“You all right?” Apathy asks.
“I’m a little sad, but I’ll be fine. Just a minor setback.”
A sense of discomfort settles across the room, until Good2cu addresses it head-on. “It doesn’t seem right that you made money for us, then we just took off like that. I sorta feel like we hit-and-ran you.”
“What are you saying?” asks Jman. “That you guys are on the hook for part of the loss?”
It’s an odd moment for the group. On the one hand they’re friends, and what are friends if not the people who support one another in a situation like this? Some friends might even return some of their winnings to Jman, helping to ease his pain.
But they’re also professional poker players, or at least aspire to be. While there may not be much in the way of a gambler’s code of ethics, a deal is a deal. And their deal ended when Good2cu and Apathy took their shares.
“You know that’s not how it works,” Jman says. “Our deal was done. I appreciate the concern. But I’ll be all right.”
The loss stings, but it’s an impressive victory for professionalism. Everyone slinks off to their respective beds.
Two nights later, Apathy and Chantel will be sharing one.
32
I asked them if their power was out, to which they responded, “No, we’ve had power all day.” Which I found very odd, seeing as our power was out, but I didn’t think anything more of it since I’m a Ship It Holla Balla, and I don’t give a fuck.
—Good2cu
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA (July 2006)
Good2cu wakes up covered in sweat.
It’s got to be a hundred degrees in his room. He’s confused—central air-conditioning usually means a comfortable seventy-two—but not enough to question it too deeply. He has larger concerns. He’s awake, so he should be playing poker.
The house is quiet, but not strangely so. The Rolex says noon, which means everyone else has already left for the Rio or is still sleeping. Good2cu stumbles downstairs and tries to start up his laptop, but the screen stays black, even after he double-checks that it’s plugged in. He moves on to the TV, the GameCube, the refrigerator. None of them work. Coupled with the lack of air-conditioning, it’s pretty clear, even to his foggy brain, that the power is out.
A quick dip in the dirty swimming pool proves mildly restorative, but it’s already so hot Good2cu starts sweating again as soon as he climbs out. He walks next door to check with the neighbors, who have been treating him like an old friend ever since he replaced all of their windows. Their power is working just fine.
He wishes Inyaface were here to deal with this, but he’s already left for the Rio. As the house slowly stirs to life, the various houseguests give Good2cu a hard time about how (literally) uncool it is, shaming him into calling the electric company. A surprisingly helpful human being promises to send a repair truck to the house right away.
Everyone moves into the pool area to wait it out. Some kid no one’s ever seen before pokes his head over the wall. “Is your power out?”
“Yeah,” says Good2cu. “We called the power company. Supposedly a guy is on its way.”
The kid blinks a few times and disappears behind the wall.
It takes the repairman two hours to arrive, but the issue is identified and resolved in under a minute.
“Something tripped your circuit breaker,” the repairman explains, eyeing the myriad laptops, computer monitors, and gaming devices in the house. “You might want to unplug a few things. If it happens again, just flip the switch.”
The air-conditioning rumbles to life. So do the laptops. Bonafone passes around a bong. Time to play poker.
They’re not even an hour into their session when the power conks out again.
“What did the guy say to do?” Good2cu asks.
“Something about the circuit breaker,” mumbles Bonafone.
“Right. Where was that again?”
“The basement?”
“Does this house even have a basement?”
“Fuck this. We need air-conditioning, or we’ll die. Let’s go to a casino.”
They hit the Strip. The houseguests want to play blackjack, and because Good2cu is a Balla, he agrees to stake them. They lose a few hundred dollars, decide blackjack is rigged, and move to a roulette table, where Good2cu bets $200 on red four spins in a row. The wheel stops on black each time.
“Maybe we should’ve stuck to blackjack,” offers one of his friends.
“Yo, Dan!” Good2cu yells at sixty-year-old Dan Harrington, poker’s world champion in 1995 who is cashing out chips at the casino cage. Harrington smiles weakly and heads in the opposite direction. Clearly he hasn’t heard of the Ship It Holla Ballas yet.
Good2cu’s phone buzzes. “You need to come back to the house,” Jman tells him. “Now.”
“I know. The power’s out.”
“Yeah, there’s that. And the house sort of got robbed.”
* * *
Without the household electronics to provide cover, the detritus the Ballas have produced over the last few weeks has been promoted to center stage. A policeman stands in the living room, taking notes, eyeing the spent bottle rockets and empty beer cans. “Whoever did it really trashed the place,” he says.
“Terrible,” Good2cu replies. “Just terrible.”
“So what exactly got stolen?”
Everybody starts talking at once. Fourteen laptops. A couple of desktop computers and flat-screen monitors. A few digital cameras and iPods. Bonafone’s video camera—considered priceless, as it contained the footage of Good2cu chucking the pool ball through the neighbor’s window. Around $10,000 in cash and casino chips.
The cop puts down his pen. These kids are clearly shitting him. “You know insurance fraud is a serious crime.”
“It can’t be insurance fraud,” Raptor assures him, “when you don’t have insurance.”
In the background, typically mild-mannered Inyaface is screaming into his phone. “We don’t have time for this bullshit, Bindar! You’ve got to freeze these accounts right now!” He covers the phone’s mouthpiece and turns to his friends. “Fucking Party Poker. They want everyone’s screen names and passwords before they’ll put a hold on our accounts.”
Inyaface’s stress is warranted. Whatever’s been taken from the house is chicken feed compared to all the money they’ve got in their online poker accounts. If the burglars use the stolen computers to log into these accounts, this royal mess is going to become a holy catastrophe. He removes his hand from the phone and resumes screaming. “If you hang up this phone, I will fucking slap you!”
“Well,” says the cop, “It seems like you have your hands full. We’ll let you know if we make any progress.”
Inyaface finishes the call and wipes the sweat off his brow. “What’s up with the air-conditioning? It’s got to be a hundred and fifty degrees in here.”
“Yeah, about that,” Good2cu says. “You don’t happen to know where the circuit breaker is, do you?”
“Probably on the outside of the house. Why?”
And that’s when they remember the kid who poked his head over the fence earlier in the day. The burglars weren’t some criminal masterminds. They simply shut off their power and waited for the heat to drive them out of the house. Maybe Dan Harrington and the rest of the poker world don’t have any idea who the Ballas are, but they’ve obviously succeeded in attracting the attention of a few of Vegas’s small-time thieves.
Good2cu suddenly feels awful.
This isn’t the summer he planned. He’s not taking the poker world by storm. He’s not sleeping with beautiful women. Mike Sparks has yet to reimburse him for the totaled BMW, which, until the matter gets resolved, has left a gaping hole in his bankroll where $50,000 should be. Apathy and TheUsher are barely speaking to each other because of Chantel. Jman is still struggling to recover from his massive loss. The only thing Good2cu can depend on is online poker, but now the main tool of his trade, his $3,000 state-of-the-art laptop, is gon
e. While all the houseguests get drunk on warm beer in the backyard, Good2cu crawls into bed and cries.
A few minutes later, Raptor bursts into the room and starts shaking him.
“Get up. Get dressed. We’re going to the Rio.”
“Not in the mood to play,” Good2cu mumbles.
“Not to play. To sweat TheUsher. He’s like five spots away from making a final table!”
33
Super Bowl champions have Disneyland. Poker champions have the Spearmint Rhino. Clearly, we have it better.
—Good2cu
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA (July 2006)
It’s just after 9:00 P.M. at the Rio, the seventh hour of the second day of the thirty-second event at this year’s World Series of Poker. The game is pot-limit hold’em. Fourteen players remain, competing for nine seats at tomorrow’s final table. First prize is more than a half-million dollars. Every move is carefully considered and reconsidered. The pace of play is deliberate, the atmosphere thick with tension.
At least until a pack of extremely loud and clearly intoxicated kids storms into the room. They form a wall along the rail behind one of the youngest players left in the tournament, a twenty-three-year-old, white baseball cap stylishly askew, sitting behind a pile of chips. TheUsher smiles at his friends, then announces he’s raising. His friends go apeshit. They cheer even louder when he wins the hand.
“Ship it!”
A few of the players laugh. But not everyone is amused. Chau Giang, one of the most respected high-stakes pros in the world, complains to the tournament director, who warns the Ballas to keep it down. They obey, more or less. Even after TheUsher gets Giang to fold a hand with a well-timed reraise. Even after Giang, in what feels to the Ballas like instant karma, gets eliminated from the tournament.
But the closer TheUsher gets to making the final table the harder it becomes for his friends to contain themselves. On the last hand of the night, TheUsher bets all of his chips against Nam Le, a poker pro from California who, six months ago, won a major televised event on the World Poker Tour. Le calls with pocket queens, but TheUsher has pocket kings. The kings hold up, eliminating Le from the tournament. Not only has TheUsher made tomorrow’s final table, he’ll be starting the day as the chip leader.
The wall behind him erupts. All the pent-up frustration of the day, of the entire trip, gets discharged in a rowdy celebration. TheUsher’s friends pour over the rail to congratulate him.
Good2cu starts crying again, but this time they’re tears of joy. “I’m so happy for you!” he says, hugging his friend.
“Thanks, man!”
“Oh, by the way. The house got robbed, and all our shit got stolen.”
TheUsher doesn’t get much sleep that night, especially after learning that the thieves took his desktop computer and the keys to his car. But when he returns to the Rio the next day his spirits are lifted by the forty-plus fans supporting him from the bleachers. They jump and yell and cheer in a way that would make any soccer hooligan proud. The enthusiasm is infectious: soon even the reporters covering the event are yelling, “Ship it!” after every big pot. It’s also effective, or at least not ineffective—at the dinner break, only two players remain, TheUsher and yet another longtime professional player, Jason Lester, who finished fourth in the Main Event the year Chris Moneymaker won.
Ten minutes after the break, TheUsher tries to run a big bluff past the pro, but he’s misjudged the strength of his opponent’s hand and Lester takes all of his chips. Reporters from various poker magazines and online sites rush to interview Lester, while TheUsher’s cheering section looks on in gloomy silence.
One of the reporters, waiting for an opportunity to speak with Lester, turns to TheUsher. “You just won $284,000. What are you going to do next?”
TheUsher breaks into a huge smile. “We’re going to the Rhino!”
* * *
The Spearmint Rhino sends a party bus to pick them up at the Balla Mansion. When they arrive at the strip club, they’re whisked into a private VIP room, complete with its own bar.
Mike Sparks, who has been hanging out with the Ballas so much he’s become a sort of honorary member of the crew, makes the first toast of the night. “Meeting you guys has been one of the most amazing experiences of my life. There’s a lot I could say, but I think I can sum it up in two words: ‘Ship it!’”
What follows is a blur of lap dances, champagne, and top-shelf drinks. Good2cu peppers his friends with philosophical questions while naked women grind into his lap. Raptor and Unarmed do the world’s worst robot dance. Durrrr argues with Mike Sparks over whether they should be drinking Monet or Dom until, having downed too much of each, he sprints to the bathroom and pukes. Bonafone complains to anyone who will listen that he has somehow managed to lose the $4,000 in cash he earned from investing in a piece of TheUsher’s action.
“You didn’t lose it,” Good2cu yells at him. “You spent it all on drinks and lap dances!”
Apathy and Chantel canoodle in a dark corner of the room. TheUsher notices, but he’s not going to let it bother him, not tonight. He can’t decide which is cooler: that he just won a quarter-million dollars, or that he’s getting a lap dance in the VIP room while sitting next to Phil Ivey, arguably the best poker player on the planet.
The sun has already risen by the time the Ballas stumble outside and reboard the party bus. For months to come, all of them will swear it was one of the greatest nights of their lives, even if none of them can remember all the details. They don’t know exactly how much it cost them, but they have a rough idea—tallying credit card receipts and surveying the absence of cash in their wallets, they figure $40,000, roughly split between drinks and dances.
Fuck it. They can always make more money tomorrow.
34
I imagine that if I had walked down the road and told the neighbors that the owners of this house weren’t even twenty-one years old (yet owned the house), they’d have looked at me as if I had a few screws loose.
—Chris Vaughn, “Lifestyles of the $ick and Famous,” in Bluff
FORT WORTH, TEXAS/EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN (August 2006)
Four days after TheUsher’s second-place finish, the World Series Main Event gets under way. Its $10,000 entry fee is no longer unique—there are now dozens of tournaments with similar buy-ins and a few that are even bigger. But the winner still gets to call himself the world champion of poker. Victory here means instant fame. Television appearances. Invitations to celebrity tournaments. Sponsorship deals. And thanks to a record-shattering field of 8,773—most of them winning seats via online satellites—this year’s winner will also take home an all-time best $12 million.
But it won’t be a Balla. Good2cu, Raptor, durrrr, Deuce2High, and Bonafone are all still too young to play. Inyaface gets eliminated on the first day, Apathy on the second. Jman also falls short of making the money. TheUsher, still running well, survives the longest, making it to Day Four and earning $30,000 for finishing in 391st place.
The World Series didn’t provide the splashy debut they’d hoped for, but the Ballas are clearly gaining exposure. Jman gets some face time on ESPN when the network airs footage of his eighteenth-place finish in a tournament he played last winter. Apathy wins a major online tournament, then creates an inadvertent controversy on Two Plus Two when he casually mentions having trashed his hotel room in Monte Carlo in the spring. The supporters and haters form the usual battle lines, giving props to his carefree hedonism or slamming him for irresponsible excess.
Somehow the stink never reaches Raptor. In the world of Two Plus Two, he remains a beloved celebrity. The kid who ran $450 into $20,000. The creator of the Quad Monitor Set-Up. The issuer of Raptor Challenges. His posts routinely generate tons of positive feedback from a growing number of fanboys whose devotion is borderline stalkerish.
So it’s actually news in the poker world when Raptor, still just twenty, and durrrr, nineteen, buy a half-million-dollar house in Fort Worth. After they post pictures of the place
on Two Plus Two, the poker magazine Bluff dispatches a reporter to check it out. He writes about the two seventy-three-inch plasma TVs, mounted side by side in the living room. The six Xbox 360s scattered throughout the house. The full-time personal assistant who makes sure the dishes get washed and the bills get paid. The young poker players’ habit of tipping visiting laborers and deliverymen with crisp $100 bills and $200 bottles of Johnny Walker Blue.
The reporter jumps at the opportunity to watch them ply their trade. Raptor plays ten tables at once, a mix of Sit N Gos and cash games, spread across two computer monitors. He seems to be suffering throughout, shouting expletives, glowering at the screen in disbelief, but after two hours he leans back in his Herman Miller Aeron chair and casually informs the reporter that he’s won $40,000.
Then it’s durrrr’s turn: multitabling at stakes ten times bigger than the games Raptor just played, he wins nearly $200,000 in just forty-five minutes.
The article gets titled “Lifestyles of the $ick and Famous,” which Raptor thinks is pretty funny because he really hasn’t been feeling all that $ick lately. Whether it’s his new role as a homeowner in an upscale neighborhood or the weight of a $4,400 monthly mortgage payment, the kid who just six months before advised Good2cu to “jump around the world” and party with strippers is becoming the guy who will scold you for resting your feet on the coffee table. Raptor’s turning into a curmudgeon in his young age, eschewing frat parties and crowded bars in favor of cooking at home, shooting pool with durrrr on their new regulation-size table, or watching episodes of The Wire in bed with Haley. As far as he’s concerned, nothing beats hanging out with your girlfriend in a $10,000 Tempur-Pedic California king.
While Raptor trends older, Good2cu rededicates himself to collegiate living, minus the inconvenience of classes. He moves into a sprawling off-campus apartment complex near Michigan State, rooming with a friend of his who’s still enrolled at the university. There’s a swimming pool and plenty of young women. But this is a way station, not a destination. He’s tasted the life he wants to lead, that of a poker celebrity, and remains committed to attaining that goal.
Ship It Holla Ballas! Page 15