Ship It Holla Ballas! (30 page)

This is the first year that all of them—except Bonafone, who’s still only twenty—are old enough to play in the World Series, and they don’t disappoint. TheUsher goes deep in two events. Durrrr makes two final tables. Apathy nearly becomes the first Balla to win a coveted gold bracelet when he finishes second in the $10,000 Pot-Limit Omaha event, earning more than a half-million dollars. Jman successfully clears the hurdle when he wins the $5,000 Pot-Limit Omaha event, earning over $800,000. Ten days later, Inyaface earns a bracelet of his own in a $1,000 No-Limit Hold’em event that pays him nearly $700,000.

Good2cu only manages to cash once in his World Series debut, but he makes the most of it, finishing third in the $5,000 Limit/No-Limit Hold’em event and earning $144,000. His appearance at the star-laden final table allows Trent—who earns a field promotion from “assistant” to “manager”—to negotiate a one-day sponsorship deal with Full Tilt Poker on his employer’s behalf. Decked out in garb promoting the card room, Good2cu finishes just behind ZeeJustin, the Internet player whose career path he once emulated, and Eric Lindgren, a poker pro he grew up watching on TV.

Raptor just misses making the final table in two events and outlasts 99 percent of the field in the Main Event, but the prize money represents only a small portion of his summer haul. Thanks to a few more shrewd investments in other players and his own dominant play online, he adds a million dollars to his bankroll over the course of a single month.

Two years ago, any one of these finishes would have triggered a massive celebration and a few cases of alcohol poisoning. This time around they respond to their achievements like professionals. There is no over-the-top party to end the summer. When the Series comes to a close, a few of them go on vacation. The rest simply get back to work, grinding online or at the nearest card room.

Raptor retreats to his house in Fort Worth to spend some time with his girlfriend. This also means a return to the lifestyle that depressed him so much before.

“For some reason, I am just not all that happy with what I am doing,” he confesses in his blog soon after getting back to Texas. “I have made a ton of money, have set myself up for life, but can’t seem to get any fulfillment out of poker. I am working on some lifestyle changes, and they are coming along nicely.”

Most of them involve his body and his mind. He exercises like a madman. He carefully evaluates every morsel of food that enters his mouth. He employs a poker coach to help him with his motivation and psychological well-being. He reads books about Buddhism. He gets more serious about meditation. He plans a couples vacation to Kauai.

A few weeks into his homecoming, Raptor suffers one of the worst sessions of his career, dropping $140,000 in a single night. What surprises him is how little it bothers him.

Maybe I’ve turned a corner. This is how it goes at this level, so get used to it. Win a mil in a month, lose a hundred grand in a night, move on.

He’s able to dispel the loss from his mind as soon as he logs out of his account. He banters cheerfully with Haley. They go to Whole Foods and buy a vegan cookbook, a carton of egg substitute, and some nondairy butter, and spend the rest of the night experimenting in the kitchen.
Vegan brownies aren’t half bad,
he decides.

The next day, he plays more than eight thousand hands. Invoking some of the advice given to him by his poker coach, he stays focused on the present, putting yesterday’s setback out of his mind. He knows trying to win back all the money he lost is a good way to lose even more. This attitude helps make the $15,000 loss he suffers feel slightly more bearable.

One day later, he loses $70,000 in less than an hour, then another $70,000 trying to win it back. The day after that, he drops another $100,000, bringing his four-day downswing to nearly $400,000.

Raptor keeps his cool.
Just numbers on a screen,
he reminds himself. He’s pleased with the way he’s handling this slump. He doesn’t have to keep playing these stakes if he doesn’t want to—thanks to the new deal between CardRunners and Full Tilt, he has been named a “Red Pro,” an arrangement that pays him $35 every hour he plays and returns 100 percent of his rake. He figures he could easily make several hundred dollars an hour multitabling smaller games, assuming he could stand the tedium. For now, he turns off his computer and goes to a yoga class with Haley.

The next day, he practices jiujitsu at the gym, falls asleep in a movie theater watching
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
, and loses $97,000 online. In just five days, he’s down almost a half-million dollars, more than half the money he has in his online accounts. He’s far from broke—between his money market savings and his houses in Texas and Vegas, he’s still worth more than $3 million—but a sense of panic is starting to creep in. He briefly considers cashing out most of what he has left in his online accounts, forcing him to rebuild his bankroll by playing smaller stakes games. But just thinking about how long it would take to win back all that he’s lost makes his mouse hand start to cramp. Instead, he decides to take a sabbatical, burying the Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars icons on his computer in a nest of subfolders:

He vows to take two weeks off from the game, even if durrrr texts him to say that the five biggest fish in the world are sitting at the same table and there’s an open seat. He occasionally glances at his computer to see what games are running, but doesn’t allow himself to sit in any of them.

During his time off, he does his best impression of a regular guy. He goes out to dinner with his girlfriend and her parents, something he’s never done, he realizes, despite having dated her for two and a half years. He takes that vacation in Kauai, surfing, snorkeling, and diet-busting with cheeseburgers and Oreo cookie smoothies. When he gets back to Texas, he tries to teach himself how to speak Japanese.

The more poker recedes from his mind, the more space there is for other thoughts to enter.

Man, I forgot how much I miss playing baseball.

What would have happened if I hadn’t hurt my shoulder?

I probably would have played in college.

I bet I would have been happy going to college.

I wonder if going to college would make me happy
now
?

Maybe I should give it try.

He begins to look into schools that might accept a two-time dropout. One possibility is St. John’s, a small liberal arts college in New Mexico that employs “The Great Books” program, tossing out textbooks, lectures, and examinations in favor of a curriculum devoted to reading and discussing the finest works in the Western canon. Raptor loves that the college consistently ranks in the top ten in both student happiness and academic rigor. Who wouldn’t want to go to a school like that?

He sits down at his computer and, in a single frenzied session, bangs out eight pages of essays for the application.

56

These kids were going to be leaders regardless of what fields they chose. I’ve talked a little bit about this with them, where I’m not sure that Internet poker is a great thing, because I’m not sure you should be taking these guys and have them committing all their time to playing a stupid game when they could be building bridges and educating other kids and leading their communities and fixing people and building rockets.

—Irieguy

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
(November 2008)

In an effort to milk the World Series of Poker for all it’s worth, ESPN breaks up its coverage into an entire season of weekly shows that follow the tournament from beginning to end. A perfectly reasonable strategy, save for one thing: by the time the finale rolls around, everyone has already known the identity of the champion for months.

To restore some of the drama, the final table of this year’s Main Event has been delayed until the fall. In the intervening months the November Nine, as the players at the final table come to be known, have been waiting anxiously for their fate to be determined. The unluckiest of them will take home $900,000. The champion will earn ten times that amount.

None of the Ballas are still in the tournament, but Raptor still has a personal interest in the outcome, as one of his buddies from Texas, a twenty-three-year-old online player named Craigmarq, is still alive. Craigmarq ends up being the first player to get eliminated from the final table, but another young online player, lsser from Denmark, goes on to win it all. Only twenty-two years old, lsser becomes poker’s youngest world champion, breaking the record set by Phil Hellmuth two decades before. Only one year will pass before the feat gets surpassed by jcada99, a twenty-one-year-old who grew up just ninety miles away from Good2cu. At the time of his victory, jcada99 claims that he’s been playing serious poker on the Internet for the past six years. Do the math.

Raptor isn’t happy to see his buddy Craigmarq get knocked out of the Main Event’s final table so quickly, but some consolation arrives when he finds an extra $42,000 in one of his online accounts. It’s a refund from the virtual card room Ultimate Bet—part of its effort to restore trust following the second “superuser” scandal to rock the online poker world in the last thirteen months.

For years players have been speculating about the existence of a tool that would allow an unscrupulous player to see his opponents’ hidden hole cards. The notion that so-called “superusers” might actually exist has generally been dismissed as a conspiracy theory and vehemently denied by the online card rooms.

To borrow from
Scooby-Doo
, the cheaters might have gotten away with it, were it not for those meddling kids—or to be more specific, some youthful members of Two Plus Two who have been collecting information about suspicious players who seem to possess far more information than they should. In September 2007, this informal investigation draws the attention of Michael Shackleford, an adjunct professor of casino math at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, who uses statistical analysis to prove what the aggrieved players suspect: an Absolute Poker player called Potripper can see their cards.

Absolute Poker initially denies the accusations. But a brief internal investigation reveals that a disgruntled employee—“a geek trying to prove to senior management that they were wrong” and “took it too far,” according to a company source—has indeed ripped off players to the tune of $1.6 million.

A few days later, thanks to more detective work from Two Plus Twoers, Ultimate Bet announces its own investigation into a similar claim. The ensuing controversy is even more devastating to the poker community as the culprit turns out to be a poker legend. For nearly four years, Russ Hamilton, the 1994 world champion, has been using a superuser tool to take money away from “friends” like Mike Matusow, even loaning them money so they could continue losing to him. The story goes national on
60 Minutes,
where correspondent Scott Pelley calls it “the biggest scandal in the history of online gambling.”

When the dust settles, Ultimate Bet starts the painful process of refunding more than $22 million to the players who got cheated. One of the biggest beneficiaries is durrrr, whose reimbursement tops a quarter-million dollars. One of durrrr’s greatest rivals in the high-stakes poker scene, former model Patrik Antonius, is also slated to receive a hefty refund, but it never makes it to him—his personal assistant, Trent, intercepts the money and gambles it all away.

Trent’s larceny forces Good2cu to audit his own books.
Never trust anyone
, he reminds himself. When he discovers that Trent has been skimming from him as well, Good2cu has no choice but to fire him.

Good2cu’s move to Vegas has been insanely profitable. In just six months, he’s won over a million dollars. But his day-to-day happiness—or what poker players half-jokingly call “life equity”—has dipped to an all-time low. For at least ten hours a day, he’s either sitting in front of a computer or at a table in a casino, interacting with people who can calculate the exact odds of making a straight flush but who would have a hard time telling you the name of the president.

“I’ve forgotten how to talk to ‘normals’ (this is what we poker degenerates call normal people),” he confesses on Two Plus Two. “I’m unable to hold more than a brief conversation with people not in the gambling field. I feel that I’ve become a highly skilled specialist, who is somewhat isolated from the real world. I think I’m starting to realize that making money isn’t ultimately the highest purpose of life. Money is a means to an end; not an end in itself.”

Unlike Raptor, Good2cu is able to quickly shunt aside these troubling existential thoughts. It might not always be pretty, but this is the life he’s chosen. He’s back in Bobby’s Room the very next day, giving $100 handshakes to the floormen and laughing at jokes he’s heard a million times. He even manages to negotiate a truce with Tweety, who offers to take a piece of Good2cu’s action in an upcoming match against PerkyShmerky, the New York trust fund kid whose losses paid for Traheho’s BMW.