Ship It Holla Ballas! (24 page)

When NBC decided to bring poker to network television for the first time in 2005, it revived the format. The National Heads-Up Poker Championship, a $20,000 buy-in, single-elimination invitational tournament, mixed the world’s most popular poker players with a handful of celebrities and Internet qualifiers. It’s the highest-rated poker show on television. Entrance into the tournament’s sixty-four-player field has become one of the most sought-after invitations in the poker world.

Durrrr has yet to score an invitation, but that’s got more to do with his age—he’s still not old enough to gamble legally in the United States—than his ability. Online, he’s regularly been playing heads-up against anyone who dares sit across from him. While in Rome with TheUsher and Traheho, durrrr has spent most of his time battling a guy called PerkyShmerky.

Perky’s not a terrible player. Against average competition, he wins as much as he loses. But he tends to bet in a way that tips off the strength of his hand, a flaw that observant players like durrrr and TheUsher are happy to exploit. Even better, Perky’s a trust fund kid from Manhattan with what appears to be an inexhaustible bankroll. He regularly plays with $50,000 in front of him, and if he loses that, he simply reloads with $50,000 more.

Traheho isn’t a trust funder. Growing up in Orange County, he wasn’t poor, but he wasn’t rich either. Both of his parents worked full time. He attended public schools. When he was sixteen, he won $12 playing poker at a friend’s house, a small taste of success that made him hungry for more. He went home and did the math, trying to figure out how many times he’d have to replicate the feat to be able to afford his dream car, a BMW M3.

Way too many,
he decided. But he kept playing anyway, slowly moving up through the ranks. His skills and bankroll have developed to the point where he now feels comfortable teaming up with durrrr and TheUsher and taking on a player like Perky, whose wealth allows him to employ an unpredictable style and laugh off losses that would cause severe mental trauma for nearly everyone else.

Traheho quickly becomes one of Perky’s favorite opponents. Some online players might as well be robots the way they play, hiding behind their computer monitors, silently clicking their mice, but both Traheho and Perky enjoy talking trash, using the chat box to poke fun at each other whenever they get a chance. They even exchange phone numbers, so they can better torment each other.

One night, in the midst of one of their heads-up matches, Perky catches a lucky card to rob Traheho of a six-figure pot.

Ten seconds later, Traheho’s phone rings.

“Hey, you prick, how do you feel about a jack on the river for a hundred-and-twenty K?” Perky cackles into the phone. “Got you, bitch!”

Click.

Traheho has to laugh. He knows there’s no real malice behind Perky’s words. But the exchange plants a seed in Traheho’s mind, and he looks forward to the day when he can deliver an appropriate response.

Traheho is back home in Orange County when that day arrives. Perky challenges him to a series of three $50,000 heads-up battles, and Traheho wins all three. His take, after giving his partners their share, is $90,000.

He celebrates by heading straight to the nearest BMW dealership. A salesman informs him that the M3 he’s had his eye on is out of stock. They do, however, have the next model up—an M6—that happens to cost around $90,000. Traheho pays cash and adorns his new car with a vanity license plate that will always remind him exactly who he has to thank for his good fortune.

TYPERKY.

43

Everybody will eventually run worse than they thought was possible. The difference between a winner and a loser is that the latter thinks they do not deserve it.

—Irieguy

EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN
(May 2007)

Traheho posts a picture of his new car—license plate front and center—on the Two Plus Two site. Good2cu smiles when he sees it, but he can’t help but feel jealous. It feels like all his friends are becoming poker superstars, while he remains mired in a slump he can’t seem to shake.

Maybe the games are harder. Maybe he doesn’t have what it takes. Maybe he’s suffering what statisticians call a “regression to the mean,” the idea that extreme results tend to become less extreme over time. Maybe he got lucky to win the $200,000 and, in reality, he’s more of a break-even player.

It’s a phenomenon Irieguy observed several years earlier. “I am beginning to realize that most people don’t have the psychological fortitude or spiritual perspective to manage the vicissitudes of this game,” he wrote in a post on Two Plus Two. “I also believe that of the very small number of professional poker players who have been successful for more than a few years, most of them are actually quite lucky. I believe that there are many pros who will fail once they begin to experience average luck.”

For Good2cu, there’s only one consolation:
At least I haven’t gone busto.
These days the News, Views, and Gossip Forum is full of stories about spectacular flameouts. Forced by the rapidly shrinking player pool to go after one another, players who steadily built up large bankrolls over the course of several years are suddenly “blowing up,” losing it all in just a fraction of the time.

In
Fooled by Randomness
, a book written for Wall Street investors but popular among poker players for its observations about the role of luck in our lives, Nassim Nicholas Taleb provides a definition of the phrase that works equally well in either world: “
Blow up
in the lingo has a precise meaning; it does not just mean to lose money; it means to lose more money than one ever expected, to the point of being thrown out of the business (the equivalent of a doctor losing his license to practice or a lawyer being disbarred).”

The idea that he could do the same terrifies Good2cu. “What worries me is that dozens of other kids were also in my position and they blew up,” he confesses in his blog. “They went on crazy monkey tilt and blew their roll and went back to school a psychological mess.”

There’s Grimstarr, a young Two Plus Twoer who was almost a millionaire earlier this year. Now nearly broke, he’s become infamous for challenging players to heads-up matches, quitting while he’s ahead should he win the first hand, hurling insults at his opponents when he doesn’t.

Go play in traffic.

I’ll murder you.

Die in a grease fire.

Neverwin, of Neverwin Poker fame, has not only gone busto, but is in debt to a long and increasingly impatient line of players. One of them is Newhizzle, Brandi’s former sparring partner, who is in the process of frittering away in high-stakes cash games the $1.5 million he won in a WPT tournament less than a year ago. Compounding his misfortunes at the poker table: bad loans to players like Neverwin, the $30,000 Brandi squandered while using one of his accounts, and an $80,000 loss playing shuffleboard at this year’s PokerStars Caribbean Adventure—half of which found its way into the pockets of Apathy, durrrr, and Raptor.

Good2cu doesn’t want to join them as a character in some cautionary tale. He’s momentarily cheered when Nick Gair’s article about the Ballas appears in
Bluff
—the crew comes off looking like rock stars—but a close read dulls his enthusiasm. He only gets mentioned a few times, mostly in the beginning where the author notes his “passion for hijinks” and “disdain for the rules of grammar.” Oh, and near the end, when the author mentions that Good2cu is “on a bit of a downswing.”

The article underscores Good2cu’s feeling that he’s the only Ship It Holla Balla whose career isn’t on the rise. Apathy seems to have a knack for cashing in at major online tournaments, while Inyaface continues to grind out a steady profit in whatever types of games he chooses to play. Durrrr and Raptor have made a relatively easy transition to high-stakes cash games, pushing their bankrolls into seven figures. And FieryJustice just won more than a million dollars in a World Poker Tour event at the Mirage that will be televised next March.

But Jman’s ascent might be the most spectacular. A year ago he was still making a rocky transition from Sit N Gos to cash games. Now he’s playing every bit as high as durrrr and Raptor. Thanks to his growing reputation and some friends in the right places, Jman gets invited to appear on
High Stakes Poker
, one of the most popular poker shows on TV. His appearance is brief—he’s bumped after a single day for the more ratings-friendly celebrity poker pro Daniel Negreanu—but he spends enough time matching wits with famous pros like Sammy Farha and Phil Hellmuth to form an opinion about their play.

“America still thinks that my table (besides me) is full of the best poker players in the world,” he tells his friends on Two Plus Two, “when I would’ve salivated over playing any of them heads-up.”

Good2cu wants to believe that he’s every bit as good at poker as his friends, that they’ve just gotten a little luckier than him, that his time will come. But the facts say otherwise. He hasn’t been a consistent winner for almost a year. With that in mind he walks into Michigan State’s admissions office and tells them that, after taking a year off to find himself, he’s ready to reenroll.

Come September, he’ll reenter civilian life as a student.

44

IM 21!!!!!! I CAN PLAY THE LIVE POKAHS NOW!!!! WHOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!

—Raptor

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
(May–June 2007)

Two weeks before the start of the 2007 World Series of Poker, Raptor turns twenty-one. In the eyes of the law, he’ll finally be able to drink, gamble, and go to strip clubs. Pardon him for not getting too excited, as these aren’t exactly novel experiences. Some friends help him celebrate at a Las Vegas club. He’s home and in bed by midnight.

But there’s one aspect of being twenty-one he does appreciate: he’s finally going to get to play in the World Series of Poker. Hoping to recapture some of the good times that took place last summer, he signs on to live with the rest of the crew in whatever rental property Inyaface can secure for them. The directive given to Responsible Guy this time around:
go bigger.

Inyaface delivers what can more accurately be described as a compound than a mansion, the kind of property that demands entry through an imposing front gate. The main house is surrounded by four guest cottages, a pool, a tennis court, and a fifty-foot-wide putting green.

Good2cu flies in from Michigan, Raptor and TravestyFund from Texas, Jman from Wisconsin. Apathy and Inyaface, joined by their friend BigT, make another epic road trip from Canada in the Pontiac Pursuit, this year’s highlight a random stumble across a Vanilla Ice concert in Des Moines. TheUsher arrives from Rome. Durrrr, who’s still too young to play in any of the WSOP tournaments, promises to join them in a few days—rumor has it he and Traheho have been playing $100,000 heads-up matches against PerkyShmerky in New York City.

To divvy up the bedrooms, the Ballas plug a laptop into the projector in the home theater and fill the sixteen-by-nine screen on the wall with a randomly chosen low-stakes Sit N Go. Everyone picks an unknown player to root for, injecting the contest with the same uncertainty as a cockroach race. Apathy’s player busts first, relegating him to the shabbiest guest house, a shedlike structure at the back of the compound previously occupied by a bunch of feral cats. Raptor has flowers delivered to Apathy’s quarters to cheer him up.

The night before the Series begins, the crew meets Irieguy at the Spearmint Rhino. Raptor jokingly promises one of the lap dancers that he’ll make seven final tables and win four gold bracelets this summer. Irieguy laughs. Winning a single bracelet is hard enough. But he wouldn’t bet against any of these guys. Not only are they improving at Internet speed, they’ve been on a roll. Three months ago, TravestyFund won an event at the L.A. Poker Classic that paid him $160,000. A month later, TheUsher won $140,000 after taking down a tournament at the Wynn.

Made worse by high expectations, Raptor’s first World Series event is a huge bummer. He sails into the dinner break with a healthy pile of chips, then takes two horrific beats in a row to get eliminated. His results don’t get any better in the weeks that follow. Fortunately there’s a consolation prize: cash games.

“I’m here for the cash games” is one of the more frequent refrains you’ll hear during the Series, and it’s not just idle talk. For six weeks every summer, the Las Vegas poker economy goes bananas. Recreational players come to town to watch or to enter an event or two, then retreat to the cash games eager to re-create the excitement. The tables are packed, the action loose, the games juicy.

Frustrated by his tournament results, Raptor begins to devote more of his attention to these games. Now that he’s twenty-one and able to report his earnings to the I.R.S. he no longer has to tiptoe his way around the card rooms. He can play anywhere he wants. For his first foray into the live high-stakes games, he chooses Bobby’s Room, the special section of the Bellagio’s card room that’s home to some of the biggest games in the world.

The room is named after Bobby Baldwin, poker’s original whiz kid. In the early 1970s Baldwin dropped out of Oklahoma State and moved to Las Vegas, hoping to defy the odds and make a living as a professional gambler. After some incredible ups and downs—he once turned $75 into $180,000 over the course of a weekend, then lost it all—he ditched craps and sports betting to focus on poker. He was only twenty-eight when he won the 1978 WSOP Main Event, making him the youngest ever to do so by a good decade and a half.

Baldwin went on to earn three more gold bracelets in World Series events, but the biggest win of his career came during a cash game against the rising business mogul Steve Wynn. Impressed by the acumen of the guy who just cleaned him out, Wynn asked Baldwin if he’d be interested in doing some consulting for his casino, the Golden Nugget. Two years later, Wynn made Baldwin the Nugget’s president.