Ship It Holla Ballas! (26 page)

The bartender, who has been drinking as much as everybody else, starts making out with one of the guests, who guides her into the Jacuzzi. He orally pleasures her on the edge of the hot tub, setting some sort of record for the number of
entendres
that can be milked out of “wet bar.” On the other side of the glass doors, half of the party jostles for a better view.

The next morning, Good2cu wraps a towel around his waist and walks from room to room, surveying the damage. People are passed out in every corner of the suite, several sporting fresh hickeys and bruises they won’t remember acquiring. One guest wakes up in the hallway with a dim memory of betting—and losing—$100,000 on a single hand of blackjack. Food and drink are spilled everywhere. Artwork has been removed from the walls, apparently mistaken for party favors. A used condom floats in the pool.

The hotel bill, with damages, will exceed $20,000, but no one will complain. The night will be reconstructed and reexamined on the message boards,
Rashomon
-style, for weeks to come.

Good2cu drops the towel and slips into the infinity pool, resting the back of his head against its edge. Even by the light of day, the Las Vegas Strip seems to twinkle like a cluster of stars and the horizon looks every bit as infinite and full of possibility as it did the night before. He can’t think of a place he’d rather be. It’s perfect—as long as you don’t get too close to the edge.

47

I die a lot in my dreams.

—Raptor

FORT WORTH, TEXAS
(August 2007)

After six weeks in the Balla compound, Raptor is ready to return to the relative normalcy of Fort Worth. It only takes a few days of normalcy for the gloom to creep back in.

He can’t make sense of it. He’s got more than a million dollars safely earning interest in money market funds. A sweet car. A girlfriend who not only tolerates his lifestyle but genuinely cares about him. A house that’s nicer than the one he grew up in. And he’s only twenty-one. He knows he should be doing cartwheels down the street.

So why do I feel like crap all of the time?

He dreams about dying. He gets shot in the chest and run over by cars. One recurring nightmare has him happily zooming along in a Corvette … until—BAM!—he gets hit by a truck. The car crumples in on him, slowly squeezing him to death, before he wakes up in a sweat.

Maybe it’s his diet. During his time in Vegas this summer, the four basic food groups were pastries, waffle fries, cheeseburgers, and sour gummy bears. He begins to keep a precise log of everything he ingests. He reads about nutrition and, for a week or two, flirts with veganism.

Maybe it’s the lethargy that comes from sitting at his computer all day long. He starts working out five or six times a week, practicing High Intensity Training to burn his muscles to the point of failure. He tries to stay offline as much as possible, carving out time to go shopping with his girlfriend or see a film.

One night he’s driving home from the movie theater with a couple of friends when traffic slows to a crawl. Three lanes are being funneled into one. They creep into a disorienting haze of blinking colored lights where emergency vehicles are gathered under an overpass. Floodlights illuminate a circle of traffic cones in the center of the road. A group of medics mill about inside the perimeter, blithely shooting the breeze like they might at a cocktail party.

As his car inches past, Raptor gets a better look. It’s a girl, about his age, skinny as a basketball pole. She’s got black hair. Pockmarks on her face. A tattoo of a black star on her wrist. One of her legs is twisted at an almost impossible angle.

How long has she been lying there like that? Nobody’s helping her, so she has to be dead, right? Why hasn’t anyone bothered to move her? Shouldn’t they cover her up?

The next morning, Raptor’s not sure whether the girl was real or part of another morbid dream. He scans the local paper. It doesn’t take long to find the story. She was twenty-one, a cashier at Central Market, a gourmet grocery store where he’s shopped dozens of times. According to witnesses, she got into an argument with her boyfriend, jumped out of his car when he stopped for a light, and leapt from the overpass onto the highway below.

Raptor tries to shake the image of her body, all mangled and twisted in the middle of the road. How unfazed the medics seemed to be in the presence of a life cut so short.
Just another jumper,
he imagines them saying.

He can’t see himself ever getting depressed enough to jump off a bridge, but at the same time he knows he isn’t getting any happier. He gets a momentary thrill every time he achieves one of the many goals he’s set for himself, but that joy never lingers long. And when he tries to articulate his feelings, either to himself or others, he feels guilty about having such a woe-is-me attitude.

I’m only twenty-one, and I’ve already earned more money than most people in the world will see in a lifetime. What do I really have to complain about? God, I’m such a whiny emo bitch.

Hoping to shove the darkness to the back of his mind, he orders a few more books on nutrition, vows to put in an extra day at the gym, and gets back to grinding online.

48

If I ever want to return to college, it’s really going to present some problems for me.

—Good2cu

EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN
(Fall 2007)

Shortly after Good2cu returns to Michigan State, an Australian newspaper—the
Sydney Morning Herald
—runs an article about the explosive growth of online poker. The piece is effusive in its admiration for him and his friends:

In the world of online poker, they’re known as ballas (pronounced ballers). They party hard, spend big and live large. Their website boasts of $40,000 nights on the town complete with strippers, limos and Kristal [sic] champagne. And while most of us would baulk at wagering $50, let alone $500, on a hand, ballas bet big to win big.

The author, who has obviously relied on ShipItHollaBalla.com as a primary source, portrays Good2cu as the very exemplar of the high-rolling excitement that’s luring so many people to the game. According to the article, Good2cu made $145,000 last year while riding in limousines and partying with strippers. “Not bad,” writes the journalist, “for a 22 year old who lists ‘travelling the world,’ ‘fine dining,’ and ‘waking up after 3 pm’ among his hobbies.”

Good2cu chuckles. He isn’t twenty-two. He won’t turn twenty-one for another couple of days. And the strippers and limos feel like part of a blurry past. His current reality is a shitty off-campus house that he shares with three guys he’s been friends with since high school. They’re united by their love of partying, so there’s plenty of debauchery, but this is still East Lansing. A big night out means paying five dollars for a plastic cup at a keg party and, if you’re lucky, hooking up with a sorority girl.

Still, he’s pretty sure coming back to school was the right decision. The only mistake he made was signing up for a full course load, a situation he quickly rectifies by dropping everything but Econ and Interpersonal Communications, leaving him plenty of time to play poker.

The one thing the article does get right is his income. Well, sort of. Since his return from Vegas, he’s actually been doing quite a bit better than that. In his first month back at school, he adds another $100,000 to his bankroll, averaging $700 an hour in the process.

Flush enough to throw himself a twenty-first birthday party the campus won’t soon forget, he hires a DJ and buys a dozen cases of Dom Pérignon. The event will never be mistaken for what took place at the Playboy Suite, but by East Lansing standards, it’s Mardi Gras and Burning Man rolled into one.

The party is hardly indicative of his (second) collegiate experience. Most nights Good2cu holes up in his room, headphones on, grinding away. How can he afford
not
to, given all the uncertainty surrounding online poker’s future? He feels like he’s got to keep making as much money as he can for as long as he can.

That’s the rational argument, anyway. The emotional component is this: he loves playing poker and can’t imagine doing anything else. He misses the total immersion in the poker world he experienced during the summer. Discussing hands and trading strategies. Tapping into the collective energy of a group of guys who are starting to prove that they have a genuine talent for the game. The nonstop party atmosphere maintained by his current roommates is starting to feel less like fun and more like a distraction from the work that he’s supposed to be doing, that he
wants
to be doing.

He puts in so many hours at the table in October that he only manages to add two new posts to the Web site. The first announces that TravestyFund just made the final table of a tournament in Aruba. The second congratulates him for winning the $800,000 first-place prize. TravestyFund’s hot streak will earn him a place on
CardPlayer
magazine’s list of the top one hundred players of the year, where he will join TheUsher and FieryJustice.

His friends’ success scares Good2cu a little, like they’ve all hopped aboard a train that’s rapidly speeding away while he’s left standing at the station. But in his shitty off-campus house he’s still the resident tycoon. He pretty much pays for all of the non-rent expenses because, why not? The guys he lives with are usually broke, so he’s happy to help them out, buying groceries, alcohol, and the occasional bag of weed. When one of his housemates, on sabbatical from both school and the workforce, can no longer come up with his share of the rent, everyone just assumes Good2cu will pick up the slack. The presumption bothers him.

What the hell am I doing here?

It’s meant to be a rhetorical question, so he’s surprised when he gets an actual response. From some deep recess in his brain, he can hear the advice Irieguy gave him a year and a half ago, now reverberating louder than ever: “Vegas is where you want to be if you are a cardplayer.”

Good2cu doesn’t bother officially dropping his last two classes, believing his complete absence should get the point across, and by the time he informs his housemates of his decision to leave, he’s already settled in his new condo in Las Vegas.

49

My life has recently been single-mindedly focused on my career as I spend eight hours a day, six days a week playing poker. I wish I spent more time away from my computer, but as a job I can hardly think of anything I’d rather do. I don’t know how long the games will be beatable, or how long I can sustain this level of play and I’m going to try to make as much money as I can.

—Good2cu

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
(January 2008)

Sky Las Vegas is a brand-new, forty-five-story tower of luxury condos right in the middle of the action on Las Vegas Boulevard, a five-minute drive to the Bellagio and the biggest cash games in the world. Good2cu’s two-bedroom rental comes with granite countertops, marble floors, and an unobstructed view of the Strip. He spends $9,000 stocking his bar: liquor, a few cases of Dom, as per usual, but also some fine red wines he’s read about—he’s not living in a frat house anymore.

Now that he’s twenty-one he can finally enter the major tournaments, and there’s no shortage of them in Las Vegas. He arrives in town just in time to play in the Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic at the Bellagio. On the second day he finds himself at the same table as one of his poker heroes, Daniel Negreanu.

“So,” asks Negreanu, “you an online pro?”

“Me? No, I won a five dollar satellite on PokerStars to get here,” lies Good2cu, inwardly chuckling.

In Michigan he felt like a minor celebrity; here he’s almost completely anonymous. Aside from TheUsher and Irieguy, who both live about ten minutes away, Good2cu doesn’t know anyone in Las Vegas, but hopes to quickly expand his social circle, starting with the dancers at the Spearmint Rhino.

“One of my top priorities here in Vegas is to be on a first-name basis with the top strippers in town,” he blogs. “Learning their names should not be hard, since there are only around five or six stripper names. Hopefully they learn mine quick.”

But a part of Good2cu embraces the anonymity as an opportunity to reinvent himself once again. In the past several months his “balla” persona has started to feel like a caricature of itself, and it’s beginning to bother him.

He gets two or three e-mails every week from complete strangers calling him an arrogant idiot or an attention whore. Someone even compares him to Brandi Hawbaker. Every post he makes on Two Plus Two invites a flurry of abusive ad hominem attacks.

You’re a loser.

You suck at poker.

Your forehead is too big.

Your forehead is so big it should be called a “fivehead.”

You look like John Edwards … with Down syndrome.

Some of these insults are given life in distorted pictures created by Two Plus Twoers with rudimentary Photoshop skills and too much time on their hands. Good2cu laughs but it’s still painful. He’s self-aware enough to know that he’s asking for most of the abuse, thanks to the image he’s created for himself. What bothers him the most is the way it’s interfering with anyone taking him seriously as a poker player. And his performance at the Doyle Brunson Classic shows how ready he is to be taken seriously: he tallies his first two major tournament scores, cashing twice in the series for almost $40,000 each time.

Good2cu goes into problem-solving mode. He starts a thread on Two Plus Two’s Psychology forum titled, “Why do people on the internet (2p2) hate me?” He knows he’s painting a target on his back, and plenty of zingers do get hurled his way, but some of the replies are genuinely heartfelt and sympathetic. “Ship It Holla Ballas? Really?” writes one respondent. “You’re better than that; I don’t even know you, but you’ve got to be better than that.”