Champagne Parties and Caviar Dreams

I think a lot of people, especially when they first start playing poker, have a few poker players they idolize at least a little bit. For some people it might be Sam Farha, the consummate suave gambler with the dangling unlit cigarette. For some it might be Scotty Ngyuen, laughing and knocking back Michelobs, taunting with, “You call, it’s gonna be all over, baby.” For some, especially when they were just starting out, it might have been, let’s face it, Phil Hellmuth. Like any competitive field, poker has its stars, its personalities, its celebrities.

But one of the amazing things about poker is that it is actually possible for an average player to sit down and compete with the “names” of the game. If you’re a basketball fan and worship Kobe Bryant, you’re never going to find yourself D-ing him up on the court, but if you play poker and love Barry Greenstein, you really might find yourself across the table from him in a tournament some day. And even if you did somehow find yourself in a game of one-on-one against Kobe, you wouldn’t stand a ghost of a chance. You wouldn’t even score a point. But if you find yourself in a tournament against Barry Greenstein, it is completely possible that you’ll beat him in a hand. Hell, you can even knock him completely out of the tournament, and take home a signed copy of “Ace on the River” as proof!

The more you move up in stakes, the more likely to are to find yourself competing against the “stars” of poker. As Emil moved up in stakes, I would see and hear about him playing against names that I knew from television, and I was amazed. And that’s when Emil started finding out that just because someone was on TV doesn’t mean they are any good at poker!

One by one he would sit with someone we both watched on ESPN back in 2003 and he would be shocked at their level of play. One by one he would report back to me: “Man, Hellmuth is terrible!” “Man, Matusow is terrible!” “Man, so-and-so is terrible!”

Without exception, the players I knew from TV turned out to be, according to Emil, godawful. He once played a tournament out in L.A. and he sent me a text. “They seated us alphabetically by first name. I made mincemeat out of Eric Lindgren and Eric Seidel!”

It was actually a little sad and disillusioning, kinda like finding out there was no Santa Claus. I had started playing because I thought the players and the lifeastyle were so cool, and now I learn that they’re not actually any good. Suddenly I had almost no poker heroes left.

But I did have at least one: Phil Ivey. Every year Norman Chad kept saying how awesome Phil Ivey was, how he was the best, etc. etc. At least I could hope and believe that Phil Ivey actually was the real deal.

Then, in the summer of 2007, Jay and Emil rocketed up to the nosebleeds, and soon enough they were playing 200/400 and 300/600 on Full Tilt against the one and only Phil Ivey.

And they started beating the shit out of him.

I couldn’t believe it. They were up mid-six-figures against him almost immediately. Emil would sit at tables waiting for him, and when Ivey sat in, Emil would walk through the apartment cackling. “We got Ivey!!!” He did the same thing whenever some megafish European whale sat against him. I couldn’t believe he viewed Phil Ivey as an opponent the same way he viewed some random rich businessman. I even saved this screenshot, because I just couldn’t believe that anyone, let alone the kid who was my roommate, would want to make sure he could play Ivey more.

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“You’re excited to play Ivey?” I asked. “Isn’t he supposed to be awesome?”

“No, dude!” Emil laughed. “Ivey’s terrible!”

That was it. I had no heroes left. Apparently everyone in the world is terrible at poker.

I stopped asking about who was good and who wasn’t, because I now knew that everyone was terrible. No point in asking. They kept playing Ivey. I think Ivey ended up winning a bunch back from Jay and Emil, (he might have actually finished up against them, six figures isn’t exactly a huge amount at 200/400 and 300/600, it turns out), but I didn’t really pay close attention. Shortly afterwards, Jay and Emil had a brutal downswing at 500/1000 and stopped playing the nosebleeds for a while.

Years later I read an interview somewhere about how Phil Ivey plays online poker. Someone was saying (it might have been Phil Gordon) that, online, Ivey didn’t really care about the money so much, he just wanted to learn how the online hotshots played their game and defeat them. There was a story of how Ivey sat against some highly feared online limit player with the goal of making the player refuse to play him. Apparently Ivey lost over a million to this online limit player while studying his game, then Ivey won it all back plus more and finally, this highly feared limit player refused to play him anymore. There was a quote in the interview that went something like, “Ivey will sit in and lose a couple hundred thousand to these kids, just to see what they do and why, and then he’ll win it all back and then some.”

I thought to myself, “Wait a minute…”

One day around that time I was hanging out with Emil and some other high stakes players and they were all talking shop: discussing results, opponents, poker news, players. I think Isildur1 might have been the big story at the time, and everyone was talking about durrrr, Antonius, Ivey, everyone involved in the matches. But this time, all these high stakes players had nothing but glowing things to say about Ivey, and Ivey’s game.

Even, to my utter amazement, Emil.

Once again, I couldn’t believe it. But this time, I was incredulous for the completely opposite reason. Two years ago, I couldn’t believe that all these poker players were bad. But this time, after years of hearing how awful everyone apparently really was, I couldn’t believe anyone, anywhere was, according to Emil, actually any good at poker at all, let alone (to judge from the way everyone was talking) really, really good.

By this point there were a steady stream of Ivey stories online. The $16 million drubbing of Andy Beal, games of craps played at stratospheric stakes, effusive testimonials to his skill from every top cash pro, bracelets and bracelet bets won…check out the “Phil Ivey is the Stone Cold Nuts” thread on 2p2 and you will find some awesome stories (e.g. Ivey is talking to Barry Greenstein about Super Bowl bets. Ivey: I basically broke even, won about 800. Barry: Well, which is it, you broke even, or you won $800,000? Ivey: What’s the difference?). Everything seemed to point to Ivey actually being the real deal, the best and coolest goddamn gambler on Planet Earth.

The only lingering doubt I had was what Emil had said about him two years prior.

So on that day, two years later, I asked him again. “Emil, so Ivey’s good?”

Emil must have learned something in those matches against Ivey after I stopped paying attention, because this time Emil said something he’d never said about any player ever before.

“Ivey’s awesome.” Emil grinned, “Ivey’s the Man.”