Ship It Holla Ballas! (28 page)

“How can you tell?”

Trent points to the first DVD Jay’s selected:
Sex and the City
, Season One.

“It’s gonna get lonely in here, yo,” 20K Jay explains, holding up a bottle of lotion and grinning.

News of the bet quickly spreads to the Internet. Trent sets up a live Webcam to monitor Jay’s behavior, streaming the footage on ShipItHollaBalla.com. Good2cu offers a $500 reward to any viewer who catches Jay violating the rules, attracting thousands of visitors to the site.
Card Player
sends a reporter who films a ten-minute segment about the bet for the magazine’s Web site.

A few nights later Good2cu is hanging out at Spearmint Rhino with his buddy tsarrast, who’s dating one of the dancers. She introduces Good2cu to one of her coworkers. He asks her for her number. She gives it to him. And just like that, Good2cu has a girlfriend who’s stripper hot.

He doesn’t want to celebrate prematurely, but, just a few months after leaving Michigan, all his fantasies about life as a professional gambler in Las Vegas seem to be coming true.

52

This explains why people who look too closely at randomness burn out, their emotions drained by the series of pangs they experience. Regardless of what people claim, a negative pang is not offset by a positive one (some psychologists estimate the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one); it will lead to an emotional deficit.

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
Fooled by Randomness

FORT WORTH, TEXAS
(April 2008)

“Hey, guys,” Raptor writes. “Today I would like to talk about something I would imagine most wouldn’t in their first CR blog post … downswings. Currently, I am pulling myself out of the biggest one of my life, ~375K. I was playing in games where I thought I had a pretty good edge, but the swings are just so epic, that sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

It’s the first day of Raptor’s new “job,” if you really want to call it work. About once a week he plays a Sit N Go or a cash game, narrating his thoughts along the way, a presentation that gets turned into an instructional video. He’s also expected to make occasional entries to a blog.

His new bosses are only a couple years older than he is. Green Plastic and Muddywater met in 2005 at the University of Illinois, where both were developing reputations as successful online players. Tired of answering the same questions over and over about how to win at the game, they created videos of themselves playing real hands, describing the thought process behind each move, and posted them on a Web site. No good deed goes unpunished: they were quickly besieged with requests for more. So they decided to make it worth their while, offering access to their growing catalogue of poker how-tos for a monthly fee.

Three years and ten thousand subscribers later, CardRunners has become the world’s largest poker training Web site. They’re making a push to get even bigger, having persuaded Lee Jones to ditch his job with the European Poker Tour to come onboard as chief operating officer. They’re also bringing in some fresh talent to join their team of instructors, such as the young online poker legend who once took $450 and turned it into $20,000 in just thirty-six hours.

Raptor doesn’t need the money. For him, it’s more of a lateral career move. Lately, he’s been feeling like if he really wants to be a professional poker player, then he needs to fully commit and put himself in the best position to succeed. That means moving to Las Vegas and pursuing a sponsorship deal.

He figures making videos for CardRunners is a great way to increase his marketability in a way that doesn’t make him want to puke. While he loves all of the Ship It Holla Ballas as individuals, he’s always been a little too self-conscious to promote himself as part of the group, politely declining whenever Good2cu invited him to post on the site. CardRunners, on the other hand, is a highly respected company within the industry, generating more than $3 million in revenue the previous year.

There’s more: Green Plastic and Muddywater are currently working out the details of a partnership with Full Tilt Poker that, should everything fall into place, could make Raptor a sponsored pro on the site. This would be an incredible opportunity, as Full Tilt has become one of the biggest online poker sites in the world. Ever since Party Poker’s departure from the American market two years ago, Full Tilt has been battling for supremacy with PokerStars. So far it’s been a dead heat, with PokerStars corralling most of the online tournament action and Full Tilt hosting the bigger cash games.

Raptor already spends most of his time on Full Tilt, so the idea of getting paid to play there is more than enough incentive to encourage him to make a few videos. All he’s got to do is talk while he plays, remembering to keep the swearing to a minimum.

He isn’t so sure what to make of the blog. The other pros on the site mostly use the space to discuss interesting hands, linking to videos that will hopefully encourage casual readers to become paying customers. But when Raptor sits down to write his first post, he has trouble focusing on any particular hands. He’s too consumed by the agita that has accompanied the biggest downswing of his career.

Over the last two weeks, he’s lost nearly $400,000.

He knows, intellectually, that these kinds of swings are a normal part of the “nosebleeds” he’s been testing, games where the typical buy-in is $60,000 and pots often climb into six-figure territory. His bankroll is large enough to withstand the volatility. Aside from his own continuing success at the tables, he has made several very successful investments in other players and still has a stable of affiliates generating a steady income for him each month. Spreadsheets help him keep track of all his assets—online poker accounts, bank accounts, cars, real estate—down to the last dollar. While his contemporaries are graduating college and scrambling for crappy entry-level jobs, Raptor has already built a net worth close to $3 million.

So a $400,000 loss shouldn’t bother him too much. But he can’t help thinking about the money in real-world terms: he’s lost a dozen nice cars, a house, a retirement nest egg. Which only gets him more aggravated, because this is the kind of thinking that has the potential to make it even worse.

You have to blow off the losses, call it a bad day at the office, and move on. Your bankroll is just a number on a screen. The cards don’t care whether you’re running hot or cold; neither should you. Psychological distress is just noise that will distract you from picking up the signals you should be paying attention to if you want to stay on your A game.

But right now the noise is
REALLY FUCKING LOUD.
It’s pounding in his skull as he sits down to write his first blog entry for CardRunners, so how can he possibly write about anything else? Before he knows it, he’s poured nearly a thousand words onto the page, an unguarded inquiry into his prospects for a sane life given the occupational hazards of his chosen line of work. As he looks over what he’s written, he worries for a moment that he might be revealing too much. But this is the Facebook Age—everybody overshares. He hits the
PUBLISH
button, flinging his rant out into the world.

It feels so cathartic he’s ready to do it again the very next day. This time he makes an effort to do what he’s supposed to, describing a few hands he played the night before, but soon finds himself shifting gears.

“Just so everyone knows,” he warns his readers, “this is NOT going to be a dedicated poker blog. I do lots of other things rather than poker and fully intend to include those things in this blog. I am trying to expand my ‘horizons’ and try to get out of the habit of just waking up and getting on the computer for fourteen hours a day. I know a lot of people struggle with this as well, so maybe this can help us both.”

He starts blogging almost every single day about whatever strikes his fancy: the Texas Rangers game he took his dad to, the second season of
Lost,
the video games he’s playing. He provides obsessively meticulous accounts of his various exercise regimens and diets, offering the precise details of his workouts and breaking each meal down into calories, fat, carbohydrates, fiber, and protein.

He frequently ruminates about the role poker plays in his life—negative, he suspects, as these days it seems to be generating far more pain than pleasure. He’s not even a month into the job when he comes right out and admits that lately he’s had “no desire whatsoever to play poker.”

He knows he’s not exactly inspiring his readers; he’s just being honest. The blog is a place where he can say the things he’s too polite to utter in real life. He describes a dinner he’s forced to attend with a bunch of people he hardly knows. When he mentions, between bites, that he’s thinking about buying a house in Las Vegas, the relative strangers at the table start hammering him with questions.

“So poker’s treating you well? What’s your strategy? How much money have you made? Do you want to play heads-up sometime?”

And finally: “Dude, can I crash at your place the next time I’m out there?”

Raptor goes mute for the rest of the meal, afraid to give his new “friends” another opening to hit him up for strategic advice, free lessons, or a place to stay. He pulls out his phone and pretends to send text messages, hoping they’ll take the hint and leave him alone.

When he’s finally able to escape, Raptor returns home to an in-box inundated with Facebook friend requests from people he doesn’t know and e-mails asking if he’d be interested in meeting up for drinks or doing some coaching. He resists the urge to rip off snarky replies, instead using his blog to vent his frustrations, relying heavily on capital letters and exclamation points.

A few days later, he buys a $95,000 Mercedes-Benz on the Internet and has it delivered to the house in Vegas he just closed on. He’s looking forward to living in a city where he doesn’t have to be embarrassed about his expensive habits and to spending more time with his old poker friends. But what he hopes more than anything is that the move will revive his passion for the game. If it doesn’t, he honestly doesn’t know what he’ll do next.

53

You guys might recall a post a few months ago about moving to Las Vegas and implementing new habits. Well, I worked my plan and achieved results that surpassed even my lofty skills (in just a span of a few months), and still found myself uncontent.

—Good2cu

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
(January–April 2008)

While 20K Jay is serving the twentieth evening of his sentence in a bathroom a few hundred feet above his head, Good2cu is dining in a dramatically different part of the Bellagio, the avant-garde restaurant Fix. It’s almost a triple date: Trent and WildBill have both brought their significant others; only Good2cu’s girlfriend has begged out, claiming illness. They’re drinking vintage wine and having a grand old time until Good2cu reveals the real reason he organized this dinner—a breakup. He tells WildBill that he’s tired of waiting around for his new Web site to be built, so he’s going to hire somebody else to do it.

WildBill’s not happy to hear the news. He anxiously tugs at his New Survivalist beard. “But I’ve already done a ton of work on it.”

“Maybe,” says Good2cu. “But I haven’t seen any of it. Not even a single screenshot.”

WildBill shrugs. “I expect I’ll be compensated for my time.”

“Why? You offered to build the site for free.”

“That was when we were going to split the revenues on the back end. Just give me ten grand, and we’ll call it good.”

“Ten grand?! That’s ridiculous. Besides, you owe me at least that much.”

“What are you talking about?”

For Good2cu, this is the more pressing reason for the breakup: he thinks WildBill is stealing from him. The irony is that he never would have suspected it if WildBill hadn’t encouraged him to hire Trent, who still handles customer service for RakeAid and is privy to the company’s financials.

“I’ve paid you everything I owe you!” WildBill insists.

“That’s not the information I have.”

WildBill glares angrily at Trent, grabs his female companion roughly by the arm, and storms out of the restaurant.

Trent laughs. “That went well.”

Good2cu calls his girlfriend on the way home. “It’s me,” he says. “Want to come over?”

“That depends.… Are those two whores still there?”

She’s referring to a couple of Good2cu’s female friends from Michigan who have been crashing in his guest bedroom. “They’re not whores.” He sighs. “Come on, I want to see you.”

“There’s something we need to talk about,” she says.

Good2cu’s phone informs him with a beep that he’s got another call coming in. “Hold that thought,” he says, clicking over to the other line.

“Guess what?” says Trent. “20K Jay just stepped out of the bathroom.”

“Are you sure?”

“We got it on the Webcam.”

“Ship it!” Good2cu switches back to the other line. “Good news!”

“Me too,” his girlfriend says. “I’m pregnant.”

*   *   *

She’s not really pregnant. She made up the story because she’s angry at him for having two female houseguests. The incident makes Good2cu reevaluate their relationship.

What kind of person fakes a pregnancy just because they’re pissed at you? One I don’t want to be with,
he decides. He breaks up with her, vowing never to date another stripper.

The kid who arrived in Vegas with stars in his eyes, hoping to become a professional gambler, is now getting an up-close view of the city’s underbelly. It’s not a pleasant sight. Take, for example, the characters at the Bellagio who a couple of months ago seemed so colorful. One of them is now threatening to break his legs, while the other has apparently cheated him, and he’s having a hard time deciding which is worse.

The dustup with Tweety is probably Good2cu’s fault—not only did he violate a sort of unspoken code, but he clearly underestimated the man.

On the surface, Tweety epitomizes the image of a degenerate gambler. He lives alone. He’s balding and overweight. He spends freely on women in return for a variety of favors. He isn’t afraid to gamble for millions, even when he’s drunk.
Especially
when he’s drunk. Part of Good2cu wants to mock the guy. Another part of him worries that he’s looking at his future.