The Poker Bum

"Is he good for poker?"

That's the question a perplexed John Hennigan asked during a $5,000 limit hold'em final table at the World Series of Poker last year. Hennigan, who won the event, was talking about Ellix Powers, one of the oddest, most erratic, most controversial, and most complex characters in the poker world. I don't know if he's good for poker or not, but he is good for a story.

The Ellix Powers legend is that of a homeless bum sleeping under bridges who seemingly came out of nowhere last year to win two Bicycle Casino tournaments, then made a WSOP final table, where he threw some of the world's best players off balance with his bizarre play and disruptive behavior. He got his 15 minutes of fame when ESPN filmed and broadcast his antics, and he's now trying to build a new career as a poker personality, poker teacher, and star of a poker documentary. His story is inspiring to some and disturbing to others. Is he street-smart, unbalanced, a humble innocent, or an irritating misfit? Perhaps he's a little of each. One thing I discovered after a lengthy, sometimes rambling, sometimes incisive, but always candid interview is that there is more to Powers than meets the eye, and there's a method to his madness. Or, perhaps there's a madness to his method.

Ellix Powers

Powers is 52 and was born in Texas to a father who was a full colonel and base commander at the Air Force Academy. "He did very well for himself, but I turned out as a bad seed," Powers said. "I was a sports fanatic, a great football player in high school. I've never really had a job, except I was a dealer back in the early '70s at Carl's Silver Club in Reno. It was a small club, a hands-on operation, and I was the first black poker dealer in Reno."

After eight months, Powers got in trouble when a player threw coffee on him after a bad beat. Powers grabbed the player's shirt and got a two-day suspension. Then, one thing led to another. He started gambling, got involved with a cocktail waitress, began doing drugs, and started his downhill slide. "I call it 30 years wandering around in the desert," Powers sighed.

However, he wasn't totally homeless and a society dropout during this time. "I was an entrepreneur and very sharp. I went to Kansas, and had a band, there and in Utah. Then, I went back to Kansas, which is my home base, with all my family." Powers got married and his father gave him money to start a firewood business. Then, his wife left him. "I guess I was really in love with her, and I got lost for a lot of years.

"Drugs kind of took over. I began drinking and made a lot of mistakes. The next thing I knew, I was back in L.A. trying to work as a dealer. I blew about two or three banks on drugs, including a bank at The Bicycle Casino. At that time, I also worked at the Normandie and the Horseshoe (in Gardena), with Robert Turner."

Unable to work without money for a bank, he decided to go to Washington state to try to learn how to play no-limit, because, he said, in the mid-'80s, Washington was the no-limit capital of the world, and he had a dream of winning the World Series. He ended up doing jail time for drugs there. "During that time, I slept outside a lot. It got cold there in the winter, and I had to learn how to survive. I slept during the day, in a lot of abandoned cars, and played poker and did things at night. I was there four years and probably worked only two months."

Powers eventually tired of Washington and returned to California. He never had a job, but had Amir Vahedi as a tournament backer. He won a couple of events and also managed to get himself barred from Hollywood Park Casino for sleeping there a couple of times. He never really slept under a bridge, he explained. Actually, he slept under a warm vent near the old Forum in Inglewood. "Probably, people are still living there. Thank God I've been lucky enough to survive this whole thing," he said, choking up.

Last year he was walking out of The Bicycle Casino when a friend of his – Brian McCann, a one-time host there – offered to stake him in a no-limit tournament in the Winnin' o' the Green, where he did "fairly well." The next night the casino had a $300 limit hold'em tournament. Powers wanted to play, but was having trouble cashing his welfare check. He finally got to the casino five minutes before the event started. He was still short of cash, so McCann gave him half the buy-in, and Powers ended up winning his first tournament ever. Two days later he played in the $300 pot-limit hold'em event and got heads up with a 10-1 chip lead over Jim Miller, a top player and last year's World Series of Poker tournament co-director. The accepted story is that when Powers suggested a deal and a little extra money, Miller held out for an even chop, and Powers agreed because money was too valuable for him to risk further play, even with such a dominant lead. Powers said that's not true, that he gave Miller $12,000 and took $17,000, which was certainly not in proportion to the chip count, but he thought Miller was too dangerous an opponent, and he didn't want to risk gambling.

Powers decided against sticking around and playing for the all-around points championship, and went to Reno instead, where he played $10-$20, eventually making enough, along with his tournament money, to pay off most of the $35,000 in debt he had accumulated.

From there he went to Vegas with $4,400. He had been at the WSOP for two years before that, made money both years, and knew his way around. Instead of a pricey hotel room, he paid for a few weeks to secure a $140 a week room. "I knew what I was doing, because those two years I had been standing on the sidelines watching all the great players. And I knew a lot of great players, like Tuna, and Michael Laing, who's one of my best friends." He played mostly live action, then won a $1,500 satellite. "I played the tournament ($1,500 limit hold'em), but blew it. A friend came down, and I spent time and had a couple of drinks with him. I had never played a World Series before and wasn't ready for the long hours. I was so tired, I only ended up 17th."

Powers said he learned a lesson: "You can't drink and play, because if you play real late, the alcohol will affect you the last hour."

After that, he waited around and played some more satellites and live games. Finally, a friend and tournament player, Mickey "Mouse" Mills, put him in a $500 satellite, which he won. The $5,000 event played down to 13 players on day one, and when Powers returned the next day, the weirdness began. He began betting, and raising and reraising, sometimes without looking at his cards, wandering away from the table for five and 10 minutes at a time during action, goading players, laughing hysterically when he beat Jim McManus with a king high, and causing all kinds of disruptions. The onlookers loved it and cheered, but Powers created chaos at the table. McManus, in a now-famous quote, berated him for "disrespecting" the game. McManus, the Harper's Magazine writer who electrified the poker world by finishing fifth in the championship event in 2000, later posted on the Internet that he didn't chastise Powers just for betting dark.

"He'd just spent two hours aggressively taunting the likes of T.J. Cloutier and David Chiu, two of the best players ever. He also left the table during the action several times, muttering to himself, claiming anyone who wanted to finish higher than sixth was crazy or greedy. Anyone who was there can tell you he was 186,676 miles out of line," McManus wrote.

I asked Powers to explain his behavior. "I made some bad choices." He said he'd had no sleep the night before because he let McCann have his room, couldn't find another, ended up drinking, went to a girlfriend's house in the morning, and suddenly realized it was nearly time for the tournament to resume. "I was in bad shape. I knew I'd have a problem winning, so I decided to put the players off balance."

Walking in the door, he immediately tried to put T.J. on tilt. He accused him of being a "choker," saying T.J. had made so many WSOP final tables in the past without winning any until that year. Betting and raising in the dark was another deliberate move aimed at getting players to change their standards and come after him, and it seemed to work. And leaving the table was another strategy. He had plenty of chips and could afford to miss some blinds, and perhaps players would get knocked out during that time, he reasoned. As for his taunting Chiu, Powers insisted that it made no difference because, "I could read him like an open book."

How much his erratic play helped or hurt is debatable, but he lasted to seventh place when Chiu knocked him out with pocket queens. His payday was $40,000.

And today? Well, Powers didn't get to keep very much of his overall $100,000 in winnings after paying off his backers and debts. He still doesn't have a permanent residence, making the Reno Hilton his current home base. He's talking to an agent to promote him and perhaps get him speaking engagements, and he's also been engaged to be a speaker at an upcoming "Poker Academy" being launched in the L.A. area by Stuart Locascio. The Academy is designed to provide live poker experience for those too timid, or too young, to enter a land-based casino. "There's nothing like sitting at a table, hearing the chips splash and the cards riffle, breathing the recycled air," Locascio explained. At the same time, Powers will be part of documentary now being shot by Clay Campbell of Far Flung Films. The documentary will follow the lives and careers of several pros as they play in cash games and tournaments.

And that's the Ellix Powers story to date. Whether he'll become a poker rock star or take up residence again under the vent, only time will tell.