Moneymaker: How an Amateur Poker Player Turned $40 into $2.5 Million at the World Series of Poker

214 Pages·2005·0.83 MB·English

by  Chris Moneymaker

MONEYMAKER
HOW AN AMATEUR POKER PLAYER TURNED $40
MILLION AT THE WORLD SERIES OF POKER
CHRIS
MONEYMAKER
with DANIEL PAISNER
Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.
—Paul Newman, in Cool Hand Luke
CONTENTS
EPIGRAPH
DAY ONE: MORNING
1. EASY MONEY
DAY ONE: EARLY AFTERNOON
2. NOT-SO-EASY MONEY
DAY ONE: LATE AFTERNOON
3. POKER STAR
DAY ONE: EVENING
4. DO TELL
DAY ONE: LATE NIGHT
CHIP LEADERS: CLOSE OF PLAY, DAY ONE
5. DAY TWO
CHIP LEADERS: CLOSE OF PLAY, DAY TWO
6. DAY THREE
CHIP LEADERS: CLOSE OF PLAY, DAY THREE
7. DAY FOUR
CHIP LEADERS: CLOSE OF PLAY, DAY FOUR—FINAL TABLE
8. DAY FIVE
CHIP LEADERS: TOURNAMENT RESULTS
9. THE MORNING FRIGGIN’ AFTER
AFTERWORD
APPENDIX A: CRIB SHEET 1
THE RELATIVE VALUES OF POKER HANDS
APPENDIX B: CRIB SHEET 2
A SHORT COURSE ON TEXAS HOLD ’EM
APPENDIX C: CRIB SHEET 3
THE RELATIVE VALUES OF TEXAS HOLD ’EM HANDS
APPENDIX D: CRIB SHEET 4
THE PROBABILITY OF KEY OPENING HANDS
APPENDIX E: CRIB SHEET 5
A GLOSSARY OF POKER TERMS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
DAY ONE: MORNING ♥ ♣ ♠ ♦
I don’t usually eat a big breakfast. Nine o’clock in the morning, most mornings,
my stomach’s not really awake yet, but this wasn’t like most mornings. This was
Monday morning, May 19, the first day of the 2003 World Series of Poker, and I
was about to join 838 of the best poker players on the planet, on the floor of one
of the most famous poker halls in the country, in a last-man-standing, knockout
tournament to crown a world’s champion.
I was here on a whim and a prayer and the fool notion that I stood even the
slightest chance. I’d won a $40 promotional tournament staged by an online
poker site called Poker Stars, and the first prize was a $10,000 World Series
seat. I didn’t win any money, mind you, just an all-expenses-paid trip to Vegas
and the chance to sit across the table from these great players and get my ass
kicked. Some prize.
The main event started at noon, and I couldn’t see playing on an empty
stomach. I’d be at it all day, with any luck, and I’d probably be too antsy to eat
during the scheduled dinner break, so I ordered up a great, heaping plate of
bacon and eggs and home fries. A glass of orange juice to wash it down. I waited
on the food and tried to calm my nerves. The small restaurant was pretty much
empty. A couple other guys—poker players, I was guessing—keeping mostly to
themselves, getting their heads together for the first day. No one I recognized.
Not much in the way of a breakfast crowd around here. Not much of any kind
of crowd, really, save for the players and poker groupies and friends and family.
Binion’s Horseshoe Hotel and Casino, for all its history and character, didn’t
really attract a typical Vegas clientele. The place was threadbare and throwback,
more Holiday Inn than Mandalay Bay, more roughneck than highbrow. There
was probably more denim and turquoise in this one casino than there was in the
whole of Vegas—by the kind of wide margin some of these people would want to
bet on. Folks came to Binion’s to gamble, just, and they didn’t much go for the
pomp and glitz and sideshows the way they did at some of the shinier hotels and
casinos. They didn’t strut. They went about their business, and, for a lot of these
people, gambling was their business. At Binion’s—in the older part of the city,
well off the Strip—the carpets were frayed, there were lightbulbs missing in the
marquee, and the waitresses all looked a little older and a little more beaten
down than they did at every other joint in town, but nobody cared. At Binion’s
the cards were all that mattered.
I was nervous as hell, and the time to kill wasn’t helping. I’d never played in
a live poker tournament in my life, and in just a couple hours, I’d be going up
against the reigning legends of the game: Johnny Chan, Scotty Nguyen, T. J.
Cloutier, Phil Hellmuth, Amarillo Slim. Their names alone scared the plain shit
out of me, and as my mind raced over the list of entrants I’d seen registered for
the tournament, I realized I wouldn’t know half these guys if I tripped over them.
I’d read about them. I’d heard about them. I knew Johnny Chan from Rounders,
the all-time-greatest poker movie, with Matt Damon and Edward Norton and
John Malkovich. I knew that T. J. Cloutier was supposedly the best player never
to win the main event at the World Series. But I’d never seen them play—not all
of them, not in any kind of studied way.
I looked around and tried to determine if any of these few other diners were
checking me out, wondering who I was, whether I belonged. And I was
wondering pretty much the same. Wondering, too, why I hadn’t tanked the last
couple hands in that Poker Stars tournament and copped the $8,000 runner-up
prize, money I could have used with a new house and a new baby and enough
credit-card debt to keep me up nights. Wondering if my Oakley Straightjacket
shades made me look intimidating, or if the Poker Stars threads the company
was making me wear marked me as easy pickings. Wondering how I might bluff
my way through the first day of the tournament. That was my goal, going in, to
make it through the first day. Wasn’t much of a goal, but I was trying to be
realistic.
I took my time with the bacon and eggs. Nursed that orange juice like I was
on death row and this was my last meal. Knowing that, soon as I finished, I’d
have to make my way downstairs to the poker tables and get myself killed. It was
early, and most of the players in the tournament were probably still in bed, but I
couldn’t sleep. Tossed and turned and played out all kinds of imagined hands in
my head. There was too much going on, too much to worry about, too much at
stake. It was all just too, too damn much.
Slowly the restaurant began to fill, and by ten o’clock I needed to get out of
there. I wanted to be off by myself somewhere, to stretch out some, get my head
around what was about to happen, consider what passed for my strategy: to hold
on, keep my cool, take some time with my cards. I told myself I’d wait a full five
seconds before calling or checking or betting. Usually I make my moves as they
occur to me, but I’d have to change my game plan to compete at this level, mix
things up a little. Whatever the situation, it wouldn’t do to be jumping into these
pots on an impulse, without really thinking about it, not against the best of the
best. Doesn’t seem like much, five seconds, but it’s all the time in the world when
you’ve got a real hand. That was about all I had, in terms of strategy. That and
the Oakley Straightjackets I was hoping to hide behind, not wanting to give away
a thing.
I made my way down to the table where I’d be playing. There were ninety or
so tables set up for the first day of play, most of them in a big room about the
size of a football field. To look out on that room, with all those damn tables, was
to grasp the magnitude of this event, begun thirty-four years earlier on a kind of
lark and now one of the most popular world-class competitions in any sport—if
you can even consider poker a sport. (Some folks do, I’m told, on the theory that
if you break a sweat, it must be a physical activity.) Part of the appeal of the
World Series was that it was open to anyone with $10,000 and the balls to go for
it. “Anyone can win”—that’s the tournament slogan used by the folks at
Binion’s, and it’s a tremendous hook. Imagine being able to buy your way into
the Indy 500 or the U.S. Open. To head into the same turns, the same dog-legs
left, against all those awesome champions. It’s one of the great thrills good
money can buy, and these days there are all kinds of satellite tournaments and
tie-in promotions that make it possible for amateurs like me to sit down at
Binion’s main event with a buy-in of just $40.
So yeah, anyone can win. In theory.
I was assigned to Table 8, which was in a smaller room of tables, downstairs
from the main floor. Still a big room, but nothing like the football field overhead.
There was no one around. It felt a little bit like I was at a wedding reception, and
I’d wandered over to my table ahead of everyone else, and there was nothing to
do but stand there awkwardly, waiting for someone to come join me. I set my
Oakleys down on the table in front of my assigned seat—seat four—thinking my
opponents would be by soon enough and see that I’d already been here, thinking
maybe it would give me some kind of edge.
Then I rubbed the cloth for luck.
Then I left.
Headed back upstairs to the main floor, where there was a small gallery set
up along the walls, rimming the tables. Just a couple rows of chairs and four or
five rows of bleachers, and I climbed to the top row of one of the bleacher
sections and sat down. It was about eleven-thirty, a half hour before the
tournament was due to begin, and there was still hardly anyone around. Some
security guards, some Binion’s people, a handful of players starting to mill about
their tables. Most everyone else was lined up at registration, checking in,
running late. I lowered my head and set it between my hands and started
massaging my temples, trying to block out the rest of the room, to focus, to get
into some kind of zone. Shit, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I had the
butterflies like you wouldn’t believe. I wanted the damn tournament to start. I
wanted it to be over. I wanted to be in the middle of it, sitting behind a nice stack
of chips.
I must have been a sight, perched there like that, legs propped on the row
beneath me, head between my knees, my hands rubbing at my scalp. Probably
looked like I was winded, or nauseous, which I might as well have been. I don’t
know how long I was there—five minutes, ten— but at some point an older
gentleman came over to me. I saw his shoes before I saw the rest of him, and I
glanced up as he spoke.
“First World Series?” he said, his voice easy with kindness and concern. He
was chubby, with a wisp of mustache. He looked to be about my dad’s age, and
he seemed like a nice guy. He was big and (mostly) bald and six kinds of poised.
He wore a loud Hawaiian shirt and a pair of shorts—a standard uniform for this
event.
“First tournament,” I said, sitting up straight, happy for the chance at small
talk. I was dressed in khaki slacks and a black Poker Stars T-shirt, topped by my
Poker Stars ball cap. Between the two of us, we could not have turned a single
head.
“No kidding?” the man said, only a little incredulous.
I shook my head to indicate that I wasn’t kidding. “How ’bout you?” I asked.
“Me?” he shrugged. “Oh, I’m out here every year.”
“Really,” I said, thinking I’d just met a tournament veteran, someone who
could maybe teach me a thing or two before the cards began to fly. “And how do
you usually do?”
“Oh, I don’t play,” he corrected. “I play poker, but I don’t have ten thousand
dollars to risk on a tournament. I just like to watch.”
We talked for a bit as the room began to fill. Turned out the guy was well-
known at Binion’s for his crystals. Well-known all over Vegas. He’d go out in the
desert and dig up these beautiful crystals, which some of the players would use
as good-luck charms. They’d rest them on their pocket cards, or fiddle with them
during the run of play, or spin them for something to do with their hands. He
pulled out a crystal and handed it to me.
“Cool,” I said, looking it over. And it was.
He told me the story of this particular crystal, told me where he’d found it—
which part of Nevada—told me of its imperfections, its special powers. “A
crystal like this,” he said, as if he were Yoda imparting ancient words of wisdom
to some Jedi warrior, “it will bring you strength and perseverance. It will bring
you luck.”
“Cool,” I said again, working the crystal with both hands, half hoping that,
whatever special powers this thing had, some of them might rub off on me.
Meanwhile I’m thinking, Okay… what’s up with this guy? I’d never been one for
mysticism or any of the New Age stuff he seemed to be getting at. I was glad for
the company, glad for the distraction, but the guy struck me as a little bit off.
Nice enough, but way into his crystals.
“How do you like your chances?” he said.
“I don’t really know what I’m doing here,” I said, being honest. “I’ve only
been playing a couple years. Online, mostly.”