Ship It Holla Ballas! (11 page)

By 2005, online poker had grown into a $2.4 billion industry. Scores of competitors had entered the business, and the fight to attract and retain clients turned increasingly aggressive. Their number one target: college students, a clientele blessed with easy access to the Internet, their first credit cards, plenty of unstructured time, and a national gambling law that barred them from setting foot inside a brick-and-mortar casino.

Take Absolute Poker, which in an effort to lure college students to its site began enlisting campus representatives to recruit players into free tournaments, rewarding winners with real-money deposits into newly opened online accounts the way a drug dealer hands out the first taste for free. Absolute also bought promotions during halftime of N.C.A.A. basketball games to advertise their “Win Your Tuition” campaign, a series of tournaments promising a free semester of college to the champion. The event attracted more than eight thousand students from more than three hundred schools.

Setting aside any argument about the chicken and the egg, hundreds of thousands of college kids were playing online poker as if it were the fifth class on their schedule. Or the only class. According to a report published by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, 20 percent of all college students played online poker at least once a month in 2005. A study from the University of Connecticut’s Health Center claimed that one out of every four college-age players fit the clinical definition of a pathological gambler.

Stories of kids failing out of school and amassing substantial debts were becoming commonplace. Gamblers Anonymous meetings experienced an unexpected shift in demographics.

A few of the most desperate even resorted to crime: Two months before Irieguy hosted his heads-up tournament at the Venetian in Las Vegas, Greg Hogan, the president of his class at Lehigh University, walked into a Wachovia Bank in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, handed the teller a note claiming he had a gun, and made off with nearly $3,000 in cash. It was enough to get the nineteen-year-old son of a Baptist minister sentenced to twenty-two months in prison.

But not enough to pay off the $5,000 debt he’d accrued playing online poker.

17

Ship It Holla Ballas is original and patented henceforth.

—Apathy

TORONTO, CANADA
(March 2006)

Good2cu is already stuck a grand when his Internet connection craps out.

He can handle losing a thousand dollars in a day. He’s done it before. The first time he felt sick to his stomach for two days. The second time was pretty goddamn aggravating, but at least it didn’t make him want to puke. Soon the number 1,000 becomes a video game score, a regular part of his daily routine. Right now he’s working on his tolerance for five-figure swings—after running his bankroll up to nearly $100,000 in the weeks following his trip to Vegas, he’s lost $30,000.

Just a number on a screen,
he assures himself.

The $2,000 he’s about to lose, on the other hand, is driving him batshit crazy. The money is spread across eight Sit N Gos. By the time his Internet connection is restored, the tournaments are likely to be over. He can live with getting outdrawn, or even outplayed, but losing money to technical glitches feels like the worst kind of bad luck.

Good2cu is ready to eat the loss when he realizes he might not have to. He calls Apathy and explains the situation.

“Epic fail,” says Apathy. “Maybe you should remember to pay your cable bill. Or have you gone busto since Vegas?”

“I actually went on a sick heater as soon as I got back,” Good2cu replies. “This week, not so much. Where are you anyway? You logged in yet?”

“Toronto. Chilling here for a few days. Recovering from Monte Carlo.”

“How was Monte Carlo?”

“I’ll tell you all about it later.” Apathy uses Good2cu’s user name and password to sign into the poker site. “You’ve got seventy grand in your account? Nice. You
have
been running well.”

“Don’t fuck it up.”

Logged in as Good2cu, Apathy finishes all eight of his friend’s Sit N Gos for him. Not only does he save Good2cu from taking a $2,000 loss, he actually makes $400 for him, news he’s happy to report.

“I owe you big time,” says Good2cu. “How about I ship you half the profit?”

“Why don’t you just buy me some drinks? How about this weekend? Inyaface and I are going out with some friends. You should come on up.”

“Holla!”

*   *   *

Good2cu has been to Canada a few times, both to play poker and to exploit the lower drinking age, but never to Toronto and never with Apathy as a guide.

They start off at the bar where Apathy worked the previous summer, making just over minimum wage busing trays of food up three flights of stairs, shooting the shit with the old barflies during the moments of calm. A charming summer job, at least until he enjoyed a string of large cashes in online tournaments.

After Apathy quit, his friend Inyaface was rewarded for staying onboard with a promotion to bartender. Inyaface still works there part time while attending the University of Toronto, even though he really doesn’t have to—he often earns more in a single night playing online poker than he does tending bar for an entire month.

The screen name reflects a Canadian sense of irony—in real life, Inyaface is anything but. He’s a mild-mannered twenty-year-old college kid with a round, pleasant face and a self-deprecating sense of humor. He likes that the name makes him sound like an asshole. Players tend to give more action to people they think are assholes.

He’s an excellent hockey player too, not the aggressive type who delivers ferocious body checks into the boards, but a goalie, protecting the net for his college team. If every group of friends has a Responsible Guy, someone who can sober up when the cops are knocking at the door or whose parents trust him with the car, Inyaface is that guy. Which helps explain how he’s managed to keep his job at the bar, despite five mornings a week of hockey practice, a full course load at school, and poker almost every night.

In other words, he’s the opposite of Apathy, who, despite their many differences, has been one of his best friends since the seventh grade. Like connecting jigsaw puzzle pieces, they complement each other perfectly.

Convincing Inyaface that it’s a little lame to hang out at the same bar you work at, Apathy steers him, their friend Nick, and Good2cu to King Street, where they bounce from one club to the next before landing at the C Lounge, an upscale nightclub with plush couches and VIP cabanas. Apathy orders a round of Jägermeister shots. Good2cu buys a $200 bottle of Ketel One.

“Damn,” says Nick. “You guys are such
ballas.
Like you’ve got money to burn.”

“Literally,” says Inyaface, smirking at Apathy. “Tell them about Monte Carlo.”

The legal gambling age in the United States is twenty-one and Canada doesn’t host very many major tournaments, but in Europe you only have to be eighteen to gamble and there are plenty of big events to choose from. Apathy and Inyaface just got back from playing in the European Poker Tour’s end-of-the-season championship, the Grand Final in Monte Carlo. They’d flown there hoping to make a big splash, which they did, even if it wasn’t in quite the way they’d imagined.

Apathy’s cheeks turn red. “What can I say? I got wasted and acted like a donkey. Inyaface and I were debating whether you could light a cigar with a euro note, like whether it would actually burn.”

“Turns out the hundred burns the cleanest,” adds Inyaface.

“I was on tilt after getting knocked out of the tournament,” Apathy explains.

“Seriously?” says Good2cu. “You? Tilting?”

Apathy shrugs. “Happens to the best of us. I’d gotten deep in the main event when some joker sucked out on me and sent me to the rail. Back in our hotel room I got
completely
hammered and allegedly did some stupid stuff.”

“‘Allegedly’ my ass,” says Inyaface. “I’ve got photos of you lighting the C-note. You going to tell them about the furniture?”

From the way his eyes are crinkled and his mouth’s upturned it’s hard to tell if Apathy’s smiling or cringing. “We were staying in this sick hotel. Sixth floor with a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean. We’d just finished eating room service, and there was this little dock below and, you know, it looked like a good target. So I tried to hit it with a plate.”

“How’d that go?” Good2cu asks.

“Missed by a mile. But the second one was a lot closer. When we ran out of plates, I switched to glasses.”

“Then a coffeepot,” says Inyaface. “Then the furniture. End table. Lamps. The armchair. Good thing the mattress wouldn’t fit through the door.”

“Hitting that dock,” Apathy admits, “was a lot harder than I thought it would be.”

“Oh, snap,” says Nick. “How much trouble did you get in?”

“The hotel charged me an extra thirty-five hundred euros to cover the damages.”

“Ouch.”

“I know. I probably should have fought it. There’s no way that armchair was worth five hundred euros.”

Good2cu’s donkey laugh can be heard in every corner of the club. “That sounds so rock star. Man, I wish I could have been there to see it.”

“It was pretty hilarious. But I felt like a complete asshole afterward. I donated twenty percent of my bankroll to charity the second I got home. Figured I could use the karma points.”

“Hey,” says Good2cu. “You guys planning on going to the World Series this summer?”

“Sure, why not?” Apathy replies. “We should rent the pimpest suite the Rio’s got for the whole six weeks.”

“If we’re going to be there that long,” says Inyaface, “we should rent a house.”

“I don’t know,” Apathy says. “That sounds like a lot of motivation.”

“I’ll do it,” says Inyaface, voicing the familiar lament of the Responsible Guy.

“Ship it!”

“Holla!”

Nick smiles at them drunkenly. “You guys are such ballas,” he slurs. “‘Ship this ridiculously expensive bottle of vodka over here! Holla! Ship these fine-looking ladies over there! Holla!’ You know what you guys are? You’re Ship It Holla Ballas!”

“Oh, man, that’s it!” says Good2cu.

“That’s what?” Apathy asks.

“The name of our crew!”

“The Ship It Holla Ballas?” Inyaface laughs. “That might be the dumbest name I’ve ever heard.”

“No way,” says Apathy. “It’s perfect. ESPN is going to fucking love us!”

18

In the beginning if one of us found ten dollars on the street, it would’ve gone into the bankroll. It was like a commune or something. But I don’t know why I didn’t see that Dutch is basically a con artist. Maybe I was smoking too much weed.

—Gank to
Rolling Stone

For as long as there has been poker, there have been poker “crews.” In the 1800s, when the game as we know it today first appeared on steamboats traveling up and down the Mississippi River, cardsharps worked in teams to cheat unsuspecting high rollers out of their money, dealing useful cards to each other from the bottom of the deck and using signals to relay the strength of their hands.

By the middle of the twentieth century, such rampant cheating had for the most part been eradicated, but there were still legitimate reasons for players to work together as a team. In 1957, three young Texas road gamblers, Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson, Thomas “Amarillo Slim” Preston, and Brian “Sailor” Roberts, decided to pool their bankrolls and start traveling together. “Any one of us could pinch-hit for the other when he was tired or just not feelin’ right,” Amarillo Slim later recalled.

The partnership was intended to prevent any of them from ever going broke, but the most important resource they shared turned out to be something other than money: they supported one another emotionally and intellectually as well. “After a long session, none of us could hardly sleep from being so wound up,” Slim said. “And we would just stay awake for hours talking about the hands we played that night, the players in the game, and all different sorts of strategies. Imagine what it would have been like if Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant, Vince Lombardi, and George ‘Papa Bear’ Halas traveled together for ten years and did nothing but talk football. Or if Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch, and George Soros went around the world picking stocks together and exchanging investment ideas. Let’s just say there was a lot of knowledge changing hands.”

Later, the concept of a crew would undergo another evolution, offering its members something that Dolly, Slim, and Sailor never could have imagined:

Media exposure.

*   *   *

One of the stories overshadowed by Chris Moneymaker’s 2003 victory at the World Series of Poker was the twelfth-place finish by a twenty-three-year-old prodigy named Russ “Dutch” Boyd.

“Prodigy” is a word that gets thrown around loosely, but how else do you describe a kid from Missouri, raised by a single mom bouncing between welfare and minimum wage, who starts taking college classes at the age of eleven and is accepted to law school three years later?

After earning a Juris Doctor from the University of Missouri, eighteen-year-old Dutch chose to follow the same path as Matt Damon’s character in
Rounders,
shelving the idea of practicing law in favor of playing poker for a living. Settling in Silicon Valley with his brother Robert, a computer whiz who helped build one of the world’s first high-speed Internet backbones, Dutch spent his nights selling men’s underwear at Macy’s so he could spend his days playing poker in the rundown card rooms that dot the San Francisco Peninsula.

Dutch loved the idea of online poker and was an early adopter, but hated its execution. The most popular site at the time, Planet Poker, didn’t offer tournaments or any cash games other than Hold’em or draw, and the frequent software crashes in the middle of hands were infuriating and occasionally expensive.

Sitting in a hot tub at 3:00
A.M.
, twenty-year-old Dutch and nineteen-year-old Robert decided they could do better. They borrowed $80,000 of seed money from friends and family, and Robert, who had always wanted to create video games, began writing one.