#729 – This is Where I Came In, Part I

April 3, 2004. It was a Saturday. I was in Vegas with a vague idea about getting information for a book proposal about poker called The Big Game.

I kept careful notes during that period but they wouldn’t do me much good from the inside of the Bellagio poker room. The room was jam-packed. If I was standing, I was moving or being jostled. And if I was sitting, I was playing poker. In neither instance was it really possible to take good notes.

But I don’t need notes to remember that day, even five years later. It was the first event of the Bellagio Five-Star Classic. It was break time and the players were streaming from the tournament tables on the main casino floor to the poker room. In the rush and chaos, I recognized two men who brushed past me, single file, into the entrance of the poker room, Howard Lederer and Erik Seidel. As Seidel passed me, I heard Lederer in front of him call back, “That hand was a real pig fuck, wasn’t it?”

I remember it like it was five minutes ago. I wanted to write about Howard Lederer, though I had never met him or even spoken with him. (In fact, that was the first time I ever saw him in person and I was shocked at how tall he was. Seidel too. I never realized how many very tall poker players there were.) The other odd thing was that they were wearing identical long-sleeved white tee-shirts with a red triangle over the heart. “Full Tilt Poker.” I had never heard of the name and had no idea what it meant.

I was in town to talk with a dealer at the Bellagio and hopefully run into Barry Greenstein. The dealer, Linda, was friendly with Howard and told me he was a nice guy as well as a serious-minded businessman. She kept a journal online about her life, which included a lot about dealing at the Bellagio. I was there to ask her about some posts she had taken down from her site, concerning games between a reclusive Texas banker named Andrew Beal and a rotating cast of top Vegas pros including Lederer, Doyle and Todd Brunson, Ted Forrest, Chip Reese, Barry Greenstein, John Hennigan, Jennifer Harman, David Grey, and Chau Giang.

Although it was Lederer who I anticipated would be a main character in my book, I recognized Seidel instantly as well. Long before Rounders made him an artifact of popular poker history, I knew about Erik. A stock trader who lost his Wall Street job in the 1987 crash, he took up poker and, in his first World Series, battled famously with Johnny Chan for the Championship. I watched a VHS tape of that event maybe fifty times – his visor perched awkwardly on his head, the profile footage of him playing backgammon with his wife Ruah.

I was making a circuit of the high-stakes area upstairs to find Barry Greenstein. When I told my friends back in Chicago that I was playing poker and thinking about writing a poker story, my friend Hillary told me that her cousin Elena couldn’t stop talking about some high school classmate of hers who was a big-time poker player.

Against ridiculous odds, it turned out that friend was Barry Greenstein, who played the biggest games in Vegas and LA, including the heads-up game against Andrew Beal. Elena was still in touch with her classmate from thirty years earlier because he was a generous benefactor of their high school and had recently won over a million dollars in a televised event on the World Poker Tour and given it all to charity.

Elena encouraged Greenstein to speak with me and gave me his phone number. We had a pleasant conversation, the common ground of which was that the real stars of poker were the cash-game players, even though the names increasingly familiar to the public were tournament players. I didn’t tell Barry that I wanted to write specifically about the Andy Beal games – which was a good thing because he told me he didn’t feel comfortable talking about the subject, in case some of the other guys weren’t paying their taxes – but he was open and frank about the poker world in general. He told me he would be living at the Bellagio for the next few months to play some tournaments there and at the World Series, but mostly to play the big cash games that were a fixture of tournament season. If I wanted to ask anything more, I could find him in the high-stakes section of the Bellagio poker room.

These are my notes from the first time I laid eyes on the big game, taken right after I left the room:

I stopped by the upstairs game to see if Barry was around. There he was, at a full-table $1,000-$2,000 mixed game, Seat 5, big pile of chips, maybe $300,000. Doyle Brunson was sitting to the right of the dealer in Seat 8. A crutch leaned against the wall behind him. Chau to the left of the dealer. David Grey and Johnny World in Seats 3 and 4. Daniel Negreanu to Barry’s left. Howard Lederer and Erik Seidel stand behind Grey and Hennigan.

Barry invited me to sit and talk with him, to pull up a chair. But every chair in the room is taken, and I really didn’t want to ask him questions with these other players present or be writing down answers. As I looked around for a chair or an excuse, Doyle Brunson shot me some kind of a look, like he knew something was up. (Geez, he’s good.)

I later came back to see if he was still there but he had left. In his place was a Styrofoam container of some noodle dish that Daniel Negreanu was wolfing down.

The place was also a madhouse because today was the first day of the tournament and Ben Affleck and Matt Damon were in the room playing. They had a big entourage, plus a zillion people following in their wake.

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