For those who need the intro: The World Series Of Poker is the largest (in terms of cash) and the most prestigious poker tournament series each year. There are about 15-20 tournaments, and the winner of the largest, the $10,000 No Limit Hold 'em Championship Event, is generally considered to be the reigning World Champion of Poker. Winners of any event during the Series are given snazzy gold bracelets, which identify them as talented and/or lucky wherever they go. When this story began, I had been playing poker for about 7 months.
Date: Fri, 7 May 1999 19:29:44 -0400 (EDT)
From: Patri Friedman <patri@izzy.com>
To: patri-l
Subject: It begins with a purple mohawk...
...and ends with the most painful poker hand I have ever played. But don't worry, whining about it to y'all is sure to make me feel better.
When I got back from cancun last week (with only one box of cuban cigars, I didn't go too crazy), a friend of mine from high school named Darrell had just come into town from Utah. He stayed with me for a couple days, and I let him wield the clippers on my hair. I had meant for the mohawk to be just on top, and to have the back shaved, but he interpreted it as going all the way from my forehead down to my spine. After seeing it that way, I was perfectly happy to leave it. Next, we got out the bleach, and set about the task of making me blonde. It took quite a while, as my hair likes its color, but eventually it worked. Then I realized that I didn't know where my purple hair dye was! A search was fruitless, so we turned to the phone and the internet. What to look up in the (online of course) yellow pages? I associate selling hair dye with tattooing/smoking type shops (like South Street in Philly), so I started with them. The first few didn't have any and didn't know where I could get it, but then one of them suggested Hot Topic. Of course! I shoulda thought of that...
A quick trip to hot topic was successful, and naturally resulted in some idle chit-chat with the multiple-visible-piercings and untold-horrors-lurking-beneath-clothing sales staff of that revered shop. I chose a color called "Pimpin' Purple", as much for the name as for the color. The dye was applied succesfully, and my hair became purple.
On friday I headed to Vegas, proudly and for the first time with hair to match my backpack. I had a big roll of bills, a suitcase full of classy clothes (and a few pimpin' outfits as well), and a lot of unrealistic hopes and dreams. Not that I am not a decent poker player, not that I have no chance here, its just that there are a lot of other decent poker players, and only one gets to win each tournament. I've learned reality this week, and reality is that tournaments are longshots.
Friday night I got in late-ish and, after checking into my room, headed over to the Sahara hotel, where some of my friends who I know from Bay Area poker games and the internet were staying. A "satellite tournament" especially for internet poker folks was scheduled for saturday, and the organizer, whose birthday was friday, was having a little craps-playing party. I didn't see him, but I did see another friend, who was playing $1-$5 7-card stud. That limit is way beneath what I play nowadays, but it sounded like fun, so I sat down. I caught some miraculous hands that would have been nice in a bigger game, and ended up plus $130 in an hour or so, which is quite a lot for 1-5 stud.
Now is a good time to explain the "satellite" concept. In poker, the larger tournaments often have pretty big buy-ins. The events here at the world series cost $1500 to $10000 to enter. There are a lot of people who cannot afford those types of stakes, so they have smaller tournaments where the prize is an entry to the main tournament. The main difference between a satellite and a normal tournament is simply in the length and structure. In a world series tournament, such as the $3000 event I played today, you start with 150 times as many chips as the initial ante, and the antes double every hour. That means that you have a looooong time before you start to worry about being anted out, and it means that skill is very important. The deeper the money (or chips), the more "play" there is to the game, because you can raise and re-raise more times before someone gets all-in (after which there are no more decisions to be made). This is how I like it. In a satellite, you start with more like 40 times the antes and they double every fifteen minutes. This is a huge difference. After 45 minutes in a satellite, the antes are huge, and you have to push all-in frequently just to stay alive. I don't like this, because there is more luck and less skill.
The other difference is the prize payout. A single table satellite is winner-take-all, and a multi-table satellite just gives entries to the top X people, where X = money paid into satellite divided by cost of an entry to the big tournament. Winner-take-all is a good payout structure, in my opinion, for reasons I won't go into, but awarding X top prizes that are all the same is a bad payout structure. So satellites are very different from normal tournaments because of these structural differences. A single-table satellite charges everyone 1/10th of the entry (plus a little "juice" for the house), and there are 10 players, which means you have about a 1 in 10 chance of winning, and also that it isn't difficult to lose lots and lots of them...but we'll get to that.
After the stud, we headed for the craps table. Boy, that was fun. The first guy who rolled had a huge string of luck, and ended up rolling for a good 15 or 20 minutes, during which time I raked in a good deal of money. I started with $200, and by the time our happy craps crew headed to the cashier, I was up a grand and a half. What a town!
I headed to bed, and in the morning, I went to Binion's Horseshoe, the casino which hosts the WSOP. The Horseshoe is a Las Vegas legend. Founded by Benny Binion, who was on the run from the law in Texas, the 'Shoe was famous for accepting bets of any size. As long as the edge was for the house, they were willing to play as big as you wanted. Mathematicians know that for an instution with a finite bankroll and an edge, this is foolish, as they risk going bankrupt if they get unlucky, but they didn't, and Benny made quite a lot of money - and didn't go back to Texas until the charges had expired.
My purple mohawk and youthful face attracted attention immediately. While standing in line to register for a satellite, I met Susie Isaacs, who writes a column in Card Player, the bi-weekly poker magazine (which is free in cardrooms and widely read). She didn't know I knew who she was, and I saw no reason to enlighten her as she said "Wow! Can I put you in a magazine?" I agreed, and after registering, we sat down and chatted a little. I explained that part of my reason was "How can you not call a bet from a guy with purple hair", and that it also made it easier for me to be recognized by people I knew from the internet. She took some pictures of the 'do, and we left.
The super-satellite ("super" means multi-table) was dumb. You get 200 in chips, and it costs $200 to enter. Whenever you bust, you can buy 200 more. Because you have so few chips, people push all-in constantly, sometimes with good hands, often with anything. It is wild and crazy and any hand can win. I detested it. Roulette is more fun, because you don't have the illusion of control. I re-bought twice when my good hands were beaten by people who got lucky, and then gave up, six hundred dollars poorer.
Over the next couple days, I met lots of famous poker personalities, and saw lots more. Johnny Chan (two-time world champ who was in Rounders) was playing in the biggest game there, a $100-$200 antes pot-limit game. In pot limit, you can bet any amount up to what is in the pot, so you can never offer your opponent worse than 2:1 odds, but the pots grow exponentially as the hand progresses. You can imagine that when you start out with $300 in the pot, they get pretty big: the first raise is $500, the next is $1500, then $4500, and so forth - and there are 4 rounds of betting, any one of which will usually have at least one bet, and sometimes raises. The players had about 20-40 grand each in front of them.
I met Huck Seed, one of the seeds of my poker ambition, who dropped out of Caltech to play poker and won the world championship a couple years ago (at age 24 or 25). I met Archie Karras, the most famous gambler in Vegas (If you've seen the discovery channel special on vegas, it tells all about him) who ran a few hundred dollars up to 17 million, and then lost it all, because all he cared about was gambling. Not money, not having it, not spending it, just gambling it.
On sunday I played in my first WSOP event, the $2500 no-limit
holdem. My purple mohawk got lots and lots of attention, the photographer
kept coming over and taking pictures of me - especially once I
had a decent pile of chips. Unfortunately I ran into a tough beat,
and had a very good hand
beaten by a very very good hand (second set against top set, for
those who know such terms). It was an unavoidable loss, and while
I didn't lose all my chips (because he had less than I did), I
was never a serious contender after that. Out of 307 people, I
busted out about 110th or so. I enjoyed playing enourmously, I
loved the tournament format. WSOP tournaments have deeper chips
and longer rounds than most other tournaments, which means there
is more skill, and it is much more my game.
My friend Patti wrote in her trip report: "I used the TARGET prize to buy into the $2500 nolimit event on Sunday, drawing table 47 seat six. Mike Sexton was in seat eight, Will Hyde in seat one, and I didn't know any of the other people at the table, although they seemed mostly to know each other. Patri was the talk of the table for quite a while... everybody wanted to know about the kid with the purple mohawk, and I obliged them by telling a few stories."
After the tournament, I realized that I actually regretted the mohawk a little. I was getting lots of attention because I had a purple mohawk, when I really just wanted to get attention because I am new and young and surprisingly good. Sigh. You can shave your hair into a funny shape and dye it purple with the best intentions and find that it has unexpected results.
There wasn't another tournament I wanted to play until thursday, so I began playing a lot of live games (games played for real money, not tournaments). They didn't have any no-limit (my best game), but they had lots of pot-limit, which is similar (although not the same - which many no limit players don't understand, an expensive mistake), so I played that. After a couple days of doing well in the smaller games, I got cocky and decided to take a shot at a bigger game. I sat down at the $25-$50 blinds pot-limit table (a quarter the size of the 100-200 game I mentioned earlier) and realized that one of the players was O'Neal Longston, a living legend who gets mentioned in poker books, and that another player was David Sklansky, the foremost poker theorist, who writes many of the poker books. Uh-uh. I guess when you play for big money, you play with the big boys.
One of the things about big-bet poker (pot limit and no limit, where you can bet large amounts) is that winning big pots is critical. You can lose lots and lots of small pots, and make lots of poor decisions for small amounts of money, as long as you win the big ones (or fold the losing hand instead of calling a big bet). Well, I lost the big one. I made a queen-high flush, which was the 3rd best possible hand at the time (beaten only by ace and king high flushes, which were unlikely), against someone with three of a kind. We got a lot of money into the pot, and when the rest of the cards were out, he had improved to a full house, and I had lost all the money I had on the table. Ouch. It ended up being my biggest losing session ever, by far. That was serious cash drain #1.
I haven't played that game again, and don't expect to. I've done alright in the smaller games, but hideously in the satellites. I've played 2 multi-table satellites and 10 one-table satellites, without a single victory. While those results don't necessarily indicate bad skill, since my chances of winning a single table satellite if I play well should be about 1 in 7, that is an awful lot of cash to go through without any return. On the other hand, I only need to win a couple to be ahead. That is serious cash drain #2.
Since I didn't win any satellites, I've had to pay cash to enter the two tournaments I've played in so far. WSOP tournaments are expensive ($2500 and $3000), and only the top 10% or so of finishers get anything back. This is serious cash drain #3.
One the one hand, none of these indicates that I am bad at poker. All of them are the results of extremely high variance, and a couple of super-satellite wins, a good tournament finish, or a few lucky sessions at the live games would bring me back up. On the other hand, it is a lot of money, even for me, and I am not willing to invest enough money in poker to play as many tournaments as a true professional. This is a common problem in poker (although for most it is necessity, not choice), which is why most players have to scrape by for a long time, until they hit one big one and finally have enough of a bankroll to play big and earn serious money. Still, its gambling, and even the most talented of the pro's can go broke.
My hairdo has continued to attract attention all week. Tourists get their pictures taken with me. People wave and yell things. People come up to me and say things like "If I still had hair, I'd dye mine too.", and tell me stories about how they got funny haircuts and got suspended from boarding school, or had long hair in the 50's and were outcasts, and so forth. Many of them have been genuinely enthusiastic in their appreciation, which suprised me. I really didn't think of a purple mohawk as a big deal. I guess going to college in LA and living near San Francisco warps perceptions like that. A lot of these guys are from places like Texas and the south, and I guess they don't see that sort of thing very often. The hairdo seems to strike a resonant chord in some people, the rebel vibe of their youth that faded as they grew older, and I have been amazed by the warmth with which some of the old folks tell me how much they like it. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all.
I am still not sure if I am going to get to play in the $10K championship event. I dunno if I want to spend ten thousand more dollars on poker, especially after this hellish week (I'll tell you about the horror hand at the end of this email). I have maybe 3 or 4 grand more in ready cash. So I am going to use that money to enter satellites, and hopefully win a seat in the Big Dance. Heck, if I get lucky in the satellites, I could still get even for the trip, although that is unlikely. If I can get a days worth of play in the Main Event, this will have been a satisfying trip poker-wise, despite all my bad luck, and if I catch some good cards and miraculously make it into the money, all will be forgotten and all will be forgivien.
Its been an interesting experience. There are some amazing people in poker (last years world champion came over as a teenager on a boat from asia on which 3/4 of the people died), and a lot of decrepit pathetic ones. There are gold chains and people chained to habits, expensive aftershave and 3-day stubble, piercing glances and vacant eyes. A solid player who plays at the right levels for his bankroll and is confident in his games is a joy to behold, but seeing a solid player who has run into an unlucky streak and is completely broke is painful. There is joy for the winners, but none for the losers, for in poker there is more at stake than just fame and reputation. There are no sponsors, so every dollar won is a dollar someone has lost. Some of the big losers are rich enough to afford it, and those are the best kind, but some of them are broken by their losses. Life is about taking risks, and like poker, in can be cruel in its capriciousness.
This brings us to todays tournament, the $3000 pot-limit holdem event. Last years winner (Daniel Negreaneu) was 23, the youngest winner ever (although unlike me, he has been playing since he was 15). To understand how important it was to me, let me explain what led up to it.
Wednesday night, I stayed up all night hanging out with Kirby and playing hearts with her roomate and a mutual friend (I know him from the internet) who manages the Sahara poker room. The event on thursday was No Limit holdem again, my favorite game, with a $3500 entry fee. I lost several satellites wednesday night. When morning came around, they started single table satellites again for the event at noon. I was short on cash, and didn't want to just buy-in for $3500, so I played (and lost) several more. It was 11:45, fifteen minutes until the tournament. I had two grand left in cash. I really really wanted to play, so I took my shrunken roll of twenty C-bills, and did what a true gambler would do: I went to the roulette table. I bet on black. The ball landed on red, and I went off to bed with an empty pocket. I woke up at midnight, too late to get money from the bank. I thought long and hard about the game, about how much money I was willing to spend, about whether I had a chance. I was down an awful lot of money, but it would only take one good finish to turn it all around.
The next days tournament was pot limit holdem, which is probably my second best game. I decided that it would be my test, my crucible, to see whether it was worth continuing to sink money into chasing my dreams. I had been playing pot limit live games all week, and I was focused and determined and ready to play my heart out. This was my chance to win back some money, to make a name for myself. I got out $5000 more when the bank opened this morning. I played 5 single table satellites for todays $3000 pot limit event. I lost them all, for a total cost of $1620. Three times I got all my chips in against a straight or flush draw (2:1 odds in my favor), and three times I lost. I had $3400, and the tournament cost $3000. I forked over the cash and bought an entry, determined to play my absolutely best game.
I chatted with some people. They announced the start of the tournament. I sat down at my table, recognizing a couple pot-limit players from the live game, and a youngish tournament player with a reputation for playing well but crazily whom I had met the previous evening (Layne Flack). I was dealt the first hand. It was crap. I folded. The second hand. Crap. Folded. The third hand. I have two eights, a good hand.
[Begin description of poker. Skip if you don't care or understand, the gist will be explained later]
Like any pair smaller than jacks, it is speculative. If an eight comes on the board (the community cards), you have a very strong hand, three of a kind. Only a straight, flush, or higher three of a kind can beat you. Otherwise you only have a pair of eights, and you can easily fold. I call the initial bet, as do a couple other people. A player raises the maximum, which is the amount currently in the pot, making it 250 chips (we started with 3000). This sort of raise is usually made with a big hand, like two aces or two kings as your hole cards. Two players call this raise, so I do as well, making the pot 1000 chips. The flop (first three community cards) comes 7-8-9, which gives me three of a kind, but doesn't look very good, since a straight is possible (if someone has 5-6, 6-10, or 10-jack in their hand). There are also two clubs on the board, which means that someone may have a flush draw (if they have two clubs as their hand, they have 4 clubs, 5 clubs makes a flush, so they just need one of the next two cards to be a club). So if a club comes, I could lose to a flush, and if a 5/6/10/J comes, then there will be 4 cards to a straight on the board, which means a player would only need one card in their hand to make a straight.
This is a dangerous flop. I am pretty sure I have the raiser beat, since he probably has a pair of aces or kings in his hand, but I am worried about the other players. What I really want is to make a full house. Since a full house is three of a kind and a pair, and I have three of a kind, I need a pair to appear on the board. When you have three of a kind, having a pair appear is called "filling up", and happens a good third of the time. I would love to see a 7, 8, or 9 as the next card. Anyway, the three of us callers check, and the guy who raised bets 1000 chips, a third of the starting stack (and the size of the pot). Everyone else folds (yay!) and I call. The 4th community card is the 7. Hooray! I have a virtually unbeatable hand, a full house. The only worry is that my opponent will get scared of this board and not bet any more. A good player would be worried, this is a very scary board, but this guy is not a good player.
I check. He goes all-in for his last 2000 in chips. I call. There is one more card to come. He has two aces, which in combination with the community cards means he has two pair (aces and sevens).
[end description of poker. Read on for the gist]
So I have made a full house, a huge hand, and my opponent has only two pair, aces and sevens, which he has played much too strongly, letting me trap him with my monster hand. There is one more community card to come. All of our chips are in the pot, and we are both all-in. If I win, I have doubled my chips on the third hand of the tournament, which is awesome. I have a virtual lock, since someone else had an ace in their hand, and my opponent needs the final community card to be the last ace left in the deck, the ace of diamonds, or he loses. The odds against this are 41:1 (for anal mathematicians: this is based on knowing that someone else had an ace, which could be considered irrelevant because I couldn't have known at the time, but that just changes the odds to 21:1, which is still a longshot). There are 42 unknown cards in the deck, and only one of them gives him the victory. It comes, the fatal ace of diamonds, giving him a larger full house. I am dumbstruck. The other players at the table sigh in sympathy. I mutter something like "lucky catch" and stand up. I walk away. Three thousand dollars, 3 hands, two minutes. 41:1 odds. I guess I didn't sacrifice enough sheep this year.
I walked around for awhile, and decided to head to Kinko's to do email, something I hadn't done all week because I had nothing good to report. I figured it might cheer me up. As I crossed the street, a guy leaned out of a red pickup and yelled, with a smile on his face, "Hey man! Nice hair!". I waved, and thought "I may be down thousands. I may have just had a dream shattered by a longshot. But at least *I* have a purple mohawk."
Patri
Last Modified: The Closing Days of the Millenium
Patri Friedman / patri@izzy.com