Ship It Holla Ballas!

by Jonathan Grotenstein

  “Damn,” says Nick. “You guys are such ballas. Like you’ve got money to burn.”

  “Literally,” says Inyaface, smirking at Apathy. “Tell them about Monte Carlo.”

  The legal gambling age in the United States is twenty-one and Canada doesn’t host very many major tournaments, but in Europe you only have to be eighteen to gamble and there are plenty of big events to choose from. Apathy and Inyaface just got back from playing in the European Poker Tour’s end-of-the-season championship, the Grand Final in Monte Carlo. They’d flown there hoping to make a big splash, which they did, even if it wasn’t in quite the way they’d imagined.

  Apathy’s cheeks turn red. “What can I say? I got wasted and acted like a donkey. Inyaface and I were debating whether you could light a cigar with a euro note, like whether it would actually burn.”

  “Turns out the hundred burns the cleanest,” adds Inyaface.

  “I was on tilt after getting knocked out of the tournament,” Apathy explains.

  “Seriously?” says Good2cu. “You? Tilting?”

  Apathy shrugs. “Happens to the best of us. I’d gotten deep in the main event when some joker sucked out on me and sent me to the rail. Back in our hotel room I got completely hammered and allegedly did some stupid stuff.”

  “‘Allegedly’ my ass,” says Inyaface. “I’ve got photos of you lighting the C-note. You going to tell them about the furniture?”

  From the way his eyes are crinkled and his mouth’s upturned it’s hard to tell if Apathy’s smiling or cringing. “We were staying in this sick hotel. Sixth floor with a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean. We’d just finished eating room service, and there was this little dock below and, you know, it looked like a good target. So I tried to hit it with a plate.”

  “How’d that go?” Good2cu asks.

  “Missed by a mile. But the second one was a lot closer. When we ran out of plates, I switched to glasses.”

  “Then a coffeepot,” says Inyaface. “Then the furniture. End table. Lamps. The armchair. Good thing the mattress wouldn’t fit through the door.”

  “Hitting that dock,” Apathy admits, “was a lot harder than I thought it would be.”

  “Oh, snap,” says Nick. “How much trouble did you get in?”

  “The hotel charged me an extra thirty-five hundred euros to cover the damages.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I know. I probably should have fought it. There’s no way that armchair was worth five hundred euros.”

  Good2cu’s donkey laugh can be heard in every corner of the club. “That sounds so rock star. Man, I wish I could have been there to see it.”

  “It was pretty hilarious. But I felt like a complete asshole afterward. I donated twenty percent of my bankroll to charity the second I got home. Figured I could use the karma points.”

  “Hey,” says Good2cu. “You guys planning on going to the World Series this summer?”

  “Sure, why not?” Apathy replies. “We should rent the pimpest suite the Rio’s got for the whole six weeks.”

  “If we’re going to be there that long,” says Inyaface, “we should rent a house.”

  “I don’t know,” Apathy says. “That sounds like a lot of motivation.”

  “I’ll do it,” says Inyaface, voicing the familiar lament of the Responsible Guy.

  “Ship it!”

  “Holla!”

  Nick smiles at them drunkenly. “You guys are such ballas,” he slurs. “‘Ship this ridiculously expensive bottle of vodka over here! Holla! Ship these fine-looking ladies over there! Holla!’ You know what you guys are? You’re Ship It Holla Ballas!”

  “Oh, man, that’s it!” says Good2cu.

  “That’s what?” Apathy asks.

  “The name of our crew!”

  “The Ship It Holla Ballas?” Inyaface laughs. “That might be the dumbest name I’ve ever heard.”

  “No way,” says Apathy. “It’s perfect. ESPN is going to fucking love us!”

  18

  In the beginning if one of us found ten dollars on the street, it would’ve gone into the bankroll. It was like a commune or something. But I don’t know why I didn’t see that Dutch is basically a con artist. Maybe I was smoking too much weed.

  —Gank to Rolling Stone

  For as long as there has been poker, there have been poker “crews.” In the 1800s, when the game as we know it today first appeared on steamboats traveling up and down the Mississippi River, cardsharps worked in teams to cheat unsuspecting high rollers out of their money, dealing useful cards to each other from the bottom of the deck and using signals to relay the strength of their hands.

  By the middle of the twentieth century, such rampant cheating had for the most part been eradicated, but there were still legitimate reasons for players to work together as a team. In 1957, three young Texas road gamblers, Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson, Thomas “Amarillo Slim” Preston, and Brian “Sailor” Roberts, decided to pool their bankrolls and start traveling together. “Any one of us could pinch-hit for the other when he was tired or just not feelin’ right,” Amarillo Slim later recalled.

  The partnership was intended to prevent any of them from ever going broke, but the most important resource they shared turned out to be something other than money: they supported one another emotionally and intellectually as well. “After a long session, none of us could hardly sleep from being so wound up,” Slim said. “And we would just stay awake for hours talking about the hands we played that night, the players in the game, and all different sorts of strategies. Imagine what it would have been like if Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant, Vince Lombardi, and George ‘Papa Bear’ Halas traveled together for ten years and did nothing but talk football. Or if Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch, and George Soros went around the world picking stocks together and exchanging investment ideas. Let’s just say there was a lot of knowledge changing hands.”

  Later, the concept of a crew would undergo another evolution, offering its members something that Dolly, Slim, and Sailor never could have imagined:

  Media exposure.

  * * *

  One of the stories overshadowed by Chris Moneymaker’s 2003 victory at the World Series of Poker was the twelfth-place finish by a twenty-three-year-old prodigy named Russ “Dutch” Boyd.

  “Prodigy” is a word that gets thrown around loosely, but how else do you describe a kid from Missouri, raised by a single mom bouncing between welfare and minimum wage, who starts taking college classes at the age of eleven and is accepted to law school three years later?

  After earning a Juris Doctor from the University of Missouri, eighteen-year-old Dutch chose to follow the same path as Matt Damon’s character in Rounders, shelving the idea of practicing law in favor of playing poker for a living. Settling in Silicon Valley with his brother Robert, a computer whiz who helped build one of the world’s first high-speed Internet backbones, Dutch spent his nights selling men’s underwear at Macy’s so he could spend his days playing poker in the rundown card rooms that dot the San Francisco Peninsula.

  Dutch loved the idea of online poker and was an early adopter, but hated its execution. The most popular site at the time, Planet Poker, didn’t offer tournaments or any cash games other than Hold’em or draw, and the frequent software crashes in the middle of hands were infuriating and occasionally expensive.

  Sitting in a hot tub at 3:00 A.M., twenty-year-old Dutch and nineteen-year-old Robert decided they could do better. They borrowed $80,000 of seed money from friends and family, and Robert, who had always wanted to create video games, began writing one.

  The result was an online card room named PokerSpot. In September 2000, PokerSpot became the first Internet casino to host multitable tournaments, and by December it had grown into the third-biggest online poker room in the world. Dutch and his brother were making $160,000 a month and making bold predictions about their future prospects.

  Until Dutch became the most hated man in poker.

  He claimed it wasn’t PokerSpot�
��s fault, blaming the company that processed the card room’s credit card transactions. Wherever the fault lay, PokerSpot suddenly found itself short on funds, lacking the cash reserves to pay its players. Instead of coming clean with his customers, Dutch opted to stick to the classic “the check’s in the mail” strategy, figuring that if he bought some time, his company could generate enough new deposits to cover its debts.

  But these were wild and woolly days. Online poker operated without any regulations or oversight. When PokerSpot went belly-up, the players who were owed money had little recourse other than venting their anger on Internet message boards. (To date, many of those customers are still waiting on their refunds.)

  Just when it seemed things couldn’t get any crazier for Dutch, they did. Or, rather, he did. On New Year’s Eve, he suffered the first in a series of psychotic breaks. The mild ones involved public nudity. A more intense episode led to his confinement in a concrete cell at an Antiguan mental institution.

  No one wants to get diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but Dutch saw a silver lining. The affliction didn’t necessarily erode his poker skills; in fact, many of his greatest insights into the game occurred in the midst of his manic episodes.

  In May 2003, Dutch rode one of these streaks deep into the WSOP Main Event. Sporting John Lennon glasses and a mischievous grin, he played brilliantly through the first three days of the tournament and was among the chip leaders late on the fourth day when he tried to run an ill-timed bluff past Chris Moneymaker. A few hands later, Sammy Farha took the last of his chips, eliminating Dutch just three places short of the final table. With ESPN’s cameras following his exit from the room, he used the moment to make a bold announcement: He’d formed a poker crew, and they were going to “take over the poker world.”

  Their ambition extended to the name they adopted: “The Crew.” Other than their youth—most were in their early twenties—its members were an eclectic bunch. Besides Dutch and his brother Robert, The Crew included a model and full-time pothead named Brett “Gank” Jungblut and a street-savvy pool hustler named Joe Bartholdi, Jr. A few months later, they were joined by Scott Fischman, an ex-poker dealer whose rheumatoid arthritis forced him to move to the other side of the table.

  Using the $80,000 he won at the World Series, Dutch rented a five-bedroom house in Culver City, California, and turned it into their headquarters. They pooled their bankrolls, shared strategies, ate and slept only when necessary, and played online poker nearly every other minute of the day.

  At the 2004 World Series, The Crew backed up all the brash talk. Gank won a gold bracelet; Fischman earned two; and Dutch, three weeks removed from his most recent psychotic break, came tantalizingly close to winning one of his own, finishing second to the legendary T. J. Cloutier in a Razz event. Over the course of that summer’s thirty-three events, The Crew won nearly $1 million.

  Cocky kids who trained online, promised to beat the pros, then did just that? The media ate it up. Newspapers ran lengthy features. ESPN’s cameras followed them throughout the World Series. An article in Rolling Stone made them look like the Rolling Stones.

  By the time the article hit the stands, infighting had driven The Crew to disband, but their impressive performance that summer helped establish them in the poker world. Fischman parlayed his two WSOP victories into a regular column for Card Player magazine, a book about how to master Internet poker, and a sponsorship deal from Full Tilt Poker. Dutch and Gank would go on to earn sponsorship deals of their own.

  Ah, the sponsorship deal. In the eyes of online poker players who aspired to turn their hobby into a job, this was how you got made. Such endorsements were tangible proof of your skill at the game. While few deals were structured the same way, all offered the opportunity to boost one’s bottom line. Online sites often paid their sponsored players’ tournament entry fees and refunded their rake in cash games. Some sites even paid their players regular salaries, the best-known players making more than $1 million a year just for playing on the site.

  These deals turned the game of poker on its head, offering a new template for success. For most of his career Doyle Brunson had tried to keep his profession a secret to avoid moral judgment from friends and family. The Crew came along and proved that fame could be just as valuable a commodity as money itself. Texas Dolly is famously old-school in his ways, but even he was persuaded, lending his name to an online poker site called Doyle’s Room.

  Thanks to The Crew, the kids who grew up watching poker on television had been handed a road map showing them a new route to poker stardom.

  Play online.

  Form a crew.

  Talk a big game.

  Take over the poker world.

  19

  Q: What exactly does “Ship It Holla” mean?

  A: When you win a big pot in poker and you want to be funny—or maybe a little bit of a dick—you yell, “Ship it,” as in telling the dealer to “ship,” or push, the pot to you. Then, in celebration, it is correct to yell “holla.” “Ship it” can also be used in a variety of other ways—when you are sending someone money online you are “shipping them money,” or when you are ordering food you can tell the fast food employees to “ship the food.” “Holla” is also the customary greeting between young degenerate gamblers.

  —Good2cu

  EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN (April 2006)

  After a late-night session of online poker played at Inyaface’s house in Toronto, Good2cu drunk dials all the young Two Plus Twoers he bonded with in Vegas to informally invite them to join the “Ship It Holla Ballas.”

  The reactions are mixed. Raptor thinks it’s ridiculously silly. Others don’t think it’s silly enough. “You know what would be funny?” suggests Jman, a twenty-one-year-old Jason Biggs look-alike and amateur stand-up comedian who just dropped out of the University of Wisconsin to play more poker. “If we give ourselves a really gay name, so that the ESPN announcers have to say it every time one of us makes a final table at the World Series. How about ‘Pushbotting Panthers’?”

  “I’m hanging up now,” says Good2cu.

  But all of them do agree on one thing: renting a house in Vegas for the summer is an excellent idea.

  Good2cu is especially excited. Upon his return to East Lansing, he starts counting down the days until he will be reunited with his new best friends. The two halves of his double life no longer feel equal—he’s starting to think of himself as more of a Ship It Holla Balla than a Michigan State Spartan.

  Despite the growing divide between him and academic life, Good2cu is becoming something of a celebrity on campus. Everyone’s talking about the professional poker player living in the freshman dorms, and Good2cu, for the first time in his life, is becoming a person that other people want to know. He’s achieved the kind of rock-star status normally reserved for members of the university’s football and basketball teams. Every time he goes out, he gets bombarded with questions.

  “So how much money have you made?”

  “What’s the most you’ve ever lost in a night?”

  “Have you ever played against Phil Hellmuth?”

  Good2cu tries to stay modest about his success, as long as he isn’t piss-drunk or trying to impress a girl. Then stories about booking five-figure wins and drinking bottles of Cristal start to roll off his tongue. His fellow students—and even a few teachers—look at him the same way people observed successful day traders nearly a decade before, with awe and envy of a life led above the daily grind.

  There’s only one question that bothers him: “When do you find time to study?”

  The answer is he doesn’t, although it’s not from a lack of effort. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day. The rigorous daily routine he follows leaves him with little time to do anything else. Each morning, he plays four hours of poker, then chugs a Red Bull and heads to the gym. After downing another Red Bull, he returns to his computer and plays for another four to eight hours. Following this strict regimen is helping him earn him between $15
0 and $200 an hour.

  His robust earning power comes with an unexpected downside. Every time Good2cu thinks about doing something other than play poker, he has to consider the opportunity cost, a concept he first encountered in Econ last semester when he was still going to classes.

  Should I spend the next two hours playing poker or watching a movie? Play poker, and my expected return is $300, money I can’t earn if I watch a movie. Watching a movie will effectively cost me $300. It’d better be a damn good film!

  The same thinking carries over to his studies. Even though he’s stopped attending his computer class, his professor offers to pass Good2cu as long as he completes the final project. Good2cu weighs the estimated sixty hours of work it will take to pass the class against the $12,000 he could make if he were playing poker.

  Needless to say, the computer project doesn’t get done.

  One day his routine gets disrupted by a surprise visitor. Returning to his dorm from the gym, Good2cu finds his father standing outside his door.

  “Uh, hi, Dad. What are you doing here?”

  “We need to talk.”

  He knows what his dad wants to talk about. It’s not a conversation Good2cu wants to have right now. He has plans. He and a friend are about to drive to the Caesars Windsor in Canada to play in a live game. But this conversation is pretty much inevitable, so he might as well get it over with.

  “I guess you got the letter.”

  Good2cu is referring to the official notification from MSU’s administrative offices, sent yesterday to both him and his father via certified mail, informing him that he’s no longer eligible to live in student housing on account of his “light course load.” Good2cu didn’t bother to open the letter—there was no way it could be good news—but got the message when he discovered his food card had been deactivated.

  “Sounds like you’ve been missing some classes?”

  “Yeah, I know. I just haven’t had time lately. Poker has kind of become a full-time thing.”