Someone was headed for a bad beat.
A bad beat worth more than a million dollars Thursday night, and maybe twice that in the April championship.
Gus Hansen raised the pot $230,000. Paul Phillips went all in with his $2.9 million. Dewey Tomko, the only other player at the table, folded.
It was on Hansen. If he called, he could lose his entire $2.2 million stake. He could also double up to $4.4 million and virtually wipe out chip leader Phillips.
Hansen called. All in. Hansen flipped over pocket 10s. Phillips showed ace-queen. Everybody stood.
The flop came . . .
Day 1
There are lots of hats. Cowboy hats, straw hats, ball caps. And don’t forget the floral visor and the pink bucket hat.
The shirts run from floral to dress to tie-dye, even basketball and hockey jerseys, the pants from fatigues to slacks to sweats.
They are young and old, men and women, white, Asian and just about everything else, and they are sporting sunglasses, hoodies, leather jackets and Discmen.
At times, the start of these suddenly monster poker events can look like Halloween with money. But then you don’t even notice, because it’s money that makes the statements, and those with the big bully stacks wield it arrogantly and powerfully, if not artfully.
It’s all about the money. It’s all about having all the money. It is why a record 314 people plopped down $10,000 or played their way into the World Poker Tour’s Five Diamond World Poker Classic last week at the Bellagio to play four days of no-limit, freeze-out Texas Hold ‘Em. The last one with chips wins more than a million bucks.
In the turn of a card, poker crawled out of the basement and barged into your living room.
Every Wednesday the Travel Channel presents one of the World Poker Tour’s 14 events. ESPN constantly reruns Binion’s Horseshoe’s World Series of Poker episodes. Bravo put together “Celebrity Poker Showdown.” And now NBC has ordered a two-hour Travel Channel World Poker Tour “Battle of Champions” to run opposite the Super Bowl pregame show.
Ante up, America.
“I love it,” said imposing poker legend T.J. Cloutier, a former Canadian Football League tight end and a road gambler whose rough-hewn voice reflects poker past. “It’s great for us. It means bigger purses.”
Bigger everything.
The World Poker Tour is the Travel Channel’s highest-rated series. The Bellagio, the premier poker room in the country, has seen a 35 percent increase in cash play over the last 18 months. The online poker market is estimated to have grown at least fivefold in the last year.
The lure is obvious: This could be you.
Because this has been you. The last two World Series of Poker winners were amateurs, most recently the wonderfully named Tennessee accountant Chris Moneymaker.
Moneymaker symbolizes this poker phenomenon. He paid $40 to enter an online tournament, won it, earned a spot in the World Series of Poker, then won $2.5 million and the treasured Hold ‘Em bracelet. Not bad for a guy who had never played a live tournament.
“It’s the biggest sport in the world for the aging Baby Boomers who can’t get it done on the courts and field with much ardor,” said James McManus, a Chicagoan who joined the pokerati by authoring the best-seller “Positively Fifth Street.”
“You watch the NFL and you can’t imagine yourself doing that,” McManus said between hands of the Five Diamond event, “but anyone can win these events.”
The “someones” playing last week constituted a veritable all-star poker lineup, including legends Cloutier and Doyle “Dolly” Brunson, women Jennifer Harman, Annie Duke and Kathy Liebert, academics Chris Ferguson and Howard Lederer, and young guns Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu and Layne Flack.
And, of course, the arrogant Phil Hellmuth.
“Arrogant? No,” Hellmuth insists. “Egomaniacal? Yes.”
Hellmuth demands his own category and just might be the best in the world. “I think maybe right now I am,” he said.
And all those amateurs coming over the top with re-raises.
“What I’m finding is, yeah, they’re green and they’re inexperienced,” said Lederer, a two-time WPT champion, “but they’re playing like no other brand-new players I’ve ever played with.”
Because they can. You’ll never play Augusta against Tiger Woods, but you certainly can put your money and your game against the legendary Brunson or rising star Ivey.
And whoa, look at that, there’s Ivey now, bolting from the tables. Poker’s first black superstar suddenly is out on the first day.
Same goes for Brunson. And Lederer. And Hellmuth, Harman and Flack. To think, Lederer and Harman live in Vegas, and Lederer’s wife, Susan, is a manager in the Bellagio poker room. So much for home-casino advantage.
Maybe anyone can win these events.
Day 2
One day of watching live poker and it’s painfully evident: The game is boring, monotonous, frustrating. Torture by ante.
The truth is, the game is in the players’ heads. And what’s in their heads is based on what they have in the pocket–their hole cards. But players certainly weren’t going to show anyone their hole cards.
Until Steve Lipscomb came along, that is.
And now he is showing everyone’s hole cards.
Lipscomb created the lipstick-sized WPT Cam that is embedded at each player’s position at the table. It is the biggest reason poker has become the most riveting act on TV this side of gay fashionistas.
The two-hour TV show you get at home is the good stuff–the average of 150 hands at the final table snappily edited to about 30–because the WPT Cam lets us see what the best players in the world wish they could see. It lets us in on a secret, the biggest one of all.
We know who got bluffed into mucking top pair, we know who has the absolute nuts. It is the pocket rocket of poker’s popularity.
“I absolutely believed it was essential for us to put you in the seat,” said Lipscomb, who invented the WPT Cam while putting together a piece on poker for the History Channel four years ago. “When you watch our show, you had to feel like you were playing the game, sweating out the million-dollar decision.”
But the pros resisted. Amateurs already could accelerate their poker education by playing online, reading the torrent of new books and watching the WPT–and now the pros were going to let someone broadcast how they played from jump street to fifth street?
“Showing your hole cards,” Harman said, “there’s so many things involved. A lot of ego. Like, I show this hand; am I going to play it bad? Is the whole world going to watch how bad I play this hand?”
But, Lipscomb said, the resistance “kind of goes away when I give them this argument: The great players won’t be affected by this.”
Play to the egos. Play to common sense. You simply cannot market this unless people at home know more than the people at the table.
Now, the twist: Many players tape these shows to scout tendencies the way football coaches use video to break down opponents.
“I think I’m a pretty sick guy that way,” Lederer said. “I made the tapes. I made the DVDs. I edited out the commercials and I edited out the interviews, and then I keep track of who’s on each DVD, so I can look it up real quick if I’m at their table.”
But it’s not for everybody.
“If you and I played 10 years ago,” Cloutier growled, the way you’d expect from an old-school gambler, “I might not know your name, but I’d know your face and how you play.”
Day 3
“There’s Jesus.”
A couple of twentysomething men are as giddy as kids because, indeed, Jesus is coming and he’s signing autographs.
“I love it,” said Chris Ferguson, the fabulous poker star with the black cowboy hat and long brown hair that earned him his nickname. “I get stopped in airports. This is unheard of in poker.”
An older woman stops two-time WPT champion Gus Hansen outside the Bellagio during a break, fawning over him and asking for an autograph for her 21-year-old grandson, who idolizes the Danish games master and, to hear granny tell it, apparently will kick himself for missing this opportunity.
Television is making heroes of the quirky, intense and colorful personalities sitting around the tables.
The angular, stubble-headed, hard-bodied Hansen, 29, gives off Michael Jordan-like vibes, what with his calculating ferocity, aggressive instincts and dominating tendencies.
Hansen picked up poker five years ago, which followed a run as one of the best backgammon players in the world, which followed championships in Ping-Pong and tennis as a kid, which makes him a symbol for poker’s Generation Xbox.
“We’re games junkies,” said Phil Laak, a former Hansen roommate and an equally young pro who wears a hoodie and sunglasses at the table, hence his nickname “the Unabomber.”
Laak now lives with poker pro Antonio Esfandiari, a self-described “dork” in high school who became an accomplished magician and brings a bag of magic tricks to the poker table.
“Jesus” brings a doctorate in artificial intelligence from UCLA and a victory over the intimidating Cloutier in the 2001 World Series of Poker, a breakthrough moment in poker’s new era.
“It gave us, the math guys, respect,” Ferguson said. “The old-timers sneered at the math guys before.”
The tall, precise Lederer looks the part of his nickname “the Professor.” That happens when you’re the son of a New England college professor and a former prep school instructor yourself.
Lederer’s methodical, analytical style contrasts with that of his perky sister, Annie Duke, even though they both learned at the same family table.
“It was for blood,” Lederer said, “and definitely the cards went flying a few times, and let’s just say I wasn’t the one flinging them around.”
Countered Duke: “I was 6.”
Duke would be called a soccer mom, “but none of my four kids plays soccer,” she said with a laugh, so she’s a poker mom, leaving for seven to 10 days a month to play in tournaments while husband Ben plays Mr. Mom.
Ivey has Tiger Woods’ weapons-grade stare and sometimes Steve Francis’ jersey at the table, and Denzel Washington should play him in the movie that details how he sat in Atlantic City poker rooms when he was underage, honed his game and became a star at no-limit Hold ‘Em.
Baby-faced blond Daniel Negreanu looks like he should be carded at the casino door. He frequently wears hockey jerseys in tournaments, as you’d expect from a man born in Toronto.
“I’ve won while wearing Stevie Yzerman’s jersey, the Canadian Olympic jersey, Alexei Kovalev when he was with Pittsburgh and Simon Gagne of Philly,” Negreanu said. “I have a collection of jerseys. I don’t have a Blackhawks jersey because there’s not a player I really like.”
The tall, dark-haired Phil Gordon, recently seen as host of Bravo’s “Celebrity Poker Showdown,” lives in a recreational vehicle, hardly the digs you’d expect from a child prodigy who graduated from college at 20, worked on artificial intelligence projects for the military and cashed out of the dot-com bubble for nearly $100 million.
Between poker events, Gordon backpacks around such garden spots as Uganda, Ethiopia and Vietnam.
“In Bolivia,” Gordon recounted, “I hired a guy and hiked three days into the Amazon. We found some balsa trees and we made a raft and sailed three days back down the Amazon.”
And then presumably spiked aces full at the river.
Day 4
Two words for you: All in.
It’s the “bases loaded” of no-limit poker. A player pushes every last chip into the pot, betting his or her very tournament life. Win and a player can double a stake. Lose and it’s go have a sandwich or something.
“It’s so much fun to say it,” said Harman, a petite blond long on ruthlessness. “When you say `all in’ and you don’t have the best hand, your heart’s going a million miles an hour and you’re scared, but it’s exciting because you’re putting that other person to the decision and saying, `Call this.'”
“All in” is how everyone leaves the game. Everyone except one player. It is the game’s greatest show of nerve.
“It gets easier all the time,” Negreanu said. “The more you’re in that situation, the more you become numb. It’s not `Oh, my gosh;’ it’s `Just another $2 million pot.”‘
Understand, in a no-limit, freeze-out game, those chips aren’t really $2 million. They just play them on TV. They might as well be buffet coupons. But buffet coupons don’t clack like clay chips. Nothing clacks like the siren call of clay chips, especially when every last one of them is at stake.
In one dramatic turn during the Five Diamonds event, Chicagoan Casey Kastle was playing a short stack of about $130,000 at the same table as Abe Mosseri and his million-plus. Not an attractive position. But Kastle considered it an opportunity.
So, when the young, hoodie-wearing Mosseri bet $15,000 before the flop, Robert Hoff, a bespectacled older gent in a ball cap and a short-stacker himself right now, went all in with about $130,000, hoping to double up.
The short, moon-faced Kastle saw an opportunity and went all in, too, hoping to triple up.
“If you’re not committed to put all your chips in on what you think is the best hand,” Kastle reasoned, “you have no reason to be in a poker tournament.”
Kastle flipped over pocket queens. Hoff had “Big Slick” (poker for an ace and a king). Mosseri, who quickly called, turned two cowboys (kings).
The flop came 10-9-7. A deuce on the turn. Hoff needed an ace at the river, Kastle a queen.
Nope. An 8.
All in. All out. Kastle and his queens took a hike.
“I never did have much luck with the ladies,” Kastle said.
Someone was headed for a bad beat.
Defending champ Gus Hansen was all in for $2.2 million with pocket 10s. Paul Phillips, a 31-year-old dot-com millionaire who had come to big-time tournament poker only recently, held ace-queen. Phillips was about an 8-1 underdog to lose all but about $700,000 of his stake.
The flop came 9-9-jack. No help.
A 4 on the turn. Still no help.
“I don’t get emotional about each card,” Phillips said. “I just let all five cards come out.”
Good thing. Phillips spiked a queen at the river. The king was dead.
See? Anyone can win these events.
Essentials of no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em
LAS VEGAS — Each player is dealt two hole cards (also called “the pocket”). The table will be dealt three community cards to be used by all players (called “the flop”), followed by a fourth community card (“fourth street” or “the turn”) and a fifth community card (“fifth street” or “the river”).
Best five-card hand wins.
Two rotating bets–the small blind and the large blind, which is double the small blind, each increasing at prescribed intervals–force betting before the flop. A player must see at least the large blind bet to continue. A betting round follows the “turn” and the “river.”
A player can bet all his chips (“all in”) anytime. The last one to bet is on the dealer’s “button,” which rotates each hand because it allows a player to act on lesser hands after seeing everyone else’s decision.
— Steve Rosenbloom
Mistakes that will turn out your pockets
LAS VEGAS — Several poker pros at the Bellagio reveal how they read amateur players:
– You play too many hands (action is great, but patience and discipline win).
– You play weak hands early (the last thing you want with a hand that needs work is to play with five people yet to bet).
– You play too many drawing hands (chase wisely because in a freeze-out game, you can’t keep reaching into your wallet).
– You call big bets (raise or fold, got it?).
– You lose too many chips holding only one pair, even aces (if a pro risks most of his chips when you have a pair, say goodnight).
– You play the cards instead of the players (if pros sense weakness, you’re lunch).
— Steve Rosenbloom
Some poker lingo
LAS VEGAS — If you play Texas Hold ‘Em, you’d better know how to speak it. Mike Sexton, commentator for the Travel Channel’s World Poker Tour shows and host of PartyPoker.com, gives a lesson in pokerese:
– Aces: American Airlines, bullets, pocket rockets.
– Kings: Cowboys.
– Queens: Ladies.
– Jacks: Fishhooks.
– 10s: A pair is 20 miles.
– 8s: Snowmen.
– 7s: Walking sticks.
– 5s: A pair is the speed limit.
– 3s: Treys.
– 2s: Ducks.
– Ace-king: Big Slick.
– King-jack: Kojak.
– 10-2: Doyle Brunson, because the icon won back-to-back World Series of Poker in ’76 and ’77 holding that final hand.
– Aces-8s: Dead Man’s Hand, because it’s the hand Wild Bill Hickok was holding when he was offed.
– 9-5: Dolly Parton.
-7-6: 76 trombones.
– 10-4: Highway Patrol.
– Gutshot straight: Need an inside card to complete hand; also known as a bellybuster.
– All in: Just like you think: to push every chip you have into the pot.
– Come over the top: To re-raise the table, many times by going all in.
– Spike at the river: To hit winning hand on the fifth card.
– Drown at the river: To lose on the fifth card.
– Top pair: To hold the best pair in the hole or on the board.
– The nuts: Holding a seemingly unbeatable hand.
– Bad beat: When you hold the nuts, but your opponent spikes at the river.
— Steve Rosenbloom
