Ship It Holla Ballas! (29 page)

Like many of the regulars in Bobby’s Room, Tweety tries to develop personal relationships with the rich out-of-towners who occasionally sit in the game, hoping to set up private matches away from the casino where the house won’t be taking a rake out of every pot and the IRS can’t tax the winnings.

A businessman who usually has Tweety organize games for him whenever he’s in town takes a shine to Good2cu and asks for his number. Good2cu isn’t trying to hustle anyone, but when the businessman calls and requests that he set up a private game for him, what’s he supposed to do, say no? He briefly considers inviting Tweety, but ultimately decides against it.

This doesn’t sit well with the veteran poker pro, who explodes when he hears the news. Good2cu gets to see a different aspect of Tweety’s personality—the part forged during a fractured childhood spent in a rough neighborhood, honed by the struggle to survive on his own from the time he was fifteen without a high school education. The part that thinks these privileged online kids with their upper-middle-class backgrounds are a bunch of arrogant dickheads.

Tweety delivers a message via the Bellagio’s grapevine. “He’d better watch out. He’s dealing drugs on my corner and when you deal drugs on someone else’s corner, there’s going to be serious consequences.”

Good2cu won’t be making that mistake again. He does his best to mend the rift with Tweety and reminds himself that he needs to be more cautious in the future, a lesson that gets reinforced when 20K Jay refuses to acknowledge that he’s lost their bet.

According to Jay, he had to step outside the bathroom to sign some legal paperwork. Good2cu doesn’t care about the why—in his mind, Jay has clearly violated the terms they agreed upon.

Jay refuses to accompany him to the safe deposit box, so Good2cu goes on his own. He’s too late. Jay has already convinced the Bellagio that he’s lost the key—easy to do, as the box is in his name—and asked to have it drilled open. There’s not much Good2cu can do about it. Jay’s holding all the cards, or in this case, the cash.

Good2cu thinks back to the first time he saw Las Vegas from the sky, two years earlier, and remembers how glamorous he imagined life was below. Now he’s starting to understand why hard-bitten poker players call the game the world’s hardest way to make any easy living. Survival depends on outrunning bad luck, a task made even more difficult when everyone is trying to trip you up along the way.

Good2cu doesn’t need any more proof about how hard it is to keep your head above water in the poker world, but gets it anyway. The message boards are burning up with the news that Brandi Hawbaker has committed suicide in an apartment in Los Angeles. As the story of her topsy-turvy life gets dissected by people who didn’t even know her, it becomes clear that many of them feel complicit in her tragedy.

And in a way, they’re probably right.

Good2cu didn’t even know her, but feels like he did, thanks to her many tell-all confessions on Two Plus Two. Her death leaves him with an uneasy feeling that only worsens when he recalls the title of the first post she ever made on the forum:

NEVER TRUST ANYONE.

54

We were both calling the other side bad, but for different reasons. They were calling us bad because we gave off stuff or acted like nerds or whatever, and they were terrible because they were actually terrible.

—Raptor

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
(May 2008)

War has become inevitable.

On one side: the poker establishment. The guys who played poker before society thought it was cool. Old-timers who used to “fade the white line,” traveling from town to town in search of backroom games. The generations that followed were respectful because they had to be—without the Internet or decent poker strategy books, the only way to learn the game was at the feet of grizzled veterans. It’s been said that it takes ten thousand hours to master a skill. Old-school players put in their time in smoky card rooms, figuring out how to read other players while controlling their own emotions and learning how to methodically build a bankroll. It wasn’t a glamorous life, but the survivors of this rough apprenticeship felt safe in the insular, castle-like world they had created.

In the opposite corner: the kids who learned to play poker online. Thanks to the Internet, they’ve mastered the game faster than anyone could have ever imagined, sharing strategies, pooling bankrolls, and playing as many hands in a single year as the veterans could in ten.

Open gates, enter barbarians. The poker establishment still doesn’t know exactly what to make of the growing onslaught of young kids. They wear baseball caps turned backward or sideways or, most confusingly, someplace in between. They seem surgically connected to iPods and wear oversized noise-canceling headphones that look like Mickey Mouse ears. They move with twitchy impatience, throwing chips around like they’ve got nothing to lose because, well, they
don’t
have anything to lose. Having learned the game in front of computer screens, they lack social skills, table manners, and impulse control, yelling stupid things like, “Ship it holla!” whenever they win a pot.

The Internet kids offer a counterargument that sounds a little like this: yes, we’re young and annoying—deal with it. We’re also smart and talented, so go ahead and deal with that too. Many of us went to college, at least for a while, where we were exposed to a concept called “math.” You so-called professionals had better be as good at reading people as you think you are to make up for all of the fundamental mistakes you make when calculating odds or valuing hands. If we’re not as nitty with our bankrolls as you are, it’s because we don’t have to be: we’re used to winning and losing large sums of money on a daily basis. An hourly basis. The only reason you guys get so much hype is because you were in the right place at the right time just as the poker boom exploded.

Skirmishes between the two sides are being fought around the country every day as wave after wave of Internet kids turn twenty-one and—facing increasingly difficult games online—start flooding the brick-and-mortar card rooms like animals driven from the hills by a lack of food and water.

This war has been mostly a private affair so far, but in March 2008, it goes public, catalyzed, to no one’s great surprise, by the singular durrrr.

Durrrr’s invitation to play in the NBC National Heads-Up Championship is a sure sign that the poker community at large is starting to understand what the Internet faction has known for a while. Since turning twenty-one last July, durrrr has steadily demonstrated that he’s not just one of the best online players in the world—he’s one of the best players in the world period. In the last eight months, he’s made final tables in four major tournaments and racked up almost a million dollars in prize money.

Proving that they have a sense of history—and a sense of humor—the show’s producers pit durrrr against Phil Hellmuth in a first-round matchup at the featured table.

Nearly two decades ago, Hellmuth was the upstart. He was only twenty-four when he won the WSOP Main Event in 1989, making him the youngest world champion ever crowned, but nineteen years and eleven gold bracelets later he has become the poker establishment. In 2005, he won the first National Heads-Up Championship. But as talented as he is, Hellmuth is equally well known for the explosive temper tantrums at the poker table that have earned him an odd nickname for a forty-three-year-old man to bear: “The Poker Brat.”

Before their match begins, the show’s hostess Leann Tweeden—a former Hooters girl who has reinvented herself as a sports correspondent—pulls them aside for a pregame interview.

“I think that maybe he’s ahead of me online,” concedes Hellmuth, who’s wearing a hat and hockey jersey promoting his sponsor, Ultimate Bet. “It’s a little different in the real world, so we’ll see what happens.”

Tweeden turns to durrrr, who, with his button-down shirt and jeans, looks like he’s on his way to class. “Tell us about the challenge you issued Phil online.”

A look of confusion passes over durrrr’s face. “I didn’t issue it,” he says. “He issued it.”

“Really?” she asks Hellmuth. “What did you issue?”

“I don’t know. Every time I play someone heads-up online and they get a little cocky, I say, ‘Let’s meet somewhere in the real world,’ and I give them the option of flying to California to play me in person, because it’s a good test for them.”

Their match barely lasts longer than the hype preceding it. On the just the third hand Hellmuth, having been dealt pocket aces—the best starting hand in Hold’em—lures durrrr into risking all of his chips with a pair of tens. Hellmuth has about an 80 percent chance of winning, but durrrr gets lucky and catches a third ten on the turn, eliminating Hellmuth from the tournament.

The Poker Brat is anything but gracious in defeat, lambasting durrrr for his perceived poor play.

Durrrr rolls his eyes. “I was going to say, ‘Good game, sorry for the suckout,’ but when you phrase it that way, it makes me not want to. That’s why you lose money online. Pick your stakes heads-up. We can play right now if you want.” To show he’s serious, durrrr pulls a handful of high-denomination casino chips from his pocket and tosses them onto the table along with a stinging rebuke. “Learn to play heads-up no-limit.”

Word of the confrontation spreads quickly on the message boards. When NBC releases a clip of the encounter, it goes viral on YouTube, and durrrr becomes a hero for an entire generation of Internet poker players. Not only is he an incredible player, but he’s articulated what all of them have been thinking: the older players aren’t half as good as they think they are, and they’d better start taking us seriously.

Raptor, who has just moved to Las Vegas, watches the event on TV at TheUsher’s condo. The timing of his move feels auspicious: being an Internet player has suddenly become a marketable quality instead of a liability to be overcome. His friends are now getting invited to play on the same poker shows they used to watch on television. First Jman got to play on
High Stakes Poker;
now durrrr and Good2cu are slated to appear on NBC’s
Poker After Dark
, where they’ll play a cash game against seasoned pros in an episode billed as “Nets vs. Vets.”

For the first time in a while, Raptor is revved up to play. He calls the Bellagio and asks the floor manager to lock up a seat for him. But by the time he gets there, his place at the table has already been filled, a slight that thoroughly annoys him. He’s debating whether to get his new Mercedes registered or blow off the afternoon to go-cart racing when he runs into Good2cu, who invites him to join the juicy pot-limit Omaha game that’s starting up in Bobby’s Room.

As he steps into the high-limit area, Raptor takes in Good2cu’s swagger. The last time they hung out Good2cu was struggling with his confidence and talking about going back to school. Now he’s casually trading barbs with the regulars like he’s one of them.

They’re joined at the table by a rich businessman and a few high-stakes pros. Raptor recognizes one of them: Sammy Farha, the crafty gambler who Chris Moneymaker defeated at the World Series five years ago, when Raptor and Good2cu were still attending to their first pimples. Now they’re playing against him for stakes that then would have seemed unfathomable.

Part of poker’s great appeal is the idea that anyone can play with the pros—as long as you’ve got enough cash to afford the hefty buy-in, of course. But just because everyone can, doesn’t mean everyone does.

Losing to Moneymaker thrust Farha into the spotlight, perhaps even more than beating him would have. Ever since, he’s been getting challenged by a long line of overeager amateurs, and as far as he’s concerned Raptor and Good2cu are just the next two on that list. What he doesn’t know and what they’re not about to tell him is that even though they’re only twenty-two and twenty-one respectively, they’ve been playing the game nearly every day for the past five years, honing their skills, in anticipation of a moment like this.

Three hands into the session, Good2cu finds himself wrestling over a big pot with Farha, who shoves all of his chips into the middle on the flop. It’s the kind of play that should intimidate a kid. But Good2cu calmly thinks for a few minutes, decides he’s getting the right odds to call, and winds up winning the $30,000 pot.

“So you guys play on the Internet, huh?” Farha asks, motioning to a chip runner to fetch him a new rack.

“A little,” Good2cu confesses.

The new rack of chips is placed in front of Farha.

Two hands later, he pushes them all into the middle of the table once again. This time it’s Raptor who calls.

“You have a good hand?” Farha asks.

“It’s not bad,” Raptor replies, turning over his cards.

The pro’s jaw goes slack. He stares at the cards, removing the unlit cigarette from his mouth, replacing it, then removing it again. He rubs his eyes, like he can’t believe what he’s seeing, but the pips on the cards don’t change. Farha throws his cards into the muck, leans back in his chair, and yells as if speaking directly to the poker gods above.

“WHAT THE FUCK WITH THESE INTERNET KIDS?!”

55

I no longer wish to set arbitrary monetary goals that will constantly be reaching higher and higher. This is a recipe for disaster.… Setting and reaching goals is not the be all and end all of happiness. There is more out there, something bigger, and I intend to find it.

—Raptor

FORT WORTH, TEXAS
(July 2008)

By the time the 2008 World Series of Poker rolls around, the Ship It Holla Ballas are finally getting the mainstream attention they’ve been clamoring for. As individuals, they’ve made numerous appearances on TV and in
Card Player, Cigar Aficionado,
even
The New York Times
.

But defining the Ballas as a group has become nearly impossible. The loose confederation that once held them together has been eroded by their respective successes. Good2cu finally pulls the plug on ShipItHollaBalla.com, even before he finds someone to complete his new Web site. Apathy and Inyaface try to re-create the old esprit de corps by renting a sprawling 10,000-square-foot house for the summer, but everyone else has a place in Vegas now. The house gets populated by eight reasonably behaved young men from Canada. No one shoots bottle rockets or throws a pool ball through a window.