Ship It Holla Ballas!

by Jonathan Grotenstein

  Raptor already spends most of his time on Full Tilt, so the idea of getting paid to play there is more than enough incentive to encourage him to make a few videos. All he’s got to do is talk while he plays, remembering to keep the swearing to a minimum.

  He isn’t so sure what to make of the blog. The other pros on the site mostly use the space to discuss interesting hands, linking to videos that will hopefully encourage casual readers to become paying customers. But when Raptor sits down to write his first post, he has trouble focusing on any particular hands. He’s too consumed by the agita that has accompanied the biggest downswing of his career.

  Over the last two weeks, he’s lost nearly $400,000.

  He knows, intellectually, that these kinds of swings are a normal part of the “nosebleeds” he’s been testing, games where the typical buy-in is $60,000 and pots often climb into six-figure territory. His bankroll is large enough to withstand the volatility. Aside from his own continuing success at the tables, he has made several very successful investments in other players and still has a stable of affiliates generating a steady income for him each month. Spreadsheets help him keep track of all his assets—online poker accounts, bank accounts, cars, real estate—down to the last dollar. While his contemporaries are graduating college and scrambling for crappy entry-level jobs, Raptor has already built a net worth close to $3 million.

  So a $400,000 loss shouldn’t bother him too much. But he can’t help thinking about the money in real-world terms: he’s lost a dozen nice cars, a house, a retirement nest egg. Which only gets him more aggravated, because this is the kind of thinking that has the potential to make it even worse.

  You have to blow off the losses, call it a bad day at the office, and move on. Your bankroll is just a number on a screen. The cards don’t care whether you’re running hot or cold; neither should you. Psychological distress is just noise that will distract you from picking up the signals you should be paying attention to if you want to stay on your A game.

  But right now the noise is REALLY FUCKING LOUD. It’s pounding in his skull as he sits down to write his first blog entry for CardRunners, so how can he possibly write about anything else? Before he knows it, he’s poured nearly a thousand words onto the page, an unguarded inquiry into his prospects for a sane life given the occupational hazards of his chosen line of work. As he looks over what he’s written, he worries for a moment that he might be revealing too much. But this is the Facebook Age—everybody overshares. He hits the PUBLISH button, flinging his rant out into the world.

  It feels so cathartic he’s ready to do it again the very next day. This time he makes an effort to do what he’s supposed to, describing a few hands he played the night before, but soon finds himself shifting gears.

  “Just so everyone knows,” he warns his readers, “this is NOT going to be a dedicated poker blog. I do lots of other things rather than poker and fully intend to include those things in this blog. I am trying to expand my ‘horizons’ and try to get out of the habit of just waking up and getting on the computer for fourteen hours a day. I know a lot of people struggle with this as well, so maybe this can help us both.”

  He starts blogging almost every single day about whatever strikes his fancy: the Texas Rangers game he took his dad to, the second season of Lost, the video games he’s playing. He provides obsessively meticulous accounts of his various exercise regimens and diets, offering the precise details of his workouts and breaking each meal down into calories, fat, carbohydrates, fiber, and protein.

  He frequently ruminates about the role poker plays in his life—negative, he suspects, as these days it seems to be generating far more pain than pleasure. He’s not even a month into the job when he comes right out and admits that lately he’s had “no desire whatsoever to play poker.”

  He knows he’s not exactly inspiring his readers; he’s just being honest. The blog is a place where he can say the things he’s too polite to utter in real life. He describes a dinner he’s forced to attend with a bunch of people he hardly knows. When he mentions, between bites, that he’s thinking about buying a house in Las Vegas, the relative strangers at the table start hammering him with questions.

  “So poker’s treating you well? What’s your strategy? How much money have you made? Do you want to play heads-up sometime?”

  And finally: “Dude, can I crash at your place the next time I’m out there?”

  Raptor goes mute for the rest of the meal, afraid to give his new “friends” another opening to hit him up for strategic advice, free lessons, or a place to stay. He pulls out his phone and pretends to send text messages, hoping they’ll take the hint and leave him alone.

  When he’s finally able to escape, Raptor returns home to an in-box inundated with Facebook friend requests from people he doesn’t know and e-mails asking if he’d be interested in meeting up for drinks or doing some coaching. He resists the urge to rip off snarky replies, instead using his blog to vent his frustrations, relying heavily on capital letters and exclamation points.

  A few days later, he buys a $95,000 Mercedes-Benz on the Internet and has it delivered to the house in Vegas he just closed on. He’s looking forward to living in a city where he doesn’t have to be embarrassed about his expensive habits and to spending more time with his old poker friends. But what he hopes more than anything is that the move will revive his passion for the game. If it doesn’t, he honestly doesn’t know what he’ll do next.

  53

  You guys might recall a post a few months ago about moving to Las Vegas and implementing new habits. Well, I worked my plan and achieved results that surpassed even my lofty skills (in just a span of a few months), and still found myself uncontent.

  —Good2cu

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA (January–April 2008)

  While 20K Jay is serving the twentieth evening of his sentence in a bathroom a few hundred feet above his head, Good2cu is dining in a dramatically different part of the Bellagio, the avant-garde restaurant Fix. It’s almost a triple date: Trent and WildBill have both brought their significant others; only Good2cu’s girlfriend has begged out, claiming illness. They’re drinking vintage wine and having a grand old time until Good2cu reveals the real reason he organized this dinner—a breakup. He tells WildBill that he’s tired of waiting around for his new Web site to be built, so he’s going to hire somebody else to do it.

  WildBill’s not happy to hear the news. He anxiously tugs at his New Survivalist beard. “But I’ve already done a ton of work on it.”

  “Maybe,” says Good2cu. “But I haven’t seen any of it. Not even a single screenshot.”

  WildBill shrugs. “I expect I’ll be compensated for my time.”

  “Why? You offered to build the site for free.”

  “That was when we were going to split the revenues on the back end. Just give me ten grand, and we’ll call it good.”

  “Ten grand?! That’s ridiculous. Besides, you owe me at least that much.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  For Good2cu, this is the more pressing reason for the breakup: he thinks WildBill is stealing from him. The irony is that he never would have suspected it if WildBill hadn’t encouraged him to hire Trent, who still handles customer service for RakeAid and is privy to the company’s financials.

  “I’ve paid you everything I owe you!” WildBill insists.

  “That’s not the information I have.”

  WildBill glares angrily at Trent, grabs his female companion roughly by the arm, and storms out of the restaurant.

  Trent laughs. “That went well.”

  Good2cu calls his girlfriend on the way home. “It’s me,” he says. “Want to come over?”

  “That depends.… Are those two whores still there?”

  She’s referring to a couple of Good2cu’s female friends from Michigan who have been crashing in his guest bedroom. “They’re not whores.” He sighs. “Come on, I want to see you.”

  “There’s something we need to talk ab
out,” she says.

  Good2cu’s phone informs him with a beep that he’s got another call coming in. “Hold that thought,” he says, clicking over to the other line.

  “Guess what?” says Trent. “20K Jay just stepped out of the bathroom.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “We got it on the Webcam.”

  “Ship it!” Good2cu switches back to the other line. “Good news!”

  “Me too,” his girlfriend says. “I’m pregnant.”

  * * *

  She’s not really pregnant. She made up the story because she’s angry at him for having two female houseguests. The incident makes Good2cu reevaluate their relationship.

  What kind of person fakes a pregnancy just because they’re pissed at you? One I don’t want to be with, he decides. He breaks up with her, vowing never to date another stripper.

  The kid who arrived in Vegas with stars in his eyes, hoping to become a professional gambler, is now getting an up-close view of the city’s underbelly. It’s not a pleasant sight. Take, for example, the characters at the Bellagio who a couple of months ago seemed so colorful. One of them is now threatening to break his legs, while the other has apparently cheated him, and he’s having a hard time deciding which is worse.

  The dustup with Tweety is probably Good2cu’s fault—not only did he violate a sort of unspoken code, but he clearly underestimated the man.

  On the surface, Tweety epitomizes the image of a degenerate gambler. He lives alone. He’s balding and overweight. He spends freely on women in return for a variety of favors. He isn’t afraid to gamble for millions, even when he’s drunk. Especially when he’s drunk. Part of Good2cu wants to mock the guy. Another part of him worries that he’s looking at his future.

  Like many of the regulars in Bobby’s Room, Tweety tries to develop personal relationships with the rich out-of-towners who occasionally sit in the game, hoping to set up private matches away from the casino where the house won’t be taking a rake out of every pot and the IRS can’t tax the winnings.

  A businessman who usually has Tweety organize games for him whenever he’s in town takes a shine to Good2cu and asks for his number. Good2cu isn’t trying to hustle anyone, but when the businessman calls and requests that he set up a private game for him, what’s he supposed to do, say no? He briefly considers inviting Tweety, but ultimately decides against it.

  This doesn’t sit well with the veteran poker pro, who explodes when he hears the news. Good2cu gets to see a different aspect of Tweety’s personality—the part forged during a fractured childhood spent in a rough neighborhood, honed by the struggle to survive on his own from the time he was fifteen without a high school education. The part that thinks these privileged online kids with their upper-middle-class backgrounds are a bunch of arrogant dickheads.

  Tweety delivers a message via the Bellagio’s grapevine. “He’d better watch out. He’s dealing drugs on my corner and when you deal drugs on someone else’s corner, there’s going to be serious consequences.”

  Good2cu won’t be making that mistake again. He does his best to mend the rift with Tweety and reminds himself that he needs to be more cautious in the future, a lesson that gets reinforced when 20K Jay refuses to acknowledge that he’s lost their bet.

  According to Jay, he had to step outside the bathroom to sign some legal paperwork. Good2cu doesn’t care about the why—in his mind, Jay has clearly violated the terms they agreed upon.

  Jay refuses to accompany him to the safe deposit box, so Good2cu goes on his own. He’s too late. Jay has already convinced the Bellagio that he’s lost the key—easy to do, as the box is in his name—and asked to have it drilled open. There’s not much Good2cu can do about it. Jay’s holding all the cards, or in this case, the cash.

  Good2cu thinks back to the first time he saw Las Vegas from the sky, two years earlier, and remembers how glamorous he imagined life was below. Now he’s starting to understand why hard-bitten poker players call the game the world’s hardest way to make any easy living. Survival depends on outrunning bad luck, a task made even more difficult when everyone is trying to trip you up along the way.

  Good2cu doesn’t need any more proof about how hard it is to keep your head above water in the poker world, but gets it anyway. The message boards are burning up with the news that Brandi Hawbaker has committed suicide in an apartment in Los Angeles. As the story of her topsy-turvy life gets dissected by people who didn’t even know her, it becomes clear that many of them feel complicit in her tragedy.

  And in a way, they’re probably right.

  Good2cu didn’t even know her, but feels like he did, thanks to her many tell-all confessions on Two Plus Two. Her death leaves him with an uneasy feeling that only worsens when he recalls the title of the first post she ever made on the forum:

  NEVER TRUST ANYONE.

  54

  We were both calling the other side bad, but for different reasons. They were calling us bad because we gave off stuff or acted like nerds or whatever, and they were terrible because they were actually terrible.

  —Raptor

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA (May 2008)

  War has become inevitable.

  On one side: the poker establishment. The guys who played poker before society thought it was cool. Old-timers who used to “fade the white line,” traveling from town to town in search of backroom games. The generations that followed were respectful because they had to be—without the Internet or decent poker strategy books, the only way to learn the game was at the feet of grizzled veterans. It’s been said that it takes ten thousand hours to master a skill. Old-school players put in their time in smoky card rooms, figuring out how to read other players while controlling their own emotions and learning how to methodically build a bankroll. It wasn’t a glamorous life, but the survivors of this rough apprenticeship felt safe in the insular, castle-like world they had created.

  In the opposite corner: the kids who learned to play poker online. Thanks to the Internet, they’ve mastered the game faster than anyone could have ever imagined, sharing strategies, pooling bankrolls, and playing as many hands in a single year as the veterans could in ten.

  Open gates, enter barbarians. The poker establishment still doesn’t know exactly what to make of the growing onslaught of young kids. They wear baseball caps turned backward or sideways or, most confusingly, someplace in between. They seem surgically connected to iPods and wear oversized noise-canceling headphones that look like Mickey Mouse ears. They move with twitchy impatience, throwing chips around like they’ve got nothing to lose because, well, they don’t have anything to lose. Having learned the game in front of computer screens, they lack social skills, table manners, and impulse control, yelling stupid things like, “Ship it holla!” whenever they win a pot.

  The Internet kids offer a counterargument that sounds a little like this: yes, we’re young and annoying—deal with it. We’re also smart and talented, so go ahead and deal with that too. Many of us went to college, at least for a while, where we were exposed to a concept called “math.” You so-called professionals had better be as good at reading people as you think you are to make up for all of the fundamental mistakes you make when calculating odds or valuing hands. If we’re not as nitty with our bankrolls as you are, it’s because we don’t have to be: we’re used to winning and losing large sums of money on a daily basis. An hourly basis. The only reason you guys get so much hype is because you were in the right place at the right time just as the poker boom exploded.

  Skirmishes between the two sides are being fought around the country every day as wave after wave of Internet kids turn twenty-one and—facing increasingly difficult games online—start flooding the brick-and-mortar card rooms like animals driven from the hills by a lack of food and water.

  This war has been mostly a private affair so far, but in March 2008, it goes public, catalyzed, to no one’s great surprise, by the singular durrrr.

  Durrrr’s invitation to play in the NBC National Heads
-Up Championship is a sure sign that the poker community at large is starting to understand what the Internet faction has known for a while. Since turning twenty-one last July, durrrr has steadily demonstrated that he’s not just one of the best online players in the world—he’s one of the best players in the world period. In the last eight months, he’s made final tables in four major tournaments and racked up almost a million dollars in prize money.

  Proving that they have a sense of history—and a sense of humor—the show’s producers pit durrrr against Phil Hellmuth in a first-round matchup at the featured table.

  Nearly two decades ago, Hellmuth was the upstart. He was only twenty-four when he won the WSOP Main Event in 1989, making him the youngest world champion ever crowned, but nineteen years and eleven gold bracelets later he has become the poker establishment. In 2005, he won the first National Heads-Up Championship. But as talented as he is, Hellmuth is equally well known for the explosive temper tantrums at the poker table that have earned him an odd nickname for a forty-three-year-old man to bear: “The Poker Brat.”

  Before their match begins, the show’s hostess Leann Tweeden—a former Hooters girl who has reinvented herself as a sports correspondent—pulls them aside for a pregame interview.

  “I think that maybe he’s ahead of me online,” concedes Hellmuth, who’s wearing a hat and hockey jersey promoting his sponsor, Ultimate Bet. “It’s a little different in the real world, so we’ll see what happens.”

  Tweeden turns to durrrr, who, with his button-down shirt and jeans, looks like he’s on his way to class. “Tell us about the challenge you issued Phil online.”