#001 - The Playboy of Full Tilt

I am, to the concept of Full Tilt Poker, what Hugh Hefner was to Playboy in its early years. By that, I mean that I think my real life mirrors how the site is marketed to players.

Learn, chat, and play with the pros? That’s me, me, and me.

For those of you who know me or are familiar with my writing, it should come as no surprise that I am writing The Full Tilt Poker Blog. The surprise is that it took so long to happen. But for everyone else, let me explain.

I Retired to a Golf Course and Wound Up at a Poker Table

Until 2000, I was a recreational poker player and a lawyer in Chicago, Illinois. I quit practicing law and moved with my family to Scottsdale, Arizona. There, I would spend more time with my wife Jo Anne, watch my kids grow up, do some writing, play a lot of golf, and occasionally play some poker. (I didn’t learn that there was a big, bustling poker room less than ten miles from my house until 2003, after I had played a couple rounds of golf at the adjacent golf course. That’s how messed-up my priorities were back then.But for the last twelve months, I have played the same number of golf rounds as I have $10,000 buy-in poker tournaments.)

I wrote two books about business and finance for a small trade press but, by mid-2003, had given up writing. It seemed impossible to break into the publishing big time and I was finding poker a much more enjoyable hobby than piling up rejections from publishers.

Andy Beal’s Millions Versus a Rampaging Tiger

I tried to get out of writing but they pulled me back in. I was at the Mirage in October 2003, the weekend Roy Horn was mauled by a tiger. Even though the Siegfried & Roy Theatre was right next to the poker room, the players could not have cared less (other than pocketing the commemorative Siegfried & Roy chips before the dealers got them all). The buzz started at my friend Ted’s table and spread through the room like a virus: two guys were playing at the corner table upstairs at the Bellagio and there was $15 million on the table.

To me, that sounded ridiculous, part of Las Vegas’s patented hype about everything being bigger and grander in Vegas than anywhere else, plus the tendency of poker players to exaggerate (or just lie, if for no reason other than to keep in practice). But I was curious so I checked the Internet when I got home. In fact, a game that big was going on, and it had convened irregularly for over two years. There were lots of rumors, but very little hard information, and it immediately became clear that someone (and probably several people) were trying to keep information from being disseminated about the game.

Exactly one year later, I submitted my completed manuscript about the game, titled The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time, to my publisher, Warner Books. During that time, I had spoken at length with both players in that public-yet-secret game, Todd Brunson and Andy Beal. I had even played heads-up with Andy. I spoke with Doug Dalton, the Director of Poker Operations for the Bellagio. I became friends with one of the dealers in the game, Linda Geenen, who later became my boss at Pokerworks.com, where Michael Craig’s Journal appeared. (My 180 or so Journal entries are still there, and make for good readin’.) I also go to know people like Howard Lederer, Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Jennifer Harman, Barry Greenstein, Eric Drache, Mike Matusow, and Ted Forrest.

Summer 2005 – I Was Through with Poker, but Poker Wasn’t Through with Me

I knew when Suicide King was published in June 2005, I was done with poker. I became an author because I wanted to tell great stories. How could another poker story top that?

I have yet to find one, but I’m still here, more than a year-and-a-half later. I can explain why in five words:

I. Didn’t. Want. To. Leave.

I can describe the feeling by telling you about some random scenes during a two-day period in August 2005. After a couple days of the Main Event of the World Series of Poker, I had no reason to be there. I had completed my publicity obligations for Suicide King. I had no pending writing assignments. My media credentials were, for all practical purposes, made up. So I went home.

But I was hypnotized by the live updates of the Main Event and Mike Matusow’s performance. I had met Mike the previous summer and, within five minutes, thought he was one of the most interesting people I had ever met. After an hour, I considered him a friend. After our second meeting, when he confided in me that he had been set up for a drug bust by a friend and was possibly looking at thirty years in prison, I cried as I drove home. Now, after a plea bargain and six months in the rotten Clark County Detention Center, he made the final 58 players, from a field of over 5,600.

I decided I had to return to Vegas to watch, so I started the five-hour drive from Scottsdale. Half way, I received a call from Ted Forrest. Ted, an almost incomprehensibly fascinating person, had asked me weeks earlier to write the cover story Card Player wanted to publish about him.

Ted called me because he had made the final table of a tournament Full Tilt would be broadcasting live on Fox Sports Net that evening. I changed plans but not direction and watched offstage as Ted finished second. I also met up with Anthony Holden, author of Big Deal, whose work I had idolized for years. Now I was having dinner with him and he was hanging on the details of my poker stories.

On the way out of the Wynn, I also met Clonie Gowen for the first time. Coincidentally, I had e-mailed Clonie the week before, to find out if she would be the subject of a profile I would write about her for – I didn’t know what publication. I heard so many people gleeful at the Series that she had not cashed, as if there was something wrong with her for being attractive or taking the opportunities that afforded. I wanted to know what it was like playing with that pressure, what kind of a person she was, and what kind of a person that situation had made her.

She, like Forrest, made the final table of the Full Tilt tournament, finished third, and we spoke right after she walked off stage. She was receptive to the idea, told me she admired my work, and said, “It would be an honor to have Michael Craig write about me.”

It’s hard to describe the effect of this. Clonie photographs well but she is even prettier and more glamorous in person, especially walking off the set of the live TV production. She was devastatingly attractive, like brushing past Reese Witherspoon or Cameron Diaz or Scarlett Johansson. And she’d be honored to have me write about her?

Yeah, I should give up poker and write about the famous heart surgeon who committed suicide or the serial killer who became an interstate trucker.

And that’s not even the end of it. I found out, before I could even race over to the Rio to see Matusow, that play had ended for the night. Mikey had the chip lead.

Binion’s would host its final two days of the World Series, so Mike would be competing just 2,000 feet from his jail cell.

The next day was one of those days where, as a writer, everything seems to move in slow motion. It’s all part of the story – what story, I didn’t even know – and the imperative is to capture it all.

Phil Ivey near the chip lead. Greg Raymer, the defending champion, near the chip lead. Mike, nearly getting into a fistfight with Sean Shiekhan within ten minutes after the beginning of play. From fifteen feet away, watching Phil Gordon wrap his arm around Matusow's shoulder, a like a brother, and talk him into calming down during his ten minute penalty, and seeing Mike's actual brother, Scott, peer at Sheikhan, ready to jump the rail and go after him. Watching Raymer lose most of his chips – and an opportunity to make money and history far beyond any previous repeat champion – on one of the most brutal beats imaginable. Seeing Ivey’s aggressive play cost him most of his chips as he ran into big hand after big hand. Learning Andy Black’s story, how he made the last two tables the year Stu Ungar won his third championship, then quit poker to become a Buddhist monk. (His card protector was a double dorje, a Buddhist symbol of stability.)

On top of the incredible poker, the human drama, and the unbelievable tension, there were countless little moments that I’ll never forget. Meeting John Juanda, Erik Seidel, Phil Gordon, and Andy Bloch that day. Juanda, leading Matusow’s group to a Thai restaurant during the dinner break (“Phil Hellmuth ate here before he won his last two bracelets”) only to find it closed. Erik and John, repeatedly calling out, with stunning accuracy, the hands of players in all-in confrontations.

What I remember most is riding the escalator out to the valet with Mike at 3 AM. He made the final table and had a lot of chips. With a previous Main Event final table and two bracelets – no one else remaining had ever played at a World Series final table – it was hard not to like his chances. I felt like we were walking on air.

“I am playing so good. The only way they can beat me is if I get kings and someone wakes up with aces, or some donkey tries to bluff off all his chips and hits a miracle draw.”

And that’s exactly how the two hands went that cost Mike all his chips, putting him out in ninth place.

So how am I going to leave poker after two days like that?

The great thing is that, for me, poker got even better. Taking just the participants of those two days, look how the last year-and-a-half has worked out:

*I have become good friends with Mike Matusow (though he might be mad at me because we couldn’t work out a deal for me to help write his autobiography) and was allowed to share his greatest professional moment, winning the Tournament of Champions in November 2005.

*I am still friendly with John Juanda, Erik Seidel, and Phil Gordon.

*Andy Bloch has become one of my best friends in poker, a remarkable person who I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with – his pre-flop No-Limit Hold ‘Em chapter of the Full Tilt book is going to blow you away – as well as writing about and sharing his greatest professional moment, albeit one tinged with disappointment.

*Clonie Gowen is such a good friend that I actually passed on an opportunity to steal a pair of her underpants. (My first Journal entry at Pokerworks.com was “Oh, the Things I’ve Stolen” and everyone in poker who knows me is aware that I’m on the lookout for “unique” poker items. I took my sights off Andy Bloch’s cowboy hat only when Full Tilt incorporated it into his avatar.)

*Tony Holden, who I had only just met before watching the final table of the Full Tilt tournament, has completed the sequel to Big Deal, called, of course, Bigger Deal. It will be out for this year’s World Series and, for better or worse, I have become a character.

*I have shared some of Ted Forrest’s highest and lowest moments of the last two years, and been privy to countless remarkable stories about a remarkable man.

All Roads Lead to Full Tilt

All that in less than three days, after I was done with poker. During the Fall of 2005, I schemed for a reason to stay connected to poker. The Ted Forrest profile took nearly 10,000 words and three issues of Card Player, after which they asked me to write a column. I spoke about poker and writing at Yale.

My last fourteen months have been dominated by my work on a book titled The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide – Tournament Edition. In addition to Ted Forrest, the following Full Tilt pros collaborated on the book: Andy Bloch, Richard Brodie, Chris Ferguson, Rafe Furst, Phil Gordon, David Grey, Howard Lederer, Mike Matusow, Huckleberry Seed, Keith Sexton and Gavin Smith. For a year, I interviewed these players, wrote chapters with them, and got to know them. Some, like Mike Matusow and Ted Forrest, were old friends by now. Others, like Andy Bloch and Chris Ferguson, I barely knew before the project and have developed friendships and solid working relationships.

I also left Card Player to write for Bluff, producing nearly 20,000 words about the Andy Beal games at the Wynn last February. Since then I have written a monthly column for the magazine and profiles on Andy Bloch and Chris Ferguson. During last year’s World Series, I started writing Michael Craig’s Journal for Pokerworks.com. My journal entries there were similar to the kind of content I expect to post on The Full Tilt Poker Blog: profiles and anecdotes from my friendships and interactions with the world’s best poker players; analysis, commentary, and opinion about the legal and public policy issues facing poker; reporting and color from the World Series and several other big poker tournaments; and my opinions and experiences as a player on Full Tilt.

I’m not going to bore you with hand histories and playing results. But I have clearly benefited from a year of learning from a dozen of the best tournament poker players in the world. I’ve won a lot of money playing tournaments on Full Tilt (and lost a lot, too). When the right situation develops, I like to share what I’ve learned.

So that’s what I expect to give you: adventures in poker, stories from the tournament trail, essays on the issues facing poker, and some things I’ve learned from the Full Tilt pros. There are a lot of great news sites and poker blogs out there, as well as many good poker magazines. My goal is to get as close to the “inside” as an outsider can get and share with you information you won’t find anywhere else.

Where’s Poochie?

Expect this blog to evolve. I’m pretty sure I just described the core content, but I’m going to look for some other things to write. I’m willing to listen to suggestions, both from players on the site, readers of this blog, and from the operators of Full Tilt. We are going to work on the look and feel of this page, as well as anything I can do to make Full Tilt a better experience for players.

I play tournaments on Full Tilt all the time, usually late in the evening and in the big tournaments on Sunday. I play on Full Tilt under my own name, “Michael Craig”, and I’m happy to chat while I’m playing. You can e-mail me at mrchaotic@aol.com or leave comments at the end.

I feel pretty comfortable putting myself in Full Tilt’s hands for this project. They are excellent with graphics, interfaces, and all aspects of marketing and presentation.

But that doesn’t mean I won't agitate to try to make things better, or at least my version of “better.”

There is an episode of The Simpsons in which the cartoon the kids like, Itchy & Scratchy, adds a new character, Poochie the Dog. The first episode with Poochie bombs. Homer, who is the voice of Poochie, walks in on a meeting of writers and executives to give his suggestions:

“One, Poochie should be louder, angrier, and have access to a time machine. Two, when Poochie’s not on the screen, the other characters should ask, ‘Where’s Poochie?’”

I want to keep from being that guy. Without telling Homer, they killed off his character, and brought a lawyer on the TV show to certify that Poochie would never come back to life.

I keep thinking that I’m done with poker, yet I’m sticking around. I don’t know how long I’ll be doing this, but if I disappear without a trace, there’s a good chance it was my own fault.