Ship It Holla Ballas! (21 page)

They’re able to recover the computer in time to make their plane to London, where they check into another luxury hotel and play another $6,500 buy-in EPT event that none of them cashes in. They’re able to laugh off these failed investments because they know they can simply log in to an online card room and make it all back.

This is how Ship It Holla Ballas roll.

36

Religious leaders of all denominations and faiths are seeing gambling problems erode family values. If Congress had not acted, gamblers would soon be able to place bets not just from home computers, but from their cell phones while they drive home from work or their BlackBerries as they wait in line at the movies.

—Representative Jim Leach, (R-IA)

WASHINGTON, D.C.
(September 2006)

It’s nearly fall in the nation’s capitol, and Election Day is approaching. The Republicans, despite controlling the White House and both branches of Congress, are worried.

With good reason: President George W. Bush’s approval ratings have dropped below 40 percent thanks to, in no particular order, a perceived failure to step up during Hurricane Katrina, rising dismay and hopelessness over America’s involvement in Iraq, and an ongoing scandal surrounding the president’s relationship to a corporate lobbyist named Jack Abramoff. As the president is safely ensconced in his second term, it’s Congress that’s in line to take the expected beating when voters cast their ballots.

In an effort to mobilize the socially conservative wing of the Republican base, House Speaker Dennis Hastert spends the summer pushing forward a red-meat package of ten bills dubbed the “American Values Agenda.” Increased protections for the Pledge of Allegiance, the American flag, and unborn fetuses. Stricter prohibitions against cloning and gay marriage.

Oh, yeah, and a ban on Internet gambling.

The online gambling bill is similar to one that passed the Senate in 2000. For those who enjoy playing the what-if game, the 2000 bill could have terminated the poker boom before it even got started, had it not been scuttled in the House, thanks in large part to the diligent lobbying efforts of Jack Abramoff. Enacting the ban now would help Republicans create distance from the scandal surrounding the lobbyist while appeasing church leaders and anti-gambling groups.

The version that reaches the House floor, merging separate proposals from Representatives Bob Goodlatte of Virginia and Jim Leach of Iowa, would expand the Wire Act—a federal law enacted during the Kennedy administration to prevent gamblers from betting on horse races via telegraph—to include Internet gambling. It doesn’t go after the players themselves, but the financial institutions that handle the payments to and from the online casinos.

Goodlatte-Leach passes the House by a healthy 317–93 margin, but it’s not expected to survive the Senate. There’s not even enough support for the bill to
get
a vote, at least not before Election Day. Goodlatte-Leach appears destined to suffer a quiet demise.

Enter Senator Bill Frist, the Majority Leader who unwittingly added to the Republican woes, a year earlier, when he tried to insert the Senate into the debate over Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman in a vegetative state whose husband sought to remove her from life support. On the day before Congress adjourns for the upcoming elections, Frist holds a vote on a bill called The Port Security Improvement Act. It’s a no-brainer, given the nation’s ongoing War on Terror. Who doesn’t want safer ports? The bill passes unanimously.

But most of the senators fail to notice or otherwise ignore a new provision that was quietly tacked on in the wee hours prior to the vote: Title VIII, better known as the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). Goodlatte-Leach has passed the Senate.

Two weeks later, President Bush signs the bill into law. It won’t do much to sway the elections—the Democratic Party will win a majority in both the House and Senate—but the UIGEA will wreak immediate havoc on the Internet poker industry. Party Poker, home to a whopping 40 percent of the world’s online action, announces that they’ll no longer be serving American players. The site’s corporate parent, the publicly traded British company PartyGaming, watches its stock tank, losing $4 billion in value overnight. Other companies scramble to divest themselves of their American operations, in a couple of cases for a nominal one dollar, in an effort to avoid tangling with the law.

It’s not quite a death knell for online poker: in the short run, many American players simply move their business to PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, privately held companies that are willing to risk tomorrow’s legal complications for today’s increase in market share.

As for the long-term implications, no one knows what to expect. Good2cu bemoans the uncertain future on the Ship It Holla Web site:

It now looks like [online poker] may all be over. I have no idea if I’ll be able to successfully return to the real world. I fear I may be like one of those ex-college athletes who is doomed to talk about his “glory days” for the rest of his life … but if this is the end, it has been one hell of a ride.

37

Now, it’s a strange phenomenon of this digital age that you can partially follow someone’s course in life simply by reading the person’s changing MSN screen name.

—Nick Gair, “Ship It!!!” in
Bluff

NIAGARA FALLS, CANADA
(October 2006)

Like so many other twenty-somethings, Nick Gair is trying to figure out what the hell to do with his life. He’s in a band—Max Galactic and the Cloud of Evil—and harbors dreams of becoming the next John Prine, but admits his fear on his MySpace blog that he’ll never write a song even half as good as “Donald and Lydia.” He has ambitions of becoming a journalist, but on the rare occasions one of the stories he’s written on spec actually elicits a response from an editor, it’s been “thanks, but no thanks.”

Were it not for online poker, he might be forced to try his hand at gainful employment. He’s playing a Sit N Go on PokerStars one day when he notices that Inyaface, a tournament regular and an acquaintance from college, has changed his avatar. His new icon is more of a corporate logo, hot pink text over a purple background, promoting a Web site called ShipItHollaBalla.com. Gair doesn’t know it, but he’s looking at a prize-winning design: Good2cu recently ran a contest on the Ship It Holla Web site, awarding $25 to whomever could create the best-looking logo, an effort to generate buzz—at least familiarity—during the many hours spent grinding at the virtual tables.

And right now, it’s doing exactly what it was intended to do. Gair spends the rest of the day on the Ship It Holla site, reading Good2cu’s accounts of the past summer’s adventures. When he’s finished, Gair still isn’t sure whether the Ballas are poker prodigies or cocky shitheads, but one thing is clear—the stories are entertaining as hell. Reintroducing himself, this time as an interested journalist, he reaches out to Inyaface.

Good news: the entire crew is getting together for a World Poker Tour event in Niagara Falls, an easy drive from Gair’s apartment in Toronto. He can follow their progress in the tournament, perhaps getting lucky enough to see one of the Ballas make the final table.

Bad news: by the time Gair arrives in Niagara Falls, on the second day of the three-day tournament, all of the Ballas have already been eliminated.

But that’s not the worst part.

He’s also missed the chance to see durrrr swim through the fountain just outside the casino’s entrance—fulfilling the terms of a $1,000 prop bet—and sprint naked through a Denny’s for $500 more.

He’s too late to witness their $4,000 adventure in a local strip club and, later, the wild rumpus at the Ballas’s hotel after one of their two new stripper friends, who passed out in Good2cu’s bed, locks herself out of the room, half-dressed and half-awake, and has to call her husband to come pick her up.

Gair has missed all three noise complaints issued by the hotel as well as Raptor’s attempt to assuage the manager with a fully committed imitation of comedian Dave Chappelle impersonating singer Rick James—a performance that was, to put it mildly, politically incorrect, and, as far as the manager was concerned, ample reason for kicking them out of the hotel.

And he didn’t get to see durrrr, in the midst of all the chaos, book another ho-hum $140,000 win.

It seems Gair has missed the entire story. With nowhere to stay and no reason to linger, the Ballas are about to skip town and make the eighty-mile road trip to London, Ontario, where one of Apathy’s friends is throwing a Halloween party.

Apathy notices the aspiring journalist’s disappointment. “You want to come along?”

Gair eagerly accepts.

He follows them to a local Walmart, where he watches them spend $2,000 on Halloween costumes. Durrrr alone drops $500 on a handful of silver necklaces and a business suit he’ll never wear again just so he can tell people he’s Tom Cruise in
Risky Business
. Jman, the crew’s resident funny guy, buys a tutu, tiara, wand, wings, and a large sack of distributable sweets. “I’m the Candy Fairy,” he announces.

Outside the store, the Ballas realize that there’s no way all of the purchases are going to fit in their cars, so they pay a cab driver $270 to ferry their costumes to the party.

Gair will spend three weeks wrestling with insomnia, agonizing over the article’s structure, finally cranking out a draft in a drug- and alcohol-induced frenzy. His first attempt to sell the piece causes him nearly as much pain as the writing.
Canadian Poker Player
magazine rejects it, leading Gair to consider “taking a bath with my toaster.” Out of desperation he submits the article to
Bluff,
an American publication with a much larger circulation. To Gair’s great surprise, the editors love it, although they won’t be able to publish it for another six months.

In a time of twenty-four-hour news cycles and Twitter, six months is an eternity. By the time the article runs, much will have changed for the Ballas. Not so much will change for Gair—the article turns out to be the first and last piece of paid journalism he’ll ever write. He’ll still devote his creative energy to his band, but Max Galactic and the Cloud of Evil will break up a couple of years later when one of its members heads off to law school. Gair will soon find himself studying to become a financial analyst.

He may never write a song or story that moves its audience in quite the same way that “Donald and Lydia” does, but his article for
Bluff
succeeds in capturing the spirit of the Ship It Holla Ballas, circa 2006:

Now, most kids go off to college and do some things they’d rather their parents didn’t know about. The Ballas, around the same age, are up to the same things. However, free from both parental and financial constraints, the Ballas live in a world almost entirely free of rules or boundaries. And, just as there are a range of personalities in the group, the members of the crew engage in various levels of excess.

However, if at any point in the evening someone begins to discuss poker, the atmosphere suddenly changes. Upon the mention of any hand, real or hypothetical, things turn to business. Amidst all the commotion of the frat party, a Balla will consider a proposed situation and offer his sincere opinion of what the correct play is. Although they joke about almost anything else, they take cards very seriously.

The “Ship it Holla Ballas” constantly walk the line between being too-rich and too-young, leading a vacuous lifestyle devoted to foolish spending, and being an inseparable band of comrades, genuine scholars of the science of gambling.

38

Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table.

—Technologist Clay Shirky

EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN
(December 2006)

The Single-Table Tournament Forum isn’t the only destination on Two Plus Two. There is a forum for nearly every variation of poker, from the relatively ancient game of Stud to a new creation called Badugi, and every kind of bankroll, from micro limits to high stakes. There are groups dedicated to politics, travel, and golf. One forum is devoted entirely to discussions about poker legislation; another focuses on the psychology of the game. There’s even a forum
about
the forums, where members can ask questions concerning the inner workings of the Web site.

But the two most popular areas are Beats, Brags, and Variance (BBV)—a place for players to boast about wins and whine about losses—and News, Views, and Gossip (NVG), where they can discuss current events and trade rumors. NVG is also where players go to post jokes, make lists of favorites, create polls, give shout-outs, issue conspiracy theories, vent rage, and laugh at the misfortune of others.

As salacious as some of the NVG threads are, there are limits as to what can actually be said. The rules stated in Two Plus Two’s FAQ are fairly straightforward—participants aren’t allowed to post commercial solicitations or any material that is copyrighted, trademarked, or deemed offensive. Moderators are given the power to edit or delete any post that violates these rules and, in more egregious cases, ban the poster. Back home in Michigan, Good2cu gets a firsthand taste of the “banhammer” when he posts a derogatory comment about poker pro Kathy Liebert and gets suspended from the site for a week.

In 2004, responding to an environment that many perceive as being overly regulated, a group of young poker players start a rival Web site. Neverwin Poker promises uncensored conversations about poker players, by poker players, with little editorial control. Profanity and pornography are not only allowed but encouraged. The site aspires to become the TMZ or Perez Hilton of the poker world, printing the stories that Two Plus Two would never touch, like a well-known poker pro’s secret past as an actor in a fetish porno.

Despite alienating almost everyone over the age of twenty-five, Neverwin Poker generates enough traffic to sell a few banner ads. But one of NWP’s founders, the eponymous Neverwin, has begun to grasp the same idea that Good2cu has been batting around: being Internet famous might be a currency in and of itself.