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#852 – 2009 WSOP Revisited #11 – The Great PearlJammed Caper, Part II
THE GREAT JON TURNER CAPER
It’s near midnight as I try to make sense of what happened two nights ago. I’m trying to write a profile of Full Tilt Pro and online tournament superstar Jon Turner. The material for the profile was supposed to come from the dinner meeting that night at a sushi restaurant called Naked Fish. But I am stuck. Utterly stuck.
The first place I go when I’m stuck is my notes. Page 112 of my notebook says, “Dinner with Shauna and JT at Naked Fish at 9pm.” But the rest of the page has a drawing of a hermaphrodite fish wearing a bikini, the various bulges revealing its dual sexuality, I guess. Page 113 starts with Day 2A of the Main Event the next morning.
Normally, Shauna would bail me out of this jam, but she fled Las Vegas in the pre-dawn darkness, taking her dog Shvivee, all my plastic bowls, and the last of the bottled water. I thought she was driving back to Scottsdale but by the time I talked to her she was on her way to Dallas. She proved not to be useful in helping me reconstruct that evening because we couldn’t even agree on the principal cause of the mess: Did we, or did we not, get into a fight over a triple-A battery?
Without notes or a confirming witness, I can usually work through writing troubles by listening to my audio recorder. I generally take excellent notes and have a great memory but for interviews that take place in social situations, it’s not always convenient or possible to write or remember things the same way. When it occurred to me that I could just fall back on the audio recording, my spirits were momentarily lifted. But I quickly remembered that the audio recorder was the start of the problem.
This is how I think it happened, though any of this (or even all of it) could be inaccurate.
When we arrived at Naked Fish, Jon Turner was already sitting at a table near the door. I asked Shauna to take out the audio recorder. She did, pushed a button to start it, and said, “The battery must be dead.” I have asked Shauna to do at least a thousand things for me at the World Series and she has done nearly all of them not only flawlessly but routinely far exceeding expectations.
But she had neither the back-up batteries nor the back-up recorder, both of which I had previously given her. This resulted in our sole disagreement in seven weeks, though neither of us at the time acknowledged it. The idea of Shauna and I not getting along, after working and sharing a house for the entire Series seems so foreign that, again, I’m questioning whether it really happened.
Both she and Jon – I think Jon was there and said this – said there was a gas station and other stores just next door so buying a triple-A battery should be no problem. I thought I remembered passing gas stations and grocery stores along the way so I volunteered to run out.
And run I did. Naked Fish is in a strip center, one of about a million in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, so I thought it would be ridiculous to take my car-key to the parking lot. What was I going to do, drive my premium-gas-guzzling Mercedes 200 feet to purchase, of all things, a battery?
I was walking blind from the start. The strip center was set back so far from the street that I had to walk out to Durango to see what was on either side of it. Unfortunately, there were no gas stations or stores immediately next door on either side. Since we came from the South, I started walking to the right because I thought I remembered us passing a gas station. In fact, I’m sure we passed a gas station along the way because it was an eight mile drive. After what seemed like a long walk, I passed a large building announcing itself as “Mission of God World Ministry.” Then a dental office. Once past the dental office, I could see lights in the distance, but they were for Wendy’s and Jack in the Box. Unless these fast food outlets recently put triple-A batteries on the menu, this in itself was not a positive sight. But maybe there was a gas station or grocery store next to them.
By this time, that hope was a superior alternative to turning back. I had walked at least ten minutes from the restaurant, so it would be another ten minutes back. I was still a little steamed at Shauna and didn’t think I would be getting my point across by disappearing for twenty minutes – and FAILING to get a single battery.
It was almost 9:30pm and still over 100 degrees in the Las Vegas desert. I just now realized that I left without any water. In fact, I hadn’t drunk any water in the restaurant and uncharacteristically had not brought a bottle of water on the twenty-minute drive over. I live in a desert twelve months a year and it’s rare for me, even indoors, to go fifteen minutes without drinking some water.
Just beyond the Wendy’s, I saw the sign for an Albertson’s grocery store. Naturally, it turned out to be some distance beyond the Wendy’s and the creative landscaping required me to walk the long way behind the restaurant’s dumpster to get to the grocery store. As I staggered behind Wendy’s, it looked like two employees were engaged in a water fight outside the open back door. The first employee sprayed the second employee with the hose while the second employee defended and struck back with a bucket. God I was thirsty.
The Albertson’s, despite the frosty air conditioning, was torture. Who would have thought it would take so long to find a single tiny battery in a gigantic grocery store? I must have walked through six aisles before I discovered the battery display. Fortunately I found a register with just one customer in front of me. (Among the impulse items stocked next to the register were, of course, batteries.)
My mind could have been playing tricks by this time but I think the person in front of me had just one item as well. A can of beets. But the can of beets didn’t have a price or scanning code on it and the cashier was helpless to figure out what to do. The delay to find the price of the can of beets was so long that if it had happened during the day, they probably would have stopped trading the company’s shares on the New York Stock Exchange. I know the delay was lengthy because I lost count of the number of times I asked myself, “Who goes into a grocery store to buy one can of beets?”
I eventually made it back to Naked Fish, where I expected to have to explain my embarrassingly long absence. Shauna and Jon were talking and laughing, as if I hadn’t even left. I have some recollection of the dinner and discussion that followed, but no audio recording.
This is why I am starting to wonder whether all this really happened. If I went through hell in the desert to get batteries for the recorder, why didn’t we record the interview? Then there was the disagreement with Shauna, which was uncharacteristic. Finally, there was the matter with Jon Turner’s appearance. To say he has a fair completion is an understatement. His skin seemed almost translucent, like an apparition or a mirage.
This sounds cliché even to me, especially because of the things ( I think) I remember from the interview.
This is what I thought were the outlines of Jon Turner’s story. Like millions of young guys, he started playing online poker four or five years ago. By playing a zillion tournaments, he eventually became one of the dozen or so best online tournament poker players in the world. As PearlJammed and PearlJammer he won over $3 million dollars in tournament prizes, about $1 million of it in profit. On the strength of these phenomenal results and his pre-eminence in online poker, he became a Full Tilt pro and began scoring big results in some major live tournaments. He recently moved to Las Vegas.
But all those things are incorrect, or at least inconsistent with the interview at Naked Fish. It’s not like I engage in rigorous fact-checking but I hesitate to correct what seems like conventional wisdom with material from an unreliable source – especially when the unreliable source is ME.
Jon Turner started playing poker in local college games in North Carolina in 2003. Although the stakes weren’t high – they initially played with a $20 buy-in – a number of top pros came out of those games. It was in those college poker games that Jon first played with players like Chris Bell and Mike Gracz. After sneaking away from school several times to Atlantic City and winning in cash games, Turner moved to Las Vegas in 2005. He had hardly played any online poker, tournaments or otherwise, but came out with some friends to try to make a living in live poker games. After having some success in poker tournaments at the Bellagio that summer, he started playing online tournaments. Even now that he is one of the most successful online tournament players in the world, he still considers playing live cash games at the Bellagio as an important part of his profession. And despite the zillions made in online and NLHE tournaments, when Jon makes his living in the Las Vegas poker rooms, he does it at mixed-limit games.
I do remember Jon confirming his interest in Pearl Jam, so I wasn’t hallucinating about everything. Jon has seen the band perform twenty-one times, though not in the last three years. That’s because the group hasn’t toured much in the US since 2006, just two U.S. dates in 2007 and a three-week U.S. tour in 2008, which coincided with the World Series of Poker. When I asked if he would be playing in London and Cyprus in September, he said, “Not if Pearl Jam is touring.”
Naked Fish turned out to be a notorious poker hang-out. Even though the restaurant was tiny, we saw several familiar faces during the meal and the establishment had signed plates on the wall from well-known players. At the end of the meal Shauna told the server who Jon was, and who I was, so we could sign some dinner plates to add to the collection.
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