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#440 – WSOP Notebook #13 – Matusow, of Course

Posted by Editor | Filed under Mike Matusow, WSOP 2008

When I saw Mike Matusow at the World Series a week ago, I barely recognized him. Sure, he’s lost 60 pounds and became addicted to running, but that wasn’t it. It was his attitude.

“I used to think you could be lucky or unlucky but now I know better. You make your own luck. I wake up every morning and I feel great. Nothing’s happened yet but I just know it’s going to be a great World Series.”

Fast-forward seven days: at 3 AM on June 12, Mike Matusow won the No-Limit Deuce-to-Seven Championship, a $5,000 (with rebuys) event commemorating an otherwise extinct form of poker by 85 of the best and richest players in the world. Along with earning over a half-million dollars, these were the last four players eliminated: Tom Schneider (2 bracelets, 2007 WSOP PoY), Erick Lindgren (1 bracelet already in 2008), Barry Greenstein (2 bracelets, including 1 in this event), and Jeffrey Lisandro (1 bracelet in 2007 and, in the words of Matusow just a week before, “the guy had one of the greatest World Series of all-time last year”).

It’s Mike’s third bracelet. Last year was his first year in a decade that he didn’t make at least one final table, though he had two near-misses, including making the final two tables of the $50,000 HORSE, which you’d have to admit is the equivalent (though not for the record books) of making a final table in any other event.

Matusow seems easy to understand: he talks all the time and doesn’t hide anything. The past drug abuse, his downward spiral in online poker, his sports betting addiction and losses, his bad choices. Who hasn’t heard him say both of the following, often in the same conversation:

*”I’m one of the top five players in the world. When I’m on my game, no one can touch me.”

*”I must be the stupidest person in the entire world. No one is dumber than me.”

Mike’s hiding in plain site. The demons are never under control, yet acknowledging them is the first step in conquering them, the step most people with similar problems are unable to make. With his overwhelming feelings of inadequacy, transparently covered by boasts and bravado, it’s impossible to tell at any moment is he is spinning out of control with self-doubt, spinning out of control with unrealistic and dangerous overconfidence, or somehow in balance.

I had a golf instructor who once listed for me all the things wrong with my golf swing. His advice at the end of the first lesson was, “If you can’t fix all your mistakes, at least try to make an even number of them. Who knows? Maybe they’ll even out.”

You never know with Mike Matusow whether he’s in control of himself or even what that means. But for all the stories about “the Matusow blow-up,” there are few times when he has shown other than complete tenacity and focus when he’s sniffed the finish line. He lost almost all of his chips before the dinner break but hung in. I remember at the Tournament of Champions in November 2005 almost the same thing, holding the tournament in the palm of his hand all day and then it seemingly slip away after losing a big pot heads-up to Hoyt Corkins.

No blow up then or last night. Just a professional bearing down and rising to the occasion.

Who knows what the future holds for Mike Matusow? There aren’t many people rooting against a happy ending and now is one of those times when it looks like it might happen.

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