Looking for ‘It’ in Vegas and Stumbling Upon Myself
I took an 11-day trip to Vegas to watch the NBA’s Summer League and learned nothing about basketball.
“Why did I do that? F***!”
When most people return from a weekend in Las Vegas, that is my understanding of a normal reaction. Even just 48 hours of living frivolously amidst the vices of our world leave most with one familiar sentiment: I need to reconsider my priorities.
That was not my experience.
When most people go to Vegas they find the need to reconsider their life. I went to Vegas and it made me consider my life.
I just finished an 11-day trip to the desert in which I spent all 264 hours in and or around “The Strip” of Las Vegas. Two nights at The Flamingo, two nights at The Luxor, three nights at The Cromwell, and four nights at an Air B and B a mile or so off the strip.
If a decade ago I was able to see into my future and know I was headed to Vegas for an 11-day stay, the reason (to seventeen-year-old me) would have been obvious: The World Series of Poker.
When I was a teenager, in the early-2000’s, “the poker boom” was in full swing. At that spot in time, poker was swiftly moving from bore to lore. According to WSOP spokesman Seth Palansky, three seminal events triggered the game of poker’s popularity:
- The advent of hole card cameras (video that showed the player’s cards at the table for the viewing pleasure of television audiences), which led to poker emerging as a compelling television property.
- The creation of software that allowed people to play for real money over the internet (online poker websites), which created global pools of players and fed thousands of new players into tournaments, pushing prize pools into the millions with tons of dead money.
- And finally, an accountant from Tennessee winning a $40 online satellite tournament that landed him a free seat in the 2003 WSOP Main Event. That accountant, Chris Moneymaker, went on to beat a field of 839 players to take home the World Championship and $2.5 million in cash.
Personally, I bought in hard to all three events.
Hole card cameras put into utility by ESPN made Tuesday night appointment viewing of the WSOP broadcasts. That was poker night for me. My high school friends and I would gather in one of our parent’s basements crack open our steel case of poker chips, fire up a cash game, and turn on ESPN. The dulcet tones of Lon Mceachern and Norman Chad — the Pat Summerall and John Madden of poker — introduced us to the stars of the poker world; Mike “The Mouth” Matusow, Daniel “Kid Poker” Negreanu, Phil “The Poker Brat” Hellmuth and all of a sudden we had a new hobby.
ESPN had effectively nailed the void in the market of sports junkies who in those mid-summer months — after the basketball and hockey seasons end but before football season starts — desired sporting entertainment.
The WSOP’s biggest “sports” competition in July was Major League Baseball. But happenstance would have it that baseball was plummeting in popularity in the 2000’s. Fueled by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa breaking Roger Maris’ home run record, baseball peaked in the late 90’s only to fall off of a cliff in the post-steroids era of the 2000’s. Those years — “The Years of the Pitcher” — were to be blunt: boring.
Poker was not.
The creation of software that allowed people to play for real money over the internet was more technologically fueled happenstance that capitalized on the intrigue of televised poker. If you were watching poker on TV you almost certainly had created your own online poker accounts— or tried out your friends — through one of the easily accessible (albeit illegal) online poker platforms. My site was PartyPoker.com.
There was only so much money to be had in a “home game” amongst friends. For many people who had developed the hobby of playing poker, there were enough home games to satiate their desire.
This truth was a reality my poker buddies and I found as eventually, we became bored with essentially passing money around the table between ourselves. So as to stop beating up on each other, a few of us — at the time underclassmen in high school — began looking for more (and bigger) games.
As it turned out, our friend group had not been the only circle fully infected by the poker itch. Eventually, through word of mouth, a few of us landed invites to The Junior’s — 11th graders — game and we even dipped our toes into the higher stakes game with The Seniors — 12th graders. But even those games began to dry up. Still not enough consistency for my taste.
And that led me to my new game. PartyPoker.com was exactly what I wanted; soft (easy) games that I could play whenever I wanted.
And it was awesome.
At sixteen years old, in 2006, I had sixteen thousand dollars in my Party Poker account. Considering my measly starting bankroll of a few hundred dollars — funded by umpiring little league baseball — getting to $16,000 at sixteen-years-old had to require one of two things; getting extremely lucky or being more sophisticated than the average patron lurking in the waters of the online poker world.
Turned out to be latter and it wasn’t that I was even that sophisticated. The essentially free money to be had came from the growing populous that thought they could play poker from the card playing knowledge they had gathered from television.
While many people began playing poker, few took the game seriously. At the time, the median-level player online was awful — “A Fish” as they call it in poker jargon. The growing quantity of ponds — online games — opened up a market that the diligent began to tap into (and eventually empty).
Through my obsessive personality, I had hit up my local library to borrow every poker book out there. Doyle Brunson’s “Super System” and David Sklansky’s “The Theory of Poker” amongst others taught me to be serious about learning how to trim the fat off of my game so as to distance myself from the casual player that had thrown a couple hundred bucks into their Party Poker account.
By treating poker like science rather than entertainment, it felt as if I were dropping dynamite into a pond. I was able to pick up fish six tables at a time, all from the comfort of my home.
And when it hit me that an accountant from Tennessee had won the World Series of Poker’s Main Event, the ceiling seemed firmly within reach.
Why couldn’t I be Chris Moneymaker? Why not better?
But I didn’t have what it took. Turns out those were naive questions asked by a sixteen-year-old. The reality of becoming a World Series of Poker champion (or even a consistent participant) requires something much more than simply reading books and being calculated. I hadn’t actually become good at poker, I had simply hacked it. A hack that proved to be temporary.
Doug Polk is one of today’s most famous players and he just won The High Roller for One Drop. An event which has a buy-in of $111,111, and awards $3,686,865 for first place. Polk is also just one year my senior at 28-years-old. His path to poker greatness was likely similar to mine in its pubescent stages.
The difference between Polk and I: He realized a key flaw in the development of the game that I did not. In this excellent article from The Ringer, David Hill details Polk’s realization:
The players in Polk’s generation, the young players who came into the game in droves during the poker boom, didn’t just seek to master poker. They sought to hack it. “The new wave of people, they’re more like scientists,” Polk says. “They know the numbers, they know the math, they know the theory.” Poker today is full of players who have studied the game to death. As a result, the game has grown tougher over the years. “If you’re coming into the game and you’re 21 years old now, you better be fundamentally sound. You better be theoretically solid. Because nowadays if you’re playing for 50 bucks, people, they care. They’re trying to beat you. They want to play their best game and beat you. Even at the smallest limits.”
Outside of poker, in the early-2000’s, I was in the midst of another pursuit: a college basketball career. While this venture proved to be naive, like my pursuit of poker greatness, I was actually pretty certain of additionally finding success in that world.
Much like my pursuance of poker affluence, I thought basketball success could be found through dedication and precision. But as many 6'2" white kids (6'3" in shoes!) who were good at basketball in their early teenage years, I was hit with the harsh reality that athletic limitations cap one’s ceiling in the basketball world.
As I went from under-to-upperclassmen hooper, the reach of my vertical plateaued at grabbing the rim when everyone else (quite literally) soared above me. I didn’t have what it took to play college basketball either.
The “it” in basketball is far simpler to define than in poker. In the most layman terms, basketball success is found through three inherent assets; athleticism, height, and intelligence.
Poker’s “it” is more ambiguous. While intelligence is still a necessity, the physical equivalents in poker is: (again, in layman terms) an appetite for risk-seeking.
One who is a risk-seeker, in any investment platform, can often be perceived to be a flippant gambler. This is not always the case. And it is my assertion this is particularly not the case for professional poker players. At least not the great ones.
Without getting too technical (and putting myself in above my head), the economic reality is that a risk-seeking — in certain markets —can be the optimal investment strategy.
The poker hack I was did not have the necessary quotient of desire for risk. Instead, I peaked at risk-neutral often leaning towards aversion.
This isn’t to say risk neutrality or aversion is always a poor choice, rather it has become my belief that unless one has a certain willingness to seek risk they, in fact, will hit a ceiling in a gambling (or any investment) venture.
When I say, “I didn’t have what it took,” I am referring to the inherent ceiling within me derived from my affinity for risk-aversion.
My second (and possibly more contentious) assertion is that I believe risk-seeking behavior is an inherent trait — A part of who you are. Someone who did not have that intrinsic aversion is a man by the name of Jerome Graham. (Again detailed by David Hill at The Ringer)
Jerome Graham was awakened by the sun coming up over the horizon of the Atlantic Ocean. He was underneath the Atlantic City boardwalk, sleeping in the sand. The night before he had lost all of his money playing seven-card stud in the Taj Mahal, felted well past the hour of the last bus back upstate to his parents’ house in Roselle. So he slept under the boardwalk as he waited for the first morning bus. It wasn’t the first time he’d done this. He didn’t imagine it would be his last. But this is what it took in the late 1990s to put together a bankroll. Sixteen-hour sessions at the Taj, jumping up stakes to take bigger and bigger shots against better and better players. Analyzing every hand, even the ones you win. Finding somewhere safe and warm to wait for the next bus.
Jerome’s telemarketing job raising money for the Fraternal Order of Police helped replenish his ever-fluctuating stud bankroll. But as he improved and moved up in stakes, he needed to spend more time in Atlantic City. His job and the two-hour bus ride each way was just keeping him away from the action. So he moved out of his parents’ house and got an apartment in Atlantic City. He’d spend every minute he could in the casino card rooms playing poker. He got to know the players, the dealers, the floor managers. The legend of his nights beneath the boardwalk spread. “No Home Jerome” they all called him.
Jerome’s skills improved steadily over the next year as he moved up in stakes. Before long he was playing in the highest stud games in the city at stakes of $75 to $150, or even $200 to $400 when they could get enough players with 10 or 20 grand to blow. He quit the telemarketing job and supported himself solely off the money he was making in those games. Much to his mother and father’s chagrin, No Home Jerome became a professional gambler.
About a year after moving to Atlantic City, Jerome walked into the Taj and announced to everyone that it was his birthday. He was 21 years old, finally old enough to legally play cards in New Jersey casinos. But how, they wondered, had he managed to play there these past few years? A fake ID, of course. He showed them his real driver’s license. His name wasn’t even Jerome. It was Phil. Phil Ivey.
If you are unfamiliar with poker you may have never have heard of Phil Ivey. But Ivey is the unanimous pick for greatest poker player of all time. And it is not close.
Ivey is great because he is not only the most calculated player in the game but is also unafraid of losing. So much so that he wasn’t too big to humble himself under a bridge. A unique path to greatness, but great none the less.
Comparing Phil Ivey to LeBron James is fair for many reasons not limited to his race. A big reason being their surges in popularity through dominance in the 2000’s. They were the very best, tiers above the competition, in their respective fields. Fields that were on the precipice of popularity explosions.
The poker boom commenced in July of 2003 when Chris Moneymaker won the Main Event. The LeBron James-era of the NBA began in June 2003 when James was drafted first overall by the Cleveland Cavaliers.
If you are someone who never caught the poker itch and have an understanding of playing cards Texas Hold ’Em style to be the same as Blackjack style, then your understanding of Ivey’s success may be jaded through the lens of him simply being a flippant gambler.
While, yes, Ivey is a gambler, the sample size of his success is far too large to be credited as luck. There is no simple metric to measure this, but Ivey is easily the wealthiest poker player in the world and (more impressively) he is regarded by all of his other peers to be the best. Ivey is simply put the king of the poker world.
But unlike most kings who inherit the throne, his path to power was earned. Ivey’s path is less King David of the biblical story and more King James of the basketball story.
LeBron James is probably the most physically gifted athlete to ever dawn a basketball court, but his beginnings (like Ivey) were humble. While James could have veered off the path and stumbled his way to the NBA on athleticism alone, he is King James through not only having the inherent physical gifts but also elite intelligence and work ethic. Phil Ivey has the same “it” in the game of poker that LeBron James possesses in the game of basketball. This is because a true king has “it.”
LeBron James and the World Series of Poker, oddly both, bring me back to my 11-day stay in Las Vegas. They were both there.
Of course, the World Series of Poker was there. “The Series” takes place at The Rio — less than a mile northwest of The Strip — at the beginning of every July. This year, the Main Event began on July 8th.
LeBron was also in Vegas for the beginning of July but not to participate in any poker events. Actually not to participate in anything. James came to the desert to observe. He was an observer in the opposite direction of The Rio — less than a mile southeast of The Strip — at The Thomas and Mack Center, the home of the NBA’s Las Vegas Summer League. While the Main Event carries on for a week at The Rio, the Summer League parallels in start time and duration at Thomas and Mack.
Summer League attracts the heavy hitters of the basketball world, like James, as the World Series of Poker draws the fat bankrolls of the poker world, like Ivey.
While I fall in neither group, Las Vegas in July, also, attracted me.
I work for SBNation.com, covering the NBA as a (part-time) basketball writer. Writing about the NBA has afforded the kid who couldn’t dunk in high school the opportunity to stay in the basketball game while using the analytics picked up in the poker game to (hopefully) produce something that resembles intelligent analysis.
As, again, happenstance would have it, I found myself in line at the airport to pick up my boarding pass on July 7th — The night before the kick off of Summer League and the Main Event — and the person ahead of me in line was the “Phil Ivey” of Minnesota’s poker scene, Mike Schneider. Schneider who has a reported $1,390,599 in career tournament winnings, per cardplayer.com, was headed to Vegas to play in the Main Event.
“Schneids” as he is more aptly known at the poker table is rather recognizable in the poker world. Especially for someone from Minnesota, like me. I greeted him in line as this wasn’t the first time the two of us had crossed paths.
On April 15, 2011, the U.S. Department of Justice shut down the three largest internet poker sites. The day would become known among the poker world as “Black Friday.” Over half a billion dollars in players’ accounts were frozen. The U.S. market for online poker was effectively shut down in one day.
Those of us — like Schneids, and myself — who had found success in the online poker world were forced to find other means to continue our poker “careers.”
At this point in time, home games had become archaic in nature. We were, then, forced to search for a new realm. The answer: “brick and mortar” poker rooms. Brick and mortar refer, literally, to buildings. And to be precise: casinos.
In 2011, now of age to play in the casino, I made my way (often) to one of the country’s finest card rooms, Canterbury Park, located just south of Minneapolis (my hometown). There, at the casino, the game was different while oddly the same.
Different in the sense that the game was much slower. In place of computer programs, real humans had to be used to shuffle up and deal the cards. This was a crazy reality for someone who was used to hundreds of hands being fired out per hour online.
While playing online, the focus would be quantity with only mediocre efficiency requisite to turn a profit. The brick and mortar casino was the opposite. The quantity of hands dropped immensely and therefore the efficiency in the precision of play had to be raised. Patience became key in a way that it simply was not online.
But the game was the same. There were still cards and chips. It was still poker.
While I was good at being patient in poker, I quickly learned that my “hack” or risk-averse style of play (in lieu of lower volume) would render but a percentage of the return it did online.
So, it was time to change it up. Time to evoke my version of “No Home Jerome.”
Even with a ramped up speed (and risk attraction), the process was still slow. I tracked my time in the casino, my expenses (gas, food, drink, etc.), my wins and my losses. Anyone who was finding success in that card room was using a similar tactic. For this to work, the process needed to be taken seriously. As if it were a job.
It took me months — playing, on average, 23 hours per week — to juice my bankroll to the point where I could (somewhat logically) afford high stakes. And it was there, at the highest stakes table, that Schneids and I first met.
The best way to describe the stakes of that game is probably by citing the games typical buy-in. The game that had juiced up my roll, had a buy-in of $600. The high stakes game, conservatively, required a $2500 buy-in. I could afford it, but I only had so many $2500 bullets in the chamber that I could afford to fire. But I knew, to make “it,” I had to take my shot (or shots).
As any poker game goes, there is variance. And as it always seems to go, the variance spun in my direction at first. I was winning. And through the chips stacking, the ceiling, again began to feel close. It began to feel real, not a naive pipe dream. And it was real. Until it wasn’t.
There isn’t one story or one hand to describe my demise. Poker is about the ups and downs that a player attempts to weather, rarely a single cash or swift bankruptcy defines a player. The real ones weather the storm so as to wind up in the black. Russian mobsters crushing your dreams, a la Teddy KGB in Rounders, only exist in Hollywood.
If playing within your means, losing in poker (in the real world) is more so a death analogous to cancer than a car crash. Eventually, through a higher quantity of “downs” than “ups,” the money trickles away.
The variance of my upswing slowly caught gravity and brought me down. Not all the way to the depths of Jerome Graham but to a point where I felt I could no longer play.
I stopped the money slippage before I approached full-Jerome status. I couldn’t do it. I suppose I don’t know if I literally couldn’t do it. But what I did learn about myself was; I am unwilling to risk dipping that low.
The inherent risk of the two realities between No Home Jerome and Phil Ivey was not worth it for me. I wrestled with it but learned that while Phil Ivey has a great story there are more Jeromes out there that never find a home. In my playing, I learned every dollar Phil Ivey has ever earned is subsidized by someone. I wasn’t going to have that be me.
The risk of complete destitution was something I — as a person, as a friend, as a brother, and as a son — would not do. For me, the feel of the metaphorical sand beneath an Atlantic City boardwalk was too painful to bear. So I didn’t, I quit.
Again, I didn’t have what it took. On the simplest of levels; the fear of what the risk leads to was too real. I didn’t have “it.”
So… I left with a bullet or two left in the chamber, bought a car, got a job, and became an adult.
Now, years hence, I found myself in Las Vegas, Nevada for the first two weeks of July. As my taxi driver picked me up from the airport he immediately asked, “The Rio for the tournament?”
“Maybe in a different in life,” I thought to myself as I directed him southeast.
But after a day of watching NBA Summer League, the evening ahead stared at me blankly. So, I went back. I sat down at the poker table.
No, this is not the part of the story where I tell you I bought into the Main Event and went on a heroic run. Again, not Hollywood. I simply sat down at a random table. A table for half the stakes I played “low stakes” at back in the day.
The dealer announced, “cashing in three hundred” as I set down the three crisp hundreds I had just withdrawn from the ATM. Three measly stacks of red five dollar chips were pushed in front of me.
While I stared down at those chips, I floated off into my memories. Reminiscing on the, once familiar, invigoration that removing the rubber band around a wad of cash would evoke. I snapped out of those fond reveries and realized this must be what a (far past their prime) former-pro basketball player would feel like when showing up to the gym for a pick-up game of hoops. Picking up a ball almost embarrassed to admit the reality that their knees don’t work the way they once did is how I felt shuffling my red chips.
As I looked up from my chips I saw a 10-gallon cowboy hat protruding over the shoulder of the dealer not more than 15-yards away. The man clad in the crisp cap seated in the “High Stakes Room” of The Bellagio was Doyle Brunson.
Slouched back in his seat with his patented cowboy hat placed firmly upon his, now, completely bald head was “Texas Dolly” as they call him in the poker world. The same Brunson that authored Doyle Brunson’s Super System — the book that I had read cover to cover, re-read, ear-marked, and scribbled notes in as a teenager. That Brunson was literally within reach.
But this was a different type of reach. While we were physically close, we weren’t. He was surrounded by the clear glass walls of The Bellagio’s High Stakes Room. Walls signifying the glass ceiling of what had become my poker career. Sitting down at a table with Doyle Brunson was a chapter of my life never written. Those pages are, now, but another reverie of a dream I could not live out.
And that, that is what I mean when I say Vegas made me consider my life.
My existential crisis of sorts, in Vegas, had nothing to do with drugs, debauchery, or bankruptcy. I left Vegas and had nothing to reconsider but found myself considering everything I had ever done.
That evening and the ten other days that surrounded my sitting within spitting distance of Brunson just made me think. Not happy thoughts, not sad thoughts, simply a realization that life has different paths. This path that I am currently on brought me to Vegas and reminded me of what is, now, a closed path. A path to poker success that required an “it” that I did not and still do not have.
Years have passed since I even remotely considered my “it” being poker or basketball. Yet that day, that night, and those 11-days made me consider the fact that I’m still searching for that inherent trait that I have somewhere within. An “it” that is uniquely mine.
I suppose some would suggest that is yet another naive pipe dream. But I disagree.
This is because I have come to realize, in the years hence, that I am not the only one on a journey. Everyone is on their journey to “it.” What I also know to be true is: Many find “it.”
The vast majority of us in this world are still and maybe always will be searching for our “it.” But a life on that journey is a good life. I believe a life with a constant commitment to who we inherently are as people lead us to find the person we are supposed to be.
It is my belief that we are all put here to search for something that resembles a vocation. A place where our best inherent trait intersects with what the world has to offer. And that, that is the place where I want to be.
To be honest, I’m still searching. But I have faith that through a commitment to the search I will find what it is that makes me a King. Or, at the very least, I’m still considering that to be an option.
