The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King Read online

  He had no specific expectations for how the World Poker Tour would turn out. Still nearly a year away from actually showing up on television, it was little more than an attempt to organize and slightly expand the number of big no-limit hold ’em tournaments. But he sensed it could be the Next Big Thing and if it was, he wanted a piece. He also wanted to improve on his dismal record in the main event of the World Series: fifth place in his first try, then fifteen consecutive finishes out of the money. Lederer decided to play all the major no-limit tournaments between that summer and the 2003 World Series of Poker, and take stock afterward.

  In November 2002, in the sixth event of the World Poker Tour, Lederer’s efforts bore fruit. Howard won the $10,000 buy-in World Poker Finals at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut. He defeated eighty-eight other players to win $320,000, including a tough final table featuring Phil Ivey (who won three World Series events that spring), MIT-Harvard-educated engineer-

  lawyer-poker player Andy Bloch, and Las Vegas tournament pro Layne Flack.

  After twenty years in poker, Howard Lederer was about to become an overnight sensation.

  When Andy Beal would pass Craig Singer in the hallways at Beal Bank, they would often exchange small talk about their common interest in poker. Singer was tall, approximately Beal’s height, but many years younger. He had a boyish face and a serious, earnest manner. The bank hired him to direct compliance, auditing, and internal control functions. Because of Beal Bank’s complex operations and position in a highly regulated environment, he always had plenty to do. Andy would usually end these brief conversations by saying, “We’ve got to get together and play sometime,” before one (or both) of them would dash off in opposite directions.

  It took almost a year, but Andy Beal’s brain would not allow him to let go of poker completely. Involuntarily, almost, his mind focused on trying to figure it out. He started to analyze why they had beaten him. He would have to identify his weaknesses and shore them up. Then he would have to figure out how to deprive the pros of their strengths and somehow take them out of their comfort zone. If he could make the contest come down to fundamentals, he might have a chance.

  In December 2002, Craig Singer was working in his office. There was a board meeting the following week and he had to gather materials on accounting, internal controls, and financial results. He got a call from the boss.

  “What are you doing?”

  Craig explained that he was getting ready for the board meeting.

  “I want to play some poker, Craig.”

  “Okay, how about tomorrow after work. I could get this finished—”

  “No, I want to play right now.”

  Singer would still have to find time to finish his work. But a few minutes later, he was with Beal on the fifth floor, clearing space on a table in a nearly empty area of the bank to set down chips and cards. Then they played Texas Hold ’Em, heads up, a freeze-out for $100.

  In December 2002, Marco and Jennifer Traniello flew to Italy to spend the Christmas holidays with Marco’s family. The decision to spend time away from Las Vegas was not entered into lightly.

  Although they had made previous trips to Italy, they had gone during the summer, the slow season in Vegas. Late December was a busy time for poker players. It was a rare concession to regimentation; like nightclub entertainers, poker players spend a lot of holidays on the job, the flip side of working at what other people—vacationing people—did for fun.

  It had already been a big year for Jennifer. She won her second bracelet. The big games were getting bigger and better. Sharing the holidays with Marco and Jennifer would be a big deal for the Traniello family, and a big deal for her. They planned the trip.

  While in Italy, she kept in touch with her friends back in Vegas. While talking with Chip Reese, she found out that Andy Beal was coming to town during New Year’s week.

  She had to leave Marco and his family behind and make the trip back to the United States. She returned only to find that Andy’s plans must have changed; he wasn’t coming after all. She spent New Year’s Eve sleeping, jet-lagged and angry at leaving Marco and his family for a game that wasn’t even happening.

  She didn’t know that Beal had never planned to come to Las Vegas, nor had he called anyone to say he was coming. It was a case of a practical joke gone awry. It was nearly two years before Jennifer learned of this, and she still refused to believe it.

  After playing a few hours a day for about a week, Andy Beal told Craig Singer that he was thinking about returning to Las Vegas for another big game. If Craig was interested, Andy would like Craig to help him prepare. Beal did not have to state the obvious to his employee: This was not part of Craig’s job and, in fact, Craig would be expected to keep on top of his work even if Beal and poker took up some of his time. Craig jumped at the chance.

  The office game evolved. They covered the six-foot table on the fifth floor with felt and played there for a while. Then they played in a space adjacent to Beal’s corner office on the fourth floor so he could be easier to reach for bank business. Finally, they moved the game to a second-floor conference room. They played intermittently but often, between business at the bank and on evenings and weekends when they could spare the time from their families.

  Beal and Singer gradually converted the conference room into a poker room. They replaced the conference table with a regulation ten-seat poker table. They had the overhead lighting transformed with several large pieces of cardboard to approximate the lighting of the Bellagio poker room. A natural hoarder, Beal stocked cases of Kem playing cards (the same kind used by the Bellagio), plastic cut cards used by dealers, dealer buttons, and cases of bottled water.

  The structure of their games was nearly always the same: Each started with 300 chips and they played 2-4 until one of them had all the chips. They always played for $100, but the experience itself (and the bragging rights for the winner) provided greater incentive to the two competitive men. Sometimes, Beal used the sessions to experiment with strategies that turned out to be disastrous. Craig also changed his play periodically to mimic the descriptions Andy had given of some of his past opponents. Andy took some pride in being ahead in the freeze-outs. Singer played strong fundamental poker, and all the practice against Andy (whose game had improved because of all his time playing the pros) had made him even more skilled. They eventually played for several hundred hours.

  Howard Lederer won a second time on the World Poker Tour in March 2003, this time aboard a cruise ship. Lederer and many other pros paid $5,000 to enter the limit hold ’em tournament, but sponsor PartyPoker held online satellite tournaments responsible for bringing aboard most of the 177 entries. He took home $289,000 in the second edition of the PartyPoker Million. The tour’s broadcast outlet, the Travel Channel, was less than two months from its premiere.

  It also appeared that the tour had its first star. In addition to devoting himself to his no-limit hold ’em tournament game, Howard had undergone gastric-bypass surgery the previous year and lost over 100 pounds. He had trimmed his beard to a goatee, then shaved it off entirely, revealing a thoughtful, angular face. Lederer’s face might not have been a window to what was going on inside, but it showed that he was intensely thinking at all times. WPT hosts Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten had taken to calling Howard “the Professor.”

  Howard Lederer was not the only high-stakes pro committing himself to the developing tournament circuit. Barry Greenstein, almost by accident, had started playing more tournaments. While Lederer had early success in the main event of the World Series and won two bracelets, Greenstein never really applied himself to tournament poker. He made the final table of a few World Series events, entered because the side action looked slow at the time, and played the main event. But he had never won a bracelet, and never really cared about it. He had done enough traveling for his poker career, so he had no interest in making a five-week pilgrimage to show anybody he could play tournament poker. Fame meant nothing to him. His poker c
areer was about chasing fortune.

  Even the prospect of big money was not sufficiently fulfilling for Barry Greenstein. He had spent his adult life in a conflict between being a good provider for his family and using his talents to do the most good. That conflict had always been resolved in favor of family, and poker had been his means of providing. He spent ten years completing his work for a Ph.D. because he was making more at poker than if he completed his education and became a professor.

  His only real job had been as a computer programmer in the late 1980s at Symantec, the Palo Alto, California, software developer. It was just a start-up back then and he took the job only because he was marrying a woman in a custody fight with her ex-husband. “Software developer” looked better in a custody proceeding than “poker player” when his employment became an issue.

  He planned to supplement his meager start-up-company income by playing in some of the Bay Area poker clubs. The project he was working on, the landmark database program Q&A, devoured all his time. The company made him postpone a promised leave of absence that would have allowed him to defend his dissertation and get his Ph.D. He had already grown tired of the academic community and wanted the degree only to be done with it and as a stepping-stone to get into medical school and do medical research.

  When Greenstein finally finished the project, he was broke and had to quit to play poker and earn enough to take care of his family. His Ph.D. was on hold, as were the plans to cure diseases. Unfortunately, the same conscience that drove him to take such good care of his extended family nagged at him for not using his talents for the public good. Throughout the 1990s, no matter how well he did in poker, however, he could never get ahead by enough to finish his degree and get on with what he believed was his destiny: to play a role in making the world a better place.

  During 2002, Barry talked with his academic advisor about finally finishing his Ph.D. Because of the time off, it would take six to nine months. Perhaps he had made enough where he could spare the time away from poker. The countervailing consideration was that he was doing so well and the games were becoming so big that he would be giving up a great earning opportunity.

  While he debated this, fate intervened, in the very bizarre apparition of pornographer Larry Flynt. One of the reasons Barry thought he might be able to afford to live without poker for a while was his performance in Flynt’s thrice-weekly stud game, in which the stakes had risen to $1,500-$3,000. When Barry started playing in the game, he thought, like many people who didn’t know Flynt but knew only of him, that Larry Flynt was a scumbag who exploited women. It would be a pleasure to relieve him of some of that smut money and do good things with it.

  Poker players who have met Flynt almost always changed their opinion. He was soft-spoken, good-natured, funny, and kind. He made his money delivering something the public obviously wanted, with the help of women who sought him out, thousands of whom sent explicit pictures to his magazine for publication without seeking compensation.

  Flynt also made his life’s work fighting to preserve the American way of life, albeit from an unusual pulpit. Defenders of individual liberty in the modern age have often been the people we instinctively least admire, because they are the easiest targets of the establishment. Flynt consistently argued for freedom—not just freedom to publish and buy pornography, but freedom to criticize the government and freedom from government oppression. Most poker players did not consider themselves as libertarians but they identified with Flynt’s situation: He provided something that his customers wanted yet was hounded by the government and the “morality police” over what should be a private transaction.

  During 2002, Larry Flynt decided to publicize his casino with a poker tournament. The tournament finale would feature the largest buy-in ever, a Seven Card Stud Championship requiring an entry fee of $125,000. The Hustler Casino planned multiple rounds of satellites, allowing players to rise from satellite to satellite to win the gigantic buy-in.

  By February 2003, not one satellite entrant had won enough flights to raise the buy-in. Flynt appealed to the members of his game to fill at least one table. Barry Greenstein anted up, along with Flynt, Johnny Chan, Steven Wolfe, Doyle Brunson, Ted Forrest, Phil Ivey, and Lakers owner Jerry Buss.

  Barry had the chip lead when he was heads up against Flynt. They agreed to split the prize, with Greenstein receiving $770,000. He did some things for his family, and then gave the rest of the money to charity. It was a staggeringly unselfish gesture, from no more complicated an idea than “this was a better use for the money than anything else I could do with it.” After all, he made money the week before. He was probably going to make money the next week. If he was doing well enough to spend $125,000 to enter, he was doing well enough to give away the winnings.

  While Barry Greenstein struggled between the conflicting goals of focusing on ever more profitable poker games and devoting himself to making the world better, he would play some more tournaments and give anything he won to charity. He could do that much, at least, until he figured out his destiny.

  While Andy Beal’s past (and potential future) opponents became wealthier and better known, he began testing himself against several lesser, but still very skilled, players in heads-up games. His circle of friends and business acquaintances included many avid poker players, a few of whom kept their poker playing secret. Although such games in Texas were legal as long as no one took a fee or charged a rake for hosting the game—Beal had this carefully researched—these games were held in private and kept very secret. Between 2002 and 2004, Beal hosted approximately 600 hours of heads-up matches at stakes from very nominal to $20,000-$40,000.

  On a rare road trip, he played a talented Phoenix amateur, who beat him and provided him insight on how an excellent player could read opponents. Andy began focusing on how to make himself as difficult as possible to read, especially because he figured he could level the playing field more in that way than by trying to read his pro opponents. Of course he would make the effort to read them, but that seemed at least as likely to mislead him as give him a clue on the strength of their cards.

  Beal transformed his playing persona. He started wearing sunglasses when he played, shielding his eyes from the inquiring stares of opponents. He purchased multiple pairs just for this purpose, alternating to find the most comfortable and best at blocking out a view of his eyes. The largest pair looked like he ordered them from an Elvis Impersonator catalogue.

  He also decided to block out noise. Apart from the distractions of the noisy poker room, Beal didn’t trust himself to make small talk and maintain full concentration as well as the pros. The pros would routinely play hands in high-stakes games while chatting at the table, bantering with players at nearby tables, watching a sporting event, taking a phone call, eating, and conducting an interview—all during the same five-minute period.

  In his early heads-up matches, especially against Howard Lederer, he would occasionally become engrossed in conversation and lose his focus. Lederer was genuinely interested in Beal’s background and their common interests. It was not outside the realm of possibility that Lederer, an incredibly driven, smart computer science major back in 1985, could have finished his education and ended up at the same poker table, but as the live one instead of the pro.

  But Andy would lose a hand on something he considered a silly error and say, “Okay, now we have to be quiet.”

  Beal found Howard interesting as well and enjoyed the conversations, but they interfered with the business at hand. If he was going to talk with Howard Lederer, it would have to be somewhere other than across a poker table.

  Though Andy did not accuse Howard Lederer of this, he thought the pros might want to engage him in conversation to get him to give away information. Concerned that small changes in his speech could provide clues on the strength of his hand, he resolved to eliminate this possibility.

  He bought several pairs of headphones designed to block out noise. To these, he added earplugs or connected an M
P3 player programmed with instrumental music.

  Closing himself off to the pros became an obsession with Beal and he went far beyond these conventional measures. Was the amount of time he spent deliberating before acting giving away information? He developed a way to randomize his decision time.

  He built a tiny battery-operated motor that he placed inside his sock. The motor would issue a small vibration every eight seconds. Andy would make his decision—fold, check, call, bet, raise—in whatever amount of time it took to decide. But he would wait to act on the decision until the next vibration. That could be a half-second or up to eight seconds after he actually decided what to do. There would be no pattern to how long it took Beal to bluff, slow-play, check and call, or make other decisions during a hand.

  Andy also tried to find ways to refine the accuracy of his decisions on pot odds. The biggest difficulty was figuring into the equation the likelihood that a bet would induce his opponent to fold.

  For example, suppose he was holding king-nine suited, known by poker players as the dog hand (K9 = canine). In the small blind on the button, he had raised. His opponent reraised and he called.

  The flop came ace-nine-four, all of different suits (or rainbow in poker parlance). His opponent acted first and bet. Assuming he had concluded that he shouldn’t fold, should he just call or should he raise?

  A determining factor would be the likelihood that a raise would make his opponent fold his hand. Correctly determining that percentage would be the poker equivalent of proving Fermat’s Last Theorem. Even guessing within 20 percent would be valuable and not beyond the realm of possibility.