The Big Laydown

As a reader of the world's leading poker magazine, you are accustomed to very sophisticated analyses. Compared with other magazines to which I have contributed, you actually want columns throwing around phrases like "dry side pot," "post oak bluff," and "badugi."



This is my first column for Card Player, and I did not get the job on the strength of my poker game. Notwithstanding that Barnes & Noble's web site referred to me as "poker ace Michael Craig," my best poker is in front of me. At least, I pray that is the case.



My position in the poker firmament rests on the year I spent with the world's best poker players and the book I wrote along the way. It was great fun, very rewarding, and gave me something to talk about at parties. Ten years ago, I had to tell people that I was a lawyer. Imagine how that went over. Five years ago, when people learned I was a business and finance writer, they told me (a) long, boring stories about their stock market losses, or (b) their ideas for a novel, which were themselves long, boring stories.



Now, everybody wants to talk about poker, and people are fascinated by the lives and games of the world's best players. The comment I hear most often is, "You must have turned into an excellent poker player, spending all that time with players like Howard Lederer, Ted Forrest, Barry Greenstein, and Jennifer Harman." Do these people believe poker skill is transmitted like the flu, or that shooting dice with Ted Forrest or helping Mike Matusow find his runaway cat translates into a certain number of bets per hour of expected value?



Unfortunately, even though I have been to Vegas 31 times since January 2004, tracking down and interviewing poker players is such an inefficient business that playing poker was almost impossible. What kind of schedule can you set if George the Greek is in town, or Larry Flynt calls a game in L.A., or Ted Forrest and Phil Ivey are at the craps table and the dice are hot?



As a journalist, I am not complaining. This attitude toward schedules worked in my favor. The first time I met Mike Matusow, he let me interview him for so long that he occasionally forgot the question he was answering.



After completing a fascinating analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the world's most successful tournament players, he finally asked, "Did that answer your last question?"



"Mike," I told him, "I think the last question I asked was whether it was OK to record this interview." If you are trying to get information, can you do better than interview someone nicknamed "The Mouth"? I enjoyed the experience so much that it started a friendship.



I ran into Mike Laing in The Mirage poker room last summer. Instead of playing in a World Poker Tour satellite, I was treated to almost two hours of Laing's bizarre, fascinating stories about flipping a coin for $8,000 with a stranger, offering to loan a billionaire $25,000, and taking a break as the chip leader from the main event of the World Series to stop by a local hospital's emergency room.



Another time last summer, after spending two months trying to pin Ted Forrest down for an interview, we finally talked for two hours outside Bellagio. When I returned to my room, he had left me a message about a story he had forgotten to tell me. It was 3 a.m., but this started a round of phone calls that lasted until the sun came up. Ted told me about bets made over whether Huck Seed and Howard Lederer could cross weights, whether Ted could run a marathon in the Las Vegas heat on the Fourth of July, whether Seed (between eight-hour tennis sessions) could spend 24 hours in a strip joint, and whether John Hennigan could live for a month in Des Moines.



I loved every moment, but I didn't have too many chances to see if any of this helped my poker game.



It wasn't lack of practice that concerned me when I played in the WPT Legends of Poker tournament at The Bicycle Casino in August. It was lack of skill. I don't think my friends among the pros were really evaluating my game, but I didn't want to make an early exit and have them say, "Don't quit your night job."



I got eliminated after less than three hours. In my defense, I don't think I could have gotten away from the hand that eliminated me. I held a pair of kings, trapped an aggressive player by merely calling his raise, and then checked when rags flopped to encourage him to make a big bet. I sprung the trap, moving all in. He called and sprung his pocket aces on me.



Jennifer Harman was sitting right behind me and we had just been talking. When I tapped her on the shoulder and told her I'd been eliminated, she registered a look of disappointment. Even though she had cards in front of her for her next hand, I used my expert player-reading skills to deduce that she wanted a detailed explanation of how I went broke and, most important, how it wasn't my fault. As she started focusing on both my nonsensical explanation and the poker tournament she had paid $5,000 to enter, I instead muttered, "I lost kings to aces. I couldn't get away from that, right?"



She could have humored me. If I had asked her if, say, wearing a monocle and a turban would make me look more distinguished, she probably would have spared my feelings. Sure. Whatever.



But this was poker. During the year that I had spent asking questions about her life in poker – far too many, Jen would tell you – she always gave me the full story when it came to what happened at the table, regardless of whether her analysis was critical of herself or an opponent. After the last interview, she even told me she didn't like the idea of the book including the discussions about the heads-up strategies employed against Andy Beal. But she couldn't be false about it. So, would she validate my belief that I was doomed to lose all of my chips on the hand?



"Well … I don't know. I didn't see the hand."



Ouch. I walked away stunned, both from losing and from Harman not seeing what I thought was obvious. What does she know, huh? Like she'd throw away kings? No way!



I believed that, up to the moment I read two days later that she was in a hand against Paul Phillips in which she threw away pocket aces after the flop with a 10-high board. Phillips showed his pocket tens after she folded.



If nothing else, I have learned that the pros are "the pros" for a reason. If we don't see it, that's probably the reason.