Ship It Holla Ballas! (27 page)

The truth is he
is
better than that. The image he created for himself online was designed to attract attention for himself and his friends. He hoped it would be a shortcut to fame; it’s turning into a major source of frustration. With that in mind Good2cu decides to retire—or at least rethink—his image. The goal has always been to enjoy a long career as a professional poker player. It’s time to emphasize the “professional” part.

The first order of business is replacing ShipItHollaBalla.com and its emphasis on hedonistic excess with a more businesslike Web site. To do the job, he hires WildBill, a Two Plus Twoer he’s already been working with for a few months.

WildBill runs RakeAid, a Web site designed to exploit online poker’s affiliate system—he signs up players and directs them to certain poker rooms, receiving a commission each month based on the number of hands they play. He returns most of the commission to the players (their motivation for signing up with him) but keeps a sliver for himself (his motivation for running the business). Good2cu has been driving traffic from ShipItHollaBalla.com to RakeAid in exchange for a percentage of the percentage. It’s been a successful arrangement so far, as Good2cu has served up a few extremely high-volume players—FieryJustice, for example, often plays enough hands in a month to generate as much as $50,000 in commission.

With WildBill working on a new Web site, Good2cu tackles the next issue: if he’s going to be a serious poker player, he’s going to have to focus even more of his attention on the game. He can’t allow himself to get distracted by the mundanities of everyday life. Buying groceries. Doing laundry. Going to the bank. Filling the car with gas. Paying bills. Booking travel. The mathematically correct play, Good2cu decides, is to hire a personal assistant. He places an ad online, offering $20 an hour plus free poker lessons.

He gets more than a thousand responses.

Sifting through a thousand resumes is exactly the kind of mundane bullshit he doesn’t have time to deal with, an irony that isn’t lost on Good2cu. He’s debating whether to toss them all into the trash when WildBill suggests that he save himself the time and hire Trent, who’s been handling RakeAid’s customer service needs.

A former athlete at the University of Southern California, Trent is also a pretty good poker player, theoretically capable of grinding out $10,000 a month playing low- and middle-stakes games, were it not for his propensity to give it all back at the high-stakes tables. The cycle has repeated itself enough times for Trent to see the wisdom of maintaining a steady income independent of his online poker accounts. In addition to RakeAid, he also works part time as a personal assistant to the Finnish poker star Patrik Antonius, but he’s happy to take on more work.

Good2cu can’t help falling in love with the idea. An ex-jock, the kind of guy who probably would have ignored him before he became a poker player, wants to work for him for $20 an hour,
and
he gets to share an assistant with one of poker’s most famous young players. Good2cu hires Trent as fast as he can.

Free to concentrate on poker, Good2cu gets to work. And it truly is work. He can see that most of the young poker players he’s crossed paths with don’t treat the game like a job. They’ve made a lot of money and enjoyed an extravagant lifestyle by playing a computer game, but that doesn’t mean they’re professional in their approach. The online world is becoming increasingly cannibalistic, and if Good2cu’s going to survive, he’s going to have to keep improving his game, which is going to take focus and discipline.

In one of the final posts he’ll make on the Ship It Holla Balla Web site, Good2cu reveals his desire to adopt an entirely new set of habits and his goal of becoming one of the best all-around poker players in the world. To aid him in that endeavor, he devises a daily schedule that promotes hard work, good health, and personal growth over hard partying, late nights, and unhealthy living.

—Do 30 minutes of cardio as soon as I wake up

—Make a list of what I want to accomplish on said day

—Lift weights five times a week

—Play poker 50 hours a week

—Do some writing once a week

—Constantly review my poker play

—Avoid drugs and alcohol (Beside an occasional drink/joint)

Here is what I picture my normal day being:

9:00 am: Wake up

9:15–10:00 am: Go to gym downstairs and do some cardio

10:00–10:45: Shower, eat, sauna, steam room, etc.

10:45 am–5:00 pm: Play online/live, read, run errands

5:00–7:00: Dinner with friends

7:00–10:00: Play more poker

10:00–11:00: Weight room

11:00 pm–12:30 am: Review hands, read, write

12:30–9:00: sleep

His schedule bears a striking resemblance to the one implemented by another Midwesterner, although F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby is a fictional character—not to mention an earlier riser.

50

I’m not really too worried about my play deteriorating, as I spend a lot of time reviewing hands and discussing them with friends. I AM worried about my mental state though, and how poker will affect me later in life. Many of us have been given the opportunity to make epic amounts of money at a very young age, and I am curious to see how many (including myself) are turning out in the next ten to fifteen years.

—Raptor

FORT WORTH, TEXAS
(Winter 2007–2008)

Like most of his poker buddies, Raptor grew up playing video games. Many of them still do—durrrr seems to have an Xbox in almost every room of the house. Raptor likes to think he’s outgrowing the habit, but lately he’s found himself getting sucked into a game called Defense of the Ancients.

DotA is a mod of the popular real-time strategy game Warcraft III. Raptor enjoys losing himself in a fantasy world where heroes battle over the Internet, earning gold for each opponent they slay. To, you know, escape from the real world where he battles poker players over the Internet, earning gold for each opponent he slays.

When he’s not playing DotA, he’s talking to people on AIM or browsing the Two Plus Two threads. In other words, procrastinating.

I must be really sick of poker.

It’s true. The game no longer captivates him the way it once did. After playing no-limit Hold’em nearly every day for four years, he frequently finds himself playing by rote.

He dabbles in other forms of poker, like the more nuanced pot-limit Omaha, hoping to reignite his passion. But at the end of the day, he’s still staring at cards on a screen.

I feel like I’m just going through the motions like I would at some job I hated. Part of the reason I wanted to make poker a profession was to prevent these feelings, yet here they are.

One night he has an eye-opening conversation with his friend John, who once flushed his entire bankroll down the toilet in a single high-stakes session. After a few miserable attempts at recouping his losses, John decided to move on from online poker and get a real job.

“How’s
that
going?” Raptor asks.

“Every day I wake up at the asscrack of dawn,” John tells him. “I go into an office and do the shit that someone else tells me to do for eight hours. But you know what’s funny? I like it. Sometimes I work late even when I don’t have to.”

Raptor’s got to admit that John seems a lot happier. He was a great poker player, but an angry one—he’d curse loudly, kick walls, and pulverize computer mice. Now he sounds relaxed, like he’s actually enjoying life.

Raptor reminds himself that there’s a world beyond poker. He could be backpacking in New Zealand or learning to salsa in Argentina. He has enough money in the bank to stay abroad for as long as he wants, immersing himself in a new culture and language.

But like his dream of buying that vacation home in Costa Rica, he never gets past the planning stage.

Real estate seems like something he
should
be interested in, so he scours Fort Worth for a rental property to buy. He reads books, has long conversations with realtors, and researches MLS listings online. He passes on the first four places he sees, until he stumbles across a fourplex, one block from the TCU campus, that promises to bring in positive cash flow for years to come. It feels great to sign the paperwork.

For a moment, anyway. Then the moment’s gone. With it goes any motivation to repeat the exercise.

He tries to get serious about golf, taking lessons and playing nearly every day, until, several months in, he abruptly quits. He joins Haley for a few bikram yoga classes; they’re enjoyable and make him feel great for hours afterward, but they too fail to become a habit. He fares better with jiujitsu. It’s a great workout—he almost blacks out during his first sparring session—and he loves the competition. Everyone at his gym can kick his ass, quickly tapping him out. So he starts training five or six days a week, sometimes twice a day, setting his eyes on a blue belt.

He’s practicing takedowns when he falls awkwardly on his side, and for a moment his shoulder, the same one he injured in high school, slips out of place. He hasn’t done too much damage—he’s able to get back on the mat after a couple of weeks of rest—but the incident gets him thinking about his torn labrum and baseball and what might have been.

What if I’d never injured my shoulder? I’d probably be getting ready for spring training. I’d be a junior in college. I wouldn’t be playing poker much, if at all. I’d be a regular guy. And who knows? I might even be happier.

Living a normal life is surprisingly appealing to him, but it’s hard to be normal when you’re a twenty-one-year-old millionaire. When his friend Kurosh talks smack about his DotA skills, Raptor finds himself challenging the kid to a best-of-eleven series.

For $10,000.

Just like a regular guy would.

51

At the time, no other online players really played those games at the Bellagio, mostly because online poker players are kind of lazy. It’s easier to stay at home than to have to go to the casino and sit there and play for hours. But to me, poker rooms were more glamorous. I liked being in the casino around all of the characters. I wanted to be a gambler.

—Good2cu

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
(April 2008)

Ever since watching Chris Moneymaker go toe-to-toe with Sammy Farha, Good2cu has maintained certain fantasies about the life of a Vegas gambler. A carefree existence devoid of soul-crushing responsibilities. The freedom to play poker whenever and wherever he chooses. Nights that last until noon. Colorful characters. Suitcases full of money. A hot girlfriend.
Stripper
hot.

Hiring Trent has proven to be a great first step along the path he hopes will lead him there; on the best days, it appears to be a masterstroke of brilliance. Any good personal assistant can shield his employer from life’s petty distractions, but how many can help his boss scout online card rooms for juicy games and high-rolling fish ready to tilt off tens of thousands of dollars? Trent is also the kind of guy who doesn’t blink when Good2cu asks him if he wants to join a blackjack team, à la the M.I.T. kids described in Ben Mezrich’s
Bringing Down the House.
Their four-man team only lasts two weeks, but they manage to make $50,000 before getting barred from the casinos.

Right now it feels like everything Good2cu touches turns to gold. He’s added, on average, more than $100,000 to his online accounts each month since leaving Michigan. But he didn’t move to Vegas to sit in front of a computer. He came to the center of the gambling universe to become a professional gambler. To play in the biggest cash games in the world. To stare down guys like Sammy Farha for hundred-thousand-dollar pots. To become a colorful character himself.

Which means spending more time in the Bellagio’s card room, particularly Bobby’s Room. There, he gets to play with some of the well-known pros he recognizes from television: Doyle Brunson, Barry Greenstein, Daniel Negreanu, even Phil Ivey. But not all of the players are famous—he loves interacting with the Machiavellian cast of characters who haunt the periphery of the big games. Like Tweety, a chubby connoisseur of debauchery who grew up hustling pool in Cleveland and now wears a Rolex Masterpiece and drives a $300,000 car. Or 20K Jay, who might pass for
Scooby-Doo’s
Shaggy, if Shaggy wore stylish glasses and hip-hop clothes and talked like a wannabe rap star.

Traheho is every bit as fascinated by this shadow world as Good2cu is. The two of them are discussing the viability of a prop bet Trent is considering—living in one of the rooms at the Bellagio for a month—when 20K Jay snorts dismissively from across the table.

“I could live in the
bathroom
of one of these rooms for a month, yo.”

“Yeah, right,” Good2cu replies.

“Care to put some money on it?”

A few minutes later, the terms have been settled. They rent a room where, for the next thirty days, Jay will be confined to the lavatory. No visitors, no computer, no drugs to help pass the time. He’s allowed an air mattress, a portable DVD player, a cell phone with four hundred minutes of talk time, and up to four visits from room service a day. Break any of the rules, and Jay owes Good2cu and Traheho $20,000. Succeed, and they owe Jay twice as much. The loser also has to foot the tab for the room.

“How do I know y’all will pay me my money?” Jay asks.

Good2cu understands the implication—he hasn’t been around long enough to have earned anyone’s trust. They agree to put the $60,000 that’s at stake into escrow in a safe deposit box at the Bellagio. The box is registered in Jay’s name, but Good2cu gets to hold on to the only key.

Good2cu and Trent watch Jay set up camp in the bathroom. He’s whistling “We’re in the Money,” although his enthusiasm noticeably wanes as he inflates the mattress, shrinking the bathroom into a human-sized doggie crate.

“Don’t worry,” Trent whispers to Good2cu. “He’s never going to make it. He’s already cracking up.”