Ship It Holla Ballas! (13 page)

Dad doesn’t waste any time putting his son on the spot. “I want you to tell her what you told me.”

“I’m dropping out of school,” says Good2cu, maybe a little too casually, “to play poker for a living.”

The horrified expression on the old woman’s face could have said it all, but she reinforces it with a litany of sympathy for Dad and disappointment for his son. “Oh, my God,” she says. “I’m so sorry. I feel
so
bad for you. I can’t tell you how many students have sat in that chair and told me the exact same thing. They start chasing this cockamamie dream of an easy life. Then they lose all of their money gambling, and they’re left with … nothing. No degree, no money, no friends. I truly am sorry.”

Good2cu can’t hide his frustration. “Easy? Do you know how hard I work? And I’m not
gambling
. Poker is a skill game. My ROI—”

“Your what?”

“My ROI. You know, return on investment? It’s over ten percent.”

“What I see is a young man caught in the throes of a sickness he doesn’t even understand.…”

Good2cu’s thoughts start to drift.
This woman doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about. The whole work-nine-to-five-and-retire-at-sixty-five mentality is a recipe for unhappiness. Why would you want to make yourself miserable doing something you hate if you could make a lot of money doing something you love? This woman is stuck in the Dark Ages, and I can’t wait to prove her wrong. I wonder what the game is like at Caesar’s.…

“… and I think you’re making a terrible choice. But if you insist upon dropping out of school, I can’t stop you. You just need to sign these release papers to make it official.”

She digs through her files until she finds the proper form, then slides it across her desk, thrusting it at Good2cu like a challenge.

He signs with a flourish, pushes the form back to her, and smiles. His days as a Michigan State Spartan are officially over. He’s a Ship It Holla Balla now, and he’s ready to get real paid.

20

It’s this expensive million-dollar house and there’s no furniture anywhere. Just laptops and video games and a big-screen TV. And I remember walking in and thinking it’s as though the parents were kidnapped and all of the furniture was jacked and pawned for video game money. The kids took the parents hostage, sold all of their household goods, and bought big-screen TVs and computers with the money.

—Irieguy

DALLAS, TEXAS/LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
(Spring 2006)

Raptor lucked out when, after his second sabbatical from college, he moved in with TravestyFund, who turns out to be a near-perfect roommate. He’s four years older than Raptor, so he tends to offer a more mature perspective on things. He actually cleans up after himself and while he likes to party, he doesn’t equate getting wasted every night with coolness. These days Raptor is in a similar frame of mind. He just started dating a TCU coed named Haley and, as an admitted girlfriend guy, prefers spending quiet nights at home with her to getting trashed in bars.

During a rare foray into the Dallas bar scene, Raptor and TravestyFund run into DocHolatchya, an old friend of theirs from the PokerBox. Doc’s a former varsity soccer player at TCU who started playing poker professionally soon after graduating. He earned a reputation for solid and profitable play in the local card rooms before moving back to his hometown—Las Vegas—where he planned to become a high-stakes cash game player.

So far, the plan seems to be working. “Vegas is awesome,” Doc tells Raptor during his visit to Texas. “I just bought a new house. You should come check it out. Shit, you can come live there if you want. I have like three spare bedrooms.”

“Seriously?”

“Sure. I’ll rent you a room for, I don’t know, eight hundred a month?”

Raptor likes the idea. To break up the monotony of playing one Sit N Go after another, lately he’s been spending more of his time playing cash games. He’s been doing well enough to officially declare himself a hundred-thousandaire, but he still spends way too much time staring at a computer screen.

Living in Vegas would allow him to fully commit to the poker lifestyle and help him figure out if this is really what he wants to do with his life. The free education he’d get from “sweating” Doc and his friends—watching over their shoulders as they play—is an added bonus. He imagines the city’s easy access to live games will encourage him to get out of the house more often so he won’t feel like such a hermit all the time. The affordable rent seals the deal; it’s cheap enough to allow him to keep his room at TravestyFund’s, so he’ll have a place to stay in Fort Worth whenever he returns to visit his family or Haley.

Doc’s house is in Southern Highlands, an affluent neighborhood with picturesque views fifteen-minutes by car from the madness of the Strip. There’s a swimming pool and a basketball court. The place is officially listed as a 3,500-square-foot single-family home, but feels even bigger because, besides the beds, the only furniture is a couch in the living room and a foosball table in the breakfast nook. The sparse décor forces one to consider the pink walls and lavender carpeting, a combination that makes Irieguy, when he stops by to welcome Raptor to Vegas, feel like he’s stepped inside Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

Raptor’s quarters could easily be mistaken for a room in a flophouse, were it not for the enormous flat-screen TV mounted to the wall. The mattress on the floor holds a rat’s nest of sheets and dirty clothes. Half-eaten boxes of Sour Patch Kids and Cinnamon Toast Crunch litter the carpet, making a simple traverse of the room feel like a journey through a minefield. He doesn’t care. He spends most of his time in the computer room around the corner.

In contrast to the rest of the house, the computer room looks like a place where work actually gets done. The centerpiece is Raptor’s now-famous Quad Monitor Set-Up, which he brought with him from Texas. In addition to its kickass graphics cards and four monitors, he’s upgraded the system with state-of-the-art software that helps him keep track of his opponents—what kinds of hands they play and how they like to play them. A heads-up display on the screen gives him instant access to this information, allowing him to make more informed decisions. While he loves (and profits by) all the bells and whistles, he can’t take credit for the technical wizardry—he flew his computer genius friend Rhino from Texas to Las Vegas to set up the rig. The $500 plane ticket was a small price to pay, especially when Raptor can make that much in just a couple of hours at the tables.

For the first few weeks of his new existence, Raptor is loving life. He’s living in a million-dollar fraternity house, improving his game daily, getting what amounts to a graduate-level education in poker. But the dynamic gets shattered when Doc returns from a tournament in Tunica, Mississippi, with a girl on his arm.

“This is Chantel,” he says. “We’re engaged. She’s moving in.”

Raptor prides himself on his ability to get inside his opponents’ heads and figure out what they’re thinking, but he can’t get a read on this pretty twenty-one-year-old brunette from Dallas. One minute, she’s an archetypal Southern belle, all grace and manners and smiles; the next, she’s every bit as coarse and temperamental as an escapee from a women’s prison.

The first couple of months after Chantel moves in aren’t so bad. She and Doc fill the air with romantic overtures and declarations of eternal love, nauseating but ultimately harmless. But soon they’re getting into big fights over small issues. Chantel gets upset when other women post on Doc’s MySpace page. When the lovebirds return from a Caribbean cruise—a Party Poker tournament that skirts age requirements by sticking to international waters—they’re barely speaking to each other. When they do, there’s a lot of screaming involved.

To avoid the drama, Raptor spends more and more time holed up in his room, enjoying low-key sessions on his laptop and scrolling through messages on Two Plus Two. One afternoon he spies an intriguing new thread started by Good2cu: “Where Should I Live?” The kid has either dropped out or flunked out of school and is looking for advice on where to go next. Many of the responses, especially from the older guys, are unkind, painting Good2cu as the poster child for everything that’s wrong with online poker—
a few months of what is probably beginner’s luck and these dopey kids think they’re ready to go pro
.

But there’s plenty of heartfelt advice as well, encouraging Good2cu to buy health insurance, open an IRA account, or travel the world. There are also numerous offers of couches to crash on, from Pennsylvania to Paris. But as usual, it’s a post by Irieguy that puts everything into perspective.

“Vegas is where you want to be if you are a cardplayer,” he writes. “Failing to realize that is much worse than dropping out of school.”

Raptor agrees and responds with his usual bravado. “Pack yer shit, jump around the world till u get bored, then ‘settle’ down in Vegas. Get a nice place, buy a nice car, meet some strippers you can hang out with on a non-pay-for-lap-dance basis, get them to introduce you to all their eighteen to twenty-three-year-old friends, party and club with them, play poker, visit friends whenever u want, laugh at all the people that tell you to go back to school because they are jealous and don’t want you to have fun, and enjoy the fuck out of your life.”

He concludes the rant with a concrete offer—there’s an extra room in Doc’s house he can probably squat in for a week or so. That, combined with another week or two on Irieguy’s couch, and he’ll have plenty of time to find a place of his own.

Thirty seconds later, Good2cu is on AIM telling Raptor he can be there in three days. Raptor loves the kid’s enthusiasm, but knows he needs to run it by Doc first.

He plans to do so over dinner, a feeding at the nearby Olive Garden, but forgets amid all the cheap pasta and wine. After dinner, he and Doc pay a visit to another friend, WSOP2005, to check out his new home theater system and play a fun, drunken, poker session online. But immediately after logging in, Doc turns stone-cold sober.

His account, which had $9,000 in it the last time he checked, is now empty.

It’s the same account Doc’s been letting Chantel use to work on her online game. She did quite well for herself playing limit poker in the underground games back in Texas, and now she’s hoping to start playing more online. Doc agreed to help her as long as she promised to stick to low-stakes Sit N Gos, but tonight she’s apparently decided to take a shot at a high-stakes cash game.

The result? Not good.

Doc gets Chantel on the phone and starts venting his rage.

“He might want to reconsider those wedding plans,” Raptor jokes.

WSOP2005 snickers.

“What?” asks Raptor.

“Dude, they’ve been married since January.”

Back at Doc’s house, the fight stretches deep into the night. Raptor plugs his ears and tries to get some sleep, but not before firing off a quick message to Good2cu:

“About that offer of an extra room here in Vegas.… Probably not such a good idea right about now.”

21

If I’m going to be a degenerate college dropout, I have to culture myself somewhat.

—Good2cu

OKEMOS, MICHIGAN
(April 2006)

Good2cu doesn’t know why Raptor has suddenly rescinded the invitation to crash in his house in Vegas, but he takes it in stride.

Plan B:
As long as I keep winning online, I can go wherever the hell I want.

He picks Italy because Kelsey, a girl he knows from high school, is studying abroad in Florence. The red-tiled houses, hillside vineyards, and craggy mountains of the Italian countryside leave a deep impression on him. The cities aren’t bad either. The Venetian wowed him when he first set eyes on it two months ago; now he realizes the casino was just an homage. This—everything he sees before him—is the real deal, and he spends each day trying to take it all in. He visits art galleries and museums, historical sites and old ruins, but it’s the churches that make the biggest impact on him. The part of him that remains innocent and impressionable can’t get over the idea that these architectural masterpieces are more than five hundred years old, while the part of his brain he uses for poker sees the underlying scam—many of these “holy sites” are also tourist traps raking in huge amounts of money for the house, i.e. the Vatican.

From Florence he travels with Kelsey to Cinque Terre—five picturesque villages, nestled into a rugged section of coastline along the Italian Riviera, connected by walking trails offering some of the most breathtaking views in the world. Good2cu does a little hiking and a lot of drinking. On his last night in town he gets slapped in the face by a bartender and passes out in a youth hostel between two girls he barely knows.

Parting ways with Kelsey, he heads to Rome, where, freed from her budgetary constraints, he checks into a five-star hotel. He laughs every time someone on the staff asks him when his parents are arriving. In the hotel’s restaurant he meets Ron, a fifty-year-old American, who invites him to sit at his table. He’s from Las Vegas where he works as a pit boss, supervising the floormen at TI. Good2cu can’t believe he’s stumbled across a true Vegas character in Europe. They’re deep into a serious discussion about gambling by the time the antipasti arrives.

Ron knows plenty, and shares some of his favorite theories. Using stop-losses and win limits to regulate your time at the tables. Employing the hit-and-run strategy to help build your bankroll.

What’s funny, from Good2cu’s point of view, is that Ron doesn’t have any idea what the hell he’s talking about. His theories are all mathematical losers, “fish logic” based on superstition instead of statistics. And Ron is a guy who, given his line of work, should know better.

Good2cu can’t help but smile.
These are the kinds of mathematical and psychological flaws that are going to allow me to make a living playing a card game.

Their differences don’t prevent them from having a good time. They knock off two or three bottles of wine, smoke some of Ron’s hash, and visit a local “strip club,” which is actually a brothel. Tom disappears into a back room with one of the girls. Good2cu spends the rest of the night chatting up a Polish dancer until her boss yells at her for neglecting the paying customers.