Ship It Holla Ballas! (16 page)

—Neil Genzlinger,
The New York Times Book Review,
January 8, 2006

EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN
(May 2006)

Had Good2cu been born twenty years earlier, he might have felt the lure of Wall Street, where bright college graduates were discovering lucrative signing bonuses and expensive cocaine habits. Ten years later, it could have been the Internet and its promise of IPO-minted millions.

For Good2cu’s generation, the poker boom is its California gold rush, offering everyone, regardless of background or education, the opportunity to strike it rich. But, as is rapidly becoming apparent, the poker boom isn’t just an economic phenomenon—it’s also producing celebrities.

Professional poker players have never had unions or guilds. Few barriers stand in the way of membership. There’s an argument to be made that it’s not even a real profession, at least as far as the IRS is concerned: poker winnings aren’t taxed as earnings, as they are for a real job, but at the higher rate reserved for windfalls like the lottery. For most of the game’s history, professional poker players have been equated with outlaws, living on the financial and social margins of society.

But for the last few years, you can’t turn on a TV without stumbling across a poker tournament. The incessant coverage is breeding familiarity, and familiarity creates fans. We’ve entered the age of the poker superstar. No longer considered outlaws, they’ve been recast as brilliant math wizards, masters of human psychology, disciplined warriors with nerves of steel. Three decades ago, Doyle Brunson had to put up his own money to get his instructional book
Super/System
published; now the septuagenarian pro has to fend off autograph seekers and photo hounds at every turn, fleeing as fast as his walker will allow.

Other players embrace the spotlight with open arms. The most popular write books, create instructional videos, and hire themselves out as private coaches or motivational speakers. Annie Duke, who won a World Series of Poker bracelet in 2004, has moved from Portland, Oregon, to the Hollywood Hills, where she’s producing a poker-themed game show, dating an actor, and dabbling in screenwriting. Her brother, Howard Lederer, has teamed up with a group of fellow poker celebrities to start an online card room—in under two years, Full Tilt Poker has become one of the biggest sites in the world, shrewdly marketing itself as the place where the game’s superstars come to play.

Other pros take advantage of the lucrative sponsorship deals the online sites seem to be doling out like wartime promotions. Some of these deals promise a steady salary, offering lucky poker players something like legitimate financial security for the first time in their lives.

These are uncharted waters, but if you’re not already a poker celebrity, the path to sponsorship typically begins with a victory in a major televised tournament. No one really believes that Chris Moneymaker is the best poker player in the world, or even among the top one hundred, but the marketing team at PokerStars—the site where he began his Cinderella-like journey in a $39 satellite—understands the value of reminding everyone exactly which company made this fairy tale possible. Moneymaker and 2005 WSOP champion Joe Hachem become the most prominent faces of Team PokerStars, a stable of sponsored pros who serve as human billboards decked out in company-logoed schwag.

The final tables of televised tournaments begin to look like NASCAR races. Plastered with ads, the sponsored players are impossible to miss, especially if you’re an aspiring young pro looking for someone to pay your way into all the tournaments. To get there, all you’ve got to do is get famous, which so far has meant outplaying, outlasting, and outlucking a ballroom full of cutthroat angle-shooters to win a major tournament.

But the Internet offers a new path to fame, a viable alternative to the old monolithic media model. Successful online players might not be world-famous, but being “Internet famous” has got to count for something, right?

A Two Plus Twoer named ZeeJustin is one of the first to solve this puzzle. A year earlier, at age nineteen, he became the youngest player in history to make a televised final table, taking advantage of Europe’s more kid-friendly gambling laws to finish fourth in an EPT tournament in Deauville, France. The accomplishment isn’t enough to turn him into a poker superstar, but it does provide the impetus and the money to hire a Web site designer. ZeeJustin starts blogging about his experiences touring the world as a professional poker player, and when the site starts to generate traffic, he monetizes it, selling banner ads and driving visitors to online poker rooms.

This spring, ZeeJustin gains even more notoriety when it’s discovered that he’s been playing tournaments on PokerStars using more than one account. In what is mostly a self-regulated industry, “multiaccounting” is one of those gray areas that straddle the lines between legal and illegal, ethical and unethical. For years, it was a standard practice among online players. In fact, it’s how many of the Ballas built up their initial bankrolls, opening accounts under different user names to take advantage of as many sign-up bonuses as they could. But ZeeJustin has been accused of using his multiple accounts to enter the same tournament more than once. PokerStars decides to make an example of the young pro, banning him from the site for three years.

The harsh punishment generates a lot of press. Good2cu is jealous—in his eyes, any publicity, even scandal, is good publicity. The proverbial lightbulb appears over his head: why not skip the TV part of the equation and try to become an Internet celebrity from the very beginning?

After returning from the Bahamas, he makes a road trip to London, Ontario, to visit Apathy. Against the backdrop of three kegs and the better part of a local sorority, Good2cu pitches him the idea for ShipItHollaBalla.com, a place for them to share their stories and inflate their reputations. Dancing for strippers and swimming with sharks is a lot more interesting than anything ZeeJustin is putting on his site.

Apathy, fending off the sorority girls long enough to hear the pitch, loves the idea. His constitution prevents him from doing any actual work, but he’s willing to put up half the seed money.

Good2cu returns to East Lansing, where he’s sharing an apartment with a friend from college, and sets the plan into motion. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel: he hires the same Web designer who built ZeeJustin’s site. The first couple of posts on ShipItHollaBalla.com are commercial enticements to visit certain online poker rooms, but Good2cu’s first travel report will set the tone for the site and help define the Ballas’ identity:

“I’ve spent the past forty days of my life, traveling, meeting random Two Plus Twoers, partying like a rock star, and mercilessly hitting on girls,” it begins. “God, do I regret dropping out of college.…”

26

FROM:
[email protected]

TO:
[email protected]

SUBJECT:
MTV “True Life: I’m Moving to Vegas”

HOLLA.

I’m a 19-year-old college dropout/professional poker player/straight balla. I dropped out of college at Michigan State University after taking a week long trip to Vegas that netted me over $8k.

(Too bad I spent $10k+ on booze, clothes, strippers and a Rolex.)

In the past year I’ve made over six figures playing poker online on
PartyPoker.com
and
Pokerstars.com
. I think I’ll bring in $300k+ this tax year. Yeah, that’s right. SHIPPPPPPPPPP IT, HOLLA.

I am a semi-well-known online pro in the Two Plus Two poker community (a forum for pro poker players). I recently finished in 2nd place in the Two Plus Two Single Table Tournament Forum Heads-Up Championship which netted me just under $6K.

Since dropping all of my classes at MSU, my days consist of sitting in front of the computer for ten hours a day playing eight tables of poker, so I can really move anywhere I want. I mean assuming I can get time off of “work.” (My boss is a real badass … BWHAHAHA.)

After making a post in the Two Plus Two forums about it, I decided there is no better place for a cardplayer to live than in Las Vegas. In my opinion not realizing that I belong in Vegas must be a much bigger mistake then dropping out of school!

I have a mansion in Vegas lined up for June 28th to August 13th with three other professional poker players (all between the ages of 19–28), which will surely be a party mansion. Yeah, drunken rich kids with more money than they know what to do with. SHIPPPPPPPP the ladies. In the meantime I’m thinking about packing up all my shit, flying down and living with a doctor (semi-professional poker player), or in a mansion with three other pros until I find my own place. I currently have a bankroll/life savings of $200,000.

Besides playing poker I am becoming a member of the PUA (pickup artist) community. I’ve read “The Game” and avidly read seduction forums on the Internet. Despite my amazingly sexy looks and classic charm, I’ve only had marginal success so far. My crowning achievement so far was getting paid in a strip club to dance for the strippers! YEAH, SHIPPPP IT HOLLA!! I suppose I’m still a nice guy at heart. Anyways, put me on MTV and the ladies will love me even more, I’ll keep shit exciting, and SHIPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP THE MTV CAMERAS THIS WAY.

PEACE OUT. HOLLA.

27

Overall, I was very impressed by the Ship It Holla Balla Mansion. It is going to be perfect for balling.

—Good2cu

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
(June 2006)

For much of its early history, the World Series of Poker hardly lived up to the grandiosity of its name. “World” was an ambitious misnomer, as its participants—almost exclusively old, white men—hailed mainly from Texas and never numbered more than a hundred.

The event wasn’t intended to be a proving ground as much as performance art—its host and creator, Benny Binion, hoped that a living exhibition of the world’s greatest poker players would pull a little extra foot traffic into the Horseshoe, his downtown Las Vegas casino. For their part, the cardsharps, hustlers, and road gamblers who gathered there embraced the rare opportunity to connect with so many like-minded souls, giving birth to an annual tradition.

Little by little, the World Series’ Main Event evolved from circus sideshow into main attraction. Younger players with college educations began to infiltrate the ranks—in 1978, a twenty-eight-year-old former Oklahoma State student named Bobby Baldwin won the championship. Then came “foreigners” like the brash New Yorker Stu Ungar, who won back-to-back titles in the early eighties, and actual immigrants like Chinese-born Johnny Chan, who managed the same feat in 1987 and 1988.

Part of the WSOP Main Event’s charm was that it was open to everyone. As long as you had $10,000 to pay for the buy-in, you could sit down and play. The creation of satellite tournaments opened the field to a wider clientele, and by the end of the eighties, the tournament routinely drew two hundred players. Bigger fields meant bigger money—1991 winner Brad Daugherty became the first player to earn $1 million. The Main Event grew steadily until 2003, when The Moneymaker Effect turned the enterprise into an entirely different animal.

The 2006 World Series crams forty-five tournaments into six hectic weeks. Several thousand people are expected to enter the Main Event, and there is speculation that the winner could take home $10 million or more. Las Vegas is swarming with journalists, not just from the poker-centric rags, but also ESPN, CNN, the
Chicago Tribune,
and
The New York Times
. If the Ship It Holla Ballas are going to take the poker world by storm, this is clearly the place to start.

As promised, Inyaface secures a short-term rental: a 3,000-square-foot house in a quiet, family-friendly neighborhood near the Southern Highlands. It comes with a pool, hot tub, billiards table, and absolutely no interference from parental or authority figures.

Welcome to the Ship It Holla Balla Mansion.

Despite losing a gamble in the Utah desert—Apathy and Inyaface blow past the
LAST GAS FOR 100 MILES
sign with less than half a tank, necessitating a middle-of-the-night rescue from a truck driver who looks like the killer in a cheesy horror movie—the two Canadians arrive first and claim the two master bedrooms for themselves. Good2cu caught a 7:30
AM
flight in hopes of beating them to the house, but, upon discovering that they had intentionally misrepresented their arrival time, has to content himself with the Asian-themed guest room. The last three members of the household—Unarmed, TheUsher, and Jman—claim the remaining rooms as they trickle into town.

It’s Sunday—a sacred day for online poker players, as most of the major Internet sites hold their biggest tournaments of the week that day—so the first order of business is setting up shop. They transform the otherwise useless dining-room table (like the group’s ever going to sit down to a meal) into a communal workstation, a tangled mess of power cords and flat-screen monitors, and get to grinding.

Raptor joins them after lunch. The way he carves out a space for himself at the table, clearing the area around his laptop and doling out the twelve-pack of ice-cold Cokes he picked up on the way over, makes it clear: he’s the unofficial seventh member of the household. While he still has a room at DocHolatchya’s place, Raptor sees a chance to have the kind of fraternal experience he missed out on when he ditched school. He’s also happy to avoid the Doc and Chantel Show: one minute they’re talking about having a baby, the next they’re screaming divorce.

Everyone settles into an online trance until late afternoon, when they get a call from Irieguy inviting them to dinner at an Outback Steakhouse.

Irieguy can’t exactly call himself a father figure to these kids—he’s more like a cool older brother who lets you borrow his ID and teaches you how to talk to strippers. Whatever sense of paternalism he might feel has been overwhelmed by awe at when he considers how much they’ve accomplished in such a short period of time. Most of them are already playing at higher stakes than he does, and he’s been playing for more than a decade.