Ship It Holla Ballas! (6 page)

“You’ve got to do what you’ve to do, son. Just … be careful. Don’t go getting in over your head. And please keep us updated and let us know how everything’s going. Don’t be afraid to call us and ask if you need help with anything…”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“… as long as it’s not money you’re looking for or a place to live. You’re on your own now, son.”

Well
, thinks Raptor as he hangs up the phone,
that went better than expected
.

Next up: the TCU administrative office. He tells the counselor he meets with that he wants to take a leave of absence for psychological reasons. Not a problem—plenty of kids get too depressed to finish their first semester of college. But in truth, he’s anything but sad. He can’t wait to start his new life as a professional gambler.

He moves into a run-down off-campus apartment with Deuce2High, one of his best friends from high school who’s now enrolled at TCU. Raptor’s share of the rent is only $400 a month, so it’s easy to set aside enough money to cover the year.

He uses another chunk of his bankroll to purchase a computer system that will turn him into a cult hero on Two Plus Two: the Quad Monitor Set-Up. Like a proud father Raptor posts pictures of it on the forum—four monitors, stacked two by two, connected to a computer with multiple graphics cards. He’s now able to see sixteen online poker tables at once, although he quickly discovers through trial and error that his results suffer if he plays more than twelve games at the same time.

Free of any obligations outside of poker, Raptor multitables Sit N Gos all day, every day, rapidly rising up the ranks until he’s regularly playing the $109s and $215s. Deuce2High is so impressed that he sells Raptor his radar detector for $250—with a few clicks, Raptor transfers the money into Deuce2High’s new poker account, seed money for grinding the $11 Sit N Gos. He will soon be winning with enough consistency to join Raptor as a college dropout.

The online cardrooms have been quick to realize that these sorts of referrals are an easy way to keep growing their business, so many have established Amway-style affiliate programs to reward players who are willing to evangelize. Raptor steers his friends to a site called Empire Poker in exchange for a percentage of the “rake.”

Most casino games are insanely profitable because they’re rigged in favor of the house. Not so with poker, where the house is relegated to spectator as the players battle among themselves. The casinos—including the online poker rooms—compensate themselves by taking a small cut out of every pot: the rake. It’s usually just a couple of dollars, so the players hardly feel the pinch, but they’re being pinched nonetheless. If the house is dealing a hundred hands an hour and taking $2 out of every pot, it’s like having an invisible player at the table who’s guaranteed to win $200 every hour. It’s not enough for a poker player to outdo his opponents; if he’s going to turn a profit, he’s got to beat this invisible player too.

As long as his friends keep playing, Raptor gets a portion of their rake in the form of a check from the card room at the end of each month. It’s almost like having a steady paycheck, which frees him up psychologically to play his best poker. He’s able to quickly build his bankroll up to $25,000, which to an eighteen-year-old feels like a grand fortune.

But after a few weeks, Raptor worries that something is missing from his life. A quick glance at his daily routine, which rarely sees him stray farther from his computer than the bathroom to take a leak or the front door to pick up delivery food, reminds him that his world lacks any kind of social life or sense of community. For the first time in his life he’s not part of a team. He’d planned to join a fraternity, but that option’s no longer available to him. He has a lot of friends at TCU and goes to plenty of college parties, but he usually feels like an outsider, disconnected from the rhythms of campus life, coping with a radically different set of concerns than the students who surround him.

It occurs to him that, as a professional gambler, the Two Plus Two site would probably be a good place to seek camaraderie. He begins to post more often, and when Irieguy throws out the idea of sharing a room at the Commerce Casino for an upcoming tournament, Raptor jumps at the chance to fly to Los Angeles.

*   *   *

Raptor is every bit as surprised by Irieguy and SkipperBob as they are by him. Irieguy is
way
older than he’d expected, like, in his thirties or something, and SkipperBob clearly gets into movies for half-price. The awkwardness slowly dissipates as they launch into an esoteric poker discussion, then disappears altogether once TheUsher, a Two Plus Twoer from nearby Santa Monica who named himself after a villainous character from HBO’s
Carnivale
, arrives on the scene.

Raptor and TheUsher have traded messages on AIM, but they’ve never actually met in person before. Raptor’s relieved to discover that TheUsher’s only twenty years old—a contemporary who speaks the same language and gets the same cultural references. The two hit it off, strutting around the Commerce Casino as if they own the place, getting so caught up in the moment that they put their names on the waiting list for a $100/$200 limit Hold’em game. It’s by far the biggest game Raptor has ever considered playing, but he has $12,000 in his pocket and he’s feeling plenty confident, especially after seeing how awful—“terribad” in his vernacular—many of the players are.

While waiting to get in the game, they drift into the adjoining room, where a group of Asian gamblers are whooping it up. Whatever strange card game they’re playing is clearly the most entertaining activity in the world.

“What the heck is that?” Raptor asks.

“Pai Gow,” TheUsher replies. “You know you can play as the bank here?”

“So what?”

“So, the bank has like a two percent edge.”

“Wait a minute. You can gamble here
plus EV
?”

“EV” stands for expected value, gamblerspeak for the amount of money that any given decision will win or lose over the long run. When you talk about the house having an edge, what you’re really saying is that casino games like craps or slot machines force players to make decisions with negative expected value—you may enjoy some short-term success, but keep betting a dollar and, once the law of averages has a chance to work its magic, you’ll only be getting back ninety-eight cents.

Savvy gamblers live for opportunities that carry positive expected value. Blackjack card-counters aren’t psychic; they don’t have any way of knowing exactly which cards are going to come out of the shoe. What they can do, by keeping close track of all the cards that have been played, is identify moments where the odds have shifted subtly in their favor, creating “plus-EV” situations. Seizing these opportunities, they suddenly increase the size of their bets, hoping to take advantage of the winds that are, however briefly, blowing their way. Winning poker relies on a similar ethic: nearly every move that a knowledgeable player makes at the table is governed by the hopes that he’s making a plus-EV decision.

Raptor, having committed himself to the life of a savvy gambler, can’t believe that this casino is going to give him an opportunity to gamble plus EV.

Or rather, he
totally
believes it. He sidles up to the table and pulls out his bankroll, quickly bringing himself up to speed on the rules of the game as it progresses.

Less than an hour later, a floorman calls his name for the poker game, but Raptor isn’t around to hear it. He’s back in his hotel room with TheUsher, feeling terribad, trying to figure out how much grinding at the poker tables it’s going to take to win back the $12,000 he just lost at Pai Gow.

9

Once I came upon Two Plus Two, I saw all these people who were playing poker on the Internet for a living. In the Midwest you’re told you have to finish high school, go to college, get a corporate job or whatever. It gave me confidence that there were actually people living outside of that system making a living playing poker. That it was more than a crazy idea.

—Good2cu

OKEMOS, MICHIGAN
(Fall 2004)

In addition to allowing him to buy beer for half of underage Okemos, Good2cu’s fake ID turns out to have another benefit: access to Soaring Eagle, an Indian casino an hour’s drive north on Highway 127.

Here he finds the kind of poker he sees on TV. Real felt tables. Professional dealers. Interesting characters. The hypnotic clickety-clack of hundreds of players simultaneously riffling their chips. In this seductive environment Good2cu’s desire to become a professional video gamer comes to an end, supplanted by the fantasy that’s been prickling his imagination for the past year. He wants to be a professional gambler, a well-heeled scoundrel living by his ingenuity and wits, a “balla” in the parlance of the rap world. Good2cu understands that he’s not a natural fit, that to be a true balla he’s going to have to overcome his social awkwardness and find a girl who’s actually interested in him, but there’s no reason he can’t embark on the gambling part right now.

His first few sessions at Soaring Eagle teach him that his dream job comes weighted with certain harsh realities. The wait-list to get into a $6/$12 or $10/$20 limit Hold’em game often exceeds an hour, plenty of time for a bored gambler to lose all his money playing blackjack. The poker games themselves aren’t quite boom-or-bust—“boom” is much too strong of a word to describe his piddling success. Good2cu tends to string together a few decent wins, only to wipe them out in a single bad session, sending him all the way back to square one. Or, rather, to the YMCA, to scrub a few more toilets, and to Two Plus Two, to search for ways to clean up his game.

While lurking on the site, Good2cu picks up some valuable information. The conventional wisdom among poker players is that, in the long run, solid play can reasonably be expected to net around one “big blind”—the betting unit that dictates the size of a game—every hour he plays. In other words, even if Good2cu plays flawlessly, the kinds of games they’re spreading at Soaring Eagle probably won’t earn him more than $10 or $20 an hour. It’s certainly better than the $7 an hour he’s making at the Y, but not exactly a path to riches.

Internet poker presents an interesting challenge to this long-maintained belief, offering an accelerated version of the game. Live poker is riddled with all sorts of tedious conventions that prevent swifter play. Human dealers have to collect and shuffle the cards. Bets have to be counted out and confirmed. Players ask other players for chip counts, dealers to change the decks when they’re running bad, and floormen to resolve arguments over even the most trivial of slights.

According to Two Plus Twoers, the Internet has redefined or eliminated many of these hurdles. Where in a live game you can expect to be dealt maybe twenty hands an hour, in an Internet game you might see a hundred or more. Online players have discovered that they’ve been driving the car in first gear. With the emergency brake on.

Taking the logic one step further, it stands to reason that a player who can make $10 an hour in a game where twenty hands are dealt can make $50 an hour in a game where he’s dealt five times as many hands.

And if you can handle playing four or eight or twelve of these tables at the same time …

Reading this inspires seventeen-year-old Good2cu to take the leap and make a deposit online. He chooses PokerStars, the site where Chris Moneymaker started his miraculous run to the world championship. He doesn’t have a credit card, so he uses Western Union to wire some of the money he’s won playing home games to his new online account. When prompted for his date of birth, he enters the same one that’s on his fake ID—if this is going to present a problem when he goes to cash out his winnings, well, he’ll worry about that when the time comes.

Turns out he doesn’t have to worry—in his first few days on the site, Good2cu learns another important lesson about Internet poker: you can lose your money a lot faster too.

He returns to Two Plus Two to learn a few more tricks. One is bankroll management, the discipline to choose games you can actually afford to play without fear of losing all your money in one sitting. Another is a form of bargain shopping specific to online poker—the competition among virtual card rooms is so fierce that most offer special deals to attract players, like cash bonuses for new deposits and “rakeback,” which rewards loyal players by refunding a portion of their rake. After comparing sites for the best deal, Good2cu makes another deposit, vowing to stick to a lower-stakes game he knows he can afford.

He also has a goal to keep him focused. Spring Break is only three months away and some of his friends are going to Mexico, a trip that promises epic drunkenness and, possibly, drunken hookups with drunken girls. His parents are willing to pay for college, but they’re not interested in subsidizing this particular aspect of their son’s education.

To go, Good2cu needs to make $2,000, and with margaritas and bikinis serving as a carrot, he manages to do just that. He flies to Playa del Carmen, drinks a thousand Coronas and half as many tequila shots, and comes awfully close, on one or two occasions, to hooking up with girls who are every bit as drunk as he.

Upon his return to Michigan, Good2cu can’t wait to get back to the tables to begin funding his next adventure. He parks himself in front of the computer in his dad’s home office, a development that does not go unnoticed by Dad, who from time to time likes to pop his head in to see what his son is up to. Sometimes Dad even likes to take a seat beside him and watch him play.

Uh-oh.

Despite the fact that one of the world’s most celebrated poker players, 1989 WSOP champion Phil Hellmuth, hails from Madison, Wisconsin, most folks in the Midwest still equate poker with gambling, and gambling with sin. Good2cu’s father is hardly a puritan, but he doesn’t take regular junkets to Las Vegas either. All he knows about poker is what he’s seen on television, and, despite his son’s admiration for them, he wouldn’t trust Sammy Farha or Chris Moneymaker to give him proper change.