A Full Boat

I know why I'm a bad poker player. I have no patience and little interest in other people and have never been all that good at math. Unfortunately I really like playing. I like the way each hand is a little lesson in masculinity: You should have had more guts to see it through, more humility to lay it down early, more cool to sucker him in and more bravado to scare him out.

So when Playboy offered to stake me $10,000 to enter the largest event on the World Poker Tour--the PartyPoker.com Million IV--I didn't much care that it meant being stuck on a cruise for a week. Sure, I'm about 40 years too young and the wrong sexuality for cruises, but for a chance to compete with the pros I'd be willing to play at a gay nursing home.

To prepare for the tourney I skimmed a few books: Sam Braid's The Intelligent Guide to Texas Hold 'Em Poker, James McManus's Positively Fifth Street and Mike Sexton's Shuffle Up and Deal. And they helped. Paul Simms, the creator of NewsRadio, invited me to a game at his house in Los Angeles one night with 10 of his friends, and in the winner-takes-all tournament I won $400. On my way I took down former NewsRadio star and 2004 Bravo Celebrity Poker Showdown champion Maura Tierney. Beating Tierney made me feel pretty good about my chances on the boat until I realized it was the equivalent of heading off to run the 400 at the Olympics after outsprinting Gabe Kaplan on Battle of the Network Stars.

On March 19 I went to San Diego to board the giant Holland America Oosterdam, which was being transformed into the Noah's ark of math nerds: There were long-haired Dungeons & Dragons types, older engineers with giant square glasses, baseball-capped frat boys, Europeans with clothes from the 1980s. As I looked at them it struck me that forcing 735 tournament players to live together in a confined area for a week was the kind of dangerous psych experiment outlawed in the 1970s. Poker players wear sunglasses and use iPods not just to hide their eyes and calm their emotions but to avoid talking to one another. And for good reason. Traditionally the only socializing done at the poker table is to inform someone that you're about to shoot them. Poker players aren't supposed to converse, much less meet on the lido deck for shuffleboard.

All the tourney players got to bring a guest, and though many of them brought poker buddies, a surprising number brought wives. I could not wrap my head around the fact that these guys have wives. I have enough trouble getting laid without playing poker online all night. These guys were my heroes. I couldn't get my wife to come, and I even stressed the words Mazatlán and Puerto Vallarta. She, however, focused on cruise and poker.

Even though the PartyPoker.com Million is a pro tournament on the World Poker Tour--with almost $7.5 million in prize money--the vast majority of players were amateurs getting a shot at becoming a millionaire but were there mostly to play against their heroes. It's akin to the Masters allowing anyone with $10,000 to play against Tiger Woods.

Only 50 players actually paid the entry fee out of pocket. Instead of shelling out the 10 grand, the rest wagered $20 or $50 in minitournaments at PartyPoker.com, where players could win a chance at the top prize of $1.5 million and nearly $6 million in other prizes. Most of the online cruise winners told me they had to spend hours convincing their wives this was not an Internet scam.

The idea for poker cruises didn't spring from the same wife-placating genius who included spas at golf resorts, though the cruises now serve a similar function. "A lot of time, wives complain that their husbands spend too much time online playing poker," says Mike Sexton, professional poker player, PartyPoker.com spokesman and World Poker Tour TV announcer for the Travel Channel. "They can say, 'Honey, I'm trying to win us a cruise for two here.'"

The cruise runs 20 miles off the coast to avoid gambling laws. Card Player Cruises offers trips throughout the year for players, and it is managing this cruise for PartyPoker.com, which acts as a sponsor for this event on the World Poker Tour. It's similar to what Coca-Cola does for NASCAR or AT&T does for the PGA. PartyPoker, by far the largest online poker site, with 55 percent of the market, is pretty good at skirting laws itself, having headquarters in Gibraltar, where fewer than 200 of its 1,200 employees actually work. Gibraltar, it seems, doesn't have a lot of gambling regulations. Or any kind of regulations. It is just a rock.

Because so many of the players qualified online, a lot of them are really young. Putting online gambling in dorms with built-in high-speed Internet connections is like putting beer in classroom water fountains. Students are dropping out of schools such as Princeton to play full-time. Three hours after I check into my surprisingly large suite--which has a TV, DVD player and balcony--I get in line to register for the tournament. I stand next to Sean Marshall, who at 22 was making so much money playing poker online that he dropped out of Berkeley 11 units shy of graduation. "I was taking classes in the summertime, but things just started taking off," he explains. Marshall's parents, not surprisingly, are no longer big fans of online poker.

Most of my fellow cruisers tell me they play poker online a few hours a day. Not only that, but they tend to play six games simultaneously on different windows on their computers. All say they make a lot of cash online. Few have much experience playing against others in person. Not one has taken on Maura Tierney.

To see just how good these professional amateurs are, I head down to the ship's poker room that first night. Though the whole ship is being dedicated to poker for the week, there is still a waiting list for a table. I get $200 worth of chips and sit down at $4--$8 Hold 'Em, the second-cheapest game.

The level of play isn't any better than at a casino table in Vegas or Atlantic City and is slightly worse than my friend's weekly game in Brooklyn that I stop by occasionally. Everyone is a little too loose, a little too cocky and more than a little easy to read. Sunglasses don't do much when you're yelling "Damn it" and telling the guy next to you what you had on your last hand. After paying tips and the house rake, I walk away $15 ahead and dangerously proud.

Back in my room, watching a Mike Sexton video on the in-ship channel, in which Sexton shows us around his house Cribs-style (he plays piano and has good intentions about using his workout room), I find I'm inventing little myths about myself to explain my victory. The main one is that I am so genetically smart that I intuit all the math. Another involves how years of journalistic training have given me the ability to gauge a stranger's honesty. Admittedly, I have been drinking a little.

The next day I do not shower. I don't even change my clothes from the night before. Despite intentions to go to the gym, as well as interview some pros, I head straight to the poker room. I step up to $6-$12 Hold 'Em and play for four hours straight, losing $136. I create a powerful new myth in my head about getting screwed over by bad cards.

Talking to my tablemates, I learn that poker players are all highly competitive people, the kind who as kids actually finished Monopoly games. In the old days poker players weren't competitors so much as gamblers. Sexton spent the first half of his amazing poker career in debt because he'd win money for six days and lose it on football games on Sunday. Once--with pros Howard Lederer, Huck Seed and Doyle Brunson--he wagered $800,000 on a game of golf. But the new guys, they're more about victory than cash. They're so into it that my dinner companion on the second night, a really nice dad from Wyoming who has come with his wife and adores cruises, tells me he won't even be getting off the ship at Mazatlán or Puerto Vallarta. He once met Lederer, who played on the cruise the year before, and Lederer told him the sun would drain him for the tournament.

I'm not in the second heat of the tournament, so I have Sunday off. When I check out the poker room, I notice a lot of sunglasses, visors, headphones and hooded sweatshirts. Between five and 10 percent of the players are women, very few of whom I'd want to have sex widh. Then again, if I were a woman, I wouldn't want to have sex with any of the men here.

At dinner I'm seated at a big table, cruise-style, with two couples. As I later recall, they are both in their 20s and from Maryland; the guys are mortgage brokers who are into sports and golf and talk a lot, and the women are dental assistants who don't speak in public. Everyone has the steak. If some of the details are a little off, they are truer than whatever the real facts are. I have never met a group of people so uniformly boring as the guys who play poker online. They are detail-obsessed.

In fact, everyone on the ship seems to have Asperger's syndrome. I suppose every group is into its minutiae, but poker minutiae are particularly boring. Guys will talk for hours about hands they played years ago and bad beats they caught. "So the guy next to me raised pre-flop and I have a queen-jack off-suit, and the flop comes queen-jack of spades and a three of diamonds and he raises, so I come over the top and...." It's as if professional baseball players really spent all day talking to one another about swing mechanics instead of cheating on their wives. At a Wednesday poker seminar, one of many that were standing-room only, one of the 140 people asks, "Could you explain how you apply the gap theory to your game?" No one laughs.

At 10 the next morning I sit down to play in the official tournament. I tell myself there is no point in playing anything but a pair of aces for the first few hours. Taking risks while the blinds are still low, especially in a tournament that isn't no-limit, is just stupid. The rewards pale compared with the risks. But lacking patience, I can't stop myself. At the end of the first hour, despite some very good cards, I am down $300 from my stack of $10,000.

After the second hour I'm down only $100, and sometime in the third hour I hear the sweetest words over the loudspeaker: "Player down." I am not the worst player here. I look forward to finding him and making fun of him.

At the end of the third hour I'm (continued on page 132)A Full Boat(continued from page 106) actually up $1,300 thanks to some pretty solid play. I'm feeling cocky. I start to bluff for no reason and pull in some pots. I bully people around and play erratically to throw them off my trail. Basically I start overthinking. These are decent moves for the final table, but there are still hundreds of people left. After four hours I'm down $2,500. So many players are down that tables are consolidated and I am moved to a scarier one where most of the stacks are significantly bigger than mine.

For our 15-minute break I run up to the lido deck and make a burrito. Unfortunately I am from the East Coast and making a burrito takes me a while. I enter the room with just 20 seconds until the end of the break. A fat guy's chair is blocking my way, so I sit down exactly five seconds late. A guy at my table from Chicago invokes the rule that if you're not sitting when the first card is set in front of you, you can't play that hand. I'm sitting on the big blind, so it costs me $400. Friendliness, I discover, leaves a tournament in the fifth hour.

Around this point I notice that a photographer with large breasts is taking a lot of pictures of me. She even smiles. I figure I know her from somewhere or that someone has told her to take pictures of the journalist, so I start mugging. This isn't so good for my poker face.

Still, I knock two people out of the tournament within 10 minutes of each other: an Asian woman and a fat guy from Texas. I feel as though I've gotten not only their chips but their hit points. I was a Dungeons & Dragons kind of math geek.

By the end of the seventh hour I am back to playing well, and I'm up $700. Basically I've been treading water for seven hours, which is all you're trying to do on the first day. It's six P.M. I know that if I last another hour and a half, I'll make it to day two, which not only would be an emotional victory but would put me close to the top 150 players, all of whom will be in the money. All I have to do is keep cool.

After taking a bad beat against a guy who pulls a flush on the last card and another against a guy who pulls an ace on the last card after going all-in against me, I am forced to make a bold move against the bastard from Chicago who invoked the in-your-seat rule. He's pissed when I call his bluff with mediocre cards.

This is when I make my mistake. The Chicago guy, now afraid of me, starts peppering me with questions so he can figure out how to play me. The most obvious one is whether I qualified online--basically, "Are you a pro?" I know that saying I won a spot online will get him off my back, but I once again overthink and start to fear that lying will break some kind of journalistic code one shouldn't violate in the post--Jayson Blair age. So I tell him I've been staked by Playboy for an article.

This does two things. The first is that he gives me my first poker nickname, and it's an awesome one--Playboy, which everyone on the cruise employs liberally. The second, which is not as good, is that players realize they can push me around since I don't know what I'm doing.

I am down to my last $2,000 in no time, my vision blurry, my brain exhausted. I've been sitting for more than eight hours, staring at cards. I have that actively bored, stressed-out feeling I haven't had since I played Pitfall on my Atari 2600, finished the game and took a picture of my TV to get that sweet, sweet patch sent to me.

I have to choose my time to go all-in or slowly get sucked out by the raising blinds. It's one of the things I like about poker: At some point you can no longer avoid a fight, and all you can do is make sure you rumble on your turf. I get the cards I want (ace-seven), the seat position I need (one from the button) and the guy I want to sucker in (aggressive, big stack). I put all my chips in the middle of the table, and my opponent turns up a king and a queen. I am a 57.5 percent favorite. A king pops up on the river.

It never seems right to get knocked out on your first all-in, without even one reprieve from the governor, but I don't feel so bad. Sure, I could have played a little tighter just to say I made it to the second day, but that would have been like pitching around Mark McGwire when he was going for 60. I went to my final showdown like a man, and the other guy got off a lucky shot from the ground. Everyone at the table knows I played my last stack right. And in a way, that's worth $1.5 million. By "in a way," of course, I mean "not at all."

I shake a few hands and leave, proud that I finished in the top half of my class. I go upstairs to my room and then head over to the ever-present, never-ending cruise buffet. As I leave the room I see my next-door neighbor pop out at the same time. It's the Chicago guy who dubbed me Playboy. "I put you at a more experienced player than you are," he says about finding out I'm a mere journalist. "You played your cards well."

Then the Chicago guy tells me he just took a quick break from the tournament to go to his room and smoke another joint. My ego is majestically deflated when it sinks in that I was beaten at poker by a stoned guy.

I have just played poker for eight and a half hours. I don't do anything for eight and a half hours, including sleep. Yet, pathetically, all I want to do is head into the poker room and play some more. In just three days I have become a degenerate gambler.

Luckily I have to go to a dinner hosted by Sexton. And far more luckily, after drinking too much wine, I am magically approached by the hot photographer, Amy Gallaher. At this point the only thing strong enough to keep me from gambling is breasts. And Gallaher has them.

And she is talking to me as I've never been spoken to in my life. That's when I realize the power of Playboy. This is my first assignment for this publication. It turns out that when women hear you're working for Playboy, they immediately think you're a little dangerous and very, very interesting. I have waited 33 years for a woman to feel this way about me. I suddenly have a little of what Tommy Lee has. She tells me secrets of her sexual history within hours of meeting me. I think some of them are even true.

I hang out with Gallaher in Mazatlán, drinking with the World Poker Tour crew at a hotel called El Cid. Sitting on the beach, she asks if she can touch my armpit hair. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I'm pretty sure it will save me from going to the tables and blowing a couple hundred. At least if I put it that way, I figure my wife will understand.

Unfortunately Sexton saves me a seat next to him during lunch at El Cid, so I have to ditch Gallaher. When I tell Sexton I almost made it past the first day, he is unimpressed. "If you had never played a pot you would have lasted about as long as you did," he says. I need my armpit hair stroked.

Sexton still plays in occasional tournaments, like the Australian Speed Tournament he says he just won, though I'm suspicious he made it up. But most of his time is spent building his empire: books, TV announcing and PartyPoker.com. "I'm still a player, so I think, Geez, I want to be down there playing. But I don't miss the aggravation," he says. "It's war on the green felt. When you're out there playing poker, there are no friends."

Sexton says that he, like most pros, got into the game because it was a job without a boss. "Far and away the best thing about being a poker player is that freedom," he says. "A lot of the big poker players would be successful in any business." But, he admits, they are social misfits, unable to talk about much besides poker. Unlike most players, Sexton has extrapoker interests: He's a former gymnast who has taught ballroom dancing, and he plays piano. "You can't even go to dinner with a poker player without spending the whole time talking about poker," he says. "That's all they want to talk about. Most poker players have a hard time enjoying life."

One thing I learn is that absolutely everyone hates pro player Phil Hellmuth, who is known equally for his cockiness and his temper. Hellmuth has a few fans, as the Oakland Raiders do, but time and again on the ship the best way to warm up a room is to make a joke about how small Hellmuth's dick is.

Like many pros, Hellmuth is not on the ship this year. The World Series of Poker circuit, the smaller competitor to the World Poker Tour, purposely scheduled a tournament at the Rio for the same week. And even though the winner took home only $695,970, most of the pros there thought it was worth it not to be on a ship with a bunch of amateurs.

Although amateurs are easy to beat (they're what the pros call dead money), they can be annoying. First of all, would Tom Cruise want to be stuck on a cruise with a bunch of Tom Cruise fans? Second, getting beat on a lucky hand by an idiot like me who is playing bad cards is just wrong. Third, though it may not be an effective strategy, it's frustrating that all the amateurs are trying to take you out so they can tell their friends.

Except for Chris Ferguson. A lot of the pros, such as the beautiful Clonie Gowen, abandon the ship in Mazatlán after they lose, off to another game. Others, like Barry Greenstein or Kathy Lieber, keep to themselves. But Ferguson, who is known as Jesus because of his long dark hair and beard, has a blast.

A shy guy, Ferguson likes being recognized because it means he doesn't have to initiate conversation. The thing that impresses me most isn't his 2000 World Championship or his ability to cut a carrot in half with a card from 10 feet away; it's that as we are leaving the dining room, a hot older blonde he met at Señor Frog's in Mazatlán not only stops him but refers to a tournament player who is obviously her husband as "my friend Randy."

As a Ph.D. student in computer science at UCLA, Ferguson started wearing his trademark black cowboy hat so other players would see him less as a math nerd than a cowboy. Now he basically runs his poker life like a small business, investing between $300,000 and $400,000 in tournament entry fees and travel each year. As of the March cruise, he had made $900,000, winning a tournament in San Diego and coming in second on NBC's heads-up tournament, losing to Hellmuth. "I let the whole poker world down," he says.

Ferguson is by far the most fun guy in the poker world. He's really into ballroom dancing (he'd met Sexton on the dance floor before they saw each other in a poker room), and he single-handedly turns the cruise into so much of a party that the ship's crew has its one A.M. curfew lifted for the week so the dancers from the on-ship musical can dance with him. He is up every night at the Crow's Nest bar, buying strangers drinks until it closes. Then he brings DJ Jazzy (the Oosterdam's version of Isaac) to the nightclub so he can dance until four A.M. And as I learn firsthand, Jesus freaks.

At 11 P.M. 50 people crowd outside on the deck to watch the tournament through the portholes. Mind you, they cannot see the cards underneath. Essentially they are just watching chips move back and forth. One of the spectators is wearing a shirt that says Life's A Bitch And I'm Her Pimp. Another is wearing one that says It Ain't Gonna Suck Itself. I am suddenly a little less flattered that Gallaher chose me to hang out with.

On my way to watch the final table, a guy stops me to ask if, in a hand I'd taken from him in the tournament, I had the flush, a pair of kings or the queens. I can't even remember the guy. He refuses to believe I can't remember the hand, figuring I'm just holding out on him so in case we ever meet again he won't have some kind of insight into my game. I assure him I don't remember. He still doesn't believe me. So I tell him I didn't have the flush. He seems satisfied. I seem scared.

At the final table the six remaining players compete in a huge auditorium, which to my amazement is packed. Watching people play poker without seeing the hole cards is freakishly boring. A dude behind me can't stop chanting "Hurricane," a nickname he's invented for Richard Kain, a 33-year-old married Haverford graduate who, in any other setting, would seem unnicknameable. Kain's plan, should he win, is to invest the money in Men's Wearhouse stock.

Last year Kain quit his job to play online full-time, working four screens of $10--$20 Omaha at once. He seems to have it down. "You have to be careful if Miss Muffett or Roxy T4 is playing, but otherwise you're okay," he says. And after playing on the cruise, he is pretty sure he can become a tournament player. "The gap of knowledge between pros and players has diminished significantly, if not been eliminated," he says. "I didn't feel intimidated."

The other people at the final table are a small young dorky kid named Adam, whom I nickname the Virgin; an Indian kid who is a senior at Princeton and has a lucky Buddha next to him, whom I nickname Siddhartha; an old guy with huge glasses, whom I nickname Coach; pro Paul "the Truth" Darden, who already has a nickname; and a college-age guy named Michael Gracz, who has such a good Everyman poker face that I nickname him Michael. Like I said, I'm really bored.

Five and a half hours later, with the theater still inexplicably full, it is finally down to Coach and Michael. Out of nowhere, music blasts, and a bunch of bikini-clad dancers from the cruise musical come in wearing feathers on their heads, dancing the conga and carrying a huge tray of cash. It makes me simultaneously proud and ashamed to be an American.

After I give up and head to bed, Michael takes out Coach. When I talk to Michael the next day, he tells me he got a friend to pay the $5,000 entry fee to a tournament in Atlantic City in December and took the $300,000. The two of them split the money. Having backers is becoming common, and Michael, who rarely plays online, is staked in this tournament as well, so he'll take home only half the $1.5 million.

That night I go to dinner with the World Poker Tour employees, and again I can't sit with Gallaher because Mark Tenner, a pro player and Card Player Cruises partner, saves the seat next to hers. Tenner says he's worried about the influx of young, inexperienced players into the game. "I think some of these kids are going to have a rude awakening when they're 30 years old and have a family to support," he says.

At a tournament for journalists and WPT employees, Tenner speaks. "Poker is a people game played with cards," he says. "It's not a card game played with people." He says it again. I'm proud that I do not laugh. Poker is played by serious people, and I have learned to respect them.

I have also learned how to kick their ass. Of the 40 people in the minitourney, which has $10,000 in prize money, I outlast all the World Poker Tour workers. It comes down to me and Jenny Yokum, a photographer. I have a stack twice the size of hers. I can afford to wait until she makes a mistake and moves against me when I have an awesome hand. Which I do. Twice. And she gets lucky both times.

Still, I come in second and win $2,000. In front of Gallaher. And more than that, I know I played well. Exploiting my Playboy-writer mystique, I tell Gallaher to put on a miniskirt and a low-cut blouse, and I meet her and Jesus at the nightclub. I buy everyone I've met a drink and dance until four A.M., when I grab a final late-night pizza with Gallaher on the lido deck before the ship docks at eight A.M.

As I leave her for the last time, in the glass elevator overlooking the moonlit Pacific, I am sad to leave the freak show that is the pro poker world. As I realize that I'll go back to my wife and never talk to these people again, Gallaher included, and that the cruise will quickly fade into a happy, vague memory, I know why I'm not a good poker player. And I'm glad.

Once--with pros Howard Lederer, Huck Seed and Doyle Brunson--Mike Sexton wagered $800,000 on a game of golf.