Ship It Holla Ballas! (7 page)

Good2cu doesn’t want his dad to know he’s playing with, and therefore risking, actual American dollars, but the $.50/$1 limit Hold’em game he’s settled into is clearly identified with boldface letters in the top-left corner of the window as being a
Real Money Game.

Which is how he discovers Sit N Gos. After buying into one of these single-table tournaments, there’s no further mention of real money being involved until the payouts are issued at the end. The bets and raises are made with tournament chips, which have no cash value, and the top-left corner offers a far more innocent-looking heading:
Tournament Table.

“Just messing around,” Good2cu tells his father.

During his frequent visits to the One-Table Forum he discovers that there are even better reasons to cast his lot with Sit N Gos. He reads nearly every post written by guys like Daliman and Irieguy, who insist that these online tournaments are cash cows that can be steadily milked. Raptor, a regular contributor who ends each of his posts with his signature catchphrase “holla!”, claims he’s consistently making a 30 percent ROI.

Good2cu’s journey begins with an epic heater, a textbook episode of beginner’s luck. He quickly jumps from the $22s and $33s to the $55s and $109s, playing as many as eight tables at once. During one stretch he plays 449 Sit N Gos and achieves an ROI of 208 percent, a number that’s twice as big as it has to be to be called a statistical anomaly.

This windfall allows him to start living in a way he couldn’t have imagined just three months before. He pays $3,000 for a top-of-the-line laptop. He buys an expensive necklace for the girl he’s starting to call his girlfriend. While his peers drink Natty Ice (a catchall term for shitty beer) and Popov vodka and smoke Mexican dirt weed, Good2cu treats himself to more exotic Coronas, Hpnotiq (a trendy blue liqueur popular in the New York club scene), and sticky kind bud.

His parents can’t help noticing the influx of disposable income their son is enjoying, and share with him the predictable concerns about his new hobby. Good2cu mollifies them by promising to set aside enough money so that he—not they—will be paying for his first semester of college. It’s an angle that will cost him roughly $5,000, but it allows him to go on playing poker.

It turns out to be the correct play. By the time Good2cu makes the three-mile trip down Grand River Avenue to the freshman dorms at Michigan State, he’s pushed his bankroll all the way up to $43,000.

10

Wake up whenever I wake up, take a piss, brush my teeth, sit down at my computer and immediately fire up as many Sit N Gos as possible. Order some food, run to door when it rings. Keep firing up Sit N Gos. Post on Two Plus Two and AIM with friends, talk about hand histories throughout the day while playing nonstop. When my eyes hurt, go lie down and watch a movie or a TV series. Fall asleep. Sleep until I wake up. Repeat.

—Raptor

FORT WORTH, TEXAS
(Fall 2005)

With the one-year anniversary of his decision to become a professional gambler fast approaching, Raptor is ready to take stock.

At times, it’s been a grand adventure. This summer, he made his first trip to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker. Barely nineteen, he wasn’t old enough to enter any of the tournaments, but that didn’t prevent him from playing cash games in any casinos that didn’t bother checking his ID. Nor did it stop him from experimenting with blackjack, specifically the Martingale Betting System, a creation of the eighteenth-century French mathematician Paul Pierre Lévy that suggests you double the size of your bet every time you lose a hand. It’s more or less foolproof if you have an infinitely large bankroll. Raptor—whose resources were not infinitely large—chased a $1,000 loss with a $2,000 wager, bet $4,000 hoping to win back the $2,000, then threw down his last $7,200 in an effort to recoup all his losses, successfully wiping out his $14,200 bankroll in under three minutes.

It made for a great story on Two Plus Two—Daliman, a skilled blackjack card counter, got a lot of comic mileage out of retelling it—and Raptor doesn’t have a problem laughing at himself. But he also felt sick to his stomach, unable to distance himself from the idea that the money he lost could have been converted into, say, a brand-new car.

Over the course of the past year, he’s also become one of the most frequent posters on his favorite Two Plus Two message board, which, during an overhaul of the site, got renamed the “Single-Table Tournament Forum” (STTF). He likes to propose informal competitions—for example, “Who can play five hundred $109 Sit N Gos in a week while achieving an 8 percent ROI?”—that will motivate him to put in even more hours at the tables. They come to be known as Raptor Challenges, and inspire many of the regulars on the forum to play longer, higher, and better than they ever have before.

But looking back on the year, he’s also ready to admit that the glamorous life of a gambling man hasn’t turned out to be quite as glamorous as he’d imagined. He spends most of his days and nights staring at a computer screen, clicking a mouse, making decisions that, 99 percent of the time, don’t require an iota of conscious thought. The only humans he interacts with are poker players, and that’s mostly through online forums and instant messages. He’s definitely not meeting any girls. Depression has become a very viable diagnosis.

Hoping to fill the growing void inside him, Raptor reenrolls for the fall semester at TCU. He cashes out all the money he has in his online accounts except for $450, enough to fool around at some low-limit games should he feel the itch, but vows to take the entire first semester off from poker.

For a last hurrah he returns to Vegas over Labor Day weekend to play in a “heads-up” (one-on-one) poker tournament hosted by Irieguy. Many of the regular posters on the Single-Table Tournament Forum fly in from all over the country to play what they dub the inaugural STTF-HU Championship. Raptor manages to finish in second place and, for the first time, leaves Las Vegas with more money than he brought with him.

Back in Fort Worth, he does his best impersonation of a normal college student. He pledges a fraternity. He begins dating again and lands a serious girlfriend. His off-campus apartment becomes a popular place to party into the wee hours of the morning. A little too popular—after the eighth noise complaint, the property management company evicts him. Luckily his friend TravestyFund has a spare bedroom to rent, but the change of scenery doesn’t do anything to curb the partying. One morning Raptor wakes up and realizes he hasn’t been to class in two weeks. His grades are so poor he’s not going to get initiated into the fraternity. And there’s no way the school is going to let him take another leave of absence. If he flunks out this time, it will almost certainly be for good. He needs a plan.

Or an escape. His eyes drift to the Quad Monitor Set-Up in the corner of the room. He brushes dust from the screens and fires up the computer. In one of his accounts he finds the $450 he’s been saving for a rainy day.

The smart move would be to stick to low-stakes—he hasn’t played in a while, and he could easily lose all his money in one sitting. Hell, the smart move would be turning off the computer and going to the library to study.

Instead, he spreads his entire poker bankroll across four $109 Sit N Go tables.

All right, time to run good. Either I win or I’m done.

In the parlance of the game, he “runs good,” winning three of the tournaments and finishing second in the fourth. He doesn’t bother standing up, using his winnings to enter eight more Sit N Gos. Then twelve. When he feels like his bankroll will allow it, he moves up from the $109s to the $215s.

Thirty-six hours later, he’s too bleary-eyed to see the cards on the screen. It takes all his remaining energy just to power down his computer, but before he does he takes one last look at his bottom line, just to reassure himself that what he thinks just happened really did happen.

Thirty-six hours of poker, and he’s transformed the last $450 in his online accounts into a $20,000 bankroll.

Well, I guess I’m a poker player again.

11

The Single-Table Tournament Forum on Two Plus Two was a small community. There were probably less than a hundred people who played those games for a living, so everyone kind of knew each other. I started talking to Raptor on AOL. He and I were playing a lot of the same games against the same opponents, and we would talk strategy. He was probably making more money playing those games than anybody else, so everybody knew who he was.

—Good2cu

EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN
(Fall 2005)

Almost everyone Good2cu knows in Okemos is going to the University of Michigan or Michigan State. His girlfriend is going to Michigan, where applicants are required to write a bunch of essays. Michigan State does not require essays, a comparative lack of rigor that is rumored to result in better-looking girls and wilder parties.

Well, it wasn’t like they were going to get married.

The classes at Michigan State aren’t very tough. Good2cu is able to maintain nearly an A average in all of them with plenty of hours left in the day to play online poker and get drunk nearly every night. He’s in the middle of a session, multitabling $15/$30 limit Hold’em, when there’s a knock on his dorm room door.

“Come in!”

Two police officers accept his invitation. They’ve come to arrest him for throwing rocks through a window last night while he was stumbling home, drunk off his ass.

But it’s the cops who get arrested by the sight of the side-by-side flat-screen monitors on his desk. Good2cu has four tables open on each screen, and at each table he has at least $1,000 in play.

“Is that Texas Hold’em?” asks one of the officers.

“Yeah,” Good2cu replies. “Do you play?”

“A little,” the cop answers sheepishly. “But not at those stakes.”

“Do you mind if I keep playing until my big blinds come around?”

The cops each pull up a chair. “No problem. Go right ahead.”

The police officers eventually get around to charging him with Willful and Malicious Destruction of Property. Luckily, Good2cu already has Okemos’s best criminal defense attorney on speed dial. He gives the man $2,000 to make the charges disappear, while setting two new goals for himself: (1) stay out of trouble; (2) win back the two grand as quickly as possible.

*   *   *

During the many hours Good2cu spends playing poker on his computer, he also finds time to surf the Web, check his e-mail, and talk on AIM. One of his favorite people to chat with is Raptor. The kid is clearly a skilled player as well as something of a celebrity on Two Plus Two.

What does it mean to be a celebrity on Two Plus Two? It means that an older STTF regular might write a tongue-in-cheek post about you, like the one entitled, “Why I Hate Raptor,” a top ten list that’s simultaneously envious of your youth and success while making fun of said youth and success. The kid’s enthusiasm for the world “holla” is particularly irritating to many of the site’s elders, but for the young players like Good2cu, it’s a generational touchstone, an edgy greeting like “’Sup, bro” that distinguishes them from the old farts.

Good2cu often runs into Raptor at the online tables and the two build an Internet friendship, mostly through instant messages. Soon they’re sharing details about their personal lives. Good2cu learns that Raptor, who’s only four months older than him, has dropped out of college—twice!—to play poker full time. From time to time he recommends that Good2cu do the same, a suggestion Good2cu laughs off.

But it’s harder to ignore Raptor’s advice that he attend something called the STTF-HUC II, a tournament that Irieguy, one of the message board’s elder statesmen, plans to host in Las Vegas in February. Raptor promises Good2cu that there will be girls, booze, and the chance to win some decent money.

Good2cu has never been to Vegas, and he’s intrigued by the idea of meeting some of the Two Plus Two guys face-to-face, so he introduces himself to Irieguy via instant message and asks about the tournament.

“We still have a couple spots open,” Irieguy replies. “You interested?”

“It’s $200, right?”

Irieguy has structured the tournament with two different prize tiers created by two different entry fees, $200 and $500. There are still a few $200 seats available, but he doesn’t know Good2cu and is looking to build a bigger prize pool.

“Sorry, just sold the last $200 seat,” Irieguy bluffs. “If you want to play, ship me $500 online, plus another $170 for food, beverages, and incidentals.”

“Incidentals?”

“Let’s just say that if you like drinking alcohol and/or naked women, you won’t be disappointed.”

Good2cu’s run of beginner’s luck has come to an end; he’s still winning more than he loses, but at a much slower rate. After paying for his first semester at Michigan State—a tab that includes lots of marijuana, even more alcohol, and Okemos’s most expensive criminal attorney—his $43,000 bankroll has been substantially reduced. The tournament buy-in, the “incidentals,” plus hotel, food, and airfare, represent a significant portion of his net worth.

“$670, huh?” he writes back. “I don’t know. I’m not that big of a balla.”

A
balla
?
Irieguy chuckles inwardly.
What is it with these kids?

“Well, think it over,” he responds.

That’s not a problem—Good2cu can’t think about anything else. It’s not even December, and the ground’s already covered with dirty slush. He has to bundle up like an Eskimo just to go to the gym or the food court. Most of the girls on campus have started wearing thick sweaters and ski hats everywhere they go, which, if you ask him, is a crime against humanity. And it’s going to be this way for another five long months.

Fuck it. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I’m going to Vegas.

Using one of his online poker accounts, he ships Irieguy the money.

12