Authors: Jonathan Grotenstein

Ship It Holla Ballas! (32 page)

The Ship It Holla Ballas were already pulling apart when Black Friday finished the job, bringing to an abrupt end the era that created them and the subculture they helped define.

For the players who are surviving on small profits and rakeback, the poker dream suddenly becomes a lot less viable after April 15, 2011. Bonafone takes over his father’s insurance business. TravestyFund uses what’s left of his winnings to seed a green energy start-up. Chantel goes to nursing school. Deuce2High joins the family business, a furniture moving company. Green Plastic and Muddywater, the founders of CardRunners, start a new business in San Francisco that allows players to gamble on their fantasy sports teams.

PerkyShmerky ends up in rehab in Malibu, where he meets and begins dating actress Lindsay Lohan. Until she dumps him for a girl. Later there are reports of a scandal at a high-stakes Hollywood home game after Perky and an accomplice are accused of marking cards with infrared ink made visible by special contact lenses.

Jman wins enough money online to buy two penthouse apartments at the top of the trendy A Building in New York City’s East Village. He combines them into one and has a giant slide installed inside the resulting megacondo. When Black Friday hits, he lists the place for a shade under $4 million—“Does anyone want to buy a slide?” he tweets—and moves to Vancouver, where he continues to play online.

The shutdown only affects the Canadians peripherally. Apathy and Inyaface continue to play online in Toronto when they’re not traveling the world, following the live tournament trail. Both cashed four times at the 2011 World Series of Poker.

Some of the American members of the crew have made an easy and successful transition to live poker. TheUsher still lives in Las Vegas, playing cash games and tournaments. FieryJustice has become one of the top tournament players in the world, with nearly $5 million in winnings to date. He’s also written two books and produced his own series of instructional videos.

Durrrr continues to reshape the poker landscape on a near-daily basis.

Six months after his showdown with Phil Hellmuth, he gets invited to join the new season of
High Stakes Poker,
where, after getting taunted by the old pros at the table for his measured play, he proceeds to win $919,600. In a single hand. It’s the biggest pot ever won on TV. One year later, he smashes his own record by winning a $1.1 million-dollar pot against the legendary Phil Ivey. In late 2009, after earning more than $7 million during a four-month stretch online, durrrr becomes the first “pure Internet” player to become a fully sponsored pro at Full Tilt Poker. In his first week on the job he loses $4 million.

His sponsorship deal disappears at the same that Black Friday shuts down the company, but durrrr barely blinks, easily moving from the biggest cash games online to the biggest live games on the planet, regularly winning (and occasionally losing) million-dollar pots in Macau, where many online players have resettled to take advantage of a new poker boom. Barely twenty-six, he’s considered by many to be the most talented no-limit player alive.

Among the friends Good2cu makes during his stay at the Ivy Hotel is an entrepreneur named Danny Fleyshman, at the time the youngest CEO of any publicly traded company. When Fleyshman launches the online card room Victory Poker a few months later, Good2cu finally gets the sponsorship deal he’s been working so hard to attain.

Black Friday brings an end to the business arrangement, but by that time Good2cu has already made an extremely successful transition to brick-and-mortar poker. Today, he shuttles between luxury condos in Las Vegas and Macau, playing in the world’s biggest cash games. He still draws more than his fair share of criticism from all the haters online, but, while he once documented his ups and downs with far too much honesty, he’s now learned to play his cards a little closer to the vest. He hasn’t bothered to inform the haters that he’s toned down the debauchery, settled down with a serious girlfriend, and, oh, by the way, he’s a multimillionaire.

Before Raptor heads off to St. John’s College, where he’ll spend the next two years studying philosophy and literature, he announces his official “retirement” from poker, creating a stir on the blogs and message boards. A year later, they’re buzzing about his comeback after he wins more than a million dollars in a month.

But Raptor doesn’t have any interest in returning to his old life, especially after Columbia University accepts him as a transfer student. Today he’s living in Manhattan with his new girlfriend and a 110-pound Newfoundland, studying Chinese and political science. But nobody ever quits poker for good. He still goes to the World Series every year. And he’s still making final tables.

Whether you believe they’re brilliant young minds who braved uncharted waters to make their wildest fantasies come true or arrogant little pricks who got beaned in the head by good fortune and landed with a horseshoe in the ass, the unique circumstances that spawned the Ship It Holla Ballas are gone forever. While the group’s fluid membership and inconsistent accounting methods make it impossible to be precise, collectively they have won close to $20 million in live tournaments and at least as much in live cash games and online. By these metrics, they are the most successful poker crew of all time.

And they’re all still under thirty.