The World Series of Poker still rules in terms of prestige, but it only happens once a year. Upstarts such as the World Poker Tour and the European Poker Tour fill the void with a new business model: smaller, lesser-known tournaments get aggregated and packaged into television-friendly “seasons” culminating in championships. The virtuous circle spins a few more times. Where the WSOP Main Event used to be the only tournament with a $10,000 buy-in and a seven-figure prize for the winner, now there are dozens.
When the online card rooms aren’t feeding players into live tournaments, they’re creating tournaments of their own. In 2002, Party Poker hosted the inaugural Party Poker Million aboard a cruise ship on the Mexican Riviera. The event was a hit—one year later, the World Poker Tour added the Party Poker Million II to its first season’s schedule. In its second season, the WPT added a tournament in Aruba sponsored by Ultimate Bet and a tournament aboard a Caribbean-bound cruise ship hosted by PokerStars.
The Caribbean theme isn’t coincidental—by hosting their events on tropical islands or cruise ships, the online card rooms can skirt U.S. law and allow players as young as eighteen, their bread-and-butter clientele, to play in the kind of tournaments they grew up watching on TV. It’s why Paradise Poker chooses the Atlantis, an enormous resort and water park on the Bahamas’ Paradise Island, to host its first ever brick-and-mortar tournament: “The Conquest of Paradise Island.”
The Conquest fails to secure any TV coverage or commitments from well-known pros—in the months leading up to the event, there’s some speculation whether it will even take place. But the allure of lax gambling and drinking laws in a tropical setting is enough for the tournament to attract more than three hundred players, a large percentage of whom are under twenty-one.
Good2cu, Apathy, and DonButtons fly there from Miami. Raptor, durrrr, Deuce2High, Bonafone, TheUsher, and FieryJustice meet them at the resort. They’re buzzed before the first round of boat drinks even hits their lips—for most of them, this is the biggest tournament they’ve ever entered.
Only durrrr can laugh off the $5,000 entry fee. While the rest of them are still devoting most of their attention to Sit N Gos, durrrr is regularly playing in the biggest cash games on the Internet. He probably shouldn’t be—any old-school player would scoff at his horrendous bankroll management, which sees him routinely flirt with going broke—but what does he really have to lose? He’s nineteen years old, has no wife or kids to support, is blessed with an active intelligence, and is fully capable of returning to college if the whole poker thing doesn’t work out. Why wouldn’t he take shots at the biggest games? When he loses—an inevitability for even the best poker players—he simply drops down to smaller stakes, rebuilds his bankroll, and waits for the chance to take another shot. But when he wins … No one’s sure exactly how much money durrrr has, as it’s an ever-changing number, but for several brief stretches lately he’s been, at least according to the pixels on the screen, a millionaire.
The rest of the Ballas are doing their best to catch up to him. Most of them are now hundred-thousandaires. Good2cu has pushed his net worth close to $200,000. Raptor’s earned enough money to buy himself a brand-new car—a sporty Subaru Impreza WRX—and is looking to buy a house with durrrr in Fort Worth.
The Ballas are brimming with confidence as they take their seats in the tournament room at the Atlantis, but, one by one, they get eliminated. Only FieryJustice makes it past the first day, hanging around just long enough to win back his entry fee.
Not the experience they’d hoped for, but hardly the end of the world—Paradise Island is aptly named. The sky is blue, the weather warm, the summer humidity a few weeks away. There are swimming pools and fruity drinks, plenty of craps and blackjack tables, and a murderer’s row of waterslides, apparently designed by an imaginative child touched by madness: “the Abyss” begins with a fifty-foot vertical drop into total darkness; “the Leap of Faith” travels through a lagoon teeming with sharks.
But this week the most popular activity takes place in the hotel lobby. The wireless Internet in the rooms doesn’t work for shit, forcing guests to gather in the only decent hot spot. No matter what time of day or night, at least fifty young online players are there, hunched over their laptops, madly clicking away.
Amped by one of these sessions, Good2cu, Apathy, durrrr, and FieryJustice decide to pay a nighttime visit to the Mayan Temple. A random mom overhears their plans and, in need of some adult time (and possibly a stern talking-to in regards to good parental judgment), asks if her sixteen-year-old daughter can tag along. “Take good care of her,” Mom says before disappearing into a bar.
The girl, half-mortified, half-intrigued, and probably a little drunk herself, attaches herself to the group. So does sublime8700, a Two Plus Twoer enjoying a long weekend away from the University of Michigan.
The Mayan Temple turns out to be closed—an unsurprising development, given that it’s past 2:00 A.M. What is surprising is that the lagoon full of sharks, with the minor exception of a waist-high railing, is wide-open and easily accessible.
“This would never fly in America,” observes FieryJustice. “There’d be like seven security guards here to keep some idiot from jumping in.”
They all stare into the water. Lights line the pool, clearly illuminating the sharks as they make their predatory rounds.
“Two thousand dollars,” says durrrr.
“What are you talking about?” asks the sixteen-year-old girl.
“I’ll give anyone here two thousand bucks if they swim down and touch the bottom.”
“Hell no,” says Good2cu. “It’s like twenty feet deep. Oh yeah, and it’s filled with sharks.”
“Fine. Three thousand.”
“I might consider it,” says FieryJustice, “for fifty K.”
“Four thousand.”
“No fucking way,” says Apathy, “but I’ll kick in five hundred bucks if anyone’s actually thinking about it.”
“Me too,” adds FieryJustice.
“Are you guys serious?” asks the girl. “That’s enough to buy a car.”
“A crappy one.” Durrrr laughs. “But, hey, if you do it, you can spend the money any way you want.”
“If you’re still alive,” says Good2cu.
The girl appraises the tank. “You’ll seriously give me five thousand dollars if I do it?”
“He’s good for it,” Apathy assures her.
Taking a deep breath, she takes off her shoes, strips down to her bikini, and steps out onto the ledge overlooking the pool.
A wave of terror and excitement passes through them: Holy shit. She’s actually going to do it.
Several sharks draw near. The sight of them triggers an eruption of fear from some recessed area of her lizard-brain, and the girl, legs shaking, steps back from the edge. “No freaking way!”
For a moment, no one knows whether to be disappointed or relieved.
“Screw it,” says sublime8700. “I’ll do it for five K.”
Sublime8700 started playing poker online a year ago. He’s made enough money to be able to travel to the Bahamas, put himself up in a $300-a-night room, and enter a $5,000 tournament, but not enough to drop out of college and play the game for a living. For him, $5,000 isn’t life-changing money, but it isn’t chump change either.
Before he can change his mind, he whips off his shirt, climbs over the railing, and jumps into the water.
For a second, no one can believe he’s actually done it.
Then panic sets in. Durrrr runs to a nearby tree, trying to rip off one of its branches.
“What are you doing?” Good2cu yells.
“Trying to find something to throw at the sharks!”
But sublime8700 is already pulling himself out of the water, no worse for wear, with a huge smile on his face.
“Ship it!”
Back in the lobby, durrrr transfers $5,000 into sublime8700’s online poker account. Having swum with sharks and lived to tell about it, he’s feeling about
as good as a human being can without benefit of sex or drugs, and he doesn’t want that sensation to go away. “I’m going to take a shot!” he announces to everyone within earshot.
Using the money he just won from durrrr, sublime8700 buys into a $25/$50 no-limit cash game, the biggest he’s ever played. The adrenaline builds as he realizes he’s sitting at the same table as Mike Matusow, a world-famous pro.
Seconds later, sublime8700 gets dealt an ace and a queen, a premium hand with only five players in the game. There is a raise and a call in front of him, but his instincts tell him that neither player is particularly strong. He figures that if he bets all of his chips, he’ll scare the other two players into folding, allowing him to win a decent-sized pot without too much stress.
But sublime8700 forgets to take one thing into account: while a $5,000 bet might feel intimidating to him, it means virtually nothing to Matusow, who has won and lost millions of dollars in his career. “Smells like ace-queen,” Matusow types in the chat box before calling with a measly pair of deuces.
The odds are more or less fifty-fifty, but the onus is on sublime8700 to improve. He needs to catch an ace or a queen to win the hand. Neither card arrives. Fifteen minutes after risking his life for $5,000, he’s lost it all to Mike Matusow on a single hand of poker.
There are sharks, and then there are sharks.
25
As the United States completes its transition to an all-gambling economy, perhaps you’re wondering what your place is likely to be in it. Depends. If the sentence “Another good scenario for a stack is a flush that’s made on the river” means something to you, you have a shot at membership in the new socioeconomic elite. If not, you can plan on washing that elite’s cars or watering its lawns.
—Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times Book Review, January 8, 2006
EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN (May 2006)
Had Good2cu been born twenty years earlier, he might have felt the lure of Wall Street, where bright college graduates were discovering lucrative signing bonuses and expensive cocaine habits. Ten years later, it could have been the Internet and its promise of IPO-minted millions.
For Good2cu’s generation, the poker boom is its California gold rush, offering everyone, regardless of background or education, the opportunity to strike it rich. But, as is rapidly becoming apparent, the poker boom isn’t just an economic phenomenon—it’s also producing celebrities.
Professional poker players have never had unions or guilds. Few barriers stand in the way of membership. There’s an argument to be made that it’s not even a real profession, at least as far as the IRS is concerned: poker winnings aren’t taxed as earnings, as they are for a real job, but at the higher rate reserved for windfalls like the lottery. For most of the game’s history, professional poker players have been equated with outlaws, living on the financial and social margins of society.
But for the last few years, you can’t turn on a TV without stumbling across a poker tournament. The incessant coverage is breeding familiarity, and familiarity creates fans. We’ve entered the age of the poker superstar. No longer considered outlaws, they’ve been recast as brilliant math wizards, masters of human psychology, disciplined warriors with nerves of steel. Three decades ago, Doyle Brunson had to put up his own money to get his instructional book Super/System published; now the septuagenarian pro has to fend off autograph seekers and photo hounds at every turn, fleeing as fast as his walker will allow.
Other players embrace the spotlight with open arms. The most popular write books, create instructional videos, and hire themselves out as private coaches or motivational speakers. Annie Duke, who won a World Series of Poker bracelet in 2004, has moved from Portland, Oregon, to the Hollywood Hills, where she’s producing a poker-themed game show, dating an actor, and dabbling in screenwriting. Her brother, Howard Lederer, has teamed up with a group of fellow poker celebrities to start an online card room—in under two years, Full Tilt Poker has become one of the biggest sites in the world, shrewdly marketing itself as the place where the game’s superstars come to play.
Other pros take advantage of the lucrative sponsorship deals the online sites seem to be doling out like wartime promotions. Some of these deals promise a steady salary, offering lucky poker players something like legitimate financial security for the first time in their lives.
These are uncharted waters, but if you’re not already a poker celebrity, the path to sponsorship typically begins with a victory in a major televised tournament. No one really believes that Chris Moneymaker is the best poker player in the world, or even among the top one hundred, but the marketing team at PokerStars—the site where he began his Cinderella-like journey in a $39 satellite—understands the value of reminding everyone exactly which company made this fairy tale possible. Moneymaker and 2005 WSOP champion Joe Hachem become the most prominent faces of Team PokerStars, a stable of sponsored pros who serve as human billboards decked out in company-logoed schwag.
The final tables of televised tournaments begin to look like NASCAR races. Plastered with ads, the sponsored players are impossible to miss, especially if you’re an aspiring young pro looking for someone to pay your way into all the tournaments. To get there, all you’ve got to do is get famous, which so far has meant outplaying, outlasting, and outlucking a ballroom full of cutthroat angle-shooters to win a major tournament.
But the Internet offers a new path to fame, a viable alternative to the old monolithic media model. Successful online players might not be world-famous, but being “Internet famous” has got to count for something, right?
A Two Plus Twoer named ZeeJustin is one of the first to solve this puzzle. A year earlier, at age nineteen, he became the youngest player in history to make a televised final table, taking advantage of Europe’s more kid-friendly gambling laws to finish fourth in an EPT tournament in Deauville, France. The accomplishment isn’t enough to turn him into a poker superstar, but it does provide the impetus and the money to hire a Web site designer. ZeeJustin starts blogging about his experiences touring the world as a professional poker player, and when the site starts to generate traffic, he monetizes it, selling banner ads and driving visitors to online poker rooms.
This spring, ZeeJustin gains even more notoriety when it’s discovered that he’s been playing tournaments on PokerStars using more than one account. In what is mostly a self-regulated industry, “multiaccounting” is one of those gray areas that straddle the lines between legal and illegal, ethical and unethical. For years, it was a standard practice among online players. In fact, it’s how many of the Ballas built up their initial bankrolls, opening accounts under different user names to take advantage of as many sign-up bonuses as they could. But ZeeJustin has been accused of using his multiple accounts to enter the same tournament more than once. PokerStars decides to make an example of the young pro, banning him from the site for three years.
The harsh punishment generates a lot of press. Good2cu is jealous—in his eyes, any publicity, even scandal, is good publicity. The proverbial lightbulb appears over his head: why not skip the TV part of the equation and try to become an Internet celebrity from the very beginning?
After returning from the Bahamas, he makes a road trip to London, Ontario, to visit Apathy. Against the backdrop of three kegs and the better part of a local sorority, Good2cu pitches him the idea for ShipItHollaBalla.com, a place for them to share their stories and inflate their reputations. Dancing for strippers and swimming with sharks is a lot more interesting than anything ZeeJustin is putting on his site.
Apathy, fending off the sorority girls long enough to hear the pitch, loves the idea. His constitution prevents him from doing any actual work, but he’s willing to put up half the seed money.
Good2cu returns to East Lansing, where he’s sharing an apartment with a friend from college, and sets the plan into motion. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel: he hires the same Web designer who built ZeeJustin’s site. The first couple of posts on ShipItHollaBalla.com are co
mmercial enticements to visit certain online poker rooms, but Good2cu’s first travel report will set the tone for the site and help define the Ballas’ identity:
“I’ve spent the past forty days of my life, traveling, meeting random Two Plus Twoers, partying like a rock star, and mercilessly hitting on girls,” it begins. “God, do I regret dropping out of college.…”
26
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: MTV “True Life: I’m Moving to Vegas”
* * *
HOLLA.
I’m a 19-year-old college dropout/professional poker player/straight balla. I dropped out of college at Michigan State University after taking a week long trip to Vegas that netted me over $8k.
(Too bad I spent $10k+ on booze, clothes, strippers and a Rolex.)
In the past year I’ve made over six figures playing poker online on PartyPoker.com and Pokerstars.com. I think I’ll bring in $300k+ this tax year. Yeah, that’s right. SHIPPPPPPPPPP IT, HOLLA.
I am a semi-well-known online pro in the Two Plus Two poker community (a forum for pro poker players). I recently finished in 2nd place in the Two Plus Two Single Table Tournament Forum Heads-Up Championship which netted me just under $6K.
Since dropping all of my classes at MSU, my days consist of sitting in front of the computer for ten hours a day playing eight tables of poker, so I can really move anywhere I want. I mean assuming I can get time off of “work.” (My boss is a real badass … BWHAHAHA.)
After making a post in the Two Plus Two forums about it, I decided there is no better place for a cardplayer to live than in Las Vegas. In my opinion not realizing that I belong in Vegas must be a much bigger mistake then dropping out of school!
Ship It Holla Ballas! Page 12