Good2cu hires a designer to create Ship It Holla Balla business cards, although he ends up giving most of them to drunk college kids at parties. Most days he adds new content to the Web site. His writing style is heavily influenced by Tucker Max, the lawyer turned author who’s taken up near-permanent residency on the New York Times Best Seller List with chronicles of his drunken, debaucherous, and occasionally misogynistic behavior. Good2cu hopes to come across as the same sort of charming scoundrel. Take, for example, his account of a keg party at Apathy’s house in Ontario, where two sorority sisters—who he calls “Sam” and “Leslie”—get into a fight over Apathy, interrupting Good2cu’s chance to score:
My head was facing the door and I saw her barge in just as her sister was swallowing my penis. This upset her. She screamed, “If I don’t get to hook up with Apathy, I expect my sisters not to hook up with his friends.” This was a pretty awkward moment so I quickly put my clothes on and did what I always do when awkward moments take place: drink more beer.
The post generates a reaction, just not the one Good2cu intended—evidently grown-ups have discovered the Internet as well. His dad suggests he show some class. Mom sarcastically asks if he was wearing a condom. When Good2cu meets Apathy’s parents during a trip to Toronto, they don’t seem particularly pleased to meet their son’s new friend.
Good2cu doesn’t take the condemnation too seriously. He thinks they’re missing the big picture. He’s just doing what has always felt most natural to him: inhabiting a persona. What are video games, if not an easy and safe way to take on a new identity, someone cooler and more powerful than you are? It’s what he does every time he plays poker, hiding behind his avatar and using “Good2cu” to project whatever image at the table he thinks will result in the most success.
Last year, he read The Game, author Neil Strauss’s autobiographical investigation into the world of self-proclaimed “Master Pick-up Artists,” and its lessons have stuck with him. The book’s characters would be the first to admit that they used to be geeks, stumbling awkwardly every time they approached a woman. So they studied seduction as if it were a mathematical equation that could be solved using a handful of simple steps. They adopted aliases like “Mystery” and “Styles,” figuring that using your real name during a seduction would be like filling out a job application with your World of Warcraft handle. They’re two completely different worlds. The goal is not to be yourself, but to inhabit an alter ego free from the emotional baggage that years of geekdom have left behind. At the end of his story, Strauss argues that however you might judge their methods, his characters were able to achieve a kind of self-actualization—when you try on a new personality for a while, you may feel more empowered to change the things you don’t like about your old one, effecting a positive transformation that might actually stick.
Like many others—The Game hovered around the top of the New York Times Best Seller List for a couple of months—Good2cu responded strongly to the book and its message. He is self-aware enough to know that he’s creating a persona. “I am not some drunken white gangsta with a serious case of ADD who wanders the world in search of pussy,” he writes on the Ship It Holla Balla Web site. “Although I must admit I do think I’m a gangsta.”
But the character he’s chosen to play has a more serious liability than parental disapproval—unless he’s very successful at what he does, he’ll come off looking like a horse’s ass. While he figures he won close to $70,000 online during his six weeks in Vegas, if you add up the bar tabs, strip clubs, a couple of unsuccessful forays into live cash games (including a $10,000 loss to the legendary entertainer Wayne Newton), and the still unreimbursed cost of a totaled BMW M3 (Mike Sparks has stopped returning his calls), he’s actually returned to Michigan $30,000 in the red.
Hoping to make up the deficit in a hurry, he tries to expand his multitabling comfort zone, playing as many as eighteen Sit N Gos at a time, and takes occasional shots at bigger no-limit cash games.
And for a while, it works. He fails to accomplish his stated goal of earning six figures in a month, but he does manage to make back the $30,000, allowing him to continue living a lifestyle he’s still struggling to define.
35
The biggest disappointment was that nobody random holla’d at the Ship It Holla Ballas today. I guess Europe just doesn’t know us yet.
—Apathy
BARCELONA, SPAIN (September 2006)
“I’m so rich! I made $100,000 last year! Check out my Rolex! I’m a Ship It Holla Balla!”
Even by the (low) standards of this turista bar—a sponge for young backpackers thanks to its proximity to the youth hostel next door—Good2cu is off-the-charts drunk. His earsplitting declarations of greatness can be heard from one end of the crowded room to the other.
Along with Apathy, TheUsher, and Deuce2High, he flew to Barcelona to play in a European Poker Tour event with a $6,500 entry fee. None of them cashed in the tournament, and none of them really care. They’re staying at a luxury hotel in the center of the city, eating crazy good food at expensive restaurants whose names they can’t remember, and carousing through the streets like sailors on leave. What’s not to love?
The love affair hasn’t always been mutual. The hostess at the restaurant where they ate earlier in the night quickly appraised them for exactly what they were before leading them to a table hidden away in the farthest corner of the back patio. Four bottles of wine later, they’d proven her right.
Tired of getting the stink eye from the classier joints, they set off in search of a place better suited to their temperament. A helpful cab driver brought them to this bar, where Good2cu is drunkenly ticking off a list of his financial assets in an attempt to impress the señoritas.
Apathy, who’s been playing pool with some girls from Australia, doesn’t want to be a cockblocker, but he’s starting to fear for his friend’s safety. “You might want to keep it down,” he says to Good2cu after he’s pulled him aside. “You’re going to get robbed if you don’t shut up.”
“But I’m a Balla, baby,” Good2cu says, his eyes drifting in and out of focus. “A shot calla. Ain’t no worries here.”
So that didn’t work.
The next best way to help him, his friends decide, is to rob him before someone else does. They take Good2cu’s wallet, passport, and Rolex, then steer him outside to get some fresh air. They’re congratulating themselves on their quick thinking when they see Good2cu wander into the street, with a girl on each arm, disappearing into the night.
“Seriously?” says TheUsher. “A threesome?”
“Somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen,” says Apathy.
The remaining Ballas bounce from the bar to a club and don’t get back to the hotel until sunrise. As they approach Good2cu’s room, they take bets on whether or not he’ll have company. The consensus is highly improbable. But the door to his room is slightly ajar and the noise emanating from inside tells a different story. They hear the unmistakable sound of sex. Loud sex. Vigorous sex. Porn star sex.
Which is precisely what it is. Good2cu is naked on the bed, but he’s alone and snoring loudly. The sex noises are coming from the in-room porn that’s playing at full volume on the television. The mystery of how he got home last night, sans wallet, gets solved when they notice Deuce2High’s laptop is missing—apparently Good2cu used it as collateral to placate a cab driver angry at being stiffed.
They’re able to recover the computer in time to make their plane to London, where they check into another luxury hotel and play another $6,500 buy-in EPT event that none of them cashes in. They’re able to laugh off these failed investments because they know they can simply log in to an online card room and make it all back.
This is how Ship It Holla Ballas roll.
36
Religious leaders of all denominations and faiths are seeing gambling problems erode family values. If Congress had not acted, gamblers would soon be able to place bets not just from home computers, but from the
ir cell phones while they drive home from work or their BlackBerries as they wait in line at the movies.
—Representative Jim Leach, (R-IA)
WASHINGTON, D.C. (September 2006)
It’s nearly fall in the nation’s capitol, and Election Day is approaching. The Republicans, despite controlling the White House and both branches of Congress, are worried.
With good reason: President George W. Bush’s approval ratings have dropped below 40 percent thanks to, in no particular order, a perceived failure to step up during Hurricane Katrina, rising dismay and hopelessness over America’s involvement in Iraq, and an ongoing scandal surrounding the president’s relationship to a corporate lobbyist named Jack Abramoff. As the president is safely ensconced in his second term, it’s Congress that’s in line to take the expected beating when voters cast their ballots.
In an effort to mobilize the socially conservative wing of the Republican base, House Speaker Dennis Hastert spends the summer pushing forward a red-meat package of ten bills dubbed the “American Values Agenda.” Increased protections for the Pledge of Allegiance, the American flag, and unborn fetuses. Stricter prohibitions against cloning and gay marriage.
Oh, yeah, and a ban on Internet gambling.
The online gambling bill is similar to one that passed the Senate in 2000. For those who enjoy playing the what-if game, the 2000 bill could have terminated the poker boom before it even got started, had it not been scuttled in the House, thanks in large part to the diligent lobbying efforts of Jack Abramoff. Enacting the ban now would help Republicans create distance from the scandal surrounding the lobbyist while appeasing church leaders and anti-gambling groups.
The version that reaches the House floor, merging separate proposals from Representatives Bob Goodlatte of Virginia and Jim Leach of Iowa, would expand the Wire Act—a federal law enacted during the Kennedy administration to prevent gamblers from betting on horse races via telegraph—to include Internet gambling. It doesn’t go after the players themselves, but the financial institutions that handle the payments to and from the online casinos.
Goodlatte-Leach passes the House by a healthy 317–93 margin, but it’s not expected to survive the Senate. There’s not even enough support for the bill to get a vote, at least not before Election Day. Goodlatte-Leach appears destined to suffer a quiet demise.
Enter Senator Bill Frist, the Majority Leader who unwittingly added to the Republican woes, a year earlier, when he tried to insert the Senate into the debate over Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman in a vegetative state whose husband sought to remove her from life support. On the day before Congress adjourns for the upcoming elections, Frist holds a vote on a bill called The Port Security Improvement Act. It’s a no-brainer, given the nation’s ongoing War on Terror. Who doesn’t want safer ports? The bill passes unanimously.
But most of the senators fail to notice or otherwise ignore a new provision that was quietly tacked on in the wee hours prior to the vote: Title VIII, better known as the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). Goodlatte-Leach has passed the Senate.
Two weeks later, President Bush signs the bill into law. It won’t do much to sway the elections—the Democratic Party will win a majority in both the House and Senate—but the UIGEA will wreak immediate havoc on the Internet poker industry. Party Poker, home to a whopping 40 percent of the world’s online action, announces that they’ll no longer be serving American players. The site’s corporate parent, the publicly traded British company PartyGaming, watches its stock tank, losing $4 billion in value overnight. Other companies scramble to divest themselves of their American operations, in a couple of cases for a nominal one dollar, in an effort to avoid tangling with the law.
It’s not quite a death knell for online poker: in the short run, many American players simply move their business to PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, privately held companies that are willing to risk tomorrow’s legal complications for today’s increase in market share.
As for the long-term implications, no one knows what to expect. Good2cu bemoans the uncertain future on the Ship It Holla Web site:
It now looks like [online poker] may all be over. I have no idea if I’ll be able to successfully return to the real world. I fear I may be like one of those ex-college athletes who is doomed to talk about his “glory days” for the rest of his life … but if this is the end, it has been one hell of a ride.
37
Now, it’s a strange phenomenon of this digital age that you can partially follow someone’s course in life simply by reading the person’s changing MSN screen name.
—Nick Gair, “Ship It!!!” in Bluff
NIAGARA FALLS, CANADA (October 2006)
Like so many other twenty-somethings, Nick Gair is trying to figure out what the hell to do with his life. He’s in a band—Max Galactic and the Cloud of Evil—and harbors dreams of becoming the next John Prine, but admits his fear on his MySpace blog that he’ll never write a song even half as good as “Donald and Lydia.” He has ambitions of becoming a journalist, but on the rare occasions one of the stories he’s written on spec actually elicits a response from an editor, it’s been “thanks, but no thanks.”
Were it not for online poker, he might be forced to try his hand at gainful employment. He’s playing a Sit N Go on PokerStars one day when he notices that Inyaface, a tournament regular and an acquaintance from college, has changed his avatar. His new icon is more of a corporate logo, hot pink text over a purple background, promoting a Web site called ShipItHollaBalla.com. Gair doesn’t know it, but he’s looking at a prize-winning design: Good2cu recently ran a contest on the Ship It Holla Web site, awarding $25 to whomever could create the best-looking logo, an effort to generate buzz—at least familiarity—during the many hours spent grinding at the virtual tables.
And right now, it’s doing exactly what it was intended to do. Gair spends the rest of the day on the Ship It Holla site, reading Good2cu’s accounts of the past summer’s adventures. When he’s finished, Gair still isn’t sure whether the Ballas are poker prodigies or cocky shitheads, but one thing is clear—the stories are entertaining as hell. Reintroducing himself, this time as an interested journalist, he reaches out to Inyaface.
Good news: the entire crew is getting together for a World Poker Tour event in Niagara Falls, an easy drive from Gair’s apartment in Toronto. He can follow their progress in the tournament, perhaps getting lucky enough to see one of the Ballas make the final table.
Bad news: by the time Gair arrives in Niagara Falls, on the second day of the three-day tournament, all of the Ballas have already been eliminated.
But that’s not the worst part.
He’s also missed the chance to see durrrr swim through the fountain just outside the casino’s entrance—fulfilling the terms of a $1,000 prop bet—and sprint naked through a Denny’s for $500 more.
He’s too late to witness their $4,000 adventure in a local strip club and, later, the wild rumpus at the Ballas’s hotel after one of their two new stripper friends, who passed out in Good2cu’s bed, locks herself out of the room, half-dressed and half-awake, and has to call her husband to come pick her up.
Gair has missed all three noise complaints issued by the hotel as well as Raptor’s attempt to assuage the manager with a fully committed imitation of comedian Dave Chappelle impersonating singer Rick James—a performance that was, to put it mildly, politically incorrect, and, as far as the manager was concerned, ample reason for kicking them out of the hotel.
And he didn’t get to see durrrr, in the midst of all the chaos, book another ho-hum $140,000 win.
It seems Gair has missed the entire story. With nowhere to stay and no reason to linger, the Ballas are about to skip town and make the eighty-mile road trip to London, Ontario, where one of Apathy’s friends is throwing a Halloween party.
Apathy notices the aspiring journalist’s disappointment. “You want to come along?”
Gair eagerly accepts.
He follows them to
a local Walmart, where he watches them spend $2,000 on Halloween costumes. Durrrr alone drops $500 on a handful of silver necklaces and a business suit he’ll never wear again just so he can tell people he’s Tom Cruise in Risky Business. Jman, the crew’s resident funny guy, buys a tutu, tiara, wand, wings, and a large sack of distributable sweets. “I’m the Candy Fairy,” he announces.
Outside the store, the Ballas realize that there’s no way all of the purchases are going to fit in their cars, so they pay a cab driver $270 to ferry their costumes to the party.
Gair will spend three weeks wrestling with insomnia, agonizing over the article’s structure, finally cranking out a draft in a drug- and alcohol-induced frenzy. His first attempt to sell the piece causes him nearly as much pain as the writing. Canadian Poker Player magazine rejects it, leading Gair to consider “taking a bath with my toaster.” Out of desperation he submits the article to Bluff, an American publication with a much larger circulation. To Gair’s great surprise, the editors love it, although they won’t be able to publish it for another six months.
In a time of twenty-four-hour news cycles and Twitter, six months is an eternity. By the time the article runs, much will have changed for the Ballas. Not so much will change for Gair—the article turns out to be the first and last piece of paid journalism he’ll ever write. He’ll still devote his creative energy to his band, but Max Galactic and the Cloud of Evil will break up a couple of years later when one of its members heads off to law school. Gair will soon find himself studying to become a financial analyst.
He may never write a song or story that moves its audience in quite the same way that “Donald and Lydia” does, but his article for Bluff succeeds in capturing the spirit of the Ship It Holla Ballas, circa 2006:
Ship It Holla Ballas! Page 16