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Honolulu Lite
Charles Memminger
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Paying to play a poker champ
I'm playing a game almost completely unlike poker, in which there are about seven cards face up on the table and I've got a few more in my hand, and I'm supposed to make a straight or a flush by combining my two cards with some of the ones on the board, as long as the ones I pick on the board are "touching" or "kitty-corner," or if the "elevator" goes up to cards I need or something.
Five of the six strangers I'm playing with seem to be enjoying themselves, trying to figure out what each might have, based on what's on the table and the way each is betting. The sixth player, Jeff Ross, seems to share my confusion about this particular game.
The game, I think, is called "Irving," for a reason that hasn't been explained to me. But everyone calls it "Al's Game" since Al's the dealer and he chose it. Al, to my right, has a mischievous gleam in his eye as he pushes chips forward. I think I might have a straight, if I'm allowed to play the kitty-cornered cards or two of the ones adjacent to each other. So I call Al's bet. The bet gets around to Jeff, who looks out onto the bloody field of battle, apparently unsure what to do.
"Technically, you're still in," says Bruce, an attorney.
"Technically, I don't know what the (blank) he's dealing," Jeff says. This is bad news for me because 1) Jeff has been playing with these guys almost weekly for 15 years and should know these games, and 2) Jeff also happens to be Hawaii's only World Series of Poker champion. If Jeff doesn't know what game this is, what chance do I have?
Jeff folds. Bruce claims he has a straight and says the pot is his. I toss my cards on the table -- luckily, face up. (I have no idea what I have, but as long as the cards are face up, they speak for themselves.) Al points out that I did indeed have a straight and Bruce doesn't, because the "elevator" card doesn't touch some other cards or something. It's way, way over my head, but I finally win some chips and I'm happily back to only being $25 down for the night.
I HAD COME to the game expecting to play poker kind of poker -- you know, with no wild cards, no weird rules and where it doesn't take longer to figure out who won than it takes to actually play a hand. I play online for fake money all the time, and have played for real money on the mainland a few times. I think I know how to play.
I had come to sit down with a real poker champion and maybe pick up a few tips for my own largely hypothetical future trip to the World Series of Poker. But after playing one hand of Texas Hold'em, one of the most simple and popular games in the entire poker universe, the games degenerated into various inexplicable and complicated games like "Two for One," "Pay to Pass," "Bruce's Game," "Messy," "Blood and Guts" and "Anaconda."
The resemblance to poker, as far as I could tell, was that the games involved the use of playing cards and me losing money. For a while I thought my new buddies were making sport of me, simply inventing nonsensical games on the fly to take the new guy's money. But after a while it was clear that this was the kind of poker these guys liked to play, a sort of strange pastime in which luck, not skill, was usually the deciding factor in who won, thereby keeping everything on a jolly, nonaggressive level.
Along with Bruce, the attorney, there's Dave, a dermatologist; Dick, a cabinetmaker; Al, retired from something or other; and Medford, whose occupation escapes me. Jeff is in insurance but is best known for having won a gold bracelet at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas in 1998. He didn't win the Main Event, the $10,000 No Limit Texas Hold'em game, but one of the many other games at the World Series. He beat out 350 people in the $2,000 No-Limit Texas Hold'em event, picking up the $259,000 first-place payout.
Since then he has gone to Vegas several times to play in various World Series events, including the Main Event, but has not placed in the money. Considering how big the World Series of Poker has grown in recent years, with more than 8,000 players in the Main Event alone this year, it's not surprising. Even the top players complain that with so many people playing -- many of them amateur online players -- making it to the final 100 players, let alone the final table, is almost like winning a lottery. (And while the "real" poker players might whine about the huge number of novice online players competing these days, if it weren't for the newbies, the winner of the Main Event this year wouldn't have picked up a cool $12 million.)
So while Jeff Ross won before the pots became huge, he still has the gold bracelet all World Series of Poker champions receive, putting him in rarefied company with the likes of Phil "Super Brat" Helmuth, Doyle "Texas Dolly" Brunson and Daniel "The Kid" Negreanu. Or at least other players who won non-Main Event games such as Limit Texas Hold'em, Omaha, Omaha High-Low and Seven Card Stud. (Apparently, "Irving" and "Messy" haven't made the big-time poker circuit yet.)
ONCE I REALIZE I'm not going to learn any real poker tricks this night, I settle down, drink a beer and let myself be washed along in the continuing weirdness of bizarre pokerlike games. Later, Jeff explains to me that while he still likes to compete on a higher tournament level, he really enjoys just kicking back socially with this group, playing games that likely would not be allowed to cross the Nevada state line.
"I play a couple of times a year," Jeff says. "I go in the summer for the World Series and buy in to one or two events. I almost made it into the money this last trip. Other times I play No-Limit Hold'em, buy in for $500."
He's not bothered by the fact that some of the guys he's beaten, like Lane Flack and the Vietnamese sensation Scotty "Yeah, Baby!" Nguyen, have gone on to become poker legends. Flack is estimated to have won at least $3 million in tournament play since Jeff beat him. Nguyen recovered nicely after Jeff knocked him out in third place in the $2,000 No Limit game in 1998 to win the Main Event later that same week, picking up $1 million.
Jeff might have been able to break Scotty Nguyen and Lane Flack, but he gets little respect at his weekly poker game in Kailua.
"Yeah, he'll give thousands to strangers in Las Vegas," says Dave the Dermatologist, "but he gets mad when he loses a hundred to his friends."
Jeff just smiles, eating some potato chips, sipping soda and flashing his gold bracelet. He's wearing it tonight apparently just to harass his friends in front of the visiting newspaper columnist. Beneath the friendly exterior, there are flashes of the serious poker player able to compete on an international level. He seems to have an intuitive knack for bailing out of hands that cost the rest of us a lot of money. And, almost mysteriously, Jeff's stack quietly grows.
So what is the secret to playing big-time poker, big-time tournament poker?
"The main thing is to wait for the cards to come to you," he says. "Don't go chasing cards. You'll see these pros sit around two hours without ever getting a hand to play."
While a lot of players like to say they can "read" other players by their various tics and "tells," Jeff says that is overrated.
"I've never understood that, trying to read people," he says. "You are always changing tables (in a tournament), playing against people you don't know anything about. How can you sit down and try to read somebody? Why bother? Once you figure it out, you are probably going to be moved to another table."
The Internet has convinced thousands of people, including yours truly, to think they know how to play poker. Living-room poker tournaments are sweeping Honolulu. And some people actually get up the money and the guts to go to Vegas and compete for real.
Jeff's counsel for these people?
"Be cool. Concentrate on what you are doing," he says. But mostly, "Go in and hope for the best."
My hopes are dashed on this night. Al's getting ready to deal again. I decide to sneak out while I'm only $25 down. It's a small price to pay for a two-hour lesson from a gold bracelet winner. I only wished we could have actually played a little poker.
Charles Memminger, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists' 2004 First Place Award winner for humor writing, appears Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. E-mail
cmemminger@starbulletin.com