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

  She would be playing stakes of at least $10,000-$20,000, more than double the highest she had ever played, and ten times the size of her regular game. Nearly all the money belonged to her friends and peers. Playing on her colleagues’ bankroll made her much more nervous than the size of the stakes. The waiting, however, was worst of all.

  Jennifer Harman did not look like a poker player. She looked more like an actress; think of Helen Hunt or Meg Ryan, sweet and likable, but much tougher in adversity than you would expect. Writers have frequently described Harman with references to actresses, which was ironic because she played a poker player in the independently produced film The Big Blind. Jennifer was just five-two and 100 pounds, with blond hair and delicate features.

  Away from the table, unless she was angry, she projected a frailty inconsistent with the stereotypical view of the world’s best players. In a game, however, she looked completely at home. She played with tremendous confidence, maintained the balance between being responsible with her money and being indifferent to losing, and had an intensity (and accompanying poker stare) as intimidating as any male player.

  Of course, part of the struggle of Jennifer’s career had been that women were not expected to be poker players. Poker could be such a lonely occupation, and the low periods could be so devastating, that seeing how players in your situation have succeeded could be an important sustaining force. Howard Lederer, for example, struggled several times as a young poker player in New York in the mid-1980s. But playing at the Mayfair Club in New York, with players who had won at the World Series and played and won in big games in Vegas, convinced him at least that it was possible. When Ted Forrest moved to Las Vegas with a few hundred dollars and the crazy idea that he could make a living playing poker, some dealers at the Palace Station poker room helped him along and even taught him to deal, an experience he credited with teaching him his talent for reading opponents.

  Jennifer had no one like that.

  No one could really understand how difficult it was for Jennifer Harman to become one of the best poker players in the world. Disguising your feelings, or just not showing them, is an elemental part of poker. But Jennifer seemed like a person forced to make her way alone.

  Jennifer Caramello grew up in Reno, in a very close-knit family. The family played games together and she learned to play poker when she was only eight. She took to the game so well that by the time she was twelve, she would play for her father in his home game if he was losing. She was precociously talented at reading other players and benefited—not for the last time, by a long shot—from older men underestimating her ability. She never failed to win her father’s money back.

  When Jennifer was a teenager, a hereditary kidney condition took her mother’s life and required that Jennifer receive a kidney transplant. Jennifer went to college to study medicine, but her poker talent intervened. She started playing locally and her father thought it was interfering with school.

  “If you play poker, you won’t get anything from me,” she recalled him saying. She later realized now that his stubbornness was just fear. “I wanted to be a doctor and now I’m a poker player? What is that? He was scared. ‘She’s going to throw away her life.’ He comes from Reno. ‘All the gamblers I know are broke and living on the street.’” Her father finally accepted her career choice in 1997. He had great respect for her abilities—as he did when she was twelve—and now realized that this was the work she was meant to do. But who could have predicted such a thing? They went several years without speaking.

  Between 1989 and 1995, Jennifer played $50-$100, $75-$150, and $100-$200 Texas Hold ’Em in Reno, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. The first time she saw the big game at the Mirage in the early 1990s, a $300-$600 game, she thought, I want to play in that game.

  Finding a game she could beat was never her goal. She wanted to become good enough to play in the biggest game in the room and win.

  This began a pattern that lasted from the late 1980s to 1997. Every time Jennifer would build her bankroll, she would take a shot at the $200-$400 or $300-$600 game, lose all her money, then start building her stake back up again. She moved to Las Vegas in 1993 so she could take a shot at the bigger games at the Mirage, and went broke. Harman was devastated. She hated borrowing money, having to rely on someone else. But she swallowed her pride, borrowed $50,000, and drove herself even harder to pay the money back and prove she could succeed in Las Vegas. (She repaid the money in four months.) Every attempt to move beyond the $100-$200 hold ’em game, however, ended in failure. At least eight times, by her count, she moved up and lost enough to be forced back into the lower game. She can still remember the stress of sitting down to a game with her entire bankroll on the line.

  By 1997, however, Jennifer Harman finally broke through. She started winning at the bigger games, and spent a year playing in the $400-$800 game, as well as learning other forms of poker. Although hold ’em was by far the most popular game in Las Vegas—Seven Card Stud remained extremely popular in California and on the East Coast, and Europeans increasingly preferred Omaha—the highest-stakes games in Las Vegas were mixed games, so moving up required playing all the games, and getting your education against the toughest competition you have ever faced.

  By the time the Bellagio opened in 1998 and Mirage Resorts (now MGM Mirage) moved the high-stakes poker room to the new property, Jennifer moved up to the biggest game in the room, usually $800-$1,600. As the games got bigger, she kept her place at Table One. Although she would occasionally have someone take a piece of her action in a particularly large game, she preferred to play her own money. “I think it’s very important to play with your own money because you just have more heart.” In addition, even in the environment of the Bellagio poker room, where money passed so easily between players, habits of self-reliance died hard. “I was always too shy to ask somebody to take a piece of me.”

  There are, at most, 100 to 200 players in the world who play at least occasionally in a $1,000-$2,000 game. Jennifer regularly played in the toughest game at those stakes, the mixed game at the Bellagio. Only a dozen or so could win regularly at that level and compete on the rare occasions when the stakes rose even higher. Jennifer was also in that select group. A few players, like Doyle Brunson and Chip Reese, had been winning at those stakes longer, and they and a few others were more likely than Jennifer to play in the games above $1,000-$2,000, so it would be overstating her position to say she was the best poker player in the world but she was unquestionably one of the best. Because of her painstaking rise to the top of the poker world, she was not an underdog to anyone in the world at any stakes at limit hold ’em. But she also had a unique qualification when it came to ranking players in other games, or evaluating all-around poker skills.

  Jennifer won her first World Series bracelet the previous May in the $5,000 buy-in No-Limit Deuce-to-Seven Single-Draw championship. After the main event, Deuce-to-Seven was the most coveted bracelet among the top professionals. The game was rarely spread except in occasional high-stakes mixed games, so the only players entering were high-stakes pros. The Horseshoe ran no satellites for this event, and rebuys were allowed for the first two hours, so entrants might spend more on this tournament than the $10,000 buy-in championship event. The list of Deuce-to-Seven champions was more impressive than the winners of the main event. Jennifer not only became the first woman to win No-Limit Deuce-to-Seven, but she won it the first time she ever played.

  The goal in Deuce-to-Seven is to make the lowest possible five-card hand. Because aces are high, pairs are bad, and straights are worse, the best possible low hand is 7-5-4-3-2. There are multiple versions of Deuce-to-Seven, the most notable being Triple-Draw (played in a structure similar to hold ’em with blinds, betting limits, and four betting rounds) and No-Limit Single-Draw. The former is an “action” game that has become popular in high-stakes games within the last few years. The latter is almost never played, except in the $5,000 buy-in World Series event. It takes an enormous amount of ga
mes-playing skill to excel in a form of poker that is practically extinct. Jack McClelland, when he was the tournament director of the World Series, was once asked the average age of Deuce-to-Seven players. “Deceased,” he answered.

  There is a sharp debate over whether Deuce-to-Seven is a game requiring tremendous skill and flair, or a card-drawing contest. Most of the top pros swear by the game, pointing out that, with no exposed cards, players must be adept at reading their opponents. Some high-stakes pros who are not Table One regulars are not so enamored. This group includes excellent poker players who don’t play the World Series event and are critical of the sudden high-stakes popularity of the Triple Draw version of the game.

  Mike Matusow, a regular in the Bellagio’s $400-$800 games and holder of World Series bracelets in hold ’em and Omaha, doesn’t mince words. “Triple Draw is a game for morons!” He will tell this to anyone who will listen, including an open microphone during the 2004 World Series of Poker. Beyond Matusow’s bluster is a serious point: Though the lack of exposed cards requires high-level skills at reading opponents, this also makes it difficult to give credibility to a bluff based on exposed or community cards.

  Matusow has an aphorism: “If you can’t steal, it ain’t poker.” Mike’s poker nickname is “The Mouth,” so his opinions are sometimes viewed as ranting.

  Although Matusow’s criticisms generally apply primarily to Triple-Draw, the lack of exposed cards in both forms of Deuce-to-Seven gives his point some validity. For example, a hold ’em player who checks and calls suddenly leads the betting after an ace appears on the turn. Does he have a hidden ace, or is he bluffing? The art of the bluff is elevated by exposed cards.

  Still, whether it was because of the game or the caliber of the players, most of the top pros played only two events in the World Series in 2001: Deuce-to-Seven and the main event. Players of the caliber of Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Barry Greenstein, and Howard Lederer were tournament stars by 2004, but that was only because of the recent explosion of televised poker and the opportunities it provided.

  Before 2003, ESPN or some lesser cable sports network showed just an hour or two of the main event of the World Series. There was no World Poker Tour on the Travel Channel until late March 2003. ESPN offered seven hours of World Series coverage in 2003 and more than three times as much in 2004. In 2003 and 2004, it reran the coverage dozens of times. Consequently, tournament purses used to be a fraction of those now contested, and those smaller fields were a mine field of hard-bitten tournament pros.

  Until recently, high-stakes cash games had been more lucrative. Making it to the final table of a tournament could take two to four days. Apart from the increased luck factor in tournaments—in a freeze-out, one bad hand or lucky draw hurts much more than in a cash game—a pro playing well enough to beat 95 percent of the competition could win many hundreds of thousands of dollars with that quality of play in a cash game. In fact, if the cash game player making it to the final table did not finish first or second, the prize money could prove to be less than the amounts contested in the individual pots of big side games.

  This changed with the success of the World Poker Tour and the poker orgy the World Series of Poker has become. Not only have the swollen fields increased prize money—while adding a lot of mediocre players to the field—but the publicity generated by tournament wins could lead to endorsements and sales of books and instructional videos. But that was still a few years away when Jennifer Harman won her Deuce-to-Seven championship.

  Jennifer wanted to play Deuce-to-Seven because all the regulars in her Bellagio game were entering. “I really want to play,” she told Annie Duke, who rose through the ranks of the Mirage’s hold ’em tables with her for several years.

  “Then why don’t we play it?”

  “Right,” Jennifer said. “I’ve never played it in my life and I’m going to start now?”

  “I haven’t played it either. We’ll get a lesson from Howard.”

  Howard was Howard Lederer, Annie’s brother and a friend of Jennifer’s. (They had dated briefly a few years earlier.)

  Howard gave them a five-minute lesson, explaining the hand quality needed to play in different positions. Deuce-to-Seven, because there were no exposed cards, had a lot more to do with feel than strategy, and Jennifer demonstrated her feel for the game by winning the tournament, beating Lyle Berman heads up. Berman, who played in only the biggest cash games in the world, had won three World Series bracelets, including Deuce-to-Seven.

  Harman had been so successful in such a difficult game that the only basis for a debate over who was the best female player in the world was ignorance. Annie Duke was better known, but that was because she finished tenth in the main event of the World Series in 2000 while eight months pregnant, juggled poker with raising a family, was close to her Ph.D. in psycholinguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, and was the sister of Howard Lederer and Katy Lederer, a poet and author who chronicled their remarkable family in Poker Face. But it had been several years since Annie had played in the cash games Jennifer played, and Jennifer was the winner of those games. Annie played primarily in tournaments, and even then Jennifer Harman had a more impressive record.

  To kill time while waiting for a call to play Andy Beal, and to adjust to the stakes and the heads-up format, Jennifer and her husband, Marco, broke out the play chips and practiced a million-dollar freeze-out. Cash games are usually not freeze-outs, but the game with Beal contained some elements of the format. On this trip, Andy and his opponent each brought $1 million to the table and generally played until one side had all the chips. But either side could rebuy or end the game by leaving.

  Marco Traniello married Jennifer just five months before, and his initiation into the poker world was rough.

  During their courtship—three months—Jennifer went on an unbelievable winning streak. On any night, Marco might ask, “How much did you win tonight?”

  “Fifty thousand.”

  “Oh, only fifty thousand? That’s it?”

  It was a joke they shared, but between the winning streak and the new romance, the pessimist in Jennifer kept asking herself, What happens when I go on a losing streak?

  As they pretended to play poker for a million dollars, their marriage was experiencing that first losing streak. After months of practically never seeing Jennifer lose, it was becoming a regular occurrence.

  Jennifer had been riding this roller coaster for fifteen years and was not concerned. She could not, however, get Marco to understand it. He grew up in Italy, half a world away from Reno and Las Vegas, and had played poker only a few times in his life. The outrageous sums his wife gambled when she won jarred him. Nothing could prepare him for an extended period in which she lost those amounts. And in the midst of this losing streak, she was going to put up a substantial portion of her depleted bankroll to have other people play poker, and she would then play their money for the highest stakes of her life.

  The mood in the Traniello home was glum when the high brush from the Bellagio called. Marco had just won their freeze-out.

  “You have to come down here and play poker against Andy. You have to leave now.” Shortly after hanging up the phone, she received five phone calls, all from other members of the group. The message was always the same. “Get down here. Get down here. Get down here.”

  As Howard Lederer and Ted Forrest gave her a pep talk in the moments before starting the poker game against Andy Beal, she could think only negative thoughts.

  Everyone else is counting on me.

  I’ve just been defeated by my husband, who has played poker about four times ever.

  I’m going to play in the biggest game of my life for a million dollars of my friends’ money.

  Everybody has beaten him and I’m going to be the big loser. (In fact, Andy Beal had played some heads-up poker for smaller stakes on the trip against pros that weren’t in the group, often while waiting for his next opponent to arrive. He did much better in those matches.)
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br />   The next thing she knew, she was seated at Table Seven, with ten neat stacks of $5,000 flags, twenty chips per stack.

  I must be out of my mind.

  But Jennifer Harman only seemed brittle. The stress, the nerves, and the doubts were all caused by the uncertainty of waiting. Once the game started, it wasn’t about a million dollars, or the responsibility of safeguarding the money of her friends and peers.

  It was about making smart decisions and Jennifer did not become one of the best poker players in the world by being cute or sweet or vulnerable. She got there by making smart decisions a remarkably high percentage of the time, under a variety of trying conditions: folding a strong hand to an opponent’s stronger hand, even though the opponent has yet to show strength; raising with a weak hand and continuing the bluff when it is clear the opponent would call, to set up future plays where monster hands could be played in precisely the same way; and countless other plays. Every play, every trick, every decision in poker had already been tried. The reason the pros were the pros was because they made those plays (and detected them in their opponents) more successfully than anyone else.

  Jennifer was in control from the start. But every time she had the match nearly closed out, Andy Beal would get the lucky card he needed to win a big pot and keep the game alive.

  Finally, after ten hours, Jennifer had twenty stacks of flags, and Andy had only green felt in front of him. The other members of the group left their game at Table One and surrounded Jennifer, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. She couldn’t talk. She had used every ounce of mental energy on the match, and was completely exhausted.

  Somehow, she made it home, and immediately fell asleep.

  The last player Andy Beal faced in this series of matches was Howard Lederer. Lederer delivered the coup de grâce during a weekend session.

  Andy Beal towered over most of his opponents at the table but he looked in danger of being swallowed up by Howard Lederer. Howard was a bear of a man, six and a half feet tall, weighing over 300 pounds, the bottom of his wide face obscured by a heavy black beard.