Inside the world of jackpots and crackpots
By IVAN SOLOTAROFF
It's 10 p.m. on a Tuesday evening in October 2004, and six kids with killer good looks and IQs north of 150 are scattered across America, living out the pipe dream of their generation. Known as "the Crew," they're taking money from people. Lots of it.
On his laptop in Fresno, California, Russell "Dutch" Boyd, the former child prodigy who stitched together this loosely knit crew of savants, is playing a few more hours of online No Limit Texas Hold 'em -- where you can bet your entire stack of chips on any card -- before getting behind the wheel for Las Vegas. At twenty-three, he's already been in "the life," the poker professionals' shorthand for the vagabond highs and lows of their existence, for five years, ever since he left Columbia, Missouri, behind, having already graduated from law school. Three thousand miles away, Dutch's twenty-two-year-old brother, Bobby, fresh from a day's sleep at an Atlantic City Super 8, has hit the sweet spot of the night. It's 1 a.m. in the Borgata Casino poker room's high-stakes pit, and the tourists trying their luck at a $2-$5 No Limit Texas Hold 'em game are starting to bleed red and green $5 and $25 chips. Back from the Philly bars an hour away, David "Dorf" Smyth, 27, is loading four games of $5-$10 Hold 'em on his father's home computer. He's a little tipsy -- Dorf can down three pints of beer in under six seconds on a bet -- but it doesn't matter. Dorf is a poker machine, and the odds and methods of playing every possible hand are second nature to him, though he's been competing seriously for less than two years.
At a $5-$10 No Limit table in the Bellagio Poker Room, Joe Bartholdi, 24, is at the tail end of a two-day binge that's netted a good week's pay -- for a mid-cap CEO. Next to the wad of $100s in his pocket is a voucher he won this afternoon for a free seat at the World Poker Tour's $10,000-entry Doyle Brunson North American Poker Championship. Its $1 million first prize is blood in the water to the top pros, and they're all in Vegas tonight.
Ten miles south of the Strip, in a cookie-cutter development on Rancho Drive, blood is in the air. That '70s Show is loud on a floor-to-ceiling entertainment center that fills half of the expensively furnished living room in Scott Fischman's corner condo, and someone has cranked AC/DC up to 11.
The power chords and canned TV laughter mix oddly with the study-center/ guerrilla-training-camp aura inside. The Crew is scattered these days, but in Vegas, this is their unofficial HQ. Upstairs, the beds are unmade and have been since the maid was here last week. The walls are bare but for a print of a pair of aces descending over an azure sea at twilight. Printed matter is limited to a few unopened magazines and a swimsuit calendar of Shana Hiatt, hostess of the Travel Channel's World Poker Tour.
The fridge completes the frat-house feel: nothing but twelve-packs, a jar of pickles, a bag of withered minicarrots. Pizza boxes, chips, beer and soda bottles line the kitchen counters and living-room table, where fellow Crew member Tony Lazar, 29, is playing four games of Hold 'em on his laptop. At the foot of the stairs, a half-packed suitcase awaits a final load of laundry for a month on "the circuit" that Fischman begins this weekend. It's a patchwork professional itinerary typical of Poker's New World Order: twenty-nine nights of casinos and card rooms; a TV studio, where he'll film an instructional Hold 'em video; a $600,000 tournament in Monte Carlo; an old factory office outside Orlando, where he and Lazar will fleece a bunch of cigar-smoking seniors in a midnight game -- "like, the five richest men in Florida," Fischman tells me later.
Fischman, Card Player magazine's number-seven-ranked player, sits at his L-shaped living-room desk like a man in a duck blind. Beneath a gray i got the nuts baseball cap and brown wraparound shades, his mouth half-open in a rapture of concentration, he fires off $5, $10 and $20 bets and raises at eight online Hold 'em games he's playing simultaneously. Raised in Vegas (his father was a casino executive), half-townie and half-prodigy, with the peach-fuzz goatee, center part and imperious smile of a math nerd finally having his day, the twenty-four-year-old Fischman has been at it for four hours, shuffling together two stacks of ten orange chips obsessively as he toggles silently between his pricey twenty-seven-inch dual flat-screens.
"Keyser Soze has a fuckin' four!" he suddenly yells. "I'm gonna puke myself."
Keyser Soze is one of thirty-six red "chairs," with players' screen names on the back, arranged around four green-felt "tables" on Fischman's right screen. Any lingering images one might have of Steve McQueen at a smoky film-set card table come to a screeching halt at Fischman's desk. Dollar totals in the tens of thousands are moving, constantly, mechanically, across Fischman's and Lazar's screens every five minutes. IMs from fellow players and lurkers hit Fischman's screens like paparazzi flashbulbs: "Scott F is God!!!" So do the flamers: "The Crew, all sevin of you can lick my hairy balls."
Dutch Boyd founded the Crew just after the 2003 World Series of Poker -- staking $25,000 of his winnings there to establish a communal bankroll and to cover the rent on the headquarters he set up in Culver City, California -- but Scott Fischman is the current superstar. He plays tournaments as a limited-liability corporation, his entry fees paid by a New York hedge-fund manager. He has a personal manager (his sister Beth) negotiating endorsement deals for poker clothes, watches and whiskey; book and video contracts; a column in Card Player; a network-TV show about the Crew; and his own online card room, thefishtank.com.
But right now, all he has is Keyser Soze, "who has no business whatsoever being in this hand with a fuckin' four." Keyser is in, though, and he does have a four, and it costs Fischman a $187 pot.
And a mouse, which Fischman slams down so hard it breaks. "Fuck," he says, looking guilty. "That's, like, my tenth little mousey this year."
On this night, across America and beyond, Keyser Soze and 149,344 others are logged into virtual card rooms, most of them playing Texas Hold 'em, a deceptively simple form of poker that was all but dead five years ago. Buoyed by massive television coverage (thirty-eight hours on five networks this particular week), it's driven a viral-marketed tap deep into the national psyche and created a dollar pool that seems almost bottomless: Tonight alone, according to pokerpulse.com, some $151,824,391 has been won and lost on Hold 'em "ring games."
All along the Strip, in Atlantic City, the California card rooms, the Indian casinos in Connecticut and the riverboat ones in Mississippi -- in every state where poker is legal, semilegal or still relegated to the backrooms -- waiting lists for tournaments and ring games can be hours long. The big hotels, which offered poker to get gamblers in the door, now can't train dealers fast enough. World Series of Poker entries doubled in 2003. The online card rooms, while offshore and hard to monitor, are widely said to pocket up to $50 million a year apiece.
"But it's not just a numbers game," says Steve Lipscomb, CEO of the World Poker Tour. "It's also a complete cultural change."
At Bellagio, the hottest casino on the Strip, the craps, twenty-one and roulette tables have been cleared out from the heart of a gaming pit to make way for the Doyle Brunson North American Poker Championship. Behind velvet ropes, hunched over five tables like they're awaiting biopsy results, sit forty-five highly skilled men and women, looking exhausted but vicious in their sunglasses, the rump end of the 312 people who each put up $10,000 for a shot at the $3 million pool. Lipscomb points to the tourists gaping behind the ropes at America's new celebrities: the former prodigies Daniel Negreanu and Phil Hellmuth; Howard "The Professor" Lederer; his sister Annie Duke; Gus Hansen, the thirty-one-year-old Dane named one of People's "50 Sexiest Men Alive"; Phil "Unabomber" Laak, the droll World Poker Tour champion famed for the hooded gray sweat shirts he vanishes inside to block opponents' stares. It's like Waiting for Godot meets Mafia sit-down, a tedious theater of concentration where the plot is rarely revealed and the actors seldom speak (and are usually lying when they do), but the fans will be six-deep until midnight.
"And it's all happened so fast," adds Lipscomb. "Two years ago, I was getting laughed out of network meetings. And when a poker pro went home for Christmas, it'd be hidden, like some family secret. Now, he's not just a household name, he's a hero to the nieces and nephews."
It's those nieces and nephews who are driving the cultural change. Hold 'em is the blood sport of choice now for any kid with a credit card. If they're good, very good, they may one day join the hundred or so who can make it in "the life." And then comes the hard part: learning to tolerate what the pros call "the variances" -- the runs of bad luck, or deviations above the norm, which can last for months. "The variances," says the Crew's Dorf, "can eat your whole family."
The day before, I watched the variances get the best of Scott Fischman as he flamed out at a tournament. Four hours in, he'd been sitting in his swivel chair like a kid at a soda fountain, cheeks flushed and yelling, "I'm in the zone!" or "I've got all the donkeys at my table!" As his stack dwindled from more than $23,000 to nothing -- in less than an hour -- his face turned ashen, his body sagged and his head vanished, inch by inch, into the neck of his please don't call me sweat shirt. Then he vanished. "I simply cannot bear my life when I bust out of a tournament," he says. "I go home and sleep as long as I can. I cannot tell you how stressful life is at this level of poker."
An inscrutable generation of right-brain warriors, today's poker kids are a community joined at the hippocampus by freak single-mindedness and equally freak abilities. To instantly compute odds. To remember distant hands. To find ways into opponents' psyches when a good mind-fucking is needed. To read an opponent -- if not his cards, then his emotional temperature. And to act, on a very selective basis, with inhuman patience and supreme aggression.
What's different with the Crew and their caste is that they learned it all largely online. "What took me decades to learn, these kids can get on the Internet," says Doyle Brunson, 71, who literally wrote the book on Texas Hold 'em (Super/System). "What I learned by brute force, dealing out hands, they learn on computers. It tends to make for fairly technical players, but they make up for it with aggression, the kind that comes when you learn things fast."
Very fast. At online sites generating instant random shuffles, they can play 10,000 hands a week. By contrast, a pro playing in a casino gets in about 30,000 hands a year. "Is it weird for people our age to be poker millionaires?" says Antonio "The Magician" Esfandiari, who became poker's first under-twenty-five millionaire in February 2004. "This story's just beginning, believe me."
The long, strange career of Dutch Boyd is the founding myth of that story. He's a genius to some in the poker world, a con man, lunatic or savior to others, and his tale of sound and fury has made him a celebrity in anyone's book. When he arrives at Bellagio on the second day of the Doyle Brunson tournament, he walks inside the velvet ropes to clicking cameras and stares, glares and greetings -- from players who don't look up from the table for anything.
A year older than Bobby, Dutch was the first of the brothers to catch poker fever after seeing the seminal Hold 'em movie, 1998's Rounders. Moved by Matt Damon's character, who ditches law school to return to a life of professional card-playing, Dutch took the plunge himself. All of eighteen, he already had his law degree but no desire to practice law. The lawyers he was interning for "were all kinda miserable," he says. After seeing the movie, he borrowed the one poker book at his suburban Missouri library and joined the forum at rec.gambling.poker. There, he learned his first lesson: Poker may seem glamorous, but it's really nothing but problem-solving and pattern recognition.
The Boyd brothers were born to do exactly that. Bobby had mastered flashcards literally in diapers, crawling across the living-room floor with his bottle in his teeth to pick out the duck and ship on his mother's command. At five, Dutch was promoted from kindergarten to the second grade after he began doing the other kids' work. Both skipped enough grades to start college at twelve.
By June 1999, Dutch followed his brother out to Silicon Valley. Bobby was working for a company that routed the Internet across vast swaths of the Midwest. While Bobby went to the office to supervise Ph.D.s twice his age, Dutch would spend his days playing poker at the Wagon Wheel, an old-timer's bar in Mountain View. He'd leave there at 6 p.m. and head over to Macy's, where he worked the evening shift selling belts and men's underwear. Afterward, he'd head to a nearby card room, flash a fake ID and play deep into the morning.
Or he'd go back home, open his laptop and play online. He was playing on Bobby's bed late one night when the software crashed on planetpoker.com, then the big site. "Man," he said to his brother. "Someone should figure out how to do this better."
"Why not us?" said Bobby.
They were in the condo hot tub with notebooks by 3 a.m. and had it figured out by sunrise. Dutch registered domain names (he still owns about 1,000 of them), and Bobby put an ad in the local paper for programmers to help with the software. Borrowing $50,000 from their stepfather, Dutch flew to the Caribbean to incorporate in Antigua and then headed to Costa Rica to put up servers. He went to gaming conferences in Canada to arrange logistics like cyber-payment-solutions. (Online poker was, and still is, technically illegal in the U.S.) Within nine months, Bobby had finished the software other sites would struggle almost another year to develop.
By year's end, their site, pokerspot.com, was up and running, and the boys were raking in $100,000 in profits a month, two and three dollars at a time, from the pots and tournament fees of their 6,000 subscribers. By January 2001, they were up to $160,000. In the online poker forums, Dutch was predicting $50 million yearly profits for the top Internet card rooms, though no one in that small world at the time took the excitable nineteen-year-old entrepreneur all that seriously.
The gray market of online gambling would become huge, quick. But it would first have to weather the dot-com crash, and in the Internet poker world, Dutch would become its most celebrated victim. Online gamblers play, by definition, on credit, and as newfound millions vanished overnight, so too did credit cards and card payments. Netpro, the offshore payment-solutions company Dutch had taken on to handle pokerspot.com's accounts, had its assets suddenly frozen in early 2001 by London-based Barclays Bank: Too many Netpro customers were issuing "charge backs," disputing or refusing to pay charges on their cards.
Dutch, who had just turned twenty, panicked. For a period of time (he says it was a month, others insist it was longer), he continued to solicit new accounts, hoping to pay creditors off with borrowed money. At best, Dutch was staving off disaster. At worst, he'd turned pokerspot.com into a Ponzi scheme. Then he went nuts. "The first episode came January 1st of 2002," he says. "Sitting in my room, New Year's Eve, watching Dick Clark and the ball drop. A car commercial came on, with some Louis Armstrong music. It was God telling me to go to New Orleans."
In the next two and a half years, Dutch's life became a nightmare of mental institutions, card rooms and casinos. At various times, he was living in fifteen-dollar-a-night Vegas flophouses or on Caribbean yachts. And along the way, he was venting his psychosis at rec.gambling.poker. His contributions to the site's threads, some hyperlogical, others rants, tell a weird picaresque of angel capitalists and shady characters, of lost weekends in Montreal, Boston, New Orleans and Antigua as Dutch tried to save his company and himself. His grandest dream was to launch a new kind of online casino, rakefree.com. Most online casinos take a small percentage of each pot -- the rake. On Dutch's new site, there would be no rake. He would charge only a flat fee of $30 a month. First, of course, he had to raise seed money.
But Dutch's psychotic episodes, mostly of the "let's take off our clothes and go naked" variety, had begun to get nastier, and backers were in short supply. Enemies weren't. "Dutch insulted some extremely fine and kind people," says Burton Ritchie, a Pensacola, Florida, cardplayer who says he spent months trying to arrange a deal between Dutch and a consortium of venture capitalists, Kansas City mobsters and NFL players. "Dutch signed a letter of intent and then went schizo. I'm sorry to hear he's bipolar, but he's also an asshole."
Dutch speaks of his psychosis with a strange, detached irony. He likens the episodes and their accompanying visions to airport murals. "The kind," he says, "where it's just colored dots as you walk by, until you hit the right place and they all come together to form the big image." He hit bottom in March 2003 in Antigua, where he and Bobby had gone for some online-casino consultancy work; despite their notoriety, the brothers' vision and technical knowledge were still sought by other gaming sites. Dutch went manic aboard a boat they were staying on, and Bobby had no choice but to commit him to an island medical hospital. His home for the next week was a six-by-nine-foot cell "with a metal door, a bed, a toilet and you sitting there with your direct line to God," he says. "My advice: Don't go crazy in a Third World country."
Dutch was a month out of that cell when he hit the national stage in the 2003 World Series of Poker's $10,000-entry No Limit Hold 'em Championship: a striking twenty-two-year-old wearing a bright-red bandanna on his head and working the tail end of a $3,500 bankroll he'd brought to Vegas a week earlier. Scott Fischman, also twenty-two and four years into "the life," was awe-struck the first time he met Dutch. "He was different," Fischman says. "He was a man of vision."
Dutch had put up $200 to enter a "satellite" tournament and outlasted others to earn his $10,000 World Series voucher. For three days, he beat legend after legend, emerging as the chip leader. By the Day Four dinner break, with only sixteen of the original 839 players left, Dutch had more than $1 million in front of him and a clear path ahead to the final table with its $2.5 million payday and certain immortality.
Then, inexplicably, Dutch waved his right hand, "all in," and bet $850,000 in chips on a middling king-high hand. The unknown Chris Moneymaker, a Tennessee accountant who was playing in his first tournament, had just made a $100,000 bet, and Dutch had smelled weakness. But Moneymaker, holding a lowly pair of threes, called Dutch's bluff and went on to take the $1.5 million hand and, twenty-one hours later, to win the $2.5 million and become the face of overnight poker riches.
In what should have been his most humiliating moment, Dutch had his next vision. Finishing twelfth in the tournament earned him an $80,000 prize and a disproportionately large share of the post-tournament limelight -- which he grabbed. He recruited four other "hip young players" at the tournament and told ESPN that he and his hastily assembled posse, soon to be known as the Crew, would "take over the poker world."
It seemed an odd claim. Two of them, his brother Bobby and "Dorf" Smyth, weren't even poker players. The other two, Joe Bartholdi and Brett "Gank" Jungblut, had a decade of spotty play between them: Bartholdi, a high school kick-out and sometime pool hustler, had run through a succession of five-figure bankrolls with little to show for it except a certain intermittent genius for playing hands full-throttle.
Jungblut, 25, a former model, seemed an even odder choice. Dutch had met Gank in Las Vegas a year earlier -- "the most beautiful male I'd ever seen," Dutch says -- and the two talked from time to time about putting a bankroll together, perhaps getting a few others involved. The son of a professional cardplayer (he was named for Brett Maverick, TV's poker-playing gunslinger), Gank was known less for his poker than for his massive intake of marijuana. By his own admission, he's stoned every minute of the day. "I'm major, major ADHD," he says. "If I'm not high, I can't even sit in a restaurant without wanting to throw a chair through a window."
The Crew left for Los Angeles the next day, found a five-bedroom house in Culver City and devoted six months of twelve- to eighteen-hour days online, honing their skills, teaching, playing, arguing with one another. At the end of 2003, they descended on casinos from L.A. to Tunica, Mississippi, where in January 2004 Dutch recruited Scott Fischman. Fischman's old running buddy Tony Lazar was added after he met Dutch at a tournament in Reno two months later. Lazar was older than the other Crew members, but he earned his way in after taking $120 from Dutch playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, which a number of poker pros use to warm up the intuitive muscles. As the 2004 World Series of Poker got into gear in Vegas in April, the Crew became the story: ESPN cameras were magnetized by their bravado and good looks as they won three of the tournament's thirty-four events between them, and close to $1 million.
They'd already begun to crack as a unit, however, largely because of Dutch's erratic behavior, which led to a huge falling-out with Gank. "In the beginning," Gank says, "if one of us found ten dollars on the street, it would've gone into the bankroll. It was like a commune or something. But I don't know why I didn't see that Dutch is basically a con artist. Maybe I was smoking too much weed." The rest of the crew doesn't see it that way. "If Gank's hair was on fire," says Dorf, "I'd piss on his leg."
It's a lifelong drip, the life of the so-called poker pro," Dutch tells me over clam chowder in Snacks, a fast-food bar off the Bellagio Poker Room. "I shudder to think how many kids have dropped out of college because of us. TV makes it look glamorous and like something anyone can do, but it's neither."
Dutch's voice is all Missouri, but his inflections are a strange mix of gentle warmth and "why aren't you getting this?" logic. Behind us, the World Poker Tour competition is in its last throes, down to eighteen players desperate to make the final table. He is talking about the Crew and how it may have been, in some ways, an outgrowth of his mental illness. "When you slip into the manic state, one of the first things to go is your sense of a separate self," Dutch says. "Part of the euphoria -- which makes it so addictive and so hard to admit that you need help -- is that you're part of one big organism. Just one of those dots, but you're the one who will be able to put them all together."
But heading into this year's World Series, the Crew has hardly been functioning as such. "are we still a crew?" Fischman asks rhetorically as he flops onto his Harrah's Atlantic City hotel-room bed in January. "No?" he muses, scanning the room-service menu before deciding on chicken fingers. Fischman has a strange habit of reading menus in their entirety, then ordering the same thing each time.
At the foot of the bed sits the suitcase I saw him packing in Vegas four months ago. His career has taken off -- Fischman recently won his first WPT title, a shootout called Young Guns of Poker, in which he beat five other under-twenty-fives -- and he's traveling across America these days with Doyle Brunson, playing tournaments and promoting the 2005 World Series. He not only personifies "the life" now, he's become something of a poster boy for Poker's New World Order, and he finds it a bit exhausting.
Fischman is a born poker player, and unlike Dutch he never speaks of the downside. Still, I wonder if he finds the pressure hard to take. Then he empties his pockets on the night table, and I stop wondering. Among the car keys and cigarette lighter are two wads of $100s, in industrial-strength red rubber bands. One wad is a good two inches thick. The other is three inches.
"Gank's gone off on some brain fart and left the Crew," Fischman says, yawning, "but, like, what does that even mean?"
"The end of the Crew?" I ask.
"Well, there's no more shared bankroll, and we don't live together. But how could you leave something that wasn't there to begin with? It's like poker. Have you played for no money? It's completely meaningless unless you're committed. The Crew definitely has that commitment to each other.
"So, yes?" he tries again. "I mean, we're still talking all the time, learning from each other. I don't know what I'd have won if not for Dutch and Gank. We're brothers, even if some of us happen to be, uh, vastly more successful than others at the present time."
Room service arrives. "I think the real answer is forever," he says. "I'd also add that it's more than the seven of us now, or the six of us. Whatever. You can call this a fad if you want and try to calculate its shelf life. But to me, to all the people I know, this is life."
