Ship It Holla Ballas!

by Jonathan Grotenstein

  In Fooled by Randomness, a book written for Wall Street investors but popular among poker players for its observations about the role of luck in our lives, Nassim Nicholas Taleb provides a definition of the phrase that works equally well in either world: “Blow up in the lingo has a precise meaning; it does not just mean to lose money; it means to lose more money than one ever expected, to the point of being thrown out of the business (the equivalent of a doctor losing his license to practice or a lawyer being disbarred).”

  The idea that he could do the same terrifies Good2cu. “What worries me is that dozens of other kids were also in my position and they blew up,” he confesses in his blog. “They went on crazy monkey tilt and blew their roll and went back to school a psychological mess.”

  There’s Grimstarr, a young Two Plus Twoer who was almost a millionaire earlier this year. Now nearly broke, he’s become infamous for challenging players to heads-up matches, quitting while he’s ahead should he win the first hand, hurling insults at his opponents when he doesn’t.

  Go play in traffic.

  I’ll murder you.

  Die in a grease fire.

  Neverwin, of Neverwin Poker fame, has not only gone busto, but is in debt to a long and increasingly impatient line of players. One of them is Newhizzle, Brandi’s former sparring partner, who is in the process of frittering away in high-stakes cash games the $1.5 million he won in a WPT tournament less than a year ago. Compounding his misfortunes at the poker table: bad loans to players like Neverwin, the $30,000 Brandi squandered while using one of his accounts, and an $80,000 loss playing shuffleboard at this year’s PokerStars Caribbean Adventure—half of which found its way into the pockets of Apathy, durrrr, and Raptor.

  Good2cu doesn’t want to join them as a character in some cautionary tale. He’s momentarily cheered when Nick Gair’s article about the Ballas appears in Bluff—the crew comes off looking like rock stars—but a close read dulls his enthusiasm. He only gets mentioned a few times, mostly in the beginning where the author notes his “passion for hijinks” and “disdain for the rules of grammar.” Oh, and near the end, when the author mentions that Good2cu is “on a bit of a downswing.”

  The article underscores Good2cu’s feeling that he’s the only Ship It Holla Balla whose career isn’t on the rise. Apathy seems to have a knack for cashing in at major online tournaments, while Inyaface continues to grind out a steady profit in whatever types of games he chooses to play. Durrrr and Raptor have made a relatively easy transition to high-stakes cash games, pushing their bankrolls into seven figures. And FieryJustice just won more than a million dollars in a World Poker Tour event at the Mirage that will be televised next March.

  But Jman’s ascent might be the most spectacular. A year ago he was still making a rocky transition from Sit N Gos to cash games. Now he’s playing every bit as high as durrrr and Raptor. Thanks to his growing reputation and some friends in the right places, Jman gets invited to appear on High Stakes Poker, one of the most popular poker shows on TV. His appearance is brief—he’s bumped after a single day for the more ratings-friendly celebrity poker pro Daniel Negreanu—but he spends enough time matching wits with famous pros like Sammy Farha and Phil Hellmuth to form an opinion about their play.

  “America still thinks that my table (besides me) is full of the best poker players in the world,” he tells his friends on Two Plus Two, “when I would’ve salivated over playing any of them heads-up.”

  Good2cu wants to believe that he’s every bit as good at poker as his friends, that they’ve just gotten a little luckier than him, that his time will come. But the facts say otherwise. He hasn’t been a consistent winner for almost a year. With that in mind he walks into Michigan State’s admissions office and tells them that, after taking a year off to find himself, he’s ready to reenroll.

  Come September, he’ll reenter civilian life as a student.

  44

  IM 21!!!!!! I CAN PLAY THE LIVE POKAHS NOW!!!! WHOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!

  —Raptor

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA (May–June 2007)

  Two weeks before the start of the 2007 World Series of Poker, Raptor turns twenty-one. In the eyes of the law, he’ll finally be able to drink, gamble, and go to strip clubs. Pardon him for not getting too excited, as these aren’t exactly novel experiences. Some friends help him celebrate at a Las Vegas club. He’s home and in bed by midnight.

  But there’s one aspect of being twenty-one he does appreciate: he’s finally going to get to play in the World Series of Poker. Hoping to recapture some of the good times that took place last summer, he signs on to live with the rest of the crew in whatever rental property Inyaface can secure for them. The directive given to Responsible Guy this time around: go bigger.

  Inyaface delivers what can more accurately be described as a compound than a mansion, the kind of property that demands entry through an imposing front gate. The main house is surrounded by four guest cottages, a pool, a tennis court, and a fifty-foot-wide putting green.

  Good2cu flies in from Michigan, Raptor and TravestyFund from Texas, Jman from Wisconsin. Apathy and Inyaface, joined by their friend BigT, make another epic road trip from Canada in the Pontiac Pursuit, this year’s highlight a random stumble across a Vanilla Ice concert in Des Moines. TheUsher arrives from Rome. Durrrr, who’s still too young to play in any of the WSOP tournaments, promises to join them in a few days—rumor has it he and Traheho have been playing $100,000 heads-up matches against PerkyShmerky in New York City.

  To divvy up the bedrooms, the Ballas plug a laptop into the projector in the home theater and fill the sixteen-by-nine screen on the wall with a randomly chosen low-stakes Sit N Go. Everyone picks an unknown player to root for, injecting the contest with the same uncertainty as a cockroach race. Apathy’s player busts first, relegating him to the shabbiest guest house, a shedlike structure at the back of the compound previously occupied by a bunch of feral cats. Raptor has flowers delivered to Apathy’s quarters to cheer him up.

  The night before the Series begins, the crew meets Irieguy at the Spearmint Rhino. Raptor jokingly promises one of the lap dancers that he’ll make seven final tables and win four gold bracelets this summer. Irieguy laughs. Winning a single bracelet is hard enough. But he wouldn’t bet against any of these guys. Not only are they improving at Internet speed, they’ve been on a roll. Three months ago, TravestyFund won an event at the L.A. Poker Classic that paid him $160,000. A month later, TheUsher won $140,000 after taking down a tournament at the Wynn.

  Made worse by high expectations, Raptor’s first World Series event is a huge bummer. He sails into the dinner break with a healthy pile of chips, then takes two horrific beats in a row to get eliminated. His results don’t get any better in the weeks that follow. Fortunately there’s a consolation prize: cash games.

  “I’m here for the cash games” is one of the more frequent refrains you’ll hear during the Series, and it’s not just idle talk. For six weeks every summer, the Las Vegas poker economy goes bananas. Recreational players come to town to watch or to enter an event or two, then retreat to the cash games eager to re-create the excitement. The tables are packed, the action loose, the games juicy.

  Frustrated by his tournament results, Raptor begins to devote more of his attention to these games. Now that he’s twenty-one and able to report his earnings to the I.R.S. he no longer has to tiptoe his way around the card rooms. He can play anywhere he wants. For his first foray into the live high-stakes games, he chooses Bobby’s Room, the special section of the Bellagio’s card room that’s home to some of the biggest games in the world.

  The room is named after Bobby Baldwin, poker’s original whiz kid. In the early 1970s Baldwin dropped out of Oklahoma State and moved to Las Vegas, hoping to defy the odds and make a living as a professional gambler. After some incredible ups and downs—he once turned $75 into $180,000 over the course of a weekend, then lost it all—he ditched craps and sports betting to focus on poker. He was only twenty-eight when he won the
1978 WSOP Main Event, making him the youngest ever to do so by a good decade and a half.

  Baldwin went on to earn three more gold bracelets in World Series events, but the biggest win of his career came during a cash game against the rising business mogul Steve Wynn. Impressed by the acumen of the guy who just cleaned him out, Wynn asked Baldwin if he’d be interested in doing some consulting for his casino, the Golden Nugget. Two years later, Wynn made Baldwin the Nugget’s president.

  While Wynn was building his second resort, the Mirage, he sought Baldwin’s input on everything from financing to design, and when the doors opened on what was then the most expensive casino in history, Baldwin was the man in charge. When Wynn decided to build an even more extravagant casino modeled after a luxury resort on the shores of Italy’s Lake Como, he didn’t have to look very far to find the perfect guy to run the Bellagio.

  At the time, most Las Vegas casinos were replacing their poker rooms with slot machines, an effort driven by an influx of MBAs looking to squeeze bigger profits out of every square foot on the casino floor. But Baldwin saw the wisdom of going against the grain at the Bellagio, creating an amenity-filled card room that quickly became the most popular in town. He also added a sanctuary, cordoned off from the tourists by etched glass windows, where his friends could play high-stakes poker in relative privacy.

  Bobby’s Room could be considered poker’s Yankee Stadium, home to the most talented (and richest) players in the world, only without the fans. Few can handle the steep price of admission. Raptor’s a little nervous when he steps into the room, like he felt three years ago when he first mustered the nerve to sit down at a table at the Poker Box with $100 in front of him. Only this time it’s $100,000.

  The one open seat at the table is being reserved for Bobby Baldwin himself, but the floorman tells Raptor he can use it until the boss arrives. Pot-limit Omaha really isn’t Raptor’s best game, but that’s what they’re playing and he’s not in any position to request a change. To calm the butterflies in his stomach, he stares at the “i” in “Bellagio” written on the table’s felt and focuses on his breath.

  Inhale.… Exhale.… Inhale.… Exhale.…

  He’d be far more anxious if, in true Raptor fashion, he hadn’t carefully researched the competition. Like the rest of the players in the room, Raptor hopes to take advantage of the presence of a single person at the table, a bald man in his late forties with a slight French accent. Guy Laliberté, the billionaire owner of Cirque du Soleil, fell in love with high-stakes poker a little more than a year ago and has been paying through the nose for “lessons” ever since. (He will reportedly lose $16 million playing online poker in 2008.)

  But when Raptor starts chatting with Laliberté, he discovers that he’s more interested in learning about the man’s storybook life—a Canadian hippie who began his improbable career as a street performer—than separating him from his money. Laliberté radiates passion, a commodity Raptor suspects is an essential ingredient to a successful life. It feels inspiring to talk to a man who became so prosperous doing what he loved most.

  Bobby Baldwin shows up an hour later to claim his seat. The other players at the table aren’t particularly happy to see Raptor leave—he wins a $200,000 pot within minutes of sitting down, and manages to hold on to most of it for the rest of the session. But as he shakes hands with Laliberté, Raptor suspects that only a small percentage of his newfound wealth is monetary.

  45

  I do have to say, though a great poker player, durrrr is one of the biggest prop betting fish I know.

  —Jman

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA (July 2007)

  Durrrr arrives at the compound carrying a backpack stuffed with bricks of bundled hundred-dollar bills. He counts out $350,000 and matter-of-factly hands it to TheUsher—his share of the action they agreed to split while they were in Italy, an arrangement TheUsher had forgotten all about.

  The sheer mass of the money makes it a moment to remember, even in the midst of a summer where $10,000 bricks are just another prop in the Ship It Holla Balla mise en scène, as ubiquitous as the piles of dirty laundry. Now that most of the Ballas can legally play in tournaments and live games, cash rivals the money in their online accounts as the currency of choice and the principal method of exchange between them. When they’re not playing poker, they’re often devising schemes that will hasten the flow of this cash from one to the other.

  Raptor and Apathy spend many afternoons playing Rapathy Golf—each player throws a golf ball into the farthest reaches of the compound, then uses a putter to return the ball to the green, avoiding whatever obstacles lie between the ball’s original position and the hole. Pretty silly stuff, unless you’re playing for hundreds of dollars a hole.

  Even larger sums trade hands on the tennis court, which is frequently in use, even though none of the Ballas brought rackets with them. After hearing through the Two Plus Two grapevine about all the high-dollar action taking place there, PerkyShmerky arrives in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce Phantom to challenge a Two Plus Twoer named Chuddo to a series of $5,000 matches.

  But when it comes to gambling serious money, durrrr has no rival. Over the last few months, several anecdotal accounts on the message boards have him donking off hundreds of thousands of dollars while multitabling high-stakes cash games. According to HighstakesDB—a Web site launched earlier in the year to track the results of Internet poker’s biggest players—durrrr has lost half a million dollars since January. When a player with his abilities can lose so much money so quickly, it creates a ripple of concern among his friends: If durrrr can go broke …

  So the backpack full of cash is a welcome sight.

  “I’d heard you’d gone busto,” says Apathy. “Glad to see that was a bunch of BS.”

  “Unfortunately, the rumors of my demise are partially accurate. I’m down about two mil over the past four months.” Durrrr sighs, before perking up. “But, hey, I started with three.”

  While its comforting to see durrrr and his backpack full of cash, it’s hilarious to see durrrr and his backpack full of cash when all the lights in the house suddenly go out, instantly producing a collective panic: Oh shit, are we about to get jacked again? Durrrr cinches the backpack’s straps tightly to his chest and paces nervously, expecting robbers to burst through the door at any moment, until the power comes back on a few minutes later.

  Durrrr’s dramatically fluctuating bankroll has done little to curb his appetite for big prop bets. He’s eating dinner at P. F. Chang’s with Raptor when the conversation turns to chess. Durrrr claims he could beat a Grandmaster if his opponent began the game down a rook.

  “Bullshit,” Raptor coughs into his napkin.

  “I’m serious. I’ll bet you fifty K.”

  “Book it,” Raptor says, then pulls out his phone and calls Curtains, a fellow Two Plus Twoer who’s in town for the WSOP.

  “Hey, it’s Raptor. You’re a chess Grandmaster, right?”

  “Incorrect,” replies Curtains. “I’m an International Master.”

  “What’s that, like, a step below?”

  “Two steps, actually.”

  “Well, could you beat durrrr in a match if you started down a rook?”

  “Maybe. What’s he rated?”

  Raptor looks across the table at durrrr and his smug grin. “He doesn’t have a rating.”

  “Then I’d place my odds of winning at around a hundred percent.”

  The chess match becomes a must-see event. Two Plus Twoers arrive at the compound in droves to sweat the action, betting thousands on the outcome. For those who can’t make it in person, Raptor provides running commentary on the message boards.

  Durrrr plays defensively, so it takes Curtains a bit longer than he expected to sweep the best two-out-of-three series. Durrrr removes a few bricks from his backpack and tosses them to Raptor, who pays Curtains $8,000 for his troubles and pockets the rest.

  Durrrr shrugs off the loss. There’s a reason money doesn’t come with handle
s on it.

  The hubbub on the message boards has barely subsided when Chuddo gives durrrr fifty-to-one odds that he can’t sink three long putts in a row on the green in the backyard. A few minutes and three incredibly lucky putts later, durrrr’s won his $50,000 back.

  46

  It was easily [one of the] top five sickest nights of my life and I’d bet everyone would say the same.

  —Traheho

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA (July 2007)

  If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of an “infinity pool,” it’s a swimming pool that uses architectural design and structural engineering to trick the eye into believing that one of its edges extends forever, when in fact it drops abruptly, sometimes off the side of a cliff.

  The infinity pool in the Hugh Hefner Sky Villa, at the top of the Palms Hotel’s Fantasy Tower, thrills guests both ways. You’re not sure whether to feel exhilarated by the gods-eye view of the Las Vegas Strip and the seemingly endless horizon beyond or terrified by the 40-story drop into the abyss.

  The pool is just one of the many amenities you get when renting the most expensive accommodations in what is arguably the city’s most rocking hotel, a joint venture between the jet-setting, hard-partying, NBA-team-owning Maloof brothers and their corporate partner Playboy Enterprises. The informal name of this 9,000-square-foot villa is the Playboy Suite—during off-hours it doubles as the set of the Playmate-centric reality TV show Girls Next Door. Taking up two floors at the very top of the hotel, it boasts pop-up plasma TVs in every room, beds that rotate to exploit the view, tables for poker and Ping-Pong, a Jacuzzi, a sauna, a wet bar, and a fully equipped gym. It even comes with a butler. Tonight his duties will include lighting joints, procuring pharmaceuticals, and shepherding drunk, hot girls from the casino up to the suite.