"Yes, we stayed on Southwest _ we'd already
paid for tickets," Raymer said. "I'm going to be glad to go first class
when someone else is paying, but I can't see spending $1,000 for a wider
seat and free drinks for four hours."
Logic and financial self-discipline are part
of the routine for Raymer, who recently won fame in international
gambling circles at Binion's Horseshoe Hotel & Casino in downtown Las
Vegas.
The phones have been ringing pretty steadily
since then for Raymer, known in the poker world as "Fossilman" because
he arranges a few fossils on the table in front of him before each game.
Already he has been interviewed by CNN, scheduled by "The Early Show" on
CBS for a morning appearance and approached by a poker-lovers' Web site
with a bobble-head doll deal.
"Can you believe it? A Fossilman
bobble-head? If you told me last week about that, I'd have said, 'Why
would there ever be such a thing?"' the 39-year-old Raymer said.
Raymer, a patent attorney for Pfizer Inc.,
predicted that neither the money nor the fame would change his life, at
least for now.
Poker has made a resurgence in the United
States in the past couple of years, fueled largely by Internet games and
televised coverage of high-stakes poker competitions. The Travel
Channel's "World Poker Tour" is one of its top-rated segments, and the
recent tournament that Raymer played in will be shown on ESPN this
summer.
And for top-level players, that's translated
into skyrocketing payoffs. Raymer's $5 million prize is twice as much as
what the champion of the 2003 tournament received. This year's
fourth-place finisher won $1.5 million, more than the 1999 tournament
paid for first place.
Even so, Raymer doesn't plan a life at the
tables.
"If you're not a fantastic player with
extreme emotion control, an unlucky streak can kill your confidence and
ruin your life," he said. "I'm not looking to make a career of playing
poker.
"You've got to play great, but there's a big
luck factor. There are still a couple hundred players more skillful than
me, possibly a couple thousand for all I know. I'm pretty good, maybe
very good, but I played the best I've ever played and I got lucky."
The $5 million isn't quite as much as it
appears. Nearly half of the money is pledged to "backers," the friends
and online poker acquaintances who've staked him to various poker
competitions over the past several years, he said. And the government
will want its share.
"I haven't heard a peep from the IRS, but I
know I will," he said.
Raymer's wife, Cheryl, wasn't pleased when
he started to play seriously several years ago. So he set aside $1,000
and promised that if he lost it, he'd give up for good. Instead, his
winnings slowly built the bankroll, and his $22,000 win at a Foxwoods
tournament covered the down payment on their house five years ago.
"He's become more aggressive, more
unpredictable. He says it's the appearance of being wild. When he first
started out, he played really tight, played only superior hands. Now
he's really honed the psychological aspects of the game," Cheryl Raymer
said. "When you're playing at this level with these tremendous players,
there's more involved than how to play the cards."
Photographs from the tournament show Raymer
wearing Mardi Gras beads and orange-and-green holographic glasses. How
much of that is part of the game? The Raymers don't say, but Cheryl
Raymer acknowledged that he doesn't wear the glasses at home.
After the pressure of the tournament, Raymer
wasn't tempted to go on a high roller's spending spree, he said.
"After I won, a lot of people gave me logo
shirts, things like that. So I wanted to get another suitcase," he
recalled. "The only store open at the was 'high-end' _ $800 for a
suitcase. I said forget about it, even if I did just win $5 million.
Somebody said, 'You can get a Rolex.' Why do I want to spend $5,000 on a
watch? I'm happy with my $100 watch."
