Ship It Holla Ballas! (20 page)

One of the reporters, waiting for an opportunity to speak with Lester, turns to TheUsher. “You just won $284,000. What are you going to do next?”

TheUsher breaks into a huge smile. “We’re going to the Rhino!”

*   *   *

The Spearmint Rhino sends a party bus to pick them up at the Balla Mansion. When they arrive at the strip club, they’re whisked into a private VIP room, complete with its own bar.

Mike Sparks, who has been hanging out with the Ballas so much he’s become a sort of honorary member of the crew, makes the first toast of the night. “Meeting you guys has been one of the most amazing experiences of my life. There’s a lot I could say, but I think I can sum it up in two words: ‘Ship it!’”

What follows is a blur of lap dances, champagne, and top-shelf drinks. Good2cu peppers his friends with philosophical questions while naked women grind into his lap. Raptor and Unarmed do the world’s worst robot dance. Durrrr argues with Mike Sparks over whether they should be drinking Monet or Dom until, having downed too much of each, he sprints to the bathroom and pukes. Bonafone complains to anyone who will listen that he has somehow managed to lose the $4,000 in cash he earned from investing in a piece of TheUsher’s action.

“You didn’t lose it,” Good2cu yells at him. “You spent it all on drinks and lap dances!”

Apathy and Chantel canoodle in a dark corner of the room. TheUsher notices, but he’s not going to let it bother him, not tonight. He can’t decide which is cooler: that he just won a quarter-million dollars, or that he’s getting a lap dance in the VIP room while sitting next to Phil Ivey, arguably the best poker player on the planet.

The sun has already risen by the time the Ballas stumble outside and reboard the party bus. For months to come, all of them will swear it was one of the greatest nights of their lives, even if none of them can remember all the details. They don’t know exactly how much it cost them, but they have a rough idea—tallying credit card receipts and surveying the absence of cash in their wallets, they figure $40,000, roughly split between drinks and dances.

Fuck it. They can always make more money tomorrow.

34

I imagine that if I had walked down the road and told the neighbors that the owners of this house weren’t even twenty-one years old (yet owned the house), they’d have looked at me as if I had a few screws loose.

—Chris Vaughn, “Lifestyles of the $ick and Famous,” in
Bluff

FORT WORTH, TEXAS/EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN
(August 2006)

Four days after TheUsher’s second-place finish, the World Series Main Event gets under way. Its $10,000 entry fee is no longer unique—there are now dozens of tournaments with similar buy-ins and a few that are even bigger. But the winner still gets to call himself the world champion of poker. Victory here means instant fame. Television appearances. Invitations to celebrity tournaments. Sponsorship deals. And thanks to a record-shattering field of 8,773—most of them winning seats via online satellites—this year’s winner will also take home an all-time best $12 million.

But it won’t be a Balla. Good2cu, Raptor, durrrr, Deuce2High, and Bonafone are all still too young to play. Inyaface gets eliminated on the first day, Apathy on the second. Jman also falls short of making the money. TheUsher, still running well, survives the longest, making it to Day Four and earning $30,000 for finishing in 391st place.

The World Series didn’t provide the splashy debut they’d hoped for, but the Ballas are clearly gaining exposure. Jman gets some face time on ESPN when the network airs footage of his eighteenth-place finish in a tournament he played last winter. Apathy wins a major online tournament, then creates an inadvertent controversy on Two Plus Two when he casually mentions having trashed his hotel room in Monte Carlo in the spring. The supporters and haters form the usual battle lines, giving props to his carefree hedonism or slamming him for irresponsible excess.

Somehow the stink never reaches Raptor. In the world of Two Plus Two, he remains a beloved celebrity. The kid who ran $450 into $20,000. The creator of the Quad Monitor Set-Up. The issuer of Raptor Challenges. His posts routinely generate tons of positive feedback from a growing number of fanboys whose devotion is borderline stalkerish.

So it’s actually news in the poker world when Raptor, still just twenty, and durrrr, nineteen, buy a half-million-dollar house in Fort Worth. After they post pictures of the place on Two Plus Two, the poker magazine
Bluff
dispatches a reporter to check it out. He writes about the two seventy-three-inch plasma TVs, mounted side by side in the living room. The six Xbox 360s scattered throughout the house. The full-time personal assistant who makes sure the dishes get washed and the bills get paid. The young poker players’ habit of tipping visiting laborers and deliverymen with crisp $100 bills and $200 bottles of Johnny Walker Blue.

The reporter jumps at the opportunity to watch them ply their trade. Raptor plays ten tables at once, a mix of Sit N Gos and cash games, spread across two computer monitors. He seems to be suffering throughout, shouting expletives, glowering at the screen in disbelief, but after two hours he leans back in his Herman Miller Aeron chair and casually informs the reporter that he’s won $40,000.

Then it’s durrrr’s turn: multitabling at stakes ten times bigger than the games Raptor just played, he wins nearly $200,000 in just forty-five minutes.

The article gets titled “Lifestyles of the $ick and Famous,” which Raptor thinks is pretty funny because he really hasn’t been feeling all that $ick lately. Whether it’s his new role as a homeowner in an upscale neighborhood or the weight of a $4,400 monthly mortgage payment, the kid who just six months before advised Good2cu to “jump around the world” and party with strippers is becoming the guy who will scold you for resting your feet on the coffee table. Raptor’s turning into a curmudgeon in his young age, eschewing frat parties and crowded bars in favor of cooking at home, shooting pool with durrrr on their new regulation-size table, or watching episodes of
The Wire
in bed with Haley. As far as he’s concerned, nothing beats hanging out with your girlfriend in a $10,000 Tempur-Pedic California king.

While Raptor trends older, Good2cu rededicates himself to collegiate living, minus the inconvenience of classes. He moves into a sprawling off-campus apartment complex near Michigan State, rooming with a friend of his who’s still enrolled at the university. There’s a swimming pool and plenty of young women. But this is a way station, not a destination. He’s tasted the life he wants to lead, that of a poker celebrity, and remains committed to attaining that goal.

Good2cu hires a designer to create Ship It Holla Balla business cards, although he ends up giving most of them to drunk college kids at parties. Most days he adds new content to the Web site. His writing style is heavily influenced by Tucker Max, the lawyer turned author who’s taken up near-permanent residency on the
New York Times
Best Seller List with chronicles of his drunken, debaucherous, and occasionally misogynistic behavior. Good2cu hopes to come across as the same sort of charming scoundrel. Take, for example, his account of a keg party at Apathy’s house in Ontario, where two sorority sisters—who he calls “Sam” and “Leslie”—get into a fight over Apathy, interrupting Good2cu’s chance to score:

My head was facing the door and I saw her barge in just as her sister was swallowing my penis. This upset her. She screamed, “If I don’t get to hook up with Apathy, I expect my sisters not to hook up with his friends.” This was a pretty awkward moment so I quickly put my clothes on and did what I always do when awkward moments take place: drink more beer.

The post generates a reaction, just not the one Good2cu intended—evidently grown-ups have discovered the Internet as well. His dad suggests he show some class. Mom sarcastically asks if he was wearing a condom. When Good2cu meets Apathy’s parents during a trip to Toronto, they don’t seem particularly pleased to meet their son’s new friend.

Good2cu doesn’t take the condemnation too seriously. He thinks they’re missing the big picture. He’s just doing what has always felt most natural to him: inhabiting a persona. What are video games, if not an easy and safe way to take on a new identity, someone cooler and more powerful than you are? It’s what he does every time he plays poker, hiding behind his avatar and using “Good2cu” to project whatever image at the table he thinks will result in the most success.

Last year, he read
The Game
, author Neil Strauss’s autobiographical investigation into the world of self-proclaimed “Master Pick-up Artists,” and its lessons have stuck with him. The book’s characters would be the first to admit that they used to be geeks, stumbling awkwardly every time they approached a woman. So they studied seduction as if it were a mathematical equation that could be solved using a handful of simple steps. They adopted aliases like “Mystery” and “Styles,” figuring that using your real name during a seduction would be like filling out a job application with your World of Warcraft handle. They’re two completely different worlds. The goal is not to be yourself, but to inhabit an alter ego free from the emotional baggage that years of geekdom have left behind. At the end of his story, Strauss argues that however you might judge their methods, his characters were able to achieve a kind of self-actualization—when you try on a new personality for a while, you may feel more empowered to change the things you don’t like about your old one, effecting a positive transformation that might actually stick.

Like many others—
The Game
hovered around the top of the
New York Times
Best Seller List for a couple of months—Good2cu responded strongly to the book and its message. He is self-aware enough to know that he’s creating a persona. “I am not some drunken white gangsta with a serious case of ADD who wanders the world in search of pussy,” he writes on the Ship It Holla Balla Web site. “Although I must admit I do think I’m a gangsta.”

But the character he’s chosen to play has a more serious liability than parental disapproval—unless he’s very successful at what he does, he’ll come off looking like a horse’s ass. While he figures he won close to $70,000 online during his six weeks in Vegas, if you add up the bar tabs, strip clubs, a couple of unsuccessful forays into live cash games (including a $10,000 loss to the legendary entertainer Wayne Newton), and the
still
unreimbursed cost of a totaled BMW M3 (Mike Sparks has stopped returning his calls), he’s actually returned to Michigan $30,000 in the red.

Hoping to make up the deficit in a hurry, he tries to expand his multitabling comfort zone, playing as many as eighteen Sit N Gos at a time, and takes occasional shots at bigger no-limit cash games.

And for a while, it works. He fails to accomplish his stated goal of earning six figures in a month, but he does manage to make back the $30,000, allowing him to continue living a lifestyle he’s still struggling to define.

35

The biggest disappointment was that nobody random holla’d at the Ship It Holla Ballas today. I guess Europe just doesn’t know us yet.

—Apathy

BARCELONA, SPAIN
(September 2006)

“I’m so rich! I made $100,000 last year! Check out my Rolex! I’m a Ship It Holla Balla!”

Even by the (low) standards of this turista bar—a sponge for young backpackers thanks to its proximity to the youth hostel next door—Good2cu is off-the-charts drunk. His earsplitting declarations of greatness can be heard from one end of the crowded room to the other.

Along with Apathy, TheUsher, and Deuce2High, he flew to Barcelona to play in a European Poker Tour event with a $6,500 entry fee. None of them cashed in the tournament, and none of them really care. They’re staying at a luxury hotel in the center of the city, eating crazy good food at expensive restaurants whose names they can’t remember, and carousing through the streets like sailors on leave. What’s not to love?

The love affair hasn’t always been mutual. The hostess at the restaurant where they ate earlier in the night quickly appraised them for exactly what they were before leading them to a table hidden away in the farthest corner of the back patio. Four bottles of wine later, they’d proven her right.

Tired of getting the stink eye from the classier joints, they set off in search of a place better suited to their temperament. A helpful cab driver brought them to this bar, where Good2cu is drunkenly ticking off a list of his financial assets in an attempt to impress the señoritas.

Apathy, who’s been playing pool with some girls from Australia, doesn’t want to be a cockblocker, but he’s starting to fear for his friend’s safety. “You might want to keep it down,” he says to Good2cu after he’s pulled him aside. “You’re going to get robbed if you don’t shut up.”

“But I’m a Balla, baby,” Good2cu says, his eyes drifting in and out of focus. “A shot calla. Ain’t no worries here.”

So that didn’t work.

The next best way to help him, his friends decide, is to rob him before someone else does. They take Good2cu’s wallet, passport, and Rolex, then steer him outside to get some fresh air. They’re congratulating themselves on their quick thinking when they see Good2cu wander into the street, with a girl on each arm, disappearing into the night.

“Seriously?” says TheUsher. “A threesome?”

“Somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen,” says Apathy.

The remaining Ballas bounce from the bar to a club and don’t get back to the hotel until sunrise. As they approach Good2cu’s room, they take bets on whether or not he’ll have company. The consensus is
highly improbable
. But the door to his room is slightly ajar and the noise emanating from inside tells a different story. They hear the unmistakable sound of sex. Loud sex. Vigorous sex.
Porn star
sex.

Which is precisely what it is. Good2cu is naked on the bed, but he’s alone and snoring loudly. The sex noises are coming from the in-room porn that’s playing at full volume on the television. The mystery of how he got home last night, sans wallet, gets solved when they notice Deuce2High’s laptop is missing—apparently Good2cu used it as collateral to placate a cab driver angry at being stiffed.