Ship It Holla Ballas! (3 page)

It doesn’t hurt that most of them are starting to make what feels like free money.

The popularity of online poker is exploding. By 2001—just three years after the first Internet cardroom, Planet Poker, deals its inaugural hand—the online poker industry generates annual revenues approaching $100 million. Sit N Gos are proving to be especially popular for the same reasons they’re so appealing to Irieguy—a chance to experience tournament-style excitement, condensed into a brief period of time, that won’t let you lose more than your entry fee. It’s a perfect format for recreational players around the world who want to pursue their poker fantasies during lunch breaks or after the kids have gone to sleep.

The online poker sites quickly recognize and respond to the growing demand. They begin to offer Sit N Go tournaments with bigger entry fees—$22s, $33s, $55s, $109s, and even $215s—that, in many cases, allow players to gamble larger sums than they could in the more traditional cash games.

The pie may be getting bigger, but the strategies for winning Sit N Gos remain in the hands of a select few, mainly the regulars of Two Plus Two’s One-Table Forum. Some of them are winning so consistently that they’re able to contemplate quitting their day jobs.

Irieguy’s not ready to ditch his stethoscope and speculum just yet, but he does make a concerted effort to stop lurking and actually join the conversation. As “Irieguy,” a name chosen for his love of Rastafarian culture and philosophy, he quickly becomes one of the forum’s most prolific contributors, averaging more than a post per day.

Many of his posts are wonky, number-crunching affairs, like “What’s the highest ITM possible at each level?”—an effort to determine scientifically how often players can expect to finish “in the money” as they move up to higher stakes. He describes with academic clarity what statistics have to say about the types of winning and losing streaks that even the most skilled players should expect.

But it’s his thoughtful posts about poker psychology that earn Irieguy an almost cult-like following within the forum. His self-proclaimed “IrieZen philosophy” requires an almost masochistic indifference to the vagaries of luck inherent to the game. He encourages his fellow players to understand and accept poker’s predictable unpredictability, helping them to avoid the irrational exuberance and crippling depression that can accompany the inevitable highs and lows.

He and the rest of the Two Plus Two regulars inevitably cross paths at the tables, but there’s plenty of money to go around. Nobody puffs their chests; encounters are simply acknowledged with casual greetings. A seemingly innocuous “’Sup, bro?” might be the virtual equivalent of a Freemason’s secret handshake, a tacit agreement not to butt heads until both players are safely in the money.

After finishing his military commitment, Irieguy settles in Las Vegas. Warm weather? Check. Beautiful women? Check. Medical practices aren’t built overnight, however, so he finds himself with plenty of spare time for playing and posting. A social creature by nature, he wonders what kinds of “real” lives his fellow Two Plus Twoers are leading. Several of them live in Las Vegas, so he reaches out to a few.

He meets Daliman in a casino bar, discovering a guy in his mid-thirties with a wife and three kids who’s making enough playing Sit N Gos (and winning the occasional karaoke contest) to quit a $36,000-a-year job selling tires. AleoMagus, McPherzen, and Lacky also turn out to be of similar age and temperament.

At the start of 2005, Irieguy puts word on the forum that he and SkipperBob are planning a trip to a tournament at L.A.’s Commerce Casino in February and asks if anyone wants to meet up. The most enthusiastic response comes from Raptor, who over the course of the last year has earned a lot of respect for his insightful strategic posts—many Two Plus Twoers credit a thread he starts about folding big hands near the end of a tournament as one of the greatest influences on their games. Raptor tells Irieguy he’d love to meet in L.A. and asks if he can share a hotel room with him and SkipperBob.

“What’s this Raptor like?” SkipperBob asks as they approach the door to the room.

“Probably just like every other guy I’ve met on the forum,” says Irieguy. “A college-educated professional in his thirties or forties with a degenerate streak.”

SkipperBob grins. “Sounds like my kind of guy.”

Which is why neither of them can say a word for a good thirty seconds after they open the door to find a teenager with a Beatles mop-top and a goofy grin sitting cross-legged on the bed between two laptops, stuffing his face with candy.

’Sup, bro.

4

MARCELLUS:
Holla, Barnardo!

—
Hamlet
, Act I, Scene I

FORT WORTH, TEXAS
(April 2004)

Raptor doesn’t need a doctor to tell him his season’s over.

Until now, his senior year at the Oakridge School in Arlington, Texas, has been a breeze. He’s been getting As and Bs without cracking a book. He can’t prove it, but his classes all seem to be dummied down to the lowest common denominator, ensuring that all the students go on to good colleges, so why bother? Besides, thanks to an academic scholarship, he already knows he’s going to Texas Christian University, where he hopes to walk on to the baseball team.

If Texas high school football is a religion, baseball is the cool science class that everyone wants to take, the one with the young, fun teacher. Every kid in the state who can swing a bat dreams of playing for the Longhorns, Aggies, Red Raiders, or Horned Frogs before moving on to the Major Leagues.

Raptor’s been playing baseball nearly every single day since the time he could first fit a glove onto his hand. He loves pitching more than anything else in the world—standing alone on the mound, engaged in a heads-up battle against the hitter, a contest that’s every bit as psychological as it is physical.

He’s sitting on a fastball, so I’ll throw a changeup.

I’ll bet I can get this guy to swing at a curveball in the dirt.

He’s a pretty good hitter too, which is why, three games into the season, he’s taking a routine lead off of first base. The pitcher makes a halfhearted attempt to pick him off. Raptor doesn’t need his brain to tell his body how to respond, because his body has done it a thousand times before. He crosses one leg in front of the other and slides headfirst back into the bag.

The shoulder is a ball-and-socket joint like the hip, only a lot shallower. The bones wouldn’t stay together at all if it weren’t for the labrum, a ring of cartilage that keeps the end of the humerus from slipping out of the shoulder socket.

His headfirst slide is only off by a fraction, but it’s enough to tear Raptor’s labrum in two. His right arm—his
pitching
arm—flaps around like a wet noodle. He’s never experienced this kind of pain before, like someone repeatedly stabbing his shoulder with a knife. But that’s not what causes the tears to pour from his eyes. It’s the realization—confirmed by a quick glance at his coach, who can barely look at him—that his love affair with baseball has come to an abrupt end.

The doctor gives Raptor a choice: undergo surgery, followed by twelve to eighteen months of intense rehabilitation; or let it heal on its own, maybe recovering 75 percent of his original arm strength. For a high school senior, eighteen months might as well be eighteen years, so he chooses to forgo surgery and rehab his shoulder on his own. He thinks he can do anything as long as he puts his mind to it, and why should this be any different?

Three weeks later, Raptor is back in his high school baseball team’s lineup, batting fifth and playing left field. He can swing the bat accurately enough to make contact, just not powerfully enough to hit home runs. He can track down just about anything hit to him in the field, but throwing the ball to the cutoff man requires an awkward sidearm motion that makes the severity of his injury apparent to all. He certainly won’t be pitching for TCU next season. Or probably ever again for that matter. From here on out, he’ll look at baseball with the same misty regard men normally reserve for women who have broken their hearts.

No other pursuit has ever worked its way into his being quite the way baseball has. He was on a swim team for ten years, but never felt entirely comfortable calling himself a swimmer. Same thing with singing, even after he joined his high school choir. Baseball has always been different, as connected to his identity as his name or the shrug he gives his teachers whenever they ask him to work a little harder. He spends the rest of his senior year doing whatever he can to keep himself from thinking about the game.

Parties.

A girlfriend.

Poker.

Lots and lots of poker.

*   *   *

The movie
Rounders
is released during Raptor’s sophomore year in high school. Matt Damon plays Mike McDermott, a young gambler who dreams of one day winning the World Series of Poker. To get there he must first make his bones competing in New York’s underground poker scene against a rogue’s gallery of shady characters who narrate their high-stakes battles with the colorful and mysterious language unique to the game.

It’s far too romantic a tableau for Raptor to resist, describing a world about as far as possible from the one he inhabits. He goes to private school. His parents belong to a country club. He is being groomed for a life of higher education, white-collar work, and, ultimately, leisure. He doesn’t know any shady characters and he’s never played a hand of poker, but he’s so intrigued by the movie he sets aside any reservations. He and his friends begin playing for small stakes, $10 or $20 at most, throwing around chips and terms like “rags” and “the flop” just as they imagine the pros do.

At first, none of them know what the hell they’re doing. But after a few weeks, it becomes obvious to Raptor that some of his friends are winning more consistently than others. Suspecting that there’s skill involved, he does some research and orders a book by a guy named David Sklansky called
The Theory of Poker.
He devours it, and several more like it. Before long he’s winning with such regularity that his friends can’t afford to play with him anymore. Kind of a bummer, until someone reminds him that, just like in
Rounders
, Texas has a thriving underground poker scene.

Technically, the state says that playing poker for money is illegal within its borders, but sometimes tradition trumps law and this is one of those cases. Poker is as ingrained in Texas mythology as longhorns and six-shooters—hell, they don’t decide the world championship playing
Mississippi
Hold’em. In the Lone Star State, backroom card games are every bit as ubiquitous as barbecue joints and taco shacks.

One such cardroom, the Poker Box, is just a short drive from Raptor’s house, and from what he’s heard its proprietors will let him play without having to show an ID. He knows that his parents won’t approve and he doesn’t like lying to them, so he tells them a half-truth—he’ll be sleeping over at his friend Donald’s house and he’ll see them in the morning.

In the game Raptor’s used to playing with his friends, you have to try really hard to lose $20, so the $3/$6 limit Hold’em game he joins at the Poker Box, with its $40 and $50 pots, feels like dizzying stakes for the sixteen-year-old. He’s already prepared his concession speech.

If I run good, great, and if I don’t, well, I got to play with some really good players at a real live poker club. What a cool experience.

Raptor makes plenty of rookie mistakes, but sometimes you make the wrong moves at the right time, and tonight is one of those nights. He’s up about $200 when one of the regulars suggests they switch to pot-limit, a game with significantly higher stakes.

Raptor understands what’s going on—these guys know he’s getting lucky and are looking to accelerate the return of the money that, in their eyes, he’s merely borrowed from them. “Nah,” he says. “I’m happy with what we’re playing.”

“But we insist,” they say.

Fine. I’ll play with my profits. When I lose that, I’ll quit.

Wary of getting beaten up or robbed, Raptor brought Donald and their friend Rei to the club with him. None of them can quite believe what happens next. In just two hours, Raptor wins more than $1,300, more money than any of them has seen outside of television.

Raptor has always prided himself on his self-control. Unlike most of his peers, he really doesn’t enjoy the feeling of being drunk. Mind-altering drugs? No thanks. He doesn’t even allow himself to get very excited about winning a baseball game, fearing that too much celebrating might somehow curse his ability to throw strikes. But this night at the poker tables feels different somehow, something worth cheering about.

On the drive back to Donald’s house, Raptor pulls his winnings out of his pocket. “Man, can you believe this wad of cash!” he tells his friends. “I think I just might have figured this game out.”

It only takes him six weeks to give it all back.

*   *   *

Good-looking jocks like Raptor tend to sail through high school, which makes his occasional bouts of emo angst all the more disconcerting for his parents.

“What are you interested in besides baseball?” they ask him.

“Nothing.”

“Well, what
kinds
of things do you like?”

Raptor grimaces as if in actual physical pain. “I dunno. Everything’s boring.”

Poker might be changing his outlook on life. He’s always been a jock first and a student second, but he loves the intellectual challenge the game poses. It inspires him in a way that history or calculus never has. He thinks about hands long after they’re over, trying to figure out how he could have played them better.

One night, he bets heavily on a full house—one of the most powerful hands you can have—only to lose to a bigger full house.
Was there any way I could have gotten away from that hand?
he wonders.
Does anyone
ever
fold a full house?