Michael Kaplan: Meeting Mike Matusow And Getting My Story KilledPoker Author Recalls An Encounter With One Of Poker's More Intriguing Personalities |
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One great thing about chronicling the poker world is that you meet the most interesting people while on assignment. The recent Amazon Prime release of his documentary reminded me of that very thing and confirmed what a great character (and a guy with character) Mike “The Mouth” Matusow is.
The first time we spoke for an extended period was back in the early 2000s. That was when a semi-cool magazine called Radar sent me to Las Vegas to report a story about a professional poker player who went to jail in the wake of a wild ecstasy sting.
The player in question, of course, was Matusow.
Improbably, he insisted that six months of incarceration gave him a better view of life – even if it did nothing to temper his notorious willingness to gamble recklessly.
Matusow opened our interview by declaring, “I’m stuck $60,000. But that’s okay… Last night I was behind $100,000. I’ve still got $2 million, and, this football season, I’m telling all the bookies that after I fall behind $200,000 I’m f****** walking.”
Did he really walk? Who knows.
Incontestable is that Matusow’s long reign as one of the game’s most entertaining players can be attributed (at least in part) to his hot-headed verbiage, love of profanity, and litany of ticks.
But those offbeat characteristics – which handily intimidate amateur opponents and garner him lots of airtime on poker telecasts – sometimes mask his ability to get soul-bleeding reads on opponents and to play hands against them perfectly. His skillfulness at deuce-to-seven lowball is such that, in the summer 2021, after Phil Hellmuth won his 16th WSOP bracelet, the first thing he did was hug a railbirding Matusow.
Hellmuth later told me that Matusow had been giving him lessons in how to play lowball and that Matusow might be the best in the world at it.
Beyond lowball, Matusow plays all the games. This was evidenced when I ran into him at Resorts World, soon after it opened, in the fall of ’21. Sporting a freshly shaved pate, he played at a high-stakes mixed-games table, bragging to me about his most enduring rush in a long while.
“I’m playing so good,” Matusow boasted, letting slip an outrageously high sum he’d won over the year. It was a welcome turn of events after having been broke due to a massive streak of bad beats, crippling pain (his back got screwed up from a mishap in the front seat of Dan Bilzerian’s sports car), a laundry-list of mind-numbing pharmaceuticals, and who knows what else. “Right now, I’m making big folds and am correct every time.”
I’ve always found Matusow to be compelling, even if my editor at Radar did not. (She killed the ecstasy-sting story. I wound up selling it to the now dead US edition of FHM magazine.)
I last saw him while reporting a Golf Digest article about professional poker players gambling on the links. Matusow’s got no interest in driving, chipping, and putting, but after hearing that Hellmuth would be playing, he couldn’t resist tagging along, heckling everyone and trying to win money off them by throwing out prop bets.
Riding to the first hole, he made clear that high-flying gambling tendencies never completely fade. “I don’t know s*** about golf,” Matusow said with a shrug. Fingering a $5,000 chip, which, to his eventual dismay, would somehow get misplaced.
“But I’ll bet on anything.”
Check out Matusow – or, even better, try engaging him in a goofy wager – and you’ll likely see that it’s true for all the best reasons.
Michael Kaplan is a journalist based in New York City. He is the author of five books (“The Advantage Players” comes out in 2024) and has worked for publications that include Wired, GQ and the New York Post. He has written extensively on technology, gambling, and business — with a particular interest in spots where all three intersect. His article on Kelly “Baccarat Machine” Sun and Phil Ivey is currently in development as a feature film.
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