The Math Players had all cashed in the WSOP, in the Main Event or its preamble. Some, like Matt, had bracelets back home in the wall safe after winning events. Bill Chen, co-author with Jerrod Ankenman of the dense, next-level treatise The Mathematics of Poker, won the Six Handed in 2006, and bagged the $3K Limit Hold’em event the same year. He was sitting with Mike Fong in Martorano’s when I introduced myself as Matt’s friend.
Mike looked at Bill. “Isn’t it pronounced, MAYTROSE?”
Bill nodded. Yes, I’d been saying Matt’s name wrong. Their game philosophy emphasized solid foundations: Why start dinner with a faulty premise?
Mike wasn’t playing today. Chillaxing at Math House. Profiled in a 2010 ESPN article called “The Smartest House in Vegas,” Math House was their HQ when they convened for the six weeks of the World Series. Swimming pool and a hot tub if the right rental popped up. Which made this the Smartest Table at an Overpriced Italian Restaurant in Vegas, but for my presence, which dragged the IQ level down to your average tailgate in the parking lot of an Albuquerque roller-derby match after an all-day whippit party. Which are fun, just not overflowing with the gifted.
“WSOP is summer camp for internet dorks,” they told ESPN. Math House’s first incarnation was a room at the Rio in 2005. Six weeks in a hotel gets pricey. That math I could get my head around, as I spend a lot of time figuring out what I’d do if I had to go on the lam after witnessing a mob hit, or to flee intimacy. Then the boys scoped out joints with enough bedrooms to hold their gang: Matt, Bill, Mike, and the others who joined us for dinner, Terrence Chan, Matt Hawrilenko, and Kenny Shei. They had encountered one another’s screen names on theory-heavy boards like rec.gambling.poker, and got chummy in real-life casinos, drawn together by common card philosophy.
They lived all over the country, supporting themselves on poker or brain-busting jobs with titles like “strategic arbitrage.” The annual hangout allowed them to catch up, trade strategy, escape the gastronomical perils of the Strip, and engage in that holy ritual of poker players: the Replay.
The Replay. Everyone did it. Home players shouting back to the table when they got up for another beer, know-it-alls haranguing strangers in a casino cash game, pros kicking back between wars. What would you have done? How would you have played it?
The Replay wants to know, What if I hadn’t stepped on that butterfly? The one you crushed when you went back in time and then when you returned to the future everything had changed into something horrible. George Bush is in his fourth term, Diet New Coke the number-one pop in the land, and someone has invented “untethered telephones,” entirely cordless, so people can just call you up whenever they want, to talk about whatever stupid shit pops into their heads. Some butterfly!
A million alternate realities branch off from that botched play, but with the Replay you can correct the mistake and set history straight. Find the world where you survive to the next level, pump up the old blood sugar at dinner break, and go on a tear to win the National Championship. What if you’d bet the pot in Barcelona, mucked in Tahoe, shoved in Choctaw, had never stepped on that bug? Un-step on that little bastard and you finally get what you deserve: ESPN zooms in on your harem as they cheerlead from the rails of the Final Table; Jack Link’s retains you as a celeb spokesman in a series of post-ironic commercials; and a dozen bracelets spin on the special custom-made glass display in the master bedroom. Look: You’re putt-putting down the marble hallways of your McMansion on a limited-edition Ferrari-branded Segway, about to add another bracelet to the trove.
Lay your failures on the slab, let’s gather around to check out the entrance wounds. The Replay cannot exist without an audience so you put it to the learned assembled: What do you do? Scientific, but sometimes this review resembled the probe of a tongue on a rotten tooth, or a neurotic’s resurrection of primal hurts. I can remember a few botched hands—in between bites, Matt and his crew mulled over missteps from years back. That Deep Stack at the Bellagio in ’09, Day 2 of the ’06 WPT Championship. Supervillains they battle from time to time at this or that Million Dollar Game—how do you defeat his heat vision, her force field?
I tried to keep up.
“Do you call? I don’t know.”
“I lasted one level today.”
“I lasted one hand yesterday.”
“How’d you go out on Jacks?”
“He makes it a thousand—now what do you do?”
“What did he look like?”
“Fortyish white guy, nondescript.”
Perfect disguise!
“From a value standpoint, you can fold to the—”
“Are you getting much of this?” Matt asked.
“Not at all.”
I would never understand the game the way they did, no matter how much I studied and hit the tables. The part of the brain these guys used for cards, I used to keep meticulous account of my regrets. So many to sort and catalogue. Like when I meant to DVR the final episode of that reality show The Last Time I Was Happy, where contestants are interviewed on their deathbeds about the titular moment, the “winner” being the person with the longest dry spell. The hockey game ran late, and it only taped the first twenty minutes. I never found out who won. And that time upstate when I stumbled on an antique store where everything looked as if it had been left out in the rain. I like to buy furniture that reminds me of myself, I don’t know. The store had a vintage nineteenth-century posture harness for sale, the kind with the mother-of-pearl adjustment knobs and leather braces, and I was sure it would straighten me out despite the condemnations of the so-called medical establishment. I went back the next day and it was gone. Never hesitate when it comes to nineteenth-century posture harnesses. And when I left for the World Series of Poker without hugging the kid one more time. That was a big one. These things add up.
That’s why I had so much trouble storing all the new poker lore from books and conversations and time at the tables: no room. Given the choice between tracking real-life bad beats and poker-table bad beats, poker jockeys pick the more lucrative endeavor. They don’t give gold bracelets for regrets.
In America.
There was one moment of intersection, when the topic of hate-watching came up. “Why do you watch TV shows—and keep watching them—if you don’t like them?” Terrence asked.
Simple: Some days, all you have is gazing upon horror, and the small comfort of being surprised that it is not yours.
Middle of summer, but you could hear the leaves rustling. There was a hint of autumn as they reminisced. The specter of death, and not just from the cholesterol grenades coming out of the kitchen. The Math Players were cutting back on the poker, moving on. Mike was starting a new computer business in Cambridge. Matt Matros missed his wife, plus he had a novel to bake. He didn’t stay the full six weeks anymore. Matt Hawrilenko would announce his retirement after this WSOP, sucked up by the Great Whale of grad school, before which so many were but drifting plankton.
Terrence, for his part, had been concentrating on his new mixed-martial-arts career. You know, Brazilian jujitsu, Muay Thai boxing, Western boxing and wrestling, things of that sort. The dude was cut. That mind-body problem I attempted to solve in my sessions with Kim Albano? Terrence had found the answer. As he explained in the PokerListings.com webvid about his course correction: “Even though it’s maybe physically unhealthy to take a lot of blows to the face, it’s in a way very spiritually healthy, and it really teaches you a lot about yourself.”
Life! What Inscrutable Card Shall Ye Throw Next Upon the Soft Felt of Our Days? Six weeks plus six weeks plus six weeks: a section of your life lived in Vegas. Weeks that accumulated into a year under the accursed fried-chicken-joint heat lamp that is the desert sun. It aged you. The boys were getting on, some of them were even in their late thirties. “I’m routinely the oldest player at the tables,” Matt said.
“We were the youngest, now we’re the oldest,” Kenny affirmed. Robotrons to the left of me, Robotrons to the right.
Then it was back to work. The next level of Event 16 awaited. I said goodbye to the Math Players on the floor of the Rio, at the head of the corridor that led to the convention hall. The other runners streaming past us back to the tables. One of my dinner companions invited me on a strip-club excursion. I demurred, spoiled by the erotic revues of Anhedonia, where the performers remain fully clothed but get emotionally naked, delivering monologues about their top-shelf disappointments, and times when they were almost happy. Hard to enjoy American-style strip clubs after that. Once you go bleak, you never go back.
The cards were in the air again. Thirty-seven minutes into Level 6, I checked on Coach.
There was an empty seat.
We all go out sooner or later.
I was back in NYC when Event 16 finally ended two days later. Hitting refresh-refresh on PokerNews.com, grabbing livestream bits on my phone while I walked down the street.
“Matt Matros is a Yale graduate. He’s working on a novel,” said Announcer #1.
“He’s also a very sweet guy,” said Announcer #2.
Matt was still in, ensconced at the Final Table when I got on the subway. When I emerged at street level, he’d won his third bracelet and half a million dollars. “It’s beyond incredible, it’s ridiculous,” he told PokerNews correspondent Kristy Arnett, who interviewed him at his winning seat.
“You sound very humble, but come on,” Kristy said. “Three years in a row. You’re one of three people to ever do it in the last thirty years. Obviously, you’re doing something right.”
“I’m not saying I don’t play well—I do. But I’ve been incredibly lucky these last three years at the Rio.” He paused. “And my dad wants everyone to know my name is pronounced MAYTROSE.”
Foundations. Master the foundations, and let us proceed from there.
Another jump: six months later. December 2012, Atlantic City. You with me? I drove down with Matt to sample circuit season. The six weeks of the World Series are one season, and the circuit tournaments, Poker Tour pit stops, and assorted megacasino events are another. Maybe you stick to the East Coast, or the Deep South, or never stray east of the Rockies, but you’re on the hunt nine months of the year, whether you’re a guru pocketing Player Points and big cashes, or a first-timer just learning the ways of the Noble Hustle.
It was raining on the trip down, the sky depleted of color. Matt was wrung out as well. After snagging that bracelet in last summer’s WSOP, he was only hitting two or three fall events, a handful in the spring. Cutting back. He’d had a nice run, as usual. Since he started playing big tournaments, there’d only been two occasions when he was down for the year. Still tired, though. “I’m not tired about poker concepts and new ideas and discussing poker with other really good players,” he said. “I still enjoy that aspect of it.” But parking your butt in brick-and-mortar tournaments when you know what everyone’s going to do before they do it? When there’s only ten minutes every two hours when you’re using your brain? It’s dull, man. “I always wanted to try professional poker for a little while. I didn’t think I was still going to be doing this when I was thirty-five. This is not supposed to have worked out as well as it has.”
He’d rather be home with his wife, Ivy, instead of dragging his ass up and down the northeast corridor again. Rather write, work on his novel. He’d been knocking out his monthly column for Card Player magazine. Sample topics: “Think the Unthinkable, Do the Unthinkable: What Makes Great Players Great?” and “America’s Love of Bluffing.” Also on the agenda: agitating for the return of online poker in Washington Post op-eds. The only time I saw Matt get tilty was when he talked about the criminalization of his cherished cards.
Online poker excised the dull parts. Everyone had bad runs when they lost twenty tournaments in a row. “Tournament poker is high variance, as we say.” You’re up, down, and the number of bodies in a large tourney meant you weren’t going to cash every time. No matter how good you were. But play thirty tournaments online a day, and those bad patches were truncated instead of stretching over a tortuous year.
The Illegal Gambling Business Act “was enacted in 1970 to crack down on organized crime,” he wrote in the Post. “It was never intended to prevent ordinary people from playing poker.” Unlike, say, craps, poker is a game of skill, he argued. A constant assessment of risk versus reward. Like Wall Street. If it were as random as roulette, good players wouldn’t make more money than bad players over time. But they do.
Fighting the government was hard work—the Anhedonian Embassy had been disputing $60K in jaywalking tickets for years, cultural misunderstandings and whatnot.
“Our government disdains a risk-reward game that millions of Americans play,” Matt wrote, “then bails out Wall Street sharks who bet unfathomable sums. I can only conclude that this contradictory stance has little to do with the skills required for each pursuit. No, for some reason, lawmakers just don’t like poker.”
Not that online lacked regrettable qualities. Collusion: How do you know that faceless users Bustanut69 and Lickylicky aren’t scheming with each other on the phone, or sitting in each other’s laps? That was an example of user misbehavior. On the other side of the screen, the moderators of Ultimate Bet abused their sys-op privileges to peek at players’ hands and go pirating. “It was completely obvious they were a bunch of crooks,” Matt said, “and anyone who played there was out of their minds.”
Ultimate Bet faded, and Full Tilt Poker emerged with their own brand of mercurial ethics. They’d permit users to hit tourneys before their funds cleared and wager with cash they didn’t have. With credit cards. Some of the money was vapor. Vapor or no, it circulated. Affiliate programs rewarded those who brought new fish to the site. More money spreading around. It didn’t help matters that Full Tilt neglected to keep a firewall between the company’s operating funds and players’ money. The biggest rake in history. How did the owners spend this big pile of cash? The usual story: fancy cars, fancier women, beef jerky.
Then came Black Friday. The Feds put the kibosh on all online operations but saved their choice indictments for Full Tilt. According to the government, the company—fronted by some of the biggest names in poker, the dudes who had inspired most of these online players to take up the game in the first place—had defrauded its users out of $300 million. “Sorry, your account has been frozen.” Matt knew people who’d had 70 or 80 percent of their bankroll tied up in the electronic ether—gone. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Paper millionaires, teenagers who’d never had a bank account in their life, reset to zero. Middle-aged guys grinding sixty hours a week, supporting their families on the fifty grand they eked out each year, were suddenly without jobs. That’s how they paid their mortgages, with a full house here and river bluff there.
The national recession had caught up to organized poker. There was dark talk about suicides. Rumors. No one really wanted to talk about it. Eighteen months after Black Friday, a lot of that money was still in the hands of the government, who wanted to get paid first before they tackled the matter of reimbursements.
Adapt or die. Just as the cowboys had to readjust to the young gunslingers and their new loose-aggressive poker or hang up their holsters, the Robos needed to learn to handle brick-and-mortar casinos. As we drove to AC, Matt’s disquisition on the State of Poker Today darkened the already overcast sky.
This Harrah’s circuit event was eleven days long, with twelve big-ticket games and assorted remora Mega Satellites and Turbo Mega Satellites. The biggie this weekend was the $1,600 buy-in Main Event. Some six hundred regional players
hopping on buses, driving down, getting a ride with Mom. The prize pool just shy of a million dollars.
Helen and Lex were there, too. Friday night they were playing a $200 Mega Satellite to chute into Saturday’s biggie. As usual, the top 10 percent of the satelliters got a ticket to next day’s event. Months earlier, Coach and her hubby had failed to make it into the WSOP Main Event. Now, in winter, the carousel had started up again. Like the thousands of poker legions across the world, they hoped to be in Vegas when the music stopped.
Okay—I’d been spoiled by the show-biz accoutrements of the Main Event. The TV cameras, the B-list celebs, the Poker Kitchen. Harrah’s Atlantic City WSOP stage was your typical meeting space in a mid-price hotel, windowless and dingy. Today it’s poker. Next week it’ll be a Chia Pet regional sales conference, a franchise meeting for Bespoke Snuggies, or an all-day Just Be Yourself self-actualization seminar, for which the doors will probably be chained shut until you sign up for the pricey Steps 1-12 workbooks. Bonus if you bring a friend, like Full Tilt.
The Final Table of Event 7, No Limit Hold’em, unfolded on a tiny area cordoned by scuffed brass rails. For Just Be Yourself, that’s where participants will beat each other with foam bats while screaming “Can you hear me now, Mommy!,” but the action now was droopy-lidded. The long slog. I plopped down in the modest audience seats while the satty players queued up to register. They were young and scruffy, day bags slung over their shoulders. They might be crashing overnight and playing tomorrow—or heading home in an hour. It had been a long time since I’d been in the presence of non-Vegas players. These guys, I recognized them by their groans.
After a crappy meal downstairs, Helen and Lex grabbed their table draws. Slim food picking on this side of Harrah’s, but they had enough fuel to get them to midnight. If they didn’t bust.
The Noble Hustle Page 11