The River

The Spectator

At 11 p.m. on Sunday night, a sophomore invited me to his fraternity
house to watch him play cards. As his computer woke up, we talked poker
strategy, and he asked about the tournament in Broadway’s lounge that I
had just left. As I told him about the $10 buy-in, it took me a minute
to realize that on his screen, he had just put $2,000 into play: $500
each at four simultaneous tables.

A poker trend that has been spreading for years across Columbia’s
campus—and nationwide—has developed to the point that casual games are
ubiquitous, official clubs are grooming novices, and high rollers like
Richard, the sophomore, are earning significant sums.

The great bulk of players, of course, don’t bet at his altitude—for
them, Texas Hold ’Em remains just a game. Richard, a varsity athlete
who asked that his real name not be used because of NCAA gambling
regulations, is best described as a semi-pro—he is among the few on
campus to craft his game to the point that he can rely on regular
profit.

We spoke for more than an hour, and only rarely, for perhaps a few
seconds at a time, did Richard stop moving his mouse between the four
simultaneous games on his screen. Click. Click. Click. Click. Bet.
Fold. Raise. Raise. Raise. Five dollars and $10 at a time, the
money—real money—leaked out and came rushing back.

Although I play online poker almost an hour a day, I am totally
unable to keep up with Richard’s betting at any one of his four tables.
At one of them, he starts with pocket jacks, a great hand. “Look at
this, I think I’m gonna win this one,” he says, but another player
shows pocket kings. “Eh,” he shrugs, as the money is digitally routed
to his opponent.

At 11 p.m., I check his chip stacks: $510, $450, $443, $574.
Overall, he’s down $23, or one percent off his initial total of $2,000.

Richard is just getting started.

Built-in Advantages

“Here’s something interesting,” Richard says as he calls up a
program called Poker Tracker. His screen fills with data—a breakdown,
in every conceivable way, of all 68,539 hands he has played in the last
four months. “It can show me all my aces—my win percentage with aces,
how much I’ve won with ’em. I can click on this here to play back the
hand—it’ll reanimate exactly what happened, who bet when. Or here, look
at this guy,” he says, moving to one of the tables and clicking on a
player with the handle “INeedRunners.”

Poker Tracker reports that they’ve met before—a window pops up with
a complete record of their shared hands. Richard ticks off the
statistics. “Attempted to steal the blinds: 14 percent of the time.
Folded the river bet: 50 percent of the time. His aggression factor:
looks like this guy is pretty aggressive. All that helps me make
decisions. When you’re playing four tables at a time, you don’t have
time to just sit there and watch people.” The $55 program tells Richard
practically everything except what cards the other guys are holding.

Richard doesn’t even have to win to make money. In poker, players
compete against each other and not the house, so to make a profit,
casinos take a “rake”—a small percentage of the pot. Empire Poker has
offered Richard a deal—because he plays at such a volume, he gets 25
percent of the rake back. If he simply breaks even, that works out to
an average of $12 an hour.

Richard also gets paid to promote the site—if he recruits new
customers, he gets 10 percent of their rake back, too. A typical day
nets $60, but the figure can go a lot higher.

“I went to Atlantic City on Friday and played in some $20/$40 games.
Broke even, I guess,” he says. “But then I got back and checked what my
friends had done online. I made $323 that day, without even sitting
down at a computer.”

Casual Games, Moderate Pots

A far more common—and modest—incarnation of poker at Columbia is the
casual game, often found in floor lounges or larger suites’ kitchen
tables. A standard buy-in is $10 to $20; multiplied by six to eight
players, it’s a big payoff to the winner and not much of a sting to the
losers.

Jonathan Treitel, CC ’05, sends out a weekly e-mail to a private list announcing games and helping players link up.

“We started out playing $5 games—now it’s up to $10,” Treitel said.
“I like to have a little money in it—otherwise people don’t take it
seriously; they’ll go in with anything. We like to keep it low stakes,
tournament-style, so no one really gets hurt. Other times, when we’ve
had a ring game where you can buy back in, we’ve had people really plow
themselves under. Or we’ve had people buy in with $10 and walk away
with $100.” Anything can happen, especially with new players coming and
going.

While most skilled players ante in for only 10 to 20 percent of
hands, TV programs like Celebrity Poker Showdown and ESPN’s World
Series of Poker can make every deal seem like a blockbuster. “They only
show the real big-action hands, so it doesn’t really teach you how to
play,” Treitel said. “You only see when someone has ace-king going
against someone with pocket jacks. It doesn’t show you the hand after
hand that these guys are folding.”

Poker can be like pick-up basketball—play the same people over and
over again and you’ll get good at exploiting their weaknesses. But when
a newcomer with a different set of skills shows up, you might lose big.

The Columbia University Poker Society, which had its first meeting
last week, aims to link aspiring players currently isolated in pockets
across campus.

“A lot of the excitement of poker is playing against new people,
learning their strategies and techniques,” said Michael “Chester”
Curtis, CC ’05, a co-founder. “It’s a social game, so what we’re trying
to do is add some variety and get people to reach outside their small
social circles and use poker as a device to meet new people and expand
their own poker-playing potential at the same time.”

Curtis was not surprised to learn that Richard, the high roller, is able to make a significant amount of money online.

“The thing about poker is that you’ll find—especially in a game like
Texas Hold ’Em—there’s a trade-off between the entertainment value and
the cash payoff value,” Curtis said. Some players just like the thrill
of going all-in, even with mediocre hands. A common scenario is a
student blowing his entire stack toward the end of a tournament. Sure,
he walks away with nothing—but it took him two or three hours to lose
the $10 to $20, about what he might have spent at a movie or a bar
anyway.

“There’s those people, and then there’s the ones who are playing
ultraconservative, especially online, clicking the button maybe once a
minute, only playing when they’ve got the right hand,” he says. “If
you’re willing to just sit there and let the money trickle in, you can
make a lot of money.”

Nerves

By 11:30 p.m., Richard is doing worse—down $176. If this was my
money, I would have been spooked off the tables long ago. Richard
doesn’t seem nearly as nervous as I am. As if to prove him right, as I
look at his weakest stack, a big pot jumps him from $392 to $474. He
shrugs, giving about the same reaction as to an earlier bad beat. In
the hour or so that I observe his play, not once did he curse in anger
or pump a fist or otherwise display emotion.

Despite the tremendous amount of money changing hands, Richard
really does seem to keep a cool head—so when he says he has a handle on
his gambling, I believe him.

“People tell me I have a gambling problem all the time,” he says. “I
don’t see it as a problem whatsoever. It’s more of a statistical
analysis of a situation than anything. In the long run, it’s a positive
output, as opposed to me just putting $300 on red every night.”

Individual hands seem not to faze him. At one point, he focuses on a
table that he wished he’d folded. “I guarantee you I lost this hand.
Oh, hey, what do you know?” he says, as the pot came his way.

“I thought I was totally screwed there, and I ended up winning.
Something I hate: people will bitch about bad beats all the time. I am
fucking sick of hearing bad beat stories. Like in the tournament
today”—that afternoon, Richard had entered a $200 tournament with a
guaranteed prize pool of $250,000—“I ran up against aces with my
queens, and I lost.”

“But there have been times when people bet queens against my aces.
It’s just going to happen, and if you let it eat you, if you get really
pissed off every time you lose a hand you shouldn’t have...” Richard
trails off to calculate the pot odds of his pair with a straight draw.
He loses.

“You’ve just got to let it go.”

Transition to Steady Money

Richard started playing a Monday night game early in high school.
“It started off as a $5 buy-in and got real cutthroat,” he says. Soon
some of the high schoolers, including Richard, were buying in for up to
$100.

“I was not always a good poker player,” Richard says. “There was a
point when I thought I was good enough to play online and make money
and definitely was not. I was always telling my parents I was good
enough to do this and make money, and they never really believed me.”

Today, Richard says, his parents pay for tuition and housing, and his poker income takes care of the rest.

Harnessing a Fad

Dustin Brauneck, CC ’05, an RA in Broadway, wasn’t arousing much
interest in his February event, a fundraiser for the Columbia
University Dance Marathon on Jan. 29. “I was having trouble with my
advertising, even though I was flyering everywhere,” he said.

Then he asked the students at the Poker Society to get involved.

“As soon as I did, I got just a ton of responses. This is more than
I was expecting, honestly,” he said, surveying the 40-plus students
spread across the Broadway Sky Lounge on Sunday night. They were seated
eight to a table, each with a fake $1,500 in chips, about to compete
for an iPod Mini, a DVD player, and two pairs of ballet tickets. Each
had paid a $10 entry fee.

“We made $400 like that,” Brauneck said, snapping. “There was no question we were going to get a lot of money.”

The tournament followed a similar one in Schapiro’s ground-floor
lounge three weeks earlier, which had also offered an iPod as a prize.
(Tournament organizers are still unsure about the legality of offering
cash or cash-equivalent prizes.)

The popularity of Texas Hold ’Em, coupled with the social network of
CUPS, has enabled these notoriously under-attended events to entertain
residents and raise money to boot.

At the Broadway tournament on Sunday, the variety of skill levels is
immediately apparent—some players drop phrases like “string bet” and
“check-raise,” but Mike—an athlete who, like Richard, didn’t want his
name used—folded one hand when he could have checked for free. “Oops,”
he shrugs. “I’m the newbie at the table.”

Most mistakes were forgiven, but everyone had a breaking point. Will
Jamieson, CC ’07, called a big bet with just a five high—only folding
or raising (bluffing) would have been appropriate. Ben Dooberman, CC
’05, couldn’t believe it. “Why’d you call?” he demanded. “Why’d you
call $300 on a bluff? You had—you had the worst possible hand!”
Jamieson brushed it aside and won an all-in bet on the next hand.

Clock in, Clock out, Get Paid

“I’ll still play in person every once in a while, just hanging out
with buddies, drinking and whatnot, but if they’re playing downstairs
for like five bucks, I’d rather just come up here and play on my
computer, ’cause I can make so much more money,” Richard says.

He’s not antisocial. He reacts with scorn to the idea of playing
alone on a Saturday night. It’s just that at his level, poker is all
business.

Earlier, he had explained how to keep a cool head. Don’t think of it
as being up or down; don’t quit when you’re losing or keep on just
because you’re winning; poker is just one big unending session. You’ve
got an equal chance tomorrow. Clock in, clock out, get paid.

“This summer I’ll get an internship, probably one that doesn’t pay,
and do this at night just for the money.” He mentions the idea of
expanding his operation—buying another computer at $1,200 to play eight
games at a time. His cut of the casino’s rake would double to $24 an
hour.

Salaries, investments, regulated play—Richard’s poker was sounding an awful lot like a job.

I had to ask—is it still fun?

He thinks for a long second. “I don’t dislike it or anything—I’d
much rather do this than schoolwork,” he says. “But there’s certainly
times I’d rather be doing something else. I do kind of feel compelled
to play as much as I can, which is tough, because I don’t have a ton of
time to relax and just watch TV and play video games. It does wear on
you sometimes.”

He turns to face me. “There’s part of me that would rather play than
do something else,” he says, “and part of me that feels like I should
play. Does that make any sense?”

Richard looks back to his computer screen. In one window, he holds
queens and 10s, a monster hand. But it isn’t the nuts—a king is on the
board, and when Richard is re-raised on the turn, he knows he’s beaten.

“Now I gotta call this guy down. I know he’s got trip kings. Shit,” he says.

He’s right. His stack drops to $291. After a few more hands Richard
logs off. He’s down about $280 after an hour of play, more than most
students spend in a month.

Richard was completely unruffled. He’d make it back tomorrow, and profit the next time around. Just another day at the office.