Ship It Holla Ballas! (5 page)

Good2cu wins about as often as he loses, $10 or $20 at a time, subsidizing the hobby with a part-time job as a janitor at the local YMCA. The job isn’t his idea, but one foisted upon him by his parents, who, before he escapes their twin nests, want to make sure he learns proper Midwestern values, the underlying foundation of which is, “An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.” Somehow scrubbing toilets for $7 an hour is supposed to make him a better person.

The lesson his parents are trying to impart either resonates profoundly or is entirely unnecessary—it might not always manifest itself in his academic life, but Good2cu possesses a stubborn work ethic. He attacks the game of poker as if it were a problem that needs to be solved, suspecting that, like video games, there must be some strategy to winning.

A trip to the bookstore confirms it. Reading every book on the subject he can get his hands on, Good2cu verifies what he was beginning to suspect: Most of the kids he battles in the lunch room are playing too many hands, bluffing too often, and focusing too much on their own cards instead of considering what their opponents might have. He puts his newly acquired knowledge to good use at his friend Jason’s home game. After Good2cu leaves with all the money on the table four consecutive times, Jason asks him not to come back.

The same dynamic is playing itself out in home games all across the country. As the money gets redistributed from the weak players to the stronger ones, the smaller games start to dry up. The winning players gravitate toward one another, eager to use their bigger bankrolls to compete in games with higher stakes.

Good2cu knows he’s going to have to get a lot better if he’s going to succeed against players with greater skills and bigger bankrolls. He’s just not sure how. He’s read nearly every poker strategy book in print, and, besides, there aren’t very many books that focus on no-limit Hold’em, the game everyone likes to play.

His quest for knowledge leads him to the Two Plus Two forums. He’s way too intimidated to join the conversation, but happily soaks up all the knowledge others are providing. The quality of his education can be measured by all the $5, $10, and $20 bills he keeps stuffing into his sock drawer. The socks are starting to complain.

His growing wealth allows him certain luxuries, like buying a high-quality fake ID on the Internet. The ID means Good2cu can buy beer, leading to several welcome discoveries. The idea of talking to a pretty girl is far less intimidating when he’s got a beer in his hand, and the notion becomes even more palatable when he’s got several of them in his belly. Alcohol doesn’t just make him braver, but also wittier, more articulate, and more charming—at least that’s how he feels under the influence.

Partying also levels the social hierarchy. The arrival of alcohol and drugs on the scene reshuffles the deck, so to speak, giving Good2cu a new way to prove his value to the pack and further increasing his confidence.

Suddenly he’s getting invited to parties and, whenever his dad goes out of town, throwing ragers of his own. One of them gets out of hand. The police arrive. Good2cu gets arrested, charged with allowing minors to consume alcohol on the premises.

Choice A: Tell Dad, beg for forgiveness, and hope to see the keys to the car sometime before college.

Choice B: Hire the best criminal defense attorney in Okemos.

What would Sammy Farha do?

When the lawyer’s bill arrives, Good2cu pays it with money he won in a home game just a couple of nights before.

7

Solved game:
a game whose outcome can be correctly predicted from any position when each side plays optimally.

FORT WORTH, TEXAS
(Summer 2004)

With his freshman year at TCU just a few weeks away, Raptor spends what’s left of his summer mucking around Two Plus Two. It’s become his default place to waste time on the Internet, a virtual home away from home (or, more precisely, a virtual home
inside
his home). When he’s not posting questions about his play—an exercise in instant gratification, thanks to the mind-cloud of serious poker junkies—Raptor explores the site’s nooks and crannies. He finds discussions on everything from hard-core poker theory to gossip about which famous pros are going broke. He loves that the site’s founders, David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth—legends in the poker world, having written and published nearly every important strategy book at the time—are active participants on the site, weighing in on the topics that interest them. But it’s the One-Table Forum, where a small community of players talk about Sit N Go tournaments as if they’re a “solved game,” that becomes the rabbit hole from which he can’t escape.

The most obvious example of a solved game is tic-tac-toe—any two reasonably intelligent players, as long as neither makes a mistake, will always battle to a draw. A less obvious example would be Connect Four, where the player who goes first is always guaranteed to win as long as she plays a perfect strategy. (Pretty sneaky, sis!)

But poker? Poker seems like the opposite of a solved game. You’re playing against unpredictable opponents, who don’t always make rational decisions, and relying on cards, which were pretty much invented as a physical representation of the universe’s crazy spirit of randomness.

Sifting through hundreds of threads started by guys like AleoMagus, Daliman, and Irieguy, Raptor learns that Sit N Gos haven’t been “solved” in the sense that you can predict the winner of any particular game, but that this community of players, after years of theorizing and debate, have cobbled together an optimal strategy for success—a way of playing these interesting little tournaments that pretty much guarantees that you’ll finish in the money more often than not.

The ideas that make up the strategy are wide-ranging and complex, but they more or less boil down to a single, unifying concept, a philosophy the Two Plus Twoers call “pushbotting.”

At the start of a Sit N Go, you have a lot of chips relative to the size of the blinds. You can afford to play a lot of hands and to call a lot of bets once you’re battling for a pot. Which is exactly what most people do. But as the blinds increase, your position reverses. You no longer have a lot of chips relative to the size of the betting. The decisions you make are riskier, forcing you to gamble with a larger percentage of your chip stack. Most people start to tighten up during the latter part of the tournament, playing fewer hands in order to preserve their chips as long as possible.

Most people are idiots. The best way to win a Sit N Go is to do the exact opposite. The smaller blinds at the beginning mean smaller pots that, in the larger context of the tournament, don’t mean very much—it’s not worth getting involved unless you’ve got a hand that’s a lock to win. When the bigger blinds at the end of the Sit N Go force you to risk a larger percentage of your chips, you’re very often “pot committed”—there’s so much money at stake that it’s worth taking a chance with a wider range of hands, even when your opponent is statistically favored to win.

Pushbotting is an effort to mechanize this strategy to the point where it no longer requires conscious thought: stay out of trouble in the beginning of the tournament, raise like a madman with all kinds of junk at the end.

The difficulty is in the details: knowing which hands to play at the beginning, which hands to play at the end, and the ability to recognize the “inflection point” where the beginning suddenly turns into the end, the moment when it’s time to change gears.

But Raptor discovers most of that mystery has been eliminated as well. The members of the One-Table Forum have created a bunch of charts that let you know which hands to play when, and they’ve created something called an ICM calculator that helps you determine, with mathematical precision, the optimal time to stop playing conservatively and start playing hyperaggressively.

With the details more or less settled, most of the active debate in the forum centers around figuring out exactly how much money you can expect to make by playing this way. Success is measured not in wins or losses, but in “ROI”—return on investment, the size of your profit relative to the amount of money you’ve invested to earn it. The Sit N Go specialists brag about ROI like it’s penis size—probably exaggerated, unlikely to be verified—tossing around numbers like 10 or 20 percent. Some claim to have stretches where they’re making as much as fifty cents on every dollar they risk.

Raptor can’t believe what he’s stumbled into. Poker’s not gambling for these guys—it’s investing. But it’s the next discovery that really blows his mind.

You can play more than one table at a time.

It’s a trick that would be nearly impossible in a live casino setting—how could you keep up with the action while racing among four separate tables? But online, you can move like a speed chess Grandmaster, clicking into a game, analyzing the board, making a play, then moving onto the next. And the beauty of pushbotting is that it’s almost robotic—most of the strategic decisions don’t require much active thought.

The regulars on the One-Table Forum have been experimenting with “multitabling” for years.
I’m earning a 10 percent ROI at one table.… What happens if I play two at the same time? Or four? Or eight?

Most of them have come to the same conclusion: It’s hard to increase the number of tables without suffering a drop in their ROI. There’s no way to turn poker into a completely robotic activity—there are occasionally critical decisions that require concentration and thought—and spreading your attention over multiple games reduces the amount of focus you’re able to give to any one in particular.

But Raptor wonders if the problem isn’t more physical than mental. It’s not easy to squeeze four tables onto a single screen—the age of giant flat-screen monitors has yet to arrive; most players are still using crate-sized CRT monitors with fifteen-inch screens. Clicking frantically from game to game, quickly trying to assess exactly what’s going on and what you should do, creates a lot of heightened stress, and it’s hard to play good poker while you’re stressed.

Raptor alleviates this issue by plugging two different monitors into the same computer. With the games spread across a wider area, he finds that he’s able to handle as many as eight tables at once without too much discomfort.

He puts this innovation to good use during the summer after graduating from high school, mastering Sit N Go strategy while playing eight to ten hours a day. By the time he moves into his new dorm room at TCU, he’s often winning $300 to $400 a day. Good money for most adults.

For an eighteen-year-old entering college, it feels like winning the lottery.

8

I’m really glad I got all that, well,
most
of the degenerate gambling stuff out of my system before it was money that would actually impact my life in some way.

—Raptor

FORT WORTH, TEXAS
(Fall 2004)

For Raptor, getting As and Bs in high school wasn’t much harder than collecting Halloween candy. Not so in college, where just three days in, his professors are actually making demands of him. Read this book. Study for the test. Show up to class.

The demands are not playing nice with his
other
schedule. During the summer, Raptor had time to play at least eight hours of online poker nearly every day. He spent so many nights at the Poker Box that the owner invited him to take a 25-percent stake in the club. (An offer that Raptor happily accepted.) There’s no way he can continue to make $300 a day if he has to read books and study for tests.

Three days into his first semester of college, and Raptor’s already asking himself,
What’s the point?

When he can’t come up with a good answer, he calls his parents, the happy loving couple who adopted him when he was two months old. Raptor won’t ascribe too much meaning to his adoption, but countless academic studies have already done the work for him, citing social confusion and depression among the possible long-term effects. Raptor does in fact feel a vague mysterious void in his life, as if everything doesn’t quite add up and he’s the only one who feels that way, but he tries not to let the feelings control him. In his mind the man and woman who raised him are his real parents. He loves them with all his heart and what they say truly matters to him.

Now he’s got to explain to Mom—an associate dean at TCU’s School of Nursing—and Dad—a Naval Academy graduate who’s been piloting American Airlines passenger jets for twenty years—that he’s planning to drop out of college.

To play poker.

“I’m really not happy doing the whole school thing” is the opening he chooses.

“Is this about baseball, honey?” his mom asks. “I know how upset you are about that.”

Raptor still can’t rotate his shoulder with anything resembling full mobility, and it seems to hurt a little more every time he walks past the baseball stadium on campus. But these days he’s so focused on poker he barely notices.

“Sort of. Well, not really. I told you guys I’ve been playing a little bit of poker online, right? I’ve also been playing at this club in town and doing pretty well.”

“…”

“So I was thinking. Maybe I’ll take the semester off and see where this whole poker thing takes me.”

“We should probably talk about this a little more,” says Mom, after taking a moment to consider her response. “But if that’s really how you feel, you should do whatever makes you happy. If you’re miserable at school, then obviously that’s not the place for you. But … poker?”

“Yeah, I know how it sounds. And I’ll admit that I have no idea where this whole online poker thing is going, whether it’ll even be around next year or not. But right now I’m making insane amounts of money and I just don’t feel like I’m ready for college.”

Dad, who’s been listening in from the phone upstairs, chimes in. “Do you really think three days is enough time to decide whether or not you’re going to pursue a degree?”

“I’m just talking about taking the semester off. I can always go back in the Spring. I just need a little time to sort through some things. I’m eighteen, so this is probably a good time for me to be figuring this stuff out, right?”