FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#879 – Looking For Ivey, Part I – The Music in Phil Ivey’s Head

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Phil Ivey on Phone - 2009-10-21 at 15-13-35" width="450" height="675" />

Just after noon on October 21, nearly 200 poker players convened in a temporary poker room tucked into a pocket of the Bellagio that otherwise functioned as the Fontana Bar. They were contesting the Festa al Lago WPT Championship at twenty tables, with the overflow – there were eventually 275 entries – housed in the regular poker room across the casino past the cashier’s cage, players club, and endless banks of slot machines between the Starting Line Bar and the Cirque du Soleil Store.

In five days, the final six would finish the tournament before a packed audience and television cameras in a ballroom at the furthest reaches of the Bellagio Convention area. But on Day One, the players outnumbered non-players more than ten-to-one, even when including WPT officials, Bellagio tournament personnel, media, and a security guard. The guard, posted at the entrance of the Fontana Bar, asked each person who tried to enter the identical question: “Are you entering the event or sightseeing?”

Casino security is supposed to be bored, gruff, and imperious. But this guy is paying particular attention to Table 51, just inside the entrance to his left. Josh Arieh, with his back to the guard, is in Seat 7. To his left, in profile in Seat 8, is David Chiu. The pair own six World Series of Poker gold bracelets and David is the reigning WPT World Champion. The guard doesn’t know any of this, nor does he care. His focus is on the player sitting to their left, to the dealer’s right in Seat 9.

Ivey.

Phil can’t help being the center of attention. The young man dealing at Table 51 gets a photographer to take a picture of him dealing to Phil Ivey; it will be a Christmas present to the dealer’s father. At this early stage of the tournament, even his legendary ability to focus is tested. Players start with chips nominally valued at 60,000. For the first 90 minutes, blinds will be just 50-100 and will progress higher so slowly that more than 30 players will skip the first day entirely.

But Phil is here for the start. He fidgets in his chair. He chats with some friends who stop by the table. He catches the eye of an attractive brunette and smiles. Mostly, he fusses with the iPod in his lap.

This brings me back to the first time I met Phil Ivey, when he had no trouble focusing. He had no iPod present but that didn’t stop him from fiddling with mine. Was it really three-and-a-half years ago?

When Phil played Andy Beal at the Wynn in February 2006, that wasn’t the first time we made acquaintance. Eighteen months earlier, at the Bicycle Club, I asked him for an interview for a book I was writing, THE PROFESSOR, THE BANKER, AND THE SUICIDE KING. Ivey had played Beal to a draw for two days in May 2004, toward the end of the action of that story. I told him that I had already interviewed Barry Greenstein, Ted Forrest, Doyle Brunson, Howard Lederer, and several other poker pros with whom he had played and socialized.

Warily, he took my card. “I might not call you back. I don’t do that kind of stuff.”

Nevertheless – though not without some objection by Phil – I spent three days seated across him at a poker table, observing him as no one has, before or since. Subsequently, we have spoken on many occasions, once even discussing poker strategy. I have collected these recollections, adding to them the sketchy public record on Ivey as well as the opinions of some of the professionals who know him best.

Although Phil Ivey is somewhat musically inclined – I have heard him rap credibly, Irv Gotti once tried brokering a deal on his behalf, he supposedly has Jay-Z on speed-dial – his instrument of choice is an iPod. Any of the amateur psychiatrists who have diagnosed Phil with ADD would find support in his music choices at the poker table. He seems to change songs like a man allergic to the chorus.

Consider it excess capacity. As much as Ivey absorbs at the poker table, it is sometimes not enough to occupy him completely. Early in a poker tournament, there isn’t enough action to direct his focus. Even when he is playing heads-up, for the highest stakes imaginable, he finds himself looking for additional things to do.

On February 21-23, 2006, at the back right corner take of the Wynn Poker Room, Phil and billionaire banker Andy Beal played three days of heads-up Limit Hold ‘Em. Each player started with $10,000,000 in $25,000-chips in front of him and they played with betting limits of $30,000-$60,000 and, on the last day, $50,000-$100,000.

Beal, who now has a net worth, according to FORBES, of $4.5 billion, was playing with his own money (though, by the magazine’s reckoning, he was probably worth only about a billion back then, maybe less). Ivey was playing a bankroll contributed by a consortium of approximately twenty pros contributing $500,000 apiece; the number of investors was much higher if you include the pros who sold pieces to additional players. Phil agreed to play Beal during those three days on the condition that he purchase TWO shares. If they played today, a war might break out among the pros because Phil would insist on playing him that high on his own money.

On the first day, they played for just a few hours, starting in mid-afternoon. They started at 9 AM on the second day and it was clear Phil was tired and unfocused for the first few hours. During one early hand, he said, “We gotta start working on you playing some more games, Andy. You’re boring me to death.” He mentioned he was thinking of calling his wife to bring his iPod. He didn’t do that, nor did he remember to bring his music the next morning.

During a brief break on day three, Phil yawned and said, “Andy has a big advantage over me for the first hour or two. After twenty hours, I’m fine.” I offered my iPod and headphones, which were upstairs in my room at the Wynn. He took me up on the offer and spent the next eight hands scrolling through my 3,000 songs. He actually listened to just one – Enya’s “Only Time” – mostly folding while he looked for something worthwhile.

On the eighth hand, Beal rivered a straight to beat Phil’s trip queens and win a $1.1 million pot. Having now lost a million dollars since receiving my iPod, he yanked off the headphones and flung the device toward me. “Alright, you can have this iPod back. I should throw it in the garbage.”

He flashed me a smile to show there were no hard feelings, though it didn’t hurt our relationship that he won a million-dollar pot with quads three hands later.

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