Ship It Holla Ballas! (17 page)

Irieguy may not be able to teach these kids much about strategy, but he’s happy to dispense wisdom from his other realms of expertise. Like how the drug MDMA can permanently affect cognitive function (hint: not for the better). Or whether or not Raptor and Good2cu should use fake IDs to enter World Series events, an idea they’re both seriously considering. (Hell no: The IRS, gripped by its own version of The Moneymaker Effect—the opportunity to tax the many millions that will be doled out to the winners—has been pressuring the tournament’s organizers to check and double-check IDs; getting caught could result in a lifetime ban from the world’s most prestigious poker tournament.)

Irieguy also has a few opinions about dining etiquette. He’ll teach Good2cu, for example, that women never pay. And when the Ballas finish their meal at the Outback, he shows them how to resolve the inevitable clusterfuck over who owes what with a simple game called Credit Card Roulette.

Everyone hands a credit card to the server, who shuffles the cards and returns them to their respective owners one at a time. Whoever’s card gets drawn last pays the entire bill. The game immediately becomes a Ship It Holla Balla ritual. Tonight TheUsher gets stuck with the $400 tab.

After dinner Irieguy heads home, while the young Ballas pile into cars and drive to the Rio All Suites Hotel and Casino, two red and purple glass towers a half-mile west of the Strip. TheUsher, who’s lost another contest, has to ride in Apathy’s trunk the entire way. They pull up to the valet, exiting in unlikely numbers from every conceivable orifice like a circus troupe from a clown car, and enter poker’s new holy ground.

In the months following Moneymaker’s victory, Benny Binion’s heirs took advantage of the spotlight cast on their father’s casino to sell the Horseshoe to Harrah’s Entertainment, a gaming corporation that owns dozens of hotels and casinos around the world. Harrah’s wasn’t particularly interested in the decrepit gaming hall—they sold the building a few days later, holding on to the asset that actually motivated the deal: the World Series of Poker.

Last year, Harrah’s moved the tournament to the more upscale Rio, staging it in its Amazon Room, a banquet hall that makes up for a lack of character with sheer size. It’s as big as Grand Central Station and, right now, equally hectic. The air is filled with what sounds like a massive swarm of crickets, the familiar hum of several thousand anxious poker players continuously riffling their chips. Every one of the two-hundred-plus tables in the room is full, and every aisle leading to those tables is packed with fans. From above, Mount Rushmore–sized photos of the Main Event’s past winners silently observe the spectacle, betraying no hint of what would surely be amazement at what Benny Binion’s little marketing ploy has turned into.

Good2cu notices one of the men in the photos, 2001 world champion Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, sitting at a table, alongside two other players he’s grown up watching on TV, Mike Matusow and Daniel Negreanu. It’s chilly inside the misleadingly named Amazon Room, but that isn’t what’s raising goose bumps on his arms. He wants to run over to the table and ask for autographs. Shit, he wants to
play
against these guys.

Raptor knows exactly what Good2cu’s thinking. “We’ll get our chance,” he tells his friend. “Just not this year.”

28

Someone on Two Plus Two was like, “Where are the chicks? You guys are losers. You’re not hanging out with any girls.”

—Inyaface

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
(June 2006)

With the exception of Inyaface, none of the Ballas are enrolled in college anymore. They would never complain about the loss of their academic lives, but there are certain rites of passage built into the collegiate experience they can’t help but yearn for. One of them is Spring Break.

This is their Spring Break.

If you’ve ever rented a vacation house with a large group of friends, then you’re no doubt familiar with the ritual that is the first trip to the grocery store. Loading up on food for the week is more than an act of self-sufficiency; it’s the symbolic start to an adventure, a celebration of freedom (“Let’s buy ten boxes of Fruity Pebbles and eat them for dinner!”) and a warm-up exercise in group dynamics (“Who, besides you, is going to eat
that
?”)

They drive directly from the Rio to a twenty-four-hour Food 4 Less. This time it’s Good2cu’s turn to ride in the trunk, and he emerges with a full head of steam. His rowdiness is contagious. They blow through the store like a hurricane, twelve hands transferring whatever strikes their fancy from the shelves to their shopping carts.

It’s after midnight, so the store’s manager can’t help but notice six extremely loud kids running down the aisles, spewing profanities, using their carts as bumper cars. He confronts them, wondering aloud if they actually intend to buy any of this stuff. Two of the carts contain nothing but liquor and beer. Another has been reserved exclusively for fireworks.

“Don’t worry,” Good2cu assures him. “We’re rich.”

The manager moves to another part of the store, but Inyaface is willing to concede that he might have a point. “Do we really need all this shit?” He points to the cart filled with smoke bombs and bottle rockets. “Why don’t we make a ‘Stupid Pile’ for the stuff that’s not essential.”

After some debate, the Ballas admit they might have gotten carried away in the healthy-eating department and move a single carton of strawberries, the lone fruit or vegetable to make it into their carts, into the Stupid Pile.

There’s no line at the checkout counter, but it still takes the cashier almost twenty minutes to ring them up. “A hundred bucks says it’s over fifteen hundred,” says Good2cu.

“I’ll take the under,” Jman replies.

“Book it!”

The receipt is four feet long. Good2cu wins by a comfortable margin.

“How do you want to pay?” asks the cashier.

“Shot not!” yells TheUsher, raising a finger to his nose.

The others quickly follow suit, but Unarmed is the slowest. He hands the cashier his credit card. They cram the groceries into their trunks, all except for the fireworks, and race home down Flamingo Road, shooting bottle rockets and lobbing smoke bombs from one car to the other, laughing the entire way.

29

For a long time they were two very separate worlds, and the people in the different worlds didn’t like each other very much. The Internet players thought all the tournament players sucked at poker and were just lucky to be famous, and the live players thought Internet players were arrogant and young and out of control. Both sides were probably right.

—Good2cu

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
(July 2006)

The house doesn’t exactly turn out to be a pussy magnet.

Apathy and Inyaface lure a couple of girls from Canada back to the lair, and some friends of friends from Michigan stop by to visit Good2cu for a couple of nights on their way across the country. Beyond that, nearly all of the interactions the Ballas have with the opposite sex take place in strip clubs. The wild parties they imagined have turned out to be a bunch of dudes getting drunk and high and breaking things. The dream was the Playboy Mansion. The reality is a frat house.

Alpha Ship It Pi.

They throw beer cans at walls and have shoot-outs with bottle rockets inside the house. The place reeks of sweat, pizza, and workout supplements. One night, Good2cu gets drunk and throws a pool ball through a window. The ball travels across the property line through a window next door. When the angry neighbors arrive at their door, threatening to call the police, Good2cu sheepishly blames the incident on an imaginary “drunk friend” who’s hiding upstairs. He defuses the situation by offering to pay for
all
their windows to be replaced. With cash.

Membership in the fraternity is fluid. At any given moment it’s hard to say for sure who’s living in the house and who’s just passing through. Raptor spends so much time here he might as well be paying rent, and the “couple of days” Bonafone told them he’d be crashing on one of the couches turns into weeks. Two of Inyaface’s buddies from L.A., intrigued by Good2cu’s posts on the Ship It Holla Balla Web site, have rolled out sleeping bags on the floor.

Up close, the most astonishing thing about the Ballas isn’t their fondness for sophomoric hijinks, but the way these kids seem to be minting money on a daily basis. They gather around the dining-room table each afternoon, sitting in front of computers and chugging sodas. While they’re sharing the same physical space, they rarely cross paths at the online tables. As confident as they are in their own abilities, colluding—even if it were possible—doesn’t interest them, but they do interact in a way that might be just as effective: pooling knowledge, sharing strategies, offering emotional support, and applying enormous peer pressure to play their A games. These communal sessions help the Ballas improve, individually, by leaps and bounds, and Inyaface’s buddies are astonished by the amount of money they’re winning.

Inyaface’s friends aren’t the only ones who have been reading Good2cu’s posts. Complete strangers are finding their way to the Web site, leaving comments that cleave more or less evenly between shout-outs and flames. The plan Good2cu set in motion is starting to deliver results—the Ballas are becoming Internet famous.

Apathy is playing a cash game at the Rio when a Swedish kid introduces himself. It’s H@llingol, a well-known high-stakes player who for a time was crushing the action at PokerStars until he ran into a steamroller named durrrr.

“Wait a minute,” H@llingol says after Apathy identifies himself. “You’re not one of the Ship It Holla Ballas, are you?”

Apathy nods hesitantly, not quite sure how his admission will be received.

“I think that site is great!”

Apathy later runs into Gank—the stoner from The Crew—who also confesses to being a fan.

But there are just as many haters. A polarizing debate takes shape, especially on Two Plus Two, as to whether these kids are living the dream or acting like total idiots. The image that the Ballas have embraced makes them perfect poster children for an emerging subculture that could only have been birthed by the Internet—college dropouts who have struck it rich playing online poker and enjoy spending their newfound wealth conspicuously. The Two Plus Two old-timers tend to see them as trainwrecks in the making, novices who have taken advantage of a few tricks and run lucky for a time, but whose luck will inevitably run out. To their supporters, the Ballas are adventurous souls charting a path into the unknown and having a damn good time along the way.

The mainstream poker world doesn’t see them at all, or at least it hadn’t until now. Very few live pros have done well playing on the Internet. They’ve written off their lack of success to online poker being a different game, the way an NBA star might explain how he got shown up by an unknown in a street game at Harlem’s Rucker Park. And they might have a point. LeBron James wouldn’t be the same player without referees to protect him; Doyle Brunson’s not Doyle Brunson if he can’t stare you in the eyes and read your soul.

But the “unknown” at Rucker Park might very well be a legend on the street, a player who possesses skills polished by thousands of hours spent on the asphalt. There’s an argument to be made that what online players like the Ballas are doing—racking up millions of hands a year online, or what an excited statistician might call a
ginormous
sample size—is a better test of poker skill than that offered by the live game. The more hands you play, the less impact chance will have to wreak havoc on your bottom line.

Chance is the only reason a lot of the well-known live pros are even famous at all. Most of them only garnered mainstream attention after winning a major tournament. But tournaments represent a very small sample size. In such a condensed environment there’s no escaping the vagaries of luck, no matter how flawlessly and patiently you play. All it takes is one unfortunate card to end your day. The winner of most poker tournaments is rarely the best player in the field, but rather the best player who didn’t get unlucky at the wrong time.

Which is why it doesn’t make any sense, at least to the Ship It Holla Ballas, that some luckbox who wins a major live tournament should get so much media attention, while the players who grind out a profit online, day after day, get none.

They used to idolize the pros, cheering for guys like Sammy Farha, Daniel Negreanu, and Phil Hellmuth whenever they saw them on TV. But now that they’re in Las Vegas, observing them in their element, the hero worship is starting to fade. Whether it’s envy or fact, they feel like most of the pros are overrated blowhards.

As for what the pros think of the Ballas:
Who?

So far, online poker’s only noticeable contribution to the live tournament world has come from amateurs—salarymen pursuing the dream that has the entire country and half the world enthralled. Allowing Chris Moneymaker to take $2.5 million out of the poker economy didn’t sit well with all of the pros, but it has paid enormous dividends both in terms of prize money and sponsorship opportunities, thanks to all the dead money that keeps flowing in.

The live pros, when they’ve bothered to acknowledge them at all, have mocked online players. But at this year’s World Series, they are being introduced to an entirely new breed of online player, as the first wave of kids—the eighteen-year-olds who discovered poker watching Moneymaker’s victory on TV and who have been playing on the Internet every day since—have finally turned 21.

At first, their presence is confusing to the veterans. These tournaments carry four- and five-digit entry fees.
Where the hell are these kids getting the money?
Watching them play only deepens the mystery. Tournament newbies generally trend toward caution and respect. Not these kids—they come out firing, playing with hyperaggression, almost as if they’re in a hurry to lose all their chips. And, oh boy, are they cocky.