There were only two nice things about this miserable time for Jennifer Harman, the last person to see Andy as he and Craig Singer rushed out of the Bellagio on the evening of May 13. The first was seeing how happy the experience had made him. “It’s good, you know, that he wins. He’s a nice guy. He’s allowed to win.” The second was, “I knew he’d be back. He was way too excited.” There would be a time for finger-pointing and recriminations, but that wouldn’t be for days. And Jennifer would have to take part by long distance, if she survived to take part at all.
The trip was a disaster for the high-stakes pros. Their losses came to over $300,000 per person. Their wins over Beal during the previous three years far exceeded that, but that money was long gone. In addition, several new members of the team never experienced those victories. It was a bad night to be a professional poker player in Las Vegas.
With one exception.
Ted Forrest kept plugging away in the $1,500 buy-in no-limit hold ’em event at the Horseshoe. With sixteen players left, he had an average amount of chips and survived to the final table. He got into a big pot with the chip leader, won, took over the chip lead, and never relinquished it. Frozen out of the Big Game, he missed out on a loss of over $300,000, and won his fifth bracelet. He also took home $300,000 in cash that night.
Ted’s instincts from the early spring were correct: It was his turn to get lucky.
11
THE NEXT BEST THING
The next best thing to gambling and winning is gambling and losing. The main thing is to gamble.
—Nick “the Greek” Dandalos (1893-1966)
LATE MAY 2004
Jennifer Harman was correct about one thing: Andy Beal could not stay away. Feeling cocky and, in retrospect, a little stupid, he returned to the Bellagio on Monday, May 24, less than two weeks later to take another shot at the pros, and to let them have another shot at him.
When Beal arrived to negotiate over the stakes, he naturally met with resistance. The pros were adamant this time. They would have to concede that he won at the highest stakes of all time. They were afraid to play as high as he wanted.
As soon as Andy Beal left town on May 13, the players fell into dissension over the reasons for the loss. The first mistake was that they allowed Beal to reach his goal of raising the stakes high enough to make the pros sweat. The magic number to do that was $100,000-$200,000.
Doyle Brunson recognized it. “I think there was more pressure on everybody because it was so high. I could see the people playing in it were affected by it a little bit. That’s what he wanted to do. Get everybody out of their element. And I think he did it a little bit with $100,000-$200,000 because after it was over, we all said, ‘No, we’re never going to do that again.’ Fifteen-thirty is plenty big and if we’re winning, we’ll go to fifty-one hundred, but that’s as high as we’ll go.”
For Jennifer Harman, the pressure of the stakes became magnified by the decision to let Beal exclude Howard Lederer from the match. “Ted’s not in. Todd’s played him all day the day before. Phil Ivey won’t play him. I’m too sick. Chau was playing in the tournament. Doyle doesn’t want to play him. Nobody wanted to play him. And we’re playing him as high as we can. And we negotiate Howard out? Smart.”
As the world’s must successful professional gamblers, was there some element of losing face in turning down a big bet when they had the advantage? For Chip Reese, ego was not a part of it. “Sometimes, I know I have an edge but maybe the downside is so great that the edge isn’t worth it. Those are business decisions.”
Likewise, Doyle Brunson could live with Andy Beal saying the pros would not play him at his stakes. “The edge isn’t big enough. When he first came, I thought we were a prohibitive favorite. He’s made the gap so close that it’s not that big a deal. He could win and damage the poker economy. I mean, you could lose $50 million or $100 million and it wouldn’t be a big deal.”
Doyle had a story to illustrate the necessity of even the consummate professional taking prudence over pride. “Benny Binion had a no-limit craps game. This guy came in and he got lucky and wanted to make such a huge bet he’d have owned the whole joint if he went on a five-minute run. Benny wouldn’t let him make the bet. The guy said, “I thought you had a no-limit craps game?” Benny said, “I thought I did, too, until now.”
The atmosphere created by so many players standing around watching also contributed, both to the dissension and the difficulty the players faced. Brunson, shuttling between the Bellagio, the Golden Nugget, and Sam’s Town, where they played the largest side games during the Series, would not have allowed it. “It’s a lot harder to play with all those people up there. I’d have chased everyone away and said, ‘Get the hell out of here, you’re bothering the player.’ It’s hard to play with someone critiquing your every move.” Howard Lederer agreed. “It’s one thing to be focused and try to eliminate from your mind the aspect of all these people you’re playing for. It’s another thing to see the people whose money you’re losing. That can’t help.”
Maybe, just maybe, the pros had gotten a little lucky over the three years and wanted to close the betting window before their luck changed. Mike Matusow, a fellow Vegas professional who earned his nickname, the Mouth, for his outspokenness, believed, “They have no idea how good they’re running. He could come in and win $10 million a day, every day for a month. If he’s aggressive, he can win. And they’ve been very fortunate.”
This was a view held not only by outsiders. Chip Reese surveyed the entire experience of playing Beal from 2001 to 2004 and concluded, “Andy played good enough to win. He should win sometimes. The truth of the matter is that he probably played unlucky to get behind as much as he did. He didn’t even play that bad in the beginning and he could have easily won.”
Ted Forrest also acknowledged: “The luck has probably broken in our favor.”
For some reason, Barry Greenstein received a disproportionate share of the blame for the decisions made on the evening of May 11. Lederer, who recognized that the decision to raise the stakes was a close call and was not part of the debate, thought they got outnegotiated. “We let him get me out of the mix. We gave him everything. I know Barry was always arguing for ‘Let him get his way. We should just gamble with him.’ And that’s a reasonable sentiment. But a lot of people were more like, ‘What kind of idiots were we? We’re the only game in town.’”
Todd Brunson, proud of his role as a winning player at the highest stakes in 2003 and 2004, nevertheless disagreed with letting Beal get his way. “They said, ‘He’s going to leave.’ I said, ‘Let him leave, he’ll come back anyway.’ Barry was the one who negotiated, along with Lyle [Berman], without anyone else’s permission, and we’re lucky something really bad didn’t happen to us all.”
Lederer’s understanding was that “Doyle was the negotiator. Barry was the instigator. Barry was the do-whatever-he-says guy in the discussion.”
To Barry Greenstein, those attitudes were antithetical to the fundamental philosophy of their trade. “We’re gamblers. We try to get the best of it but we gamble when we don’t have the best of it. We don’t just play when we’ve got the nuts. You want the best of it, but when a guy loses money, he gets to call some of the shots.”
Greenstein had no regrets, other than the attitudes of some of his fellow players. He believed in the basic plan of leaving people alone to play Beal, sticking with players who won, removing players who lost, keeping the stakes down when they started or were losing, and raising the stakes when they were ahead. “I didn’t have any misgivings about playing him higher when we were ahead of him. But whenever something negative happens, you have a bunch of people whining. And let’s say we’re a two-to-one favorite. Two-to-one favorites don’t always win. That’s just part of it. If you lose, you shake the guy’s hand. A lot of these people don’t act like that.”
Barry was in it for the money, because he thought the group had the edge. Philosophically, though, “I almost half root for Andy.
I mean, what Andy has undertaken is, from the point of view of a gambler, really neat.” Greenstein’s decisions always had his, and the group’s, financial interests at heart, but he could identify with Andy Beal more easily than with some of his fellow professionals. “Some of these people, the way they act, I feel almost like they deserve to lose. They really don’t act like I think a professional should act.”
Naturally, Andy Beal’s decision to show up again during the main event of the World Series created disorder. Several members of the group were in the hunt for the championship, which would pay a mind-boggling $5 million. This year, 2,576 players had entered, a poker orgy so intense that the Horseshoe had to cancel super-satellites and split the field into two halves on May 22 and 23.
The big story of the Series on May 24 was Mike Laing.
Yes, that Mike Laing.
Out of nearly 1,300 players who started on Saturday, May 22, Laing was the chip leader with over 129,000 chips. No one exceeded his total on Sunday, so he started May 24 as the leader.
For anyone else, Laing’s experience that day would be the most bizarre story of a lifetime. For Mike, it was just another day at the card room.
Early in the day, cameras focused on Laing, the chip leader, and tablemate Robert Varkonyi, the 2002 champion. Playing to the cameras, Varkonyi won a pot and joked to Laing, “What do you say we don’t play another pot until the final table?”
Laing didn’t miss a beat. “This is your final table, sucker. You just don’t know it yet.”
According to Laing, his concentration later faltered when his ex-wife showed up on the rail. As he drank, she drank. She also got access to some pills, and they argued because she wanted him to pay for them. Finally, he sent her home with a limousine driver he had hired to baby-sit him. After repeatedly calling her on the phone and receiving no answer, Mike said he called 911. When he learned she was being taken to a local hospital, he left the tournament, only to be told he could not see her or get information on her condition. (He said she later recovered.)
He returned to the tournament, drank a large quantity of Jack Daniel’s, and found himself with ace-jack. As Varkonyi, still at his table, made a raise, a member of the tournament staff announced that there were only four former champions left in the field, and listed them. He did not mention Robert Varkonyi.
Robert complained to the others at the table, “Why didn’t they mention my name?”
Laing called Varkonyi’s bet, and said, “They must know I’m gonna bust your ass out on this hand.” And he proceeded to do exactly that.
As his mind became increasingly addled from the whiskey, he made some playing errors, culminating in an ill-advised all-in bluff, which was called, eliminating him from the tournament.
Jennifer Harman wasn’t in Vegas to see her prediction come true. Andy came back to town on May 24, a significant day in poker. It was Day Three of the world championship at the Horseshoe and transplant day in San Francisco for Jennifer.
Marco Traniello received the call on his cell phone while his wife was in surgery.
Was she in the group?
He thought about the emotional roller coaster of life with Jennifer over the past four years. He remembered the sick feeling in his stomach whenever he heard that Andy Beal was coming to town. There were all those times he told his wife that she had too much gamble in her. One of those times, he returned from Italy, came to the Bellagio, and marched straight to the men’s room in the sports book so Ted Forrest could weigh him to settle a $3,000 bet he had with Jennifer over Marco’s weight. (Jennifer lost that one.) He thought about Beal winning nearly $12 million in one day less than two weeks earlier, including a $6 million run against Jennifer in the last thirty minutes of his trip.
It took him only an instant to answer.
“We’re in for the biggest piece we can get.”
Today, Marco would be the gambler in the family.
He even offered to leave his wife during her kidney transplant to deliver the money. “If you need it, I’ll come today. I’ll fly to you and give you the money.” They did not make Marco retrieve the cash from Jennifer’s safe deposit box: This once, they could make an exception. But he had to offer. He knew that Jennifer would kill him if he let her be excluded.
Phil Ivey played Andy Beal on Monday and Tuesday at limits of $30,000-$60,000. Perhaps spurred on by the implication that he had ducked Beal during his early May win, Ivey wanted the first chance he could get to play the banker. Ivey was ultra-competitive and had established himself over the previous year as a successful player at the highest stakes imaginable. He was also wildly aggressive, a style that won him millions in cash games and tournaments, but did not intimidate Andy Beal at all. After two days, Ivey had essentially broken even. He was ahead by less than the amount of one contested pot.
To no one’s surprise, a top contender for the world championship among the high-stakes pros was Howard Lederer. Dressed completely in black Full Tilt gear and looking in equal parts fierce, haggard, and exhausted, he was nevertheless eliminated on May 24 when another hot pro drew out on him, making a flush to beat his three of a kind on the flop.
Doyle Brunson.
Feeling every bit his seventy years and in the midst of the worst run of his career, Doyle nevertheless put on a poker clinic for thousands of players and observers at the Horseshoe and the millions who watched on ESPN through the summer and fall.
He finally busted out on Wednesday, May 26, in fifty-third place. His executioner? Bradley Berman, Lyle’s son.
Beal knew he would have problems against Todd Brunson and Howard Lederer. Todd was superb at reading him and capitalizing on his mistakes; Lederer was impossible to figure out. Andy came to town ready to insist that he would not play either of them. As with limiting the stakes, the players had made it clear that they would rather pass up the chance to win his money than give in to his demands.
How could he be upset? No one was going to pat him on the back and say, “Good job, Andy,” but they obviously thought their edge was not very big.
He got hammered by the group’s two toughest players on May 26 and May 27. On Wednesday, at $30,000-$60,000, Todd Brunson won $5 million in six hours. Beal stuck with his earlier announced decision to stop after that amount of play. In Todd’s view, this was wise. “If I had two more hours, I’d have won another $10 million. I just mowed him down from that point on. I was so sick when he quit.”
Ahead by $5 million, the players let Beal raise the stakes to $50,000-$100,000 for his match against Howard Lederer on Thursday. It was a concession that proved expensive, but this time for Andy Beal. They played for nearly eight hours and Lederer felt completely in command. “I ran pretty good that day,” Howard admitted, “but I really feel like I worked some stuff out.” He won another $9.3 million.
Ted Forrest did not have his cell phone shut off when he received the call on May 24 asking if he wanted to be part of the group. Of course, he said yes. Because the pros won nearly $15 million on this trip, he put himself in the enviable position of sharing in the win, without having to experience the $6 million loss from ten days earlier. He also won the unofficial title, bestowed by David Grey, as “The Luckiest Man in Poker.”
It was quite a turnaround from the beginning of the year, when Forrest thought he wasn’t allowed to win. He referred to the trio of accomplishments—missing out on the $6 million loss, winning the hold ’em event, and cashing in on the $15 million win—as “dancing between the raindrops.” More important to Forrest, however, than the money was the feeling that he was back in the mix. Best of all, Ted was increasingly getting that feeling of excitement from playing poker again. Sometimes it was a dangerous thrill, but he wanted to experience it nevertheless.
“If you never feel the pain of losing, you can’t really experience the joy of winning,” Ted has said. “We live life on the edge. Sometimes, we have to risk falling over the edge.”
As Andy Beal left the poker room on May 27, he knew that his two toughe
st opponents had played their best game and claimed significant victories. But increasingly, his mind was occupied with a question he couldn’t answer: Where am I going with this?
Poker was gradually taking over his mind, if not his life. He was spending a lot of time working on his poker game, something he recognized was necessary to have any chance against the pros. Even when he was doing something else, like taking his daughters for a walk or working on a $50 million business deal, his thoughts would wander to poker. He didn’t want poker to become the focus of his life, but he couldn’t see himself doing it halfway.
Almost as important, it was becoming less fun. The key to succeeding in being difficult for opponents to read, he realized, “isn’t to hide your emotions. It’s to not have them.” After playing tens of thousands of hands, at stakes ranging from nominal to $100,000-$200,000, he had trained himself to be unconcerned about the money, as well as unconcerned about the quality of the cards. A pair of aces no longer filled him with a thrill he had to worry about hiding.
It became less fun. It didn’t even seem like gambling anymore.
If Andy Beal had wanted to learn about how professional poker players thought, he finally knew. Like the pros, he was attracted to poker because it involved gambling. But developing skill made it less like gambling and more like . . . work.
Although Andy was supposed to play Phil Ivey again the next morning, he returned to the Bellagio poker room a few minutes later and found Howard Lederer and David Grey, still counting and racking chips and following the procedures for returning them to the cage and to the team’s bankroll. He reached out and shook Lederer’s hand.
”It’s been a real pleasure playing with you, Howard. I thought I could master this game but obviously I haven’t.”
The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King Page 23
