|
LAS VEGAS -- The young
guns of poker elbowed their way onto most every
Texas Holdem
table of the Mirage casino.
They were easy to spot, with their fresh faces in sharp contrast to the
gray-haired veterans who had cut their teeth in smoky backrooms.
Their quarry that May day: a cool $1.1 million, and a seat in the World
Series of Poker, being played this week at the Rio.
Raised on electronic
Texas Holdem
games, this
generation of the young and the ruthless has discovered America's oldest
game and mastered it with almost frightening speed. Because of the
Internet, they have crammed years of playing time into months. Some have
eschewed mainstream careers and college educations for the lure of quick
money. Casinos all over the country have added poker tables just to keep
up with the demand.
"It's a whole new clientele for us and they take their
Texas
Holdem
games very seriously. It's a very intelligent crowd," said Tim Gustin,
manager of the Commerce casino, south of downtown Los Angeles, which is to
the World Series of Poker what Triple-A ball is to Major League Baseball.
"There are many very young
Texas Holdem
players today," said longtime poker pro Linda Johnson, who puts together
gambling cruises. "In fact, of all new players entering poker rooms these
days for the first time, I would say 60% of them are under 28."
The young guns include players such as David Williams, 25, who dropped out
of Southern Methodist University two semesters shy of a degree in
economics, with a minor in math. There is Tuan Le, the 26-year-old son of
Vietnamese immigrants, who dropped out of college before the end of his
first semester.
Phil Laak, known as the Unabomber because of his sweatshirt hood and
aviator glasses that evoke the wanted sketch for mail bomber Theodore
Kaczynski, gave up mechanical engineering and tossed a high-risk Wall
Street trading gig before opting for Texas Holdem.
Antonio Esfandiari was 25 when he became the youngest person to win more
than $1 million on the tour. He's also a skilled magician who once made
his living with the art of illusion before turning to cards.
All make their living at the poker tables and have become cult figures on
the televised gambling circuit that reaches its zenith Friday when the
final table of the World Series of Poker is seated.
The poker craze is attributable to several factors, none more prominent
than the televised World Poker Tour, broadcast on the Travel Channel.
Now in its fourth season, the tour took a game that was about as
interesting as watching paint dry and turned it into a show-biz success by
allowing audiences a peek at the pair of "down" or "pocket" cards players
are holding. ("Our television shows really play like "The Young and the
Restless" — It has great, intelligent, good looking men and women. You
can't rig that," said Steve Lipscomb, a Los Angeles lawyer who created the
concept. "The demographics have changed and that makes it fun."
Even Hollywood is getting on board, with at least one feature film by
Warner Bros., "Lucky You," in the works — not surprising since so many
celebrities are regulars on television poker shows and tournaments.
But the odds are still in flux over whether gaming geeks and math majors
can make the transition from anonymous electronic play in their teen years
to the stare-em-down psychological drama of a game founded firmly on
deception. The Mirage tournament, one of the last qualifiers for the World
Series, had some hard lessons to teach.
...
Williams was late showing up at the Mirage for the 11 a.m. sign-up, so his
mother, Shirley, held a place in line for him.
Slim and handsome, David walked in a few minutes later, MP-3 player in his
ears. The SMU dropout is considered one of the game's young comers,
earning more than $4 million in tournament play in the last two years.
Williams was carrying a 4.0 grade-point average at SMU when he dropped out
after coming in second in the World Series of Poker last year. Before
poker, he won thousands of dollars playing "Magic, The Gathering," a sword
and sorcery card game. He switched to poker during college and worked his
way up the Dallas gambling ladder, where he was a regular at underground
big-stakes games. He continued to sharpen his holdem skills in on-line
tournaments.
Le, dressed in a conservative striped shirt and dark glasses, already was
seated in front of his $10,000 stacks of chips, the initial buy-in for all
317 players.
The 26-year-old, who has won more than $4 million on the tour, was in his
first semester at Cal State Northridge when he began playing poker in the
student union between classes. He almost always dominated the players, who
included his economics professor. One evening he went to the Hustler
casino in Los Angeles, and staked his student loans and financial aid. He
lost big time. But he quit school and kept on playing, sometimes as much
as 70 hours a week.
|
Poker has changed his
living habits, which often means sleeping through the day and playing
at card clubs until dawn and beyond.
"I eat whatever I feel like when I wake up. Sometimes it's breakfast
and sometimes it's dinner," he said. "You pretty much make your own
schedule. Everything fluctuates, from your eating to sleeping habits."
Laak, 33, is one of the most recognizable players on the tour, though
far from being among its big money winners. His official earnings
stand at roughly $150,000, but that does not include endorsements and
non-tour games, where thousands can be won or lost on a single hand.
Laak graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a
mechanical engineering degree, spending most of his time reading books
outside his coursework (he read all of Ayn Rand's works). He
calculated the minimum coursework needed to make it over the 2.0
minimum grade-point average, and hit a 2.1."I was disappointed I
didn't hit it right on the money," he said.
When he graduated, Laak spent some time as a repo man and stock
speculator, but neither career seemed to offer good odds for getting
rich fast.
For about five years, he played backgammon, traveling the world
looking for the big money games. He based himself in New York, where
he went from game to game through the night on his bicycle. During the
cold months he wore the now infamous hooded sweatshirt. When he
switched from backgammon to poker five years ago, he kept on wearing
it. The Unabomber persona was born.
"I was afraid I'd be transparent if I didn't wear it. It was an effort
to shield myself from my opponents while I assessed them to see how I
should proceed," he said. "I was able to stay in my psychic zone a
little bit longer."
Killer instinct notwithstanding, Laak is an offbeat character who
plays well to the crowd and cameras. At one point he did push-ups and
shadow-boxed during a tournament, to the annoyance of others at the
table. Laak couldn't have cared less. He has even composed his own
epitaph: "Into this world without my consent. Leaving this world
against my will."
...
Several hours into the first day of the tournament, Williams and
others at his table became irritated at the cramped playing space. The
problem would not last long. When the first round ended at 8 p.m.,
only 170 players remained. Tuan Le was not one of them. He'd gone
bust, beaten by a pair of kings.
He chalked up his loss to luck; there was no flaw in his betting
strategy, he insisted. "It's glamorous and it's easy, but there is a
bad side," Le said while relaxing in pajamas at a comped luxury
penthouse at the Bellagio, just down the street from the Mirage. "When
I'm not winning, there is a lot of pressure. I've had so much success
that a precedent has been set."
Williams and Laak were back the next day, as was Chris "Jesus"
Ferguson. With his long hair, dark glasses and cowboy hat, he is also
one of the most recognizable faces on the televised World Poker Tour
circuit. With a doctorate in computer science from UCLA, Ferguson is
considered one of the game's finer players — calculating his odds
deliberately, studying his opponents methodically behind dark glasses.
Ferguson, a lifelong resident of Pacific Palisades, has been a serious
player for the last 10 years. For skilled players like him, the poker
explosion has been good; there are plenty of novice "fish" out there
for him to pick off.
"I think there is a bubble effect going on," he said. "The question
is: when is the bubble going to burst."
Ferguson cautioned that the game is demanding over the long haul, and
that playing on the Internet is a far cry from facing down real
opponents at a poker table.
"If you want to make money, professional poker is almost certainly the
wrong field," he said. "Professional poker players are all brilliant.
Almost all of them could make money doing other things."
As if to underscore the fickleness of the game, Ferguson did not make
it through the day and neither did Williams, who immediately boarded a
plane for another poker competition in New Orleans.
"For every dollar won, there has to be a dollar lost," said Williams.
"Everyone can't be a winner."
Laak not only made it through the second day, but thrived. When all
his chips were counted , he had $211,100, ninth among the 48 who had
survived the tournament. His friend, Antonio "The Magician" Esfandiari,
busted out. Like Williams, Esfandiari boarded a plane for New Orleans.
Then Laak had a run of bad luck on day three. Dealt a pair of aces, he
had great odds for a winning hand. He went "all in," betting his
entire stack, to match another bet. He already beat the pair of kings
held by Richard Tatalovich, and what looked like a weak eight and 10
of clubs for Jean Paul Bellande. Laak even got another ace on the flop
— the three cards flipped over by the dealer and shared by all
players. But the next two cards killed him, filling a 10-ace straight
for Bellande.
|
|
Gavin Smith, a
36-year-old father of two who once made his living as a golf course
groundskeeper outside Toronto, eventually won the tournament. He took
home $1.1 million with just a pair of queens.
"I've been in this business for eight years and I've seen thousands of
poker pros come and go," Smith said after his win. "Very few people
make it. It's a very difficult life. Very few can stand the ups and
downs of the game."
Still, as many as 5 million people continue to play poker, two thirds
of them online, according to World Poker Tour founder Lipscomb.
"We've managed to create the new American dream," he said. "But
whatever you do, don't quit your day job."
|
|
