Poker Players

Erick Lindgren doesn’t lock the doors of his home, which is in a gated community in North Las Vegas. This way, his friends, who are mostly professional poker players, like him, can drop in anytime, to swim, shoot hoops, play snooker, or watch sports on a sixty-one-inch projection television—or on any of six smaller plasma screens—in his living room. Lindgren’s place is a bachelor pad in the literal sense: it’s usually filled with single men. On my first visit, in December, several young Swedes and Danes, in town for the Five Diamond World Poker Classic tournament at the Bellagio casino, sprawled on a vast sectional couch in Lindgren’s living room, tracking N.F.L. bets on their laptops and playing online poker. Lindgren, a beefy, blond twenty-eight-year-old from Burney, California, sat at a pedestal desk in the middle of the room. He was wearing flip-flops, a T-shirt, and baby-blue pajama bottoms, and was simultaneously watching the football lineup on the seven TVs and playing online poker.
On a Saturday evening in May, by contrast, the mood in the room was almost ascetic. Lindgren’s friend Daniel Negreanu, a thirty-year-old Canadian player who writes frequently about poker and is currently ranked No. 1 in lifetime tournament earnings by the Hendon Mob Poker Database, a Web site that gathers statistics about the game, sat on the couch leafing through a Swedish poker magazine that included a translation of one of his columns: “Den största pott jag någonsin förlorat” (“The Biggest Pot I’ve Ever Lost”). Negreanu, who is pale and lean, with a scruffy Caesar cut that he colors blond, laughed and read the title aloud in a convincing Swedish singsong; he can imitate anyone he’s played with, which, he says, gives him a feel for how an opponent thinks. Soon, Lindgren showed up, to take a shower. He had just lost seventy thousand dollars in a golf game—by playing for ten thousand a hole—against his friend Phil Ivey, another poker pro, but he seemed remarkably cheerful. He said that he had lost fifteen pounds in the past month and was likely to cash in on a twenty-thousand-dollar weight-loss wager that he had made with another friend.
For Lindgren and Negreanu, this was an unusually quiet weekend, the last before the World Series of Poker, an annual event, which runs this year from the beginning of June through the middle of July and culminates in a week-long championship in no-limit Texas hold ’em, currently the most popular version of the game. But the living room seemed different, too. DVDs that had been scattered on the floor in December were now neatly filed in a caddy by the fireplace, and, above the mantelpiece, an oil painting of Kramer, from “Seinfeld,” and an oversized presentation check for a million dollars, from PartyPoker.com, were arranged in crisp right angles. Lindgren had hired a housekeeper.
For professional poker players, engaging a housekeeper is not a simple task, largely because of their relationship to cash. They keep a lot of it around, in loose wads; the game both provides and requires it. “It’s the silliest thing,” Negreanu said, “but I feel naked unless I have some money on me. If I was going to the Rite Aid right here, just to get some shampoo, I would bring six or seven thousand, just in case. Like if, on the way, I had to buy a car.” On my first visit, Lindgren’s roommate, Ryan Bambrough, had left a tournament buy-in, or entry fee—in this case, three thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills—on the marble island in the kitchen. The money sat there all afternoon, while Lindgren’s guests traipsed in and out, fetching slices of takeout pizza during commercial breaks. To tidy a house that contains so much cash that you have to tidy the cash itself requires a housekeeper who is part saint. Lindgren’s friend Jennifer Harman, who may be the best female poker player in the world and lives a few miles away with her husband and four dogs, recommended her housekeeper, Maricarmen Soria. Now Negreanu employs her, too.
Poker is experiencing a cash boom. In the past five years, the first-place prize in the World Series of Poker’s championship event has grown from a million dollars, in 2000, to an estimated eight million this year, an increase that can be traced to developments in television and on the Internet that have attracted new players in unprecedented numbers. In 1998, the first online-poker sites made it possible for people to log on from anywhere, at any time. The money flowing into poker sites padded the bankrolls of young players like Lindgren, who won his first online tournament when he was twenty-two and was soon earning seven times what he had been making at his local casino. But the Web sites didn’t really take off until professional poker tournaments began appearing regularly on television, early in 2003. Television producers used reality-show-style editing and clever camera angles to make the game look exciting and deceptively easy. Viewers responded by taking out their credit cards, sitting down at their computers, and playing the game online. Poker sites returned the favor by rewarding winners of Internet tournaments with entry fees to televised tournaments, and the accumulation of those fees—which can be as much as fifteen thousand dollars—has resulted in multimillion-dollar purses on the pro tour. In tournament play alone, Negreanu has earned more than six million dollars since 1997. (He estimates that he has won another six million in online games and at casino cash games.) Lindgren, who is currently twenty-third on the Hendon Mob site, has collected more than three million since 1999.
Winnings are no longer the only source of revenue for successful poker pros. Draped over the back of Lindgren’s couch were three unworn jerseys, in basketball, baseball, and football versions—the latest merchandise from FullTiltPoker.com, which pays him to wear clothes bearing the company’s logo when he plays in tournaments. (He has a similar deal with Knob Creek Bourbon.) Negreanu is in greater demand. His poker-related side ventures include—in addition to his columns, which appear in the magazine Card Player and in twelve newspapers—a Web site and blog, fullcontactpoker.com, which receives a hundred thousand visitors a month; a video game called Stacked, which goes on sale this fall; a how-to book, which is to be published next year; an instructional DVD; a poker-chip set; and a bobble-head doll in his likeness. In February, he signed an agreement with FocusonPoker.com to endorse Clear Edge, an adrenaline blocker that is being marketed as a “poker vitamin” and has been popular with nascar drivers, because it keeps them relaxed. “I was laughing the first time I heard that,” Negreanu said. “Then I took them and I said, ‘You know what? They kind of work.’ ”
“I can count on more than one hand the guys who did speed and went from average players to making million-dollar bankrolls,” he added. “But then they became dependent on it, and they wound up going broke and being in debt.” (In poker circles, Negreanu is famous for his meat-free and caffeine-free diet, and he swears that he has never taken drugs.)
Between tournaments, Lindgren and Negreanu often play pool together, or visit comedy clubs. When Negreanu, a Toronto native, flew home to throw the first pitch at a Blue Jays game in May, Lindgren went along, and Negreanu complained affectionately in his blog about how loudly his friend had snored in the plane seat next to him. But although the two players are only a couple of years apart, they come from opposite sides of poker’s generational divide. Negreanu, a former teen-age bookie, who was thrown out of high school for running a study-hall poker game, was one of the last poker stars to emerge from the world of casino halls and private games. Lindgren, who worked briefly as a casino dealer, owes his career almost entirely to the Internet, and until recently earned most of his money playing online.
Inevitably, the two meet at poker tables. In February, at a tournament for élite players in Los Angeles, they faced each other at the final table, and Lindgren pulled off what he called a “monster bluff” against Negreanu. The cards almost don’t matter: Lindgren started off with a bet of seventy thousand dollars, and Negreanu, sensing a weak hand, raised him two hundred thousand. “I put two hundred and seventy thousand in, so I have two hundred thousand left,” Negreanu said. “And Erick looks over my chips and says, ‘How much you got left?’ And he moves all in”—wagering all he had. Under the special betting rules governing the tournament, Negreanu had only ninety seconds to decide whether to call the bet, and risk losing all his money if Lindgren wasn’t bluffing, or to fold, and give up the hefty sum that he had already put into the pot.
“I didn’t think he could be so stupid,” Negreanu said. “But it wasn’t stupid. It was like a step above. He knows that I know that he wouldn’t do something so stupid, so by doing something so quote-unquote stupid it actually became a great play.”
Negreanu folded, and Lindgren went on to win the tournament and its quarter-million-dollar first-place prize.
Poker favors players with heads for numbers, those who can coolly calculate from the incomplete information before them—the cards in their hand, the cards dealt face up on the table, and the size of an opponent’s bet—their likelihood of winning. But in its most sophisticated form, the games in which Lindgren and Negreanu earn their wealth, poker requires a gift for psychological insight and a flair for making unexpected moves. Lindgren and Negreanu are scornful of the players they call the “math guys,” who rely on game theory and probability at the expense of intuition. Still, math is at the core of poker’s basic strategies, and Negreanu believes that these can be quickly and profitably learned.
“I went to speak at Ohio State and I ended up jokingly saying that I’m starting my Stay Out of School program,” he said. “I was totally kidding, but, realistically, it’s not that far-fetched an idea. For kids that are eighteen, nineteen years old, that are going to go to college, get a dead-end job where they make fifty or sixty thousand dollars a year, I can take that same kid, teach him how to play poker, and in three months show him how to make more money than he would ever make in that dead-end job.
“The stock market is gambling, right?” he continued. “This kid studies and he makes money in the stock market, and this is considered by society O.K. A poker player, a kid, sees all these idiots making poor investments on these poker hands and says, ‘Wow, I could do a better job than they’re doing,’ and he studies, and he makes it. How is that different, realistically, than a stockbroker? I mean, I don’t see the difference.”
“Well,” Lindgren said, “there’s more cheating and collusion in the stock market.”
The latest generation of players is changing the face of poker, literally. You can spot the people who still come to the table with the old poker face—slack, unblinking, inscrutable. Doyle (Texas Dolly) Brunson is one of the best practitioners of this look. He grew up on the prairie fifty miles west of Abilene, and in the nineteen-fifties he drove around the state playing no-limit Texas hold ’em in private games with Thomas (Amarillo Slim) Preston and Brian (Sailor) Roberts. The three often played in professional surroundings with high rollers—oilmen, cattlemen, and financiers—but in some back rooms their opponents proved less than honorable. “I’ve been hijacked a few times,” Brunson wrote in “Super System: A Course in Power Poker,” which was first published in 1978, “and I can tell you it’s not a pleasant experience to be looking down at the business end of a shotgun.”
For most of Brunson’s career, poker’s reputation could be reduced to its old nineteenth-century nickname: the cheating game. (The word “poker” comes from “je poque,” meaning “I knock” or “I bet,” a phrase used by French-speaking gamblers in New Orleans in the early eighteen-hundreds.) During one rigged contest on a Mississippi steamboat in 1832, James Bowie allegedly pulled his hunting blade—the original bowie knife—on a fellow-player who was holding six cards; he should have had five. Poker flourished in frontier towns, where it incorporated elements of established games, like the British bluffing game brag, and acquired additional rounds of betting, which made it possible for skillful gamblers to wrest larger amounts of money from inexperienced players. But by the end of the nineteen-twenties, poker and its many local variants—stud, spit in the ocean, Kansas City lowball—had been banned, along with other forms of gambling, in most of the West.
Nevada legalized casinos in 1931, and in the early nineteen-sixties several “road gamblers” from Texas introduced no-limit Texas hold ’em to Las Vegas. Hold ’em proved simple to grasp and difficult to master, even for experienced gamblers. Major Riddle, who booked the first topless show in Vegas, lost his controlling interest in the Dunes casino after he lost several million dollars playing hold ’em. In 1970, Binion’s Horseshoe Casino hosted the first World Series of Poker, and the original trophy went, by peer vote, to Johnny Moss, a Texas veteran who had seen the need, on one occasion, to point his gun at a peephole in a poker-room ceiling and inquire, “Now, fellas, do I have to go and shoot a bullet in the ceiling? Or you going to send your boy down without any harm?”
Hold ’em did not become a watchable pastime in this country until March, 2003, when Steve Lipscomb, a television producer, created the World Poker Tour, an annual championship series, and began broadcasting it in weekly installments on the Travel Channel. The shows incorporated an obscure English innovation: hidden cameras that allowed the television audience to see each player’s two “hole” cards, which, in hold ’em, are combined with the five community cards dealt face up in the middle of the table to make the best possible five-card hand. (Players bet on their likelihood of having the winning hand, first after the hole cards are dealt, then on three more occasions, after the dealer introduces the third, fourth, and fifth community cards.) The hole-card cams, along with on-screen graphics that instantly calculate each hand’s odds of winning, cut viewers in on the action: once you know who’s bluffing and who’s holding the best hand, players’ facial expressions become legible and entertainingly full of portent.
Veteran players objected to the hole-card cam, arguing that it divulged signature moves and made it possible for practically anybody to try them, and, in a sense, that’s exactly what happened. According to PokerPulse.com, which tracks online play, when the first W.P.T. tournament aired some eighty-eight thousand players were betting almost sixteen million dollars in online poker games every day. Today, those figures have increased more than tenfold: in May, 1.8 million players bet two hundred million dollars online every day. Nearly every televised poker event now includes an unknown online winner playing for the big money at the final table with the pros. These players tend to eschew the flamboyance of the traditional poker costume—cowboy hats and belt buckles, loud Vegas jackets, two-fingered gold rings—in favor of student wear: baseball caps, T-shirts, and wraparound sunglasses. Suburban, clean cut, and frequently college-educated, the Internet winners are helping to turn poker into a respectable, almost wholesome career choice—the latest version, after dot-com startups and day trading, of the American get-rich-quick scheme, a lotto for the thoughtful, and with better odds.
The Bellagio, which added ten tables to its thirty-table poker room and refurbished a separate area for high-stakes cash games in April, has been more responsive than most casinos to the influx of flush, young players. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the Bellagio offers a series of qualifiers and specialty tournaments culminating in the Five Diamond World Poker Classic, one of the casino’s contributions to the W.P.T. The prize pool for the Five Diamond last December was nearly five and a half million dollars, making it among the largest purses on the poker calendar that year, and three hundred and seventy-six people had paid fifteen thousand dollars each to compete for it.
Most of the players arrived at the casino well before the event, and spent the week leading up to it playing in one tournament or another, sometimes around the clock. To accommodate the play, the casino had set up more than fifty tables on a broad swath of paisley carpet outside the poker room. Poker can be grimly serious—especially hold ’em, which allows players to bet all their chips on the turn of a single card—but it can also be as giddy as a three-Martini lunch, and there was a holiday-party atmosphere in the tournament area. Tobey Maguire was playing in a cash game next to the poker-room office, and Marcel Lüske, a European champion, who was dressed in a handmade suit from Austria, was singing Christmas carols at a table nearby. Negreanu circulated through the poker room, wearing pavé-diamond earrings and a sweater the color of orange Circus Peanuts. He posed for pictures and talked with fans. He autographed whatever he was handed, usually an ace of spades.
Everyday casino poker is rigidly stratified by disposable-income bracket (from the one-to-three-dollar table to the four-thousand-to-eight-thousand-dollar table), but in tournaments everyone starts out even. In the Five Diamond, each player began with a rack of thirty thousand dollars in chips, and the only way to get any more was to win. Tournaments project a rosy, telegenic social ideal, a class-levelling hurly-burly in which luck and guile can win you millions—what players refer to as “life-changing money.” Even those who don’t walk away rich can enjoy an affirmative-action effect, since low-stakes players, who would not normally have contact with the game’s deepest pockets, routinely get into the sort of heavy action in tournaments that convinces them that they can hold their own against wealthier opponents.
Within the first hour of play on the first day of the Five Diamond, Antanas (Tony G.) Guoga, a circuit regular from Lithuania by way of Melbourne, was standing over an older Southeast Asian man with little command of English, and shouting, “That was the worst laydown”—or fold—“of your life. Five nine off-suit! See? And you had queens? You can’t play with me! You can’t play with me!” As players at other tables stood up to watch, the older man sat motionless, staring at the table, his bald head reddening with embarrassment.
Many of the better players tune out during the early rounds. Lindgren’s friend Phil Ivey, a twenty-eight-year-old African-American who may be the most focussed cash-game player in the world, sat hooked up to an iPod. His mouth was half open, and except for his eyes and the blinking red light on his Bose noise-cancelling headphones he was completely still. He looked cold-blooded—not murderous, but indifferent. A scrap of paper next to his iPod turned out to be a check made out in his name, for a hundred thousand dollars.
Because bad players can get lucky, many good ones favor a conservative approach during the early rounds, playing only solid hands and not risking chips on fancy bluffs. Others start their endgame early, knowing that the best way to win is to arrive at the final table with a huge lead in chips. They take risks, trying to build their chip lead against players with no chance of winning—a group referred to as “dead money.” Lindgren was eliminated from the tournament this way, and many of the top players followed. “If I’m going to get there, I’m going to have chips,” Lindgren said philosophically. “And that separates the really good tournament players from the guys that just make a living.” (Using the same approach in three tournaments in January and February, he placed first, second, and fifth.)
When play stopped, at 10:30 p.m., a hundred and forty-three people had been eliminated. Tony G. was in first place, with $224,500 in chips, and Negreanu, who stood a good chance of becoming the magazine Card Player’s Card Player of the Year if he could finish in the top nine, was second, with $217,175. Trevor Buboltz, who had just turned twenty-one in early November and was probably the youngest entrant in the tournament, was in twenty-seventh place, with $82,425. His parents, who had come from Tinley Park, Illinois, to watch their son play, snapped pictures of him posing with various poker pros. Most players, however, left the casino quickly, to eat and rest before reconvening for another long day.
Negreanu is one of the most fascinating examples of the new poker face. During most games, his face is so confusingly animated—with friendly gibes, eyebrow arching, snatches of song, and sudden mimic impulses—that his rare spells of straight-faced concentration seem like just another ironic stratagem. Like many of the game’s younger players, he has started to review tournament footage the way football coaches do game tapes, scanning for behavioral tics, or “tells,” that suggest whether an opponent has a strong hand or is bluffing, and then tracking these findings, about which he is very secretive, on Excel spreadsheets. This combination of traits—part geek, part hustler, part bookie—has made Negreanu arguably the most respected tournament player of the past few years, and the first big star to emerge in the era of televised poker.
His reputation could hardly be more at odds with his table manner—joking, giving advice, snacking from Tupperware containers of vegetarian food prepared by his mother, who moved to Vegas to be near him. Negreanu weighs about a hundred and forty pounds and has the build—some days, it seems, even the outfits—of an Olympic ice dancer. Nearly every poker player reads his blog, in which he talks with unassuming charm about his game, his mom, his off-again, on-again engagement to a woman he met on a cruise ship, and his interactions with strangers, including a man who drove him to the airport in San Diego after his car broke down (they traded jokes and Negreanu paid the man’s rent) and a pair of Italian tourists in Vegas who sold him leather jackets from the trunk of their rental car (he gave them a thousand dollars and took a dozen coats).
Men (the Master) Nguyen, who came to California from Vietnam in 1978, took a seat next to Negreanu early on the third day of play. Pointing at Negreanu, he announced to the table, “I have been up all night reading his articles. I’m here to win tournament!” Negreanu, who was singing along to a Nelly song coming from a nearby club, nodded affably as Nguyen continued to talk. “I read all last night,” he said. “I didn’t learn a thing. I’d already learned it. Lot of people scared of you. Me, I’m first in line.”
The day before, Negreanu had lost his position among the chip leaders, on a hand that he analyzed that night in his blog. Around 6 p.m., he had lost two hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars to Johnny Chan, a two-time winner of the World Series of Poker, which put Chan in second place and left Negreanu with just eighty-one thousand, an amount he nevertheless managed to double, to finish the day in twenty-second place. But within three hours on the third day, Negreanu was securely back in the chips—about half a million dollars’ worth, arranged in a flying wedge in front of him—and he kept getting hands so good that they made him laugh. He forced out one player when he filled a straight draw with a king on the last card, and then he hit the rarest and most unbeatable hand in poker, a straight flush, again on the last card dealt. “That was pretty crazy. Never try that one again,” he said. He later eliminated David Singer, of White Plains, New York, whom he had been beating soundly, in an all-in confrontation that began with Negreanu lightheartedly saying, “Rematch! Let’s see if I get the same deal.” Afterward, as he raked in the pot with his long, darting fingers, Negreanu looked up at Singer and said, “Sorry about that,” with what sounded like genuine regret.
Whenever he folded a hand, Negreanu took a brief walk around the room, to goad or to socialize, keeping close tabs on the progress of his friend Jennifer Harman. As the field of players thinned, the two were playing at opposite extremes of fortune: Negreanu, with his huge chip lead, was bullying his table—one player called it “money whipping”—scaring people into folding their hands with large, seemingly arbitrary bets and doing so with such regularity that the announcer, Jack McClelland, who had begun to narrate over a microphone for the benefit of the crowd that had gathered near the velvet ropes, said, “Daniel raises the pot. Daniel takes the pot. This is a recording.” A couple of hours before play stopped for the evening, Lindgren appeared, to cheer Negreanu on. (“Late night,” he explained sheepishly. “I earned a hundred thousand dollars online last night.”)
Harman, on the other hand, was barely hanging on. As her holdings dwindled, she had been obliged to commit all of her chips on carefully chosen hands, risking everything she had, in the hope of “doubling up”—that is, winning a pot that contained all her chips and a matching amount from her opponent. At the end of the day, she told a friend who dropped by her table how crazy the pressure was making her: “I want to go home. I’m sleepy. I’m full of adrenaline. I want to stay here. I want to knock people out.”
Harman, who is in her mid-thirties, is known as a cautious player, who rarely gets into hands that she’s not favored to win. She has an intimidating ability to read people: she sits on two stacked chairs to be at eye level with her opponents, and peers at them through highlighted bangs, twitching her nose. Most of the time, she can tell by looking whether someone is bluffing. “I don’t know if life helped me with that,” she says, “or if poker helped me with life.” She started playing for fun at the age of sixteen, in Reno, her home town, where she would sneak into a casino and get instruction from a group of regulars, who took her under their wing. When she moved to Los Angeles, in 1988, she began rapidly improving, spending a few weeks at the five-and-ten-dollar table, a month at the ten-twenty, three months at the fifteen-thirty. She liked the life style so much—getting up when she felt like it, going to the beach, playing a little poker, hanging out with friends—that it didn’t dawn on her for quite a while that she was a professional.
She nearly died last year, when a kidney that she had received in a transplant as a teen-ager suddenly gave out, and she began to waste away. The day after she got a new kidney, in May, Harman, who is five feet two inches tall, weighed eighty-five pounds. That experience may partly explain her discipline at the poker table in long-odds situations, which tend to inspire bets that are foolishly risky. “I’m just hanging on like a money tick!” she said after surviving one all-in encounter. She raised her hand to show how it was shaking. After another all-in—this one against Richard Brodie, the author of Microsoft Word—Harman, wearing a sweater with fuzzy pink letters that spelled “love,” “true,” and “forever,” slid to the floor in mock collapse. “Shew!” she said, and then added, sweetly, “That’s always a good sign when Richie doubles me up. That means I might go far.”
Harman was still in the game on the fourth day of play, when enough players had been eliminated that the remaining field of ten could sit down at a single poker table. Steven Rassi, a coin-shop owner from Morton, Illinois, kept talking about all the “famous people” around him, and the announcer said, “So give them your chips, Steve. Maybe they’ll all sign your hat.” When Negreanu eliminated Eric Weiner, of Miami, thereby clinching the title Card Player of the Year, players and bystanders began shaking his hand and offering their congratulations. Johnny Chan, who was wearing a red Versace shirt and a fanny pack, said facetiously, “Why am I playing against the Card Player of the Year? I don’t belong here!” A few minutes later, Negreanu eliminated him, too. Lyle Berman, the C.E.O. of Lakes Entertainment, which provided the startup money for the World Poker Tour, stopped by to see which six players were likely to make it to the televised final table. Eying Negreanu’s stack of chips—about six million—Berman said, “I think Daniel might become a bully.”
“Don’t give him any ideas,” Harman said.
For the Five Diamond final, the table was set up in a Bellagio conference room, on a travelling studio set, between glowing pillars fitted with colored lights. Spotlights raked the players and the studio audience, in knowing homage to “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” and, in the wings, Shana Hiatt, a former Playboy playmate, who is now the host for the W.P.T., recorded intro segments over and over (“Wanna play in the World Poker Tour? Just come on down”).
Then the players and their chip counts were announced. Unlike casino chips, tournament chips have no real cash value: they’re a financial fiction and a dramatic convenience. Usually, though, the chip stacks have a rough relation to the actual prize at stake. But, at $6.865 million, Negreanu’s lead was so great—Vinny Landrum, in second place, had just $1.14 million—that the fiction had become a farce. “Let’s see,” he would say when it was his turn to bet, looking up to the ceiling and pensively thumbing his chin. “How much shall I bet? Anyone got a suggestion? How about 4.2 million?” To amuse himself and the crowd, Negreanu played a few hands without looking at his cards. At one point, he pushed all-in, causing the other players at the table to fold, and a friend of his in the audience yelled out, “O.K., cut it out, now.”
“What?” he called back. “It’s fun!”
It didn’t take long. First Nam Le, an accomplished newcomer from Huntington Beach, California, went down, followed by Rassi, the coin-shop owner, and Harman, who took $299,492 for fourth place. (The casino offered cash or chips; she chose chips.) After Landrum was eliminated, leaving Negreanu and Humberto Brenes, a veteran player from Costa Rica, three women, dressed in black gowns and stiletto heels, brought out the winner’s share: $1,770,218 in cash, piled on silver platters. During the celebration afterward, Brenes, the runner-up, hugged Negreanu’s mother, a round woman dressed in vintage jewelry and a red leopard-print shirt. “Mama, you have a good son,” he said.
Negreanu’s command over money in the game is accompanied by a strange indifference to it in everyday life. The huge prize, he said, didn’t change a thing for him. “You know what I bought with my winnings?” he said. “Three Xbox games and four CDs. Went out for, like, five hundred bucks.”
A few days after his victory, he philosophized in his blog about depression, in a polite Canadian way, remarking on how closely the lows follow the highs, and then he was back on the poker circuit, stopping in Toronto, where his reception surprised him. The night before a charity hockey game, at which he was scheduled to act as the celebrity coach, Negreanu followed three players—Eric Brewer, of the Edmonton Oilers; Mike Comrie, of the Phoenix Coyotes; and Steve Montador, of the Calgary Flames—out the door of the Sheraton hotel and was the one mobbed by the fans. “It was pretty surreal, knowing it’s a hockey town, and I’m with some of the most famous hockey players in the world, and they schlep to the limos and nobody recognizes them, and I’m bombarded. And I’m, like, ‘Wow, poker has arrived.’

by K.CONLEY