Ship It Holla Ballas! (12 page)

The result was an online card room named PokerSpot. In September 2000, PokerSpot became the first Internet casino to host multitable tournaments, and by December it had grown into the third-biggest online poker room in the world. Dutch and his brother were making $160,000 a month and making bold predictions about their future prospects.

Until Dutch became the most hated man in poker.

He claimed it wasn’t PokerSpot’s fault, blaming the company that processed the card room’s credit card transactions. Wherever the fault lay, PokerSpot suddenly found itself short on funds, lacking the cash reserves to pay its players. Instead of coming clean with his customers, Dutch opted to stick to the classic “the check’s in the mail” strategy, figuring that if he bought some time, his company could generate enough new deposits to cover its debts.

But these were wild and woolly days. Online poker operated without any regulations or oversight. When PokerSpot went belly-up, the players who were owed money had little recourse other than venting their anger on Internet message boards. (To date, many of those customers are still waiting on their refunds.)

Just when it seemed things couldn’t get any crazier for Dutch, they did. Or, rather,
he
did. On New Year’s Eve, he suffered the first in a series of psychotic breaks. The mild ones involved public nudity. A more intense episode led to his confinement in a concrete cell at an Antiguan mental institution.

No one wants to get diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but Dutch saw a silver lining. The affliction didn’t necessarily erode his poker skills; in fact, many of his greatest insights into the game occurred in the midst of his manic episodes.

In May 2003, Dutch rode one of these streaks deep into the WSOP Main Event. Sporting John Lennon glasses and a mischievous grin, he played brilliantly through the first three days of the tournament and was among the chip leaders late on the fourth day when he tried to run an ill-timed bluff past Chris Moneymaker. A few hands later, Sammy Farha took the last of his chips, eliminating Dutch just three places short of the final table. With ESPN’s cameras following his exit from the room, he used the moment to make a bold announcement: He’d formed a poker crew, and they were going to “take over the poker world.”

Their ambition extended to the name they adopted: “The Crew.” Other than their youth—most were in their early twenties—its members were an eclectic bunch. Besides Dutch and his brother Robert, The Crew included a model and full-time pothead named Brett “Gank” Jungblut and a street-savvy pool hustler named Joe Bartholdi, Jr. A few months later, they were joined by Scott Fischman, an ex-poker dealer whose rheumatoid arthritis forced him to move to the other side of the table.

Using the $80,000 he won at the World Series, Dutch rented a five-bedroom house in Culver City, California, and turned it into their headquarters. They pooled their bankrolls, shared strategies, ate and slept only when necessary, and played online poker nearly every other minute of the day.

At the 2004 World Series, The Crew backed up all the brash talk. Gank won a gold bracelet; Fischman earned two; and Dutch, three weeks removed from his most recent psychotic break, came tantalizingly close to winning one of his own, finishing second to the legendary T. J. Cloutier in a Razz event. Over the course of that summer’s thirty-three events, The Crew won nearly $1 million.

Cocky kids who trained online, promised to beat the pros, then did just that? The media ate it up. Newspapers ran lengthy features. ESPN’s cameras followed them throughout the World Series. An article in
Rolling Stone
made them look like the Rolling Stones.

By the time the article hit the stands, infighting had driven The Crew to disband, but their impressive performance that summer helped establish them in the poker world. Fischman parlayed his two WSOP victories into a regular column for
Card Player
magazine, a book about how to master Internet poker, and a sponsorship deal from Full Tilt Poker. Dutch and Gank would go on to earn sponsorship deals of their own.

Ah, the sponsorship deal. In the eyes of online poker players who aspired to turn their hobby into a job, this was how you got made. Such endorsements were tangible proof of your skill at the game. While few deals were structured the same way, all offered the opportunity to boost one’s bottom line. Online sites often paid their sponsored players’ tournament entry fees and refunded their rake in cash games. Some sites even paid their players regular salaries, the best-known players making more than $1 million a year just for playing on the site.

These deals turned the game of poker on its head, offering a new template for success. For most of his career Doyle Brunson had tried to keep his profession a secret to avoid moral judgment from friends and family. The Crew came along and proved that fame could be just as valuable a commodity as money itself. Texas Dolly is famously old-school in his ways, but even he was persuaded, lending his name to an online poker site called Doyle’s Room.

Thanks to The Crew, the kids who grew up watching poker on television had been handed a road map showing them a new route to poker stardom.

Play online.

Form a crew.

Talk a big game.

Take over the poker world.

19

Q: What exactly does “Ship It Holla” mean?

A: When you win a big pot in poker and you want to be funny—or maybe a little bit of a dick—you yell, “Ship it,” as in telling the dealer to “ship,” or push, the pot to you. Then, in celebration, it is correct to yell “holla.” “Ship it” can also be used in a variety of other ways—when you are sending someone money online you are “shipping them money,” or when you are ordering food you can tell the fast food employees to “ship the food.” “Holla” is also the customary greeting between young degenerate gamblers.

—Good2cu

EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN
(April 2006)

After a late-night session of online poker played at Inyaface’s house in Toronto, Good2cu drunk dials all the young Two Plus Twoers he bonded with in Vegas to informally invite them to join the “Ship It Holla Ballas.”

The reactions are mixed. Raptor thinks it’s ridiculously silly. Others don’t think it’s silly enough. “You know what would be funny?” suggests Jman, a twenty-one-year-old Jason Biggs look-alike and amateur stand-up comedian who just dropped out of the University of Wisconsin to play more poker. “If we give ourselves a really gay name, so that the ESPN announcers have to say it every time one of us makes a final table at the World Series. How about ‘Pushbotting Panthers’?”

“I’m hanging up now,” says Good2cu.

But all of them do agree on one thing: renting a house in Vegas for the summer is an excellent idea.

Good2cu is especially excited. Upon his return to East Lansing, he starts counting down the days until he will be reunited with his new best friends. The two halves of his double life no longer feel equal—he’s starting to think of himself as more of a Ship It Holla Balla than a Michigan State Spartan.

Despite the growing divide between him and academic life, Good2cu is becoming something of a celebrity on campus. Everyone’s talking about the professional poker player living in the freshman dorms, and Good2cu, for the first time in his life, is becoming a person that other people want to know. He’s achieved the kind of rock-star status normally reserved for members of the university’s football and basketball teams. Every time he goes out, he gets bombarded with questions.

“So how much money have you made?”

“What’s the most you’ve ever lost in a night?”

“Have you ever played against Phil Hellmuth?”

Good2cu tries to stay modest about his success, as long as he isn’t piss-drunk or trying to impress a girl. Then stories about booking five-figure wins and drinking bottles of Cristal start to roll off his tongue. His fellow students—and even a few teachers—look at him the same way people observed successful day traders nearly a decade before, with awe and envy of a life led above the daily grind.

There’s only one question that bothers him: “When do you find time to study?”

The answer is he doesn’t, although it’s not from a lack of effort. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day. The rigorous daily routine he follows leaves him with little time to do anything else. Each morning, he plays four hours of poker, then chugs a Red Bull and heads to the gym. After downing another Red Bull, he returns to his computer and plays for another four to eight hours. Following this strict regimen is helping him earn him between $150 and $200 an hour.

His robust earning power comes with an unexpected downside. Every time Good2cu thinks about doing something other than play poker, he has to consider the opportunity cost, a concept he first encountered in Econ last semester when he was still going to classes.

Should I spend the next two hours playing poker or watching a movie? Play poker, and my expected return is $300, money I can’t earn if I watch a movie. Watching a movie will effectively
cost
me $300. It’d better be a damn good film!

The same thinking carries over to his studies. Even though he’s stopped attending his computer class, his professor offers to pass Good2cu as long as he completes the final project. Good2cu weighs the estimated sixty hours of work it will take to pass the class against the $12,000 he could make if he were playing poker.

Needless to say, the computer project doesn’t get done.

One day his routine gets disrupted by a surprise visitor. Returning to his dorm from the gym, Good2cu finds his father standing outside his door.

“Uh, hi, Dad. What are you doing here?”

“We need to talk.”

He knows what his dad wants to talk about. It’s not a conversation Good2cu wants to have right now. He has plans. He and a friend are about to drive to the Caesars Windsor in Canada to play in a live game. But this conversation is pretty much inevitable, so he might as well get it over with.

“I guess you got the letter.”

Good2cu is referring to the official notification from MSU’s administrative offices, sent yesterday to both him and his father via certified mail, informing him that he’s no longer eligible to live in student housing on account of his “light course load.” Good2cu didn’t bother to open the letter—there was no way it could be good news—but got the message when he discovered his food card had been deactivated.

“Sounds like you’ve been missing some classes?”

“Yeah, I know. I just haven’t had time lately. Poker has kind of become a full-time thing.”

Dad sighs, wondering how much he’s to blame. After all, hadn’t he encouraged his son to join him on the couch to watch ESPN’s coverage of the World Series of Poker? And didn’t he let Good2cu use the computer in his home office to play online?

“I know you’ve been making some money at the game, but can’t you stay in school and play poker in your free time?”

“Sure, if I only wanted to be a low-stakes grinder,” Good2cu replies. “Someone who’s happy to win a hundred dollars so they can buy their friends a round of cheap beer.”

“That sounds pretty good to me.”

“I think I can do so much better than that. I want to make enough money to buy a car or a house. I mean, I want to buy a plane.”

“All the more reason why staying in college…”

It can be argued that, in 2006, the value of a college education has never been higher. A college diploma halves your chances of unemployment and doubles your lifetime earnings. On paper, it’s certainly a wise investment.

But Good2cu can’t help but think that he’s looking at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make boatloads of money, travel the world, party with beautiful women, and quite possibly avoid getting a real job forever. If there’s a social stigma attached to quitting college, his peers on Two Plus Two don’t seem too worried about it. Apathy, durrrr, Jman, Deuce2High, FieryJustice, Bonafone, and Raptor have all dropped out, and none of them seem to have any regrets.

But “all my friends are doing it” isn’t going to fly with Dad. So Good2cu takes a different tack. “Look, the world is changing. Go to college, get a good job, suffer through sixty-hour workweeks—it doesn’t work that way anymore. I can make more money in a day, sitting in my underwear in front of a computer, than most recent college graduates are going to make in a month.”

“But it’s gambling! What happens when your luck changes?”

“Let me show you something.” Good2cu opens a file on his computer—a detailed spreadsheet chronicling his daily poker results—and points to a number at the bottom of the screen.

“You’ve made $70,000?”

“Yeah,
last month
.”

His father looks over the spreadsheet. It shows a profit, often four figures, nearly every single day. He can’t help but admire Good2cu’s organization. He’s broken down every aspect of his play—how much he bought in for, how much he won, where he finished in tournaments, even how often he folded.

Good2cu senses his father’s resistance slipping. “You’re right,” he admits. “It may not last forever. Online poker could disappear tomorrow for all I know. But right now, today, it’s like when they first discovered gold in California. People from all over the country headed out there, hoping to get rich, but by the time most of them got there nearly all the gold was gone. I don’t want to miss out on this, Dad. Just give me a year. If I haven’t made over $200,000 by this time next year, I’ll reenroll in school. I promise.”

Good2cu’s father turns to face his son. “It’s your life. If this is how you want to live it, well, that’s up to you. But I want you to do one thing for me. Your academic counselor, she had a lot of very good reasons why you should be staying in school. She really wants to talk to you. Can you at least listen to what she has to say?”

“No problem. I’ll make an appointment to talk to her in the morning.”

“I mean
now
.”

Father and son walk up the steps of the administration building, both feeling a little shell-shocked by the unexpected turn the day has taken. When they enter the academic counselor’s office, they’re told to have a seat by a stick figure of a woman who looks like she’s been working at the university since the Roosevelt administration.