Ship It Holla Ballas! (2 page)

The original plan is to become a plastic surgeon, until a rotation in Obstetrics and Gynecology unexpectedly rocks his world. During the most exciting twenty-four hours of his life, he assists in two live births, an emergency C-section that saves a baby’s life, and a successful cancer surgery. There’s no combination of drugs and alcohol that can top the buzz he gets from introducing new lives into the world. He is literally delivering happiness. Forget face-lifts and tummy tucks. Irieguy has found his true calling.

There aren’t any idyllic ocean views or palm trees in Detroit, where he does his residency. During the long, cold winters, he vows to set up his practice someplace warm and fun and full of beautiful women—he hopes to return to California or Florida, or maybe give Arizona or Las Vegas a try. There’s just one hitch: the three-year commitment he owes Uncle Sam.

Between medical school and his residency, Irieguy has to attend Officer Training School with the rest of the freshly minted doctors, lawyers, and chaplains who have volunteered for the military in exchange for tuition money. A two-star general strides briskly to the podium to deliver the orientation briefing.

It’s called “Break Things, Kill People.”

“I think I made a big mistake,” Irieguy whispers to the doctor sitting next to him.

After finishing his residency, he gets assigned to Fort Irwin, a sleepy military base in the Mojave Desert about a half hour outside of Barstow, California. SkipperBob drives him to his post. “The good news,” he tells his son, “is that we’re probably living in the most peaceful and prosperous time in human history.”

It’s an era of peace and prosperity that will last for exactly two more days.

Irieguy is on a treadmill in the base’s gym, gazing blankly at the TV across the room. More night owl than morning person, he’s having trouble processing the image on the screen—a torrent of black smoke pouring into the sky from what appears to be a gaping hole in one of the World Trade Center towers. Several minutes later, he watches a Boeing 767 jetliner crash into the other tower.

Irieguy’s first thought is,
Holy shit.

Then he looks down at his clothes. Yup, that’s an Air Force star on his T-shirt. His eyes drift across the room full of soldiers, faces hardening to a grim sense of purpose, and he gets struck by a second thought.

This is one hell of a time to be starting a career in the military.

There are two OB-GYNs stationed at Fort Irwin, Irieguy and Dr. Miguel Brizuela. They become fast friends, commiserating daily during the buildup to war; both got into this racket to save lives, not to Break Things and Kill People. Then the inevitable orders roll in: one of them is going to be deployed to Iraq.

“Hey, Miguel,” says Irieguy. “This might sound a little crazy, but … want to flip a coin for it?”

Which is how Miguel Brizuela winds up in Mosul with the 21st Combat Support Hospital North, stitching up soldiers, while Irieguy spends the next year and a half in the Mojave Desert, killing time.

2

There are only two signals emitted from the poker universe:

1. The universe will unfold as it should;

2. If you play the right way, and your opponents do not, you will win. Everything else is noise, and to make too much of anything that doesn’t expressly involve the two above facts is to pave the road to failure.

—Irieguy

DETROIT, MICHIGAN
(January 1998)

During one of the longest and coldest winters of his Detroit residency, three years before his stay in the desert, Irieguy gets a call from SkipperBob. “Hey, you can get on the World Wide Web, right?”

“No one calls it that anymore, Dad, but, yes, I’ve got Internet access. Why?”

“You won’t believe this, but there’s this place called Planet Poker where you can play cards for real money. Against real people, anywhere in the world.”

Irieguy thinks this is pretty much the coolest thing he’s ever heard.

He learned how to play poker from SkipperBob, who, after losing his shirt in the sailing business, spent a year working as a “prop” at L.A.’s Bicycle Club, employed by the casino to keep the action flowing at the poker tables. While at Pepperdine, Irieguy brought the skills his father taught him to nearby Hollywood Park, winning enough to keep his refrigerator stocked with beer. Now, thanks to online poker, he and SkipperBob can play at the same table, chatting with each other the entire time, even though they’re separated by two thousand miles.

This discovery becomes particularly useful at Fort Irwin. During the long periods of extreme boredom that follow the occasional childbirth, Irieguy wonders if maybe he wasn’t the coin flip’s real loser. Online poker turns out to be a great way to break up the monotony. The site where he first plays, Paradise Poker, doesn’t offer his game of choice—tournament no-limit Texas Hold’em, the same form of poker used to decide the world championship at the World Series of Poker—but they do have a rough approximation, something called a “Sit N Go.”

The premise is simple: for an $11 entry fee—$10 toward the prize pool, $1 to the house—you get a seat at the table. As soon as nine players buy seats, the tournament begins.

Sit, and go.

You start with a fixed number of chips, and when they’re gone, so are you. The “blinds,” or forced bets required to play, increase every few minutes, compelling you to risk more and more of your chips, a neat bit of design that keeps the tournament from lasting more than an hour or so. The winner earns around $55, second place about half that, while coming in third gets you slightly better than a refund on the entry fee.

Irieguy quickly falls in love with Sit N Gos, because:

(a) the fixed buy-in prevents him from losing more than $11 at a time;

(b) they’re only an hour long, so he can squeeze them into the cracks of his unpredictable schedule; and

(c) he seems to have a knack for winning them.

In fact, he’s finishing in the money with such regularity that he starts to suspect there might be a science to it.

Irieguy has always loved numbers. During medical school he worked part time as a research assistant in a biomedical lab, where he spent hundreds of hours poring over statistics. It was the kind of work that most people would find insanely boring, but Irieguy knows that numbers, when looked at the right way, can tell you a story. Shed new light on the past. Predict the future. Explain everything in between.

Irieguy discovers that analyzing his Sit N Go results tickles the same part of his brain. He catches himself thinking about them even when he’s away from the table.
Can I really keep winning this consistently, or am I just getting lucky? How often can I expect to win? Is it possible to predict how much money I can make?

To the uninitiated, poker may seem like any other form of gambling. You’ve got to get lucky at the right time. The players who call themselves “pros” are basically shrewd masters of human psychology, able to outguess their opponents, spot their unconscious “tells,” and pick the right time to make a daring bluff.

But Irieguy knows that there’s more to it than observation and instincts. Poker is a game of probabilities. Some hands win more often than others. There are times when it’s worth calling a bet in the hopes that your hand will improve, and times when it’s not. By understanding these probabilities, you’re able to make decisions that are mathematically correct. Great bluffs and brilliant reads—and, of course, the luck of the draw—might be a part of the game, but the real winners are the players who consistently make more profitable decisions than their opponents.

This is especially true for online poker—your opponent may scratch his left ear every time he bluffs, but you’re not going to see it over the Internet. The best edge you can bring to the table is a deeper understanding of the game’s mathematical foundation.

And the more Irieguy studies the mathematics that underlie Sit N Gos, the more he starts to believe that he’s discovered the kind of can’t-miss proposition that gamblers dream of: an investment with a steady rate of return.

3

Winning at gambling isn’t about discovering some earth-shattering secret. It’s about finding a whole bunch of small edges. We’ve uncovered all the edges.

—David Sklansky, quoted in
Cigar Aficionado

COMMERCE, CALIFORNIA
(February 2005)

In 1984, Mason Malmuth visited the Bicycle Casino—“the Bike” to locals—in search of advice. He’d been living in Los Angeles for the past two years, working as a probability theory expert for the defense contractor Northrop, but his dream job was 265 miles east in Las Vegas. Ever since stopping there during a business trip years earlier, he wanted to become a professional gambler.

A quixotic notion perhaps, but one pursued with utmost pragmatism. Malmuth had a master’s degree in mathematics from Virginia Tech. He spent a year working for the U.S. Census. For him, everything boiled down to numbers. And according to the numbers, the only beatable games were blackjack and poker. Blackjack was illegal in Los Angeles, but the city had a thriving poker scene. With that in mind he began searching for someone who could teach him how to win.

Plenty were willing to try, but Malmuth needed someone who could explain the game in a way that would make sense to him, using math and logic, not intuition and hunches. He met his perfect match at the Bike, right down to their double-bridged, metal-framed nerd eyeglasses.

The son of a Columbia University professor of mathematics, David Sklansky scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT, ensuring his acceptance at the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to attend the Wharton School of Business but dropped out after a year to move to Las Vegas and become a professional poker player. He wasn’t a particularly gifted player in terms of instincts, bravado, or creativity, but was able to succeed by mastering the game’s probabilities, using mathematical reasoning to gain an edge over his opponents. Getting awarded a gold bracelet for winning a WSOP tournament is the most sought-after achievement in all of poker. Most poker players spend their entire careers hoping to win one. By the time he met Mason Malmuth, Sklansky had already won three.

Both men were enamored of their own intelligence and dismissive of most social graces. They got along famously. Sklansky agreed to teach Malmuth everything he knew about poker in exchange for 10 percent of his winnings. For the next four years, while Sklansky lectured him on the intricacies of the game, Malmuth compiled a thick dossier full of meticulous notes with the same diligence he’d used to earn his masters.

Malmuth had timed his jump from the corporate to the gambling world almost perfectly. The California casinos were in the midst of a small boom, thanks to a change in state law that allowed them to spread Texas Hold’em. New players were flocking to the game. Most of them didn’t know what they were doing. How could they? Poker reference books were nearly nonexistent. The ones that did exist weren’t very good.

Which gave Sklansky an idea: what if they took all the notes Malmuth had assembled and used them to write a book about Hold’em?

And so
Hold’em Poker for Advanced Players
was born. Self-published in 1988, it remains one of the most powerful books ever written about the game, a well-thumbed bible for anyone looking to understand and exploit the small edges that define one’s results. It was so well received that the duo released a similarly detailed book on Seven-Card Stud just a year later. The demand for their work inspired Sklansky and Malmuth to form their own publishing company, which, in a nod to their commitment to mathematical reasoning, they named 2 + 2 = 4. The imprint, affectionately known by its readers as “Two Plus Two,” quickly became the gold standard for books about poker and gambling.

When the Internet began to emerge in the nineties, Sklansky and Malmuth were early adopters, creating
twoplustwo.com
. They didn’t give away any of their secrets on the bare-bones, almost graphics-free site—the idea was to promote and sell their growing library of books—but they did encourage visitors to share knowledge with one another. A list of hyperlinks led to discussion forums like “Poker Theory” or “Books and Publications.” Once in a while a conversation would intrigue Sklansky or Malmuth enough for them to weigh in with an opinion, which to their growing legion of fans sounded like the word of a mountaintop prophet. It didn’t take long for Two Plus Two to become
the
place for serious players to compare strategies and seek guidance from one another and for lurking novices to learn from these exchanges.

Irieguy has been reading Two Plus Two books for years. The company hasn’t produced anything about Sit N Gos yet, but on the Web site he discovers a message board called the “One-Table Forum,” a small but dedicated community that’s just as interested in these strange little online tournaments as he is.

There’s FossilMan, a prolific poster who uses the forum to get feedback on the creative new maneuvers and strategies he loves to invent (and who will provide inspiration for them all when, putting the knowledge he gained from the forum to good use, he wins poker’s world championship in 2004). A forum member named AleoMagus generously starts a thread called, “How to Win at $10+1 NLHE Partypoker sngs,” which becomes a sort of dynamic, living bible to players hoping to master the one-table tournaments. Daliman, having spent much of his adult life figuring out how to beat the game of blackjack, offers theories about the optimal amounts to bet in certain situations. Bozeman develops the underpinnings of what comes to be known as the Independent Chip Model, or ICM, a complex set of mathematical calculations that can identify the most profitable moments to risk all of your remaining chips; Eastbay develops and distributes software that will actually do these calculations for you.

Every day, theories about Sit N Gos are raised and evaluated, amended or dismissed. There are lively debates and frequent arguments, but overall the tenor is marked by a spirit of discovery—everyone seems aware that, as a group, they’re asking questions about a form of poker that very few people really understand. This us-vs.-them mentality helps to engender a deep sense of community.