#088 - The Full Tilt Poker Guide to Maui, Part I - The Full Tilt Guide to Iowa (a/k/a Hennigan Begin Again)

This will appear many days after I write this. I am sitting in a shaded cabana next to the pool at the Four Seasons in Maui, on official business for Full Tilt Poker. Why? It all goes back to Iowa, which in turn goes back to John Hennigan.

At the end of January, John won the WPT Borgata Winter Open. Though still a young man, he is, like contemporaries Huckleberry Seed and Ted Forrest, decidedly “old school.” He has played in the biggest games in the world, won and lost outrageous sums, displayed unbelievable skill, and made some shocking mistakes. The best players in the world have told me that they are in awe of Hennigan’s A-game. Nicknamed “Johnny World” – either because of his mind-numbing skill or his equally outrageous willingness to bet on anything – he was immortalized as a fictional character in Jesse May’s classic 1999 novel, Shut Up and Deal.

May, in his novel and in “Team Carborundum” WSOP columns from a few years back – scour the internet for them, along with Andy Glazer’s final table reports if you want to read some REAL World Series of Poker writing – had a unique way of communicating the skill level of a player like John Hennigan. (His description of Ted Forrest’s talent was similar in style.) I can’t duplicate it here, but it was a combination of rumor, hyperbole, and allegory that effectively got across this message: This level of skill can’t be described. He’s that good.

Yet Hennigan had been in danger of being marginalized. Every pro who dreaded Johnny World’s A-game was quick to note the drop-off when he was NOT at his best. Like several precocious talents, he had his demons away from the table, and was perhaps guilty, like many others, of having “a little too much gamble in him.”

(It’s a further testament to Hennigan’s prowess that, in his “eclipse” during the TV poker boom, he still managed to win a televised U.S. Poker Championship and a World Series bracelet (his second), along with two WSOP final tables in 2005.)

So how did Hennigan’s return to the winner’s circle get me to Hawaii, or even talking about Iowa?

John is willing to bet on ANYTHING. He once accepted a bet that he couldn’t live for a month within the city limits of Des Moines, Iowa. I first heard about this during my early research for The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King. Linda Geenen, a dealer at the Bellagio who founded Pokerworks.com and still writes “Table Tango” would get off shift at 2 or 3 AM and, a couple times a week, we would talk on the phone until sunrise. She told me stories about players who muttered that Chau Giang used voodoo to win at poker. Or how Gus Hansen once got permission to play Todd Brunson’s discards in a round of Triple Draw, called two raises, drew five cards, and won a gigantic pot. Or about how John Hennigan moved to Des Moines on a bet.

Howard Lederer filled in some details and I’ve read the story other places, but essentially, someone bet Hennigan $25,000 he couldn’t live for a month in Des Moines. John had just taken up golf and figured he’d spend the month working on his game. (Let’s ignore for now that he could have been COSTING himself more than $25,000 by taking the break from the big game at the Bellagio.)

Because he was playing regularly in the Bellagio back then and was such a likeable character (and because most people weren’t privy to the details of the bet), regulars would ask, “Where’s Johnny?” and be told, “Oh, he’s living in Des Moines.” If the person inquiring pleaded ignorance, all the answerer would have to add is “… on a bet” and everyone instantly understood.

Howard Lederer, who was not part of the bet, told me that Hennigan wanted out after two days. “I got a very distressed call the next day. ‘This is bad. I can’t take this. I get in a cab and I ask the cab driver, ‘What’s the most happening bar?’ and the cabbie gave me the name of the most happening bar in Des Moines.’ He went to the bar and there were, like, a couple drunks and a couple of cheap hookers. It was a really, really, really dead bar, compared with what he was used to in Philadelphia or Vegas. ‘They don’t even have a good bar scene. I’m just dead.’ He left there like three days later.”

That’s given me a gambler’s predisposition against Iowa. Regardless of what you think of John Hennigan, it doesn’t say anything very nice about Des Moines if someone would turn down $25,000 (though Lederer thought it was $20,000) rather than spend a month there. In fact, John was screaming to get out after TWO DAYS.

I probably thought about this story every single day of 2006. One of the guys pushing to get UIGEA passed was Representative James Leach of Iowa. Worse, it was supposedly to curry favor in advance of the 2008 Iowa caucus that Bill Frist spent his political capital to do Leach the favor of getting the bill tacked on to a homeland security measure where it would be sure to pass without scrutiny on the last day of the legislative session.

Iowa, huh? That’s all I need to know.

But then I learned that there was hope for Iowa. They voted out Jim Leach. Iowa actually became the host of a major poker championship, the World Series of Poker Circuit Championship at the Horseshoe Casino & Hotel in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The first event drew over 500 players and 142 ponied up the five grand to play for the championship, won by Kosta “Gus” Sengos.

If Iowa, the alleged home of anti-gambling sentiment, can give Leach the bum’s rush and even become a poker destination, maybe there is hope for poker’s future after all. Perhaps we could go state-by-state, winning over the locals as we go and reminding everyone that poker is the Great American Game, a contest of skill that’s fun and challenging and deserves at least the recognition that if people want to play it in the privacy of their homes, they should be unencumbered from doing so.

Full Tilt Poker has a labyrinthine operating structure, so it was unclear who I needed to sell on my scheme. A guy I know only as “Disco Stu,” one of the directors of Full Tilt’s online tournaments, certainly seemed receptive when I told him that, with Iowa on our side, we should evaluate a live tournament in the next state alphabetically, that being Hawaii.

Disco Stu definitely liked the idea of running a tournament on the island of Maui rather than at the monitor of his computer in his windowless office. I don’t know if he had proper authority, but on his word I bought a couple tickets for Maui – I assumed Full Tilt wouldn’t expect me to make a trip of this length by myself, especially after absenting myself from Jo Anne to spend a weekend with Clonie Gowen and Shannon Elizabeth just two weeks earlier – and booked a first-class room at the Four Seasons in Wailea.

[So great was our glee over the prospects of having me do the advance work for the Full Tilt Poker Wailea Open that it wasn’t until I purchased the non-refundable tickets and paid the deposit on the suite that we discovered Hawaii is NOT the next state alphabetically after Iowa. Hawaii actually precedes Iowa by four states. Whatever. Aloha!]

Coming next, #089 – The Full Tilt Poker Guide to Maui, Part II – Wailea, the Hard Way.