Ship It Holla Ballas! (4 page)

He can’t find an answer in any of the strategy books he’s been reading. And he knows that none of his friends are going to be much help—he’s already thinking about the game in ways they wouldn’t understand.

If this were a question about baseball, he’d ask a coach or a teammate, but there aren’t (yet) any coaches or teammates in poker. He’s about to give up when he remembers the Web site mentioned on the back of Sklansky’s book:
twoplustwo.com
.

Before he can post a question on the site, he has to register an account. He chooses the username “Raptor,” the same one he used years earlier for his first AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account, because, damn, dinosaurs were cool. He goes on to describe the hand that’s been bothering him on one of the forums, fully expecting to get flamed for bothering everybody with such a n00b question.

But the responses turn out to be almost universally positive—thoughtful, encouraging, and, for Raptor, even a little therapeutic. He starts posting every time he has a question or concern, typically signing off with “Holla!” because that’s how Eminem would do it, and Eminem is even cooler than dinosaurs.

As he reads through all the other posts, he makes a surprising discovery: Very few of them are about live poker; nearly all of them describe hands played on the Internet. Apparently the online cardrooms allow you to access blow-by-blow accounts of every hand you’ve ever played, and it’s a simple task to cut and paste a “hand history” directly onto the Two Plus Two forum, where it can be communally dissected and analyzed by the poker hive-mind.

It’s also easy to open an online account—all you need is a credit card—but Raptor is still a little anxious.
How do I know I won’t get cheated? What if I lose all my money the first day? If I win, am I going to get paid?

Life is funny. Had that headfirst slide into first base gone a fraction of an inch in either direction, he’d almost certainly be preparing to play baseball at TCU in the fall. Without baseball, he feels like just another high school senior playing out the string until graduation.

Screw it. What have I got to lose?

5

This is beyond fairy tale. It’s inconceivable.

—ESPN commentator Norman Chad, describing Chris Moneymaker’s 2003 WSOP victory

OKEMOS, MICHIGAN
(November 2003)

For the first fourteen years of his life, Good2cu has enjoyed being part of a perfect nuclear family. A loving, caring mom. A hardworking, good-natured dad. A younger sister who annoys him far less than he probably deserves. All living under the same roof in a comfortable house in Okemos, a quiet, upper-middle-class suburb of Lansing, Michigan. Sure, there are moments of tension, but all families experience tough times now and then.

His freshman year of high school, Good2cu’s nuclear family gets hit by a nuclear bomb: Mom and Dad are getting a divorce. The only world Good2cu has ever known is being ripped apart. There’s denial, anger, fear, and sadness. He can’t remember ever crying as hard as he is now, with so much force he can hardly breathe.

But as the tears dry, he begins to see the angles.

His mother is only moving a few blocks away, but in terms of hands-on, parental supervision, she might as well be going to Mars. Nobody’s going to be riding his ass about taking out the garbage or cleaning his room or playing too much Xbox. This divorce thing might not be such a bad deal after all.

For many teenagers, cynicism is as unavoidable as acne, and the end of his parents’ supposedly lifelong commitment doesn’t do anything to dissuade Good2cu from the notion that most of what he was told as a kid was a bunch of bullshit. He doesn’t see much use in trying to make straight As, playing organized sports, or running for class president. He’d rather spend his time hanging out with his buddies, watching television, playing video games, and, once he gets his driver’s license, making unsupervised forays into East Lansing, the nearby college town, to see hard-rocking bands like Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, and Green Day.

Good2cu and his dad occasionally find themselves battling over the remote control, but there’s one TV show they always agree on. Every Tuesday night, in the fall of 2003, they meet on the couch, armed with popcorn and sodas, to watch new episodes of the World Series of Poker on ESPN.

They’re not the only ones. All across the country viewers are getting caught up in the drama, thanks to the timely convergence of a couple of key factors.

The WSOP’s Main Event has always been exciting in principle—a once-a-year gathering of the world’s greatest poker players, each wagering $10,000 for the chance to call himself, as the colorful “Amarillo Slim” Preston once labeled the honorific, the
world champeen
. Not into titles? There’s plenty to love about winning a cardboard box full of neatly wrapped bundles of hundred-dollar bills. Last year’s first prize reached a record $2 million.

But despite the lively characters and lottery-like payouts, the event has never translated well to television.

Poker—especially no-limit poker, which allows players to risk all of their money at any point during a hand—can be an incredibly anxious business, a pressure cooker where even the right decision might be your last. The WSOP’s Main Event requires players to make those decisions and abide by their consequences, again and again, twelve to fourteen hours a day, for almost a week. Winning requires the courage of a cliff diver and the stamina to survive multiple heart attacks.

Unfortunately, almost all of this tension takes place inside the players’ heads. Poker couldn’t be exciting on TV for the same reason that brilliant books are usually unfilmable—the tools for translation simply did not exist. Stone-faced men behaving inscrutably is no recipe for ratings success. The years the networks attempted to cover the WSOP, it was relegated to the same time slots as strongman competitions or celebrity basketball games, a sports oddity to fill the airwaves for insomniacs; many years, they didn’t even bother to try.

But a couple of things are different in 2003. The first is a technological breakthrough, or at least a vast improvement: the “hole camera,” a lipstick-sized camera that allows the television audience to see the players’ hidden (or “hole”) cards. The brainchild of Holocaust survivor Henry Orenstein, the hole camera has revolutionized televised poker, changing it from a sleep aid to something you can’t
stop
watching. TV viewers are transformed from clueless conjecturers into omniscient know-it-alls, a horror-movie audience that can see the killer long before the intended victim. The 2003 WSOP isn’t the first poker program to make use of the technology, but its impact is far greater, thanks to ESPN’s relentless airing of the event.

But while the hole cameras make the game far more fun to watch, this year’s cast of characters is what leads Good2cu and his dad to keep coming back for more, particularly a twenty-seven-year-old accountant from Tennessee with an unlikely name: Chris Moneymaker.

The WSOP has always been a stage for professional angle-shooters with weathered faces and cool nicknames like “Puggy” and “Treetop.” On occasion, an amateur has crashed the party, like the 1979 winner Hal Fowler, a Hollywood marketing guy who managed to beat the pros at their own game with a combination of blind luck and mystical calm, which may or may not have been chemically produced by frequent visits to the small pharmacy he reportedly carried in his briefcase. But Fowler is the exception, not the rule. The pros have a name for the non-pros who dare to take them on: “dead money.”

Chris Moneymaker is dead money. A goateed Everyman who looks like he’d be more comfortable sitting in the back of a fishing boat with a rod in one hand and a can of beer in the other, he’s only in the event because he won a $39 “supersatellite” tournament in an online cardroom. In a room full of ego-heavy cardsharps, Moneymaker constantly presents the picture of a guy who is humbled, even awed, by his proximity to the professionals. He keeps a low profile and struggles visibly with nervousness, which he attempts to hide beneath a baseball cap and reflective Oakley sunglasses.

Yet somehow he manages to survive the five-day grind against a record 838 opponents. When the tournament gets whittled down to its final two players, Moneymaker seems as surprised as everyone else to find himself sitting heads-up against Sammy Farha, a slick live wire with a predator’s eyes and an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth, some not-particularly-creative casting director’s idea of a professional gambler. Per tradition, the first-place money—this year, $2.5 million—gets delivered by armed guards and dumped on the table, a mountain of cash to remind everyone exactly what’s at stake.

Moneymaker does his best imitation of a stone, but it’s far from flawless. Across the table, Farha casually drums his jeweled fingers on the table, probing his opponent with amiable chatter, the corners of his mouth upturned like a cat in no hurry to finish toying with a canary—sooner or later, dinner is going to be served.

On a pivotal hand near the finish, captured from every angle by ESPN’s all-knowing cameras, Moneymaker bluffs with all of his remaining chips. Farha can smell deception and spends several minutes considering his response. Just enough time for the prickly feeling in his gut to give way to the more logical argument suggested by his ego:
There is no fucking way an amateur would dare bluff me in this spot
.

Farha throws away the winning hand and, along with it, any remaining momentum. A few minutes later, Moneymaker makes a legitimate hand and separates Farha from the rest of his chips.

The fish has eaten the shark.

A Category 5 hurricane might have less impact. The irresistible combination of his massive overnight success and his too-perfect name turns Chris Moneymaker into an instant folk hero. He gets barraged with requests for photo shoots and sponsorship deals. He makes an appearance on
The Late Show with David Letterman
. His story blazes a comet’s trail from the Midwest to Macau, igniting the imagination of every accountant, doctor, lawyer, teacher, or other nine-to-five wage slave who’s ever fantasized about an escape from the daily grind. Casual home games turn serious; online poker accounts spring up like weeds. Stories about great flops, scary turns, and brutal beats on the river slip into watercooler conversation. Poker tournaments grow as exponentially as the game’s popularity: three years from now, Moneymaker’s $2.5-million haul will represent seventh-place money in the World Series’ Main Event—the winner will take home $12 million.

But frustrated salarymen aren’t the only ones to catch the fever.

Their kids have been watching too.

How could Good2cu not be entranced by the way the players riffle their chips with unconscious precision, the soul-reading stares, the seemingly idle chitchat that is anything but? Not to mention that cardboard box full of money. When ESPN’s coverage finally concludes with Moneymaker hugging his father and raising bricks of cash high into the air, Good2cu’s mind gets seared by one lasting impression.

Professional poker players are so fucking cool, and I want to be just like them.

6

When he was a little kid, you’d ask him what he wanted to grow up to be. He wanted to be a professional video game player.

—Good2cu’s father

OKEMOS, MICHIGAN
(April 2004)

Like any kid born in the 1980s, Good2cu has never known a world without video games.

He started when he was tall enough to reach his dad’s computer, playing educational games like The Oregon Trail and DinoPark Tycoon, setting himself up for the discovery of SimCity. From there he moved on to real-time strategy games like Command and Conquer, StarCraft, and Warcraft I, II, and III, where success or failure was determined by resource management, rapid decision making, multitasking, and a fast finger on the mouse.

Good2cu loves entering these worlds, having to learn new rules on the fly and devise strategies that will (hopefully) lead to success. He gets an Xbox in high school and becomes so good at Halo he enters local competitions. A couple of times he actually comes home with prize money. While other kids his age harbor dreams of playing in the NBA or starring in a Hollywood movie, he fantasizes about following in the footsteps of Fatal1ty, the professional video gamer who is not much older than he is but who is already a full-on celebrity, thanks to his victories in the Cyberathlete Professional League and an appearance on MTV’s
True Life
.

Good2cu’s desire to become a pro gamer, when added to his thick glasses and conversational awkwardness, means he’s never going to date the head cheerleader. Or, during his first sixteen years of life, anyone else. Talking to women feels like a video game whose rules he can’t figure out. He wishes he could find the instruction manual.

But he’s not exactly a nerd either. The I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude he’s projected ever since his parents broke up plays well with the similarly jaded, which in high school leaves a lot of doors open. It helps that he likes to have a good time and laughs easily, an explosion of mirth that sometimes sounds like monkeys mating, other times like donkeys fighting. He’s got a handful of really close friends, and they do just about everything together.

After Moneymaker wins the World Series of Poker, that means playing lots and lots of poker. This isn’t exactly unique to Good2cu’s clique. According to a study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, the number of fourteen- to twenty-two-year-old males playing cards for money has risen 84 percent between 2003 and 2004, with the greatest increase coming from those in high school and college. Dan Romer, director of the Adolescent Risk Communication Institute, calls the study “worrisome,” adding that “these latest results suggest that the fad among teens is real and raise concerns that more young people will experience gambling problems as they age.”

The poker craze isn’t spreading as much as erupting: in every town, at every school, kids are dealing cards. Of the 1,600 students in Good2cu’s high school, at least a hundred play on a regular basis. Squint your eyes around lunchtime, and you might mistake the cafeteria for a Las Vegas cardroom, as there’s nearly always action—a multicultural congregation of jocks, geeks, preps, and goths dealing no-limit Hold’em for quarters. After school, someone hosts a tournament nearly every day.