in front of the computer in his dad’s home office, a development that does not go unnoticed by Dad, who from time to time likes to pop his head in to see what his son is up to. Sometimes Dad even likes to take a seat beside him and watch him play.

  Uh-oh.

  Despite the fact that one of the world’s most celebrated poker players, 1989 WSOP champion Phil Hellmuth, hails from Madison, Wisconsin, most folks in the Midwest still equate poker with gambling, and gambling with sin. Good2cu’s father is hardly a puritan, but he doesn’t take regular junkets to Las Vegas either. All he knows about poker is what he’s seen on television, and, despite his son’s admiration for them, he wouldn’t trust Sammy Farha or Chris Moneymaker to give him proper change.

  Good2cu doesn’t want his dad to know he’s playing with, and therefore risking, actual American dollars, but the $.50/$1 limit Hold’em game he’s settled into is clearly identified with boldface letters in the top-left corner of the window as being a Real Money Game.

  Which is how he discovers Sit N Gos. After buying into one of these single-table tournaments, there’s no further mention of real money being involved until the payouts are issued at the end. The bets and raises are made with tournament chips, which have no cash value, and the top-left corner offers a far more innocent-looking heading: Tournament Table.

  “Just messing around,” Good2cu tells his father.

  During his frequent visits to the One-Table Forum he discovers that there are even better reasons to cast his lot with Sit N Gos. He reads nearly every post written by guys like Daliman and Irieguy, who insist that these online tournaments are cash cows that can be steadily milked. Raptor, a regular contributor who ends each of his posts with his signature catchphrase “holla!”, claims he’s consistently making a 30 percent ROI.

  Good2cu’s journey begins with an epic heater, a textbook episode of beginner’s luck. He quickly jumps from the $22s and $33s to the $55s and $109s, playing as many as eight tables at once. During one stretch he plays 449 Sit N Gos and achieves an ROI of 208 percent, a number that’s twice as big as it has to be to be called a statistical anomaly.

  This windfall allows him to start living in a way he couldn’t have imagined just three months before. He pays $3,000 for a top-of-the-line laptop. He buys an expensive necklace for the girl he’s starting to call his girlfriend. While his peers drink Natty Ice (a catchall term for shitty beer) and Popov vodka and smoke Mexican dirt weed, Good2cu treats himself to more exotic Coronas, Hpnotiq (a trendy blue liqueur popular in the New York club scene), and sticky kind bud.

  His parents can’t help noticing the influx of disposable income their son is enjoying, and share with him the predictable concerns about his new hobby. Good2cu mollifies them by promising to set aside enough money so that he—not they—will be paying for his first semester of college. It’s an angle that will cost him roughly $5,000, but it allows him to go on playing poker.

  It turns out to be the correct play. By the time Good2cu makes the three-mile trip down Grand River Avenue to the freshman dorms at Michigan State, he’s pushed his bankroll all the way up to $43,000.

  10

  Wake up whenever I wake up, take a piss, brush my teeth, sit down at my computer and immediately fire up as many Sit N Gos as possible. Order some food, run to door when it rings. Keep firing up Sit N Gos. Post on Two Plus Two and AIM with friends, talk about hand histories throughout the day while playing nonstop. When my eyes hurt, go lie down and watch a movie or a TV series. Fall asleep. Sleep until I wake up. Repeat.

  —Raptor

  FORT WORTH, TEXAS (Fall 2005)

  With the one-year anniversary of his decision to become a professional gambler fast approaching, Raptor is ready to take stock.

  At times, it’s been a grand adventure. This summer, he made his first trip to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker. Barely nineteen, he wasn’t old enough to enter any of the tournaments, but that didn’t prevent him from playing cash games in any casinos that didn’t bother checking his ID. Nor did it stop him from experimenting with blackjack, specifically the Martingale Betting System, a creation of the eighteenth-century French mathematician Paul Pierre Lévy that suggests you double the size of your bet every time you lose a hand. It’s more or less foolproof if you have an infinitely large bankroll. Raptor—whose resources were not infinitely large—chased a $1,000 loss with a $2,000 wager, bet $4,000 hoping to win back the $2,000, then threw down his last $7,200 in an effort to recoup all his losses, successfully wiping out his $14,200 bankroll in under three minutes.

  It made for a great story on Two Plus Two—Daliman, a skilled blackjack card counter, got a lot of comic mileage out of retelling it—and Raptor doesn’t have a problem laughing at himself. But he also felt sick to his stomach, unable to distance himself from the idea that the money he lost could have been converted into, say, a brand-new car.

  Over the course of the past year, he’s also become one of the most frequent posters on his favorite Two Plus Two message board, which, during an overhaul of the site, got renamed the “Single-Table Tournament Forum” (STTF). He likes to propose informal competitions—for example, “Who can play five hundred $109 Sit N Gos in a week while achieving an 8 percent ROI?”—that will motivate him to put in even more hours at the tables. They come to be known as Raptor Challenges, and inspire many of the regulars on the forum to play longer, higher, and better than they ever have before.

  But looking back on the year, he’s also ready to admit that the glamorous life of a gambling man hasn’t turned out to be quite as glamorous as he’d imagined. He spends most of his days and nights staring at a computer screen, clicking a mouse, making decisions that, 99 percent of the time, don’t require an iota of conscious thought. The only humans he interacts with are poker players, and that’s mostly through online forums and instant messages. He’s definitely not meeting any girls. Depression has become a very viable diagnosis.

  Hoping to fill the growing void inside him, Raptor reenrolls for the fall semester at TCU. He cashes out all the money he has in his online accounts except for $450, enough to fool around at some low-limit games should he feel the itch, but vows to take the entire first semester off from poker.

  For a last hurrah he returns to Vegas over Labor Day weekend to play in a “heads-up” (one-on-one) poker tournament hosted by Irieguy. Many of the regular posters on the Single-Table Tournament Forum fly in from all over the country to play what they dub the inaugural STTF-HU Championship. Raptor manages to finish in second place and, for the first time, leaves Las Vegas with more money than he brought with him.

  Back in Fort Worth, he does his best impersonation of a normal college student. He pledges a fraternity. He begins dating again and lands a serious girlfriend. His off-campus apartment becomes a popular place to party into the wee hours of the morning. A little too popular—after the eighth noise complaint, the property management company evicts him. Luckily his friend TravestyFund has a spare bedroom to rent, but the change of scenery doesn’t do anything to curb the partying. One morning Raptor wakes up and realizes he hasn’t been to class in two weeks. His grades are so poor he’s not going to get initiated into the fraternity. And there’s no way the school is going to let him take another leave of absence. If he flunks out this time, it will almost certainly be for good. He needs a plan.

  Or an escape. His eyes drift to the Quad Monitor Set-Up in the corner of the room. He brushes dust from the screens and fires up the computer. In one of his accounts he finds the $450 he’s been saving for a rainy day.

  The smart move would be to stick to low-stake
s—he hasn’t played in a while, and he could easily lose all his money in one sitting. Hell, the smart move would be turning off the computer and going to the library to study.

  Instead, he spreads his entire poker bankroll across four $109 Sit N Go tables.

  All right, time to run good. Either I win or I’m done.

  In the parlance of the game, he “runs good,” winning three of the tournaments and finishing second in the fourth. He doesn’t bother standing up, using his winnings to enter eight more Sit N Gos. Then twelve. When he feels like his bankroll will allow it, he moves up from the $109s to the $215s.

  Thirty-six hours later, he’s too bleary-eyed to see the cards on the screen. It takes all his remaining energy just to power down his computer, but before he does he takes one last look at his bottom line, just to reassure himself that what he thinks just happened really did happen.

  Thirty-six hours of poker, and he’s transformed the last $450 in his online accounts into a $20,000 bankroll.

  Well, I guess I’m a poker player again.

  11

  The Single-Table Tournament Forum on Two Plus Two was a small community. There were probably less than a hundred people who played those games for a living, so everyone kind of knew each other. I started talking to Raptor on AOL. He and I were playing a lot of the same games against the same opponents, and we would talk strategy. He was probably making more money playing those games than anybody else, so everybody knew who he was.