Ship It Holla Ballas! (10 page)

Nearly every day for the past several weeks, durrrr has been playing against Spirit Rock, one of the most successful online poker players in the world, noted for breaking a few well-known pros who dared to venture into the online realm. They’ve been playing heads-up for tens of thousands of dollars each sitting.

Because you’re playing every hand against the same opponent, heads-up poker is a lot like an expensive game of Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Is he raising here because he’s bluffing, because he wants me to
think
he’s bluffing, or because he’s bluffing and knows that I’ll think he’s pretending to bluff?
These long psychological clashes tend to leave the winner just as drained as the loser.

Which is why durrrr didn’t bother to enter Irieguy’s tournament. He also skipped the Calcutta-style auction at the start of the day, but plenty of other players took part, wagering on the tournament’s participants, a monetary incentive that, coupled with the open bar and copious female nudity, has encouraged most of them to stick around long after they get knocked out. Some watch the matches that are still in progress. Others have heated discussions about strategy, or bet hundreds of dollars on arm wrestling, or on who can draw the highest card from a deck.

Almost everybody is drinking as if exhausting the contents of the bar were a moral imperative. Several joints have been passed around, adding their fragrance to the room. Some of the younger guys have taken hits of Ecstasy and, if their blissed-out smiles are any indication, are enjoying their lap dances on a cosmic level.

Throughout it all, Good2cu remains in character, the one he’s adopted for his Vegas adventure. He’s double-fisting drinks from the bar and needling his opponents the way he’s seen players on television do. Every time he wins a big pot he shouts, “Ship it!” and his growing legion of supporters reply, in a call-and-response pattern that will continue deep into the night, with a perfectly timed, “Holla!” The roll Good2cu’s on carries him all the way to the finals, where he squares off against Yugo, a longtime Two Plus Twoer with an uncanny resemblance to former NBA All-Star Peja Stojakovic.

Yugo is more of a recreational player than a pro, and for the first time all day, Good2cu is actually favored to win the match, but the cards don’t fall his way. Irieguy awards Yugo a gold medal for winning the tournament. As a $200 entrant, however, he’s only eligible to win the smaller portion of the prize pool.

Good2cu is the day’s real winner. Between the prize money and all his side bets, he’s earned more than $8,000. It’s the biggest score of his life, and it works on his confidence like a flattering remark from a beautiful woman. Chatting up strippers is one thing; separating thousands of dollars from a group of players whose games he admires shoots him into an entirely different zip code. He wraps all the hundreds and fifties Irieguy hands him into a roll, stuffs the cash burrito into his pocket, and grabs an enormous bottle of Grey Goose vodka from the bar. Trailed by a ragtag processional of drunken, stoned, and tripping teenagers, Good2cu marches out of the suite and through the frescoed lobby, swigging from the bottle with every step.

Irieguy knows he needs to get a hold of this situation quickly before it spirals out of control, so he steers the kids toward a fleet of limousines parked in front of the casino and tells the drivers to take them to Déjà Vu, an eighteen-and-over “gentleman’s club.” Despite the exotic name, Déjà Vu doesn’t have the same class of dancers as the Rhino and they don’t serve alcohol either, but everyone’s been drinking for twelve straight hours, so who cares?

Added bonus: full nudity.

Last night, Good2cu was a strip club newbie, but tonight he feels like a veteran. In between shouts of “I am the world champion!” he buys lap dances for all his new best friends and bottle after bottle of nonalcoholic champagne, and tips extravagantly in response to even the most mundane acts of service. His neatly wrapped bankroll quickly turns into a disheveled head of Ben Franklin lettuce, stray leaves occasionally fluttering to the ground while he negotiates prices with the saucer-eyed strippers who trace each bill’s descent.

In the midst of all this fun Good2cu gets struck by a serious thought. Two days ago, he was a fairly typical college student, studying for midterms and hating life because of all the reading he still had to do. Between hitting the books and grinding online he’s hardly spoken to a member of the opposite sex in weeks. He’s made some good friends at Michigan State, but none of them can do more than nod dumbly when he wants to talk poker.

The last two days have offered him a glimpse of a far more glamorous life. He’s been living like a balla, buying rounds of fancy cocktails and lap dances from gorgeous women and paying for it all with money he’s won off of poker players with legitimate skills. He’s made a bunch of new friends who, despite knowing him less than forty-eight hours, already seem to understand him better than anyone else in the world. And, to top it all off, he’s $12,000 richer, or at least he was at the beginning of the night.

Drunk and surrounded by naked women who won’t leave you alone because your pockets are overflowing with cash probably isn’t the best time to make an important decision about your academic career, but Good2cu doesn’t care.

To hell with midterms. I’m not ready to go home yet.

15

Going to classes just didn’t seem like the right thing to do on a lot of days.

—Apathy

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
(February 2006)

Apathy’s not ready to go home either.

The twenty-year-old Canadian is supposed to be in his second year of college at the University of Western Ontario, but, distracted by poker, hasn’t sat through a lecture since the fall. Ever since he won $75 in a freeroll tournament his freshman year of college, Apathy’s bankroll has been on a rapid ascent. Once poker made him a hundred-thousandaire, he began to focus all of his attention on the things he loves—food, travel, nightlife, women—and ditch the things he didn’t, namely studying. He never officially quit school; that would have required way too much motivation. One day, last fall, he simply stopped going to class.

When Good2cu announces his desire to stay in Vegas for a few more days, Apathy suggests they rent a room together at TI. They spend the next four days playing poker and sampling the city’s nightlife, or at least the portions accessible without a decent fake ID.

The budding bromance proves highly educational for both. While similarities drew them together, it’s their differences that cement the bond. Each sees in the other a quality he lacks. Apathy emanates the sort of charisma and natural ease with women that Good2cu craves, and Good2cu has an honest-to-god work ethic, whether it’s keeping meticulous records so he can analyze his results at the poker tables, adhering to a gym schedule, or practicing pickup lines in the hopes of improving his lot with the ladies.

They spend most of their days at the Bellagio, which has been
the
place to play poker in Las Vegas ever since it opened its doors in 1998. Tourists flock to the low-stakes tables in a never-ending stream, while high-stakes pros and the high-rolling businessmen who come to challenge them sequester themselves in Bobby’s Room, home to the biggest cash games in the world. Good2cu and Apathy occasionally peer into that special section of the card room, dreaming of a day when they might play there themselves. For now, they’re content to take money off the tourists, with Good2cu concentrating on the cash games and Apathy winning several thousand dollars in a tournament.

They’ve just emerged from the Bellagio’s card room and are walking back to their hotel when Good2cu realizes that the most exciting week of his life is about to come to an end. In four hours he’ll be getting on a plane that will carry him back to the frozen tundra of Michigan, where he’ll go back to being just another college kid.

“Fuck it.” Good2cu points at the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace. “I’ve got $8,000 in my pocket, and I want to spend it all before I leave town. Let’s go shopping.”

From its marble floors to its Corinthian pillars, the Forum Shops are designed to evoke a spirit of Roman decadence. Good2cu and Apathy ride down a three-story spiral escalator into an underground cavern where the blue skies and puffy white clouds painted on the ceiling combine with climate control to simulate the most perfect day in the history of the Empire. In the subterranean depths they find 160 of the world’s most exclusive brand-name stores, from Armani to Zegna. The Forum Shops gross more per square foot than any shopping center in America, including Rodeo Drive. And there are more than 600,000 square feet.

It’s just a glorified shopping mall, but the contrived opulence still provides an amusing contrast to Good2cu’s provincialism. He can’t tell you the difference between a Cabernet and a Chardonnay, although that didn’t stop him from ordering a bottle of each at dinner last night. He owns a sport coat, but it was purchased at a thrift store and is made out of velour. He likes to wear baseball caps with the brim turned sideways, as if protecting one ear from the elements, and nearly all of his jeans have gaping holes in them, including the ones he’s wearing now.

Adding to his disheveled appearance, he hasn’t slept more than four hours any night this week. Amid all the high-end shops, he looks like a street urchin. He feels like Julia Roberts in
Pretty Woman
as he glides from store to store on a spree that would make any shopaholic jealous. His bags are full of expensive designer clothes—part of his plan to woo the ladies—and a painting that promises to look completely out of place in his dorm room.

“But what I really need,” he tells Apathy, “is a Rolex.”

While it sounds like a spur-of-the-moment decision, he’s actually been thinking about it ever since he observed all the extravagant wristwear at Irieguy’s tournament. A cultural anthropologist studying young online poker players might identify a sort of fun house version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The first big acquisition is a brand-new, top-of-the-line computer, a prudent attempt to shore up their business infrastructure. The purchase of a blatantly expensive watch often comes next, letting everyone know just how successful that business is.

Good2cu walks into Tourneau and loudly declares his desire to buy a Rolex. When that fails to get the desired response, he pulls out a wad of cash and starts waving it in the air. Apathy laughs so hard his stomach hurts and he can’t catch his breath.

A saleswoman practically runs to assist them. “Perhaps you’d like to consider a Patek Phillippe?” she says. “They keep better time than Rolexes do.”

Patek Phillippe makes the more expensive watch. Technically superior. Understated. Elegant. The Rolex is large. Attention-grabbing. Ostentatious.

No-brainer.

“I’ll take the Rolex,” he says. “I guess I’ll just have to live with losing a second every half-million years instead of a million.”

“You’re cute.” She removes the Rolex from the glass case. “And how will you be paying for this? Credit card?”

“Credit card?” He plunks what remains of his bankroll down on the counter and starts laughing like a donkey. “Ship it!”

*   *   *

The next morning, Good2cu wakes up in his dorm room. He looks around at the drably painted cinder-block walls and the piles of books sitting on his desk.

He’s definitely not in Vegas anymore.

But the Rolex on his wrist is proof that it wasn’t all just a dream. For nearly a week, he lived his vision of a rock star’s life. He won a tournament against some of the best Sit N Go players in the world. Doesn’t that mean he’s one of the best Sit N Go players in the world?

That’s what he keeps telling himself as, instead of going to class, he logs onto Party Poker, where he plays confidently and well. Over the next four days, he wins $35,000, by far the best run of poker he’s ever had.

Good2cu’s roommate takes it all in with detached bemusement. Somehow in Vegas the kid who earned a 3.9 GPA his first semester got replaced by a poker-playing extraterrestrial who never goes to class or opens a book. The roommate doesn’t want to sound like a public service announcement, but after ten days he just can’t take it anymore. He has to say
something
.

“Hey, man, is this poker thing becoming, like, a problem?”

16

Never before have the means to lose so much been so available to so many at such a young age.

—Mattathias Schwartz, “The Hold-’Em Holdup,”
The New York Times,
June 11, 2006

In 1988, during a typically cold and brief summer in Oulu, Finland, a programmer working for the local university’s Department of Information Processing Science grew frustrated with the department’s Bulletin Board System. A rudimentary antecedent of the World Wide Web, the BBS allowed users to connect to the university’s computer server using their modems and, at least in theory, chat with one another in real time. In reality, as observed by the programmer Jarrko Oikarien—or “WiZ” to his programming buddies—the BBS relied on software that suffered from “a bad habit of not working properly.” WiZ took advantage of a lull in his schedule to try to create a better way to communicate online.

Two years later, journalists in Iraq used WiZ’s creation—Internet Relay Chat—to circumvent a media blackout and continue reporting during Operation Desert Storm. IRC quickly became the standard protocol for real-time text communication, the precursor to today’s instant messages.

In the early 1990s, Todd Mummert and Greg Reynolds, developers at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, created a script that allowed IRC users to play poker against one another. Despite a complete lack of graphics, their “IRCBot” was a huge hit among poker-loving computer geeks, even if it failed to attract a mainstream following.

If IRCBot was Project Mercury, Planet Poker was the Apollo Program. The site, launched in 1998 by Randy Blumer, a former Marine Systems Engineer in the Canadian Navy, was the first Internet card room to offer real-money games—the same place that introduced Irieguy and SkipperBob to online poker. Overshadowing its novelty were frequent crashes and the discovery that the random number generator they had licensed to deal the cards wasn’t so random after all, but Planet Poker gave the world a taste of what could be.