Battle of the Ages

At this year’s World Poker Tour Championship, Phil Hellmuth was cruising along with the chip lead. One of the original poker whiz kids and the eternal Poker Brat, Phil was paired at a fourth-day table with internet poker celebrity Justin Bonomo.

The two stars got into a verbal confrontation in which, responding to Hellmuth’s insults, Bonomo teased, “We can’t all be Phil Hellmuth.” The result was an ongoing stream of insults that made it obvious the ten-time bracelet winner had no clue who Bonomo was. When Phil was made aware, his response raised my ears; “They’ve brought half a dozen ‘internet legends’ like this kid to me before, and they’ve all gone broke within two years. Why is this kid gonna be any different?”

Bonomo and the other kiddies on the cover are strong poker players. They know their math and their betting patterns and they win against the faceless masses online. Obviously, you throw 6,000 Bonomos up against 2,000 Hellmuths and you have to think one of the Bonomos is going to win. I don’t care about quantity though; in the long run, quality wins out in this game and, given a choice of putting my money on Justin or Phil at this year’s World Series of Poker, I’ve got to go with the guy who’s already done it ten times before.

This isn’t about skill. Phil’s great, Justin’s great. They come from entirely divergent backgrounds, but there’s no doubt each can play the cards he’s dealt. Given a heads-up scenario, I can’t say I’m taking one over the other, but Justin lacks experience in the little things that make a live player complete; the things that create world champions.

If you’ve never been to the World Series of Poker before, you can’t comprehend the experience. Every day, you play poker. Every day, you eat on the run, living your life by the tournament clock. Every night there’s a party; a VIP table around every corner. The young guns might have the constitution for it, but they haven’t built up the tolerance and, except for very rare cases, haven’t built up the discipline to avoid the pitfalls.

Games run twenty-four hours a day. We’re talking both cash and tournament. When the tournaments are done, the satellites remain; but the cash games are so juicy that pros will win their tournament buy-ins without needing a satellite. Imagine it; poker heaven twentyfour hours a day.

Now imagine how you’ll feel after five weeks of it.

That’s where you’re at when you embark on the Main Event. You’ve burnt out your burnout. The old pros know the traps are coming and they limit themselves. They make it to the parties, but only for the obligatory fifteen minutes. They bring their food from home instead of buying greasy cheeseburgers on site. Every minute of every day is planned to the minute detail and strictly adhered to. The consequences of anything else are too drastic to ignore.

Meanwhile, the whiz kids are at the international internet reunion party. Players they know for twelve months of the year suddenly have faces, and bonding must ensue. The greatest nightclubs in the world give birth to every party opportunity, and Sin City offers every distraction known to man.

The first time I came to the Series in 2004, I came as a non-drinking non-gambler. Poker? Yes, but all other debauchery, no. By the end of the summer, I was lost in the desert and broke, without the story I’d come for. In the end, you can be as devout as a nun, but Vegas will get you; it’ll get the Internet pros too.

The Bonomos of the world can handle the Hellmuths, but if you’re Justin, it’s the first hand of the tournament and your opponent raises your T150 bet with an all-in move of T19,000 and change; what do you do?

Math takes care of a lot in poker, but at the World Series, the poker circus to end all poker circuses, the game goes beyond the numbers. Getting outplayed by the pros is the least of your problems; it’s walking in situationally retarded that will get you in the end.

Obviously, that’s going to be a problem for anyone and everyone. You don’t think some idiot has come over the top of Phil just to try to be the guy who took him out? Of course idiots have. Thing is, the live pros have dealt with it all before. At least they’re not starting those confrontations blind.

It’s been said that playing on TV is a disadvantage because it gives the opposition a good idea of how you play come future events. This statement would be true were the Vegas pros a series of single-gear morons who always played the same.

Truth is, the old-schoolers have been able to turn that knowledge possessed by others into an advantage. If you’ve seen them do it, they know you have and they adjust accordingly. Think Doyle is still playing the way he told you to play when he wrote Super System? No, because the opposition adjusted to him and that forced him to adjust himself or get out of the game.

He’s still in the game.

Everyone knows that when you play against Hellmuth, you make bold raises to take him off of his small-pot approach, right? Why, then, did he win one event and final-table two others last year? Simply, it’s because he knows his reputation, knows when people know that reputation, and adjusts accordingly. The new-schoolers have the advantage of anonymity, but it’s the same advantage 90% of the other players in the room have.

When Chris Moneymaker returned to the World Series to defend his crown in 2004, he made a crucial error. He continued to utilize the style that had won him the championship, so the opposition continually called. He couldn’t bluff any more.

Moneymaker’s mistake was in not turning that to his favor. When people know your face and name, you become a target. They do stupid things in the face of fame because the famous seem larger than life. If Chris had waited for his hands, he’d have been paid off every time. Why? Because he’s Chris Moneymaker.

The reason Phil got all those final tables last year is that people kept throwing those chips at him and he sat there, waiting to take them. He knew that for the weaker players, the lure of the glory was too great not to at least take a shot at being on the other end of an immortal TV moment. In that regard, some things will never change, because the commoners see the greats and in them see a link to their own potential greatness. Poor slobs.

When the generational comparisons began between live and online players, much too much was made of the importance of the read. Sure, it was crucial at your home game where your buddy looks up and to the left every time he’s bluffing, but when you get to the bigger games, you either figure out you’re being that dumb or you get cleaned out so badly you’ll never play poker again. Right?

Thing is, that’s changing now. Standing tableside at World Poker Tours, it astounds me how often I pick off moves based on physical tells (and I’m no Hellmuth). The reason for the change is simple: So many top players have come from the online world (a world with a completely different set of tells) with little live experience that, as far as picking off the weaker stacks go, the read is crucial.

That’s not to say the Bonomos of the world can’t make a read now and again, but it’s a two-way game. Protecting oneself from detection is far more important. After all, the online players do their winning without reading the opposition, aside from the occasional click-tell. It’s much more important that a lot of these guys have never been hit by the Howard Lederer stare or anything like it. When you aren’t accustomed to counting the number of times you blink per minute or keeping your heart from breaking through your chest on a bluff, you’re going to get caught by the players who know better. The old-schoolers know better, and they’re not giving off the tells themselves.

I hope this doesn’t come off as my bashing the young guns. A number of the old pros have made their way online in the last year. Chip Reese, Doyle Brunson, Gus Hansen, David Benyamine, Hellmuth… with the exception of Phil Ivey (who, let’s face it, is Phil Ivey), they’ve recorded losses at the Hold’em table because they’re playing out of their element. They’re suffering from an information shortage they’re unaccustomed to. I’d never pick them to beat the online players at their own game. That’s why I can’t pick the new kids to beat the old guys at theirs.

Of course, I could be wrong; this could finally be the year that the new school absolutely crushes the Main Event. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you see me at WSOP and are convinced the newbies are on the good money, come find me; we’ll each pick twenty guys and if either of us picks the champion, the other guy loses.

Bet you I won’t get many takers.

You heard it here first: This summer at the World Series of Poker, a new generation of players will take over the poker world.

Right now, you’re thinking; “There is no way he really thinks those punk internet kids can hold their own with the ‘real pros.’”

I do. Through the magic of the television, we have all become attached to the idea that there exists a group of poker players that resides on a higher plane, looking down at the rest of us. Most of them are named Phil. You know who I’m talking about.

Last year, in one of the more historic runs in World Series of Poker history, 21-year-old Jeff Madsen won two bracelets and made two other final tables (finishing 3rd both times). For this, he was rewarded with the W.S.O.P. Player of the Year award, besting a lot of those guys you see on TV every week.

While this was certainly a remarkable accomplishment, it was only the tip of the iceberg. Last year, final tables were flooded with baby faces and internet qualifiers. It seemed that the “fluke” of highprofile- always-on-television professionals not winning or finaltabling every event was becoming more of a reality. Twenty-somethings like Madsen, Eric Froehlich, Mark Vos, Jeff Cabanillas, Jon Friedberg, Ian Johns, and Bill Chen were taking home the gold. This year, expect more, a whole lot more. There will be a new group of 21- year-old kids who have spent the last several years chomping at the bit, awaiting their magnificent tear through the best the world has to offer them.

It shouldn’t be surprising that bracelet winners are getting younger and younger every year. This is what they eat, sleep, and work for. Most of them don’t spend their year traveling the country on the tournament circuit, or grinding out long hours of cash games while worrying about their families and mortgage payments. For a lot of them, their biggest daily concern is waking up in time to play the 2:00pm $100 rebuy tournament on PokerStars. They spend all year playing poker from the comfort of their own home, dreaming of and planning their own personal World Series success story.

Justin Bonomo has probably played more poker tournaments than any of the “veterans” on the cover of this magazine. And yes, that includes Doyle.

No one is more prepared for a poker tournament than a good internet player. He has played thousands of tournaments, experienced more situations, as has come to intuitively understand the math of most situations he will encounter.

And these players aren’t scared. I know you think the kids will fold under the pressure of the live tournament setting. But they won’t. Don’t believe me? Check your DVD and watch internet-whiz-kid Nick Schulman absolutely tear apart his final table at Foxwoods in WPT Season 4.

It’s just that simple. Nothing beats experience, right? Isn’t that the argument we hear OVER AND OVER for the old tournament veterans? How would 2,000 poker tournaments played be for experience? These kids know when to raise, when to fold, when to apply pressure, and when to back off. They know because they have practiced it, thousands and thousands of times.

A young kid sits at your table, directly to your right. He has on a pair of sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt, and is listening to an iPod. He begins raising every other pot. It’s the World Series of Poker and you have prepared for this.

At this point, I know what you must be thinking…

“It simply won’t matter how good this kid is. He’s going to give something away because he’s never had to look someone in the eye at the poker table. And then I’ll get him.”

So finally you make your move. He looks at his cards, and throws them away. You smile to yourself, knowing that he can’t get the best of you.

You get dealt your next hand, and wouldn’t you know it; he raises again…

I’m not taking anything away from great live reads. And of course, the experienced live professionals are going to make significantly more of them than the younger players who haven’t been around the block yet. But that doesn’t mean the young internet player doesn’t know what you have. He watches you play and puts you on hands. He does that all day, every day. He might not see it in your eyes, but he knows your hand ranges and narrows them down, putting you on a hand with every single move you make.

The life of a professional poker player is generally a very private one. You are playing for yourself and you spend a great majority of your time sitting at a poker table with people you don’t know, while sleeping and traveling alone.

However, I have found this is not the case for a lot of the younger poker-playing professionals. A lot of them travel and live together, renting houses or sharing hotel rooms. They talk tirelessly about the hands they play. They share information and help each other with their games. They take the hands that confuse them and post them on the internet, where hundreds of people reply with advice and support.

On a recent trip to Las Vegas, I made plans to spend some time with Justin Bonomo. His friend, Alan Sass, an incredibly talented young poker player, had just won a tournament for nearly $300,000, downstairs in the Wynn poker room. They had shared a room, along with another friend of theirs. There were two beds and a cot pulled out, and the room was covered with food, laptops, and poker magazines. Alan was on his way up to the room, and we were making plans for a celebration of his win. He came in and, before anything could be said, the three of them engaged in a long discussion of poker hands Alan had played in the tournament.

This kind of community is invaluable in the poker world. A player who constantly surrounds himself with support and advice will be improving every time he puts his chips in play. And nothing is more valuable than the internet, because it gives these players the opportunity to improve their game through the tutelage of all sorts of players with all sorts of styles.

Listen, I love the Phils. Would I even be writing for a poker magazine if I didn’t? Probably not. Without the banter of Hellmuth or the dead stare of Ivey, the game we love wouldn’t be where it is today. That game has changed though. It’s giving way to a new breed of players. They have played more hands, experienced the swings, communicate with one another, have fitness and strength of mind, understand the math, and are fearless behind their chips.

I can still hear Phil Hellmuth saying, “If it weren’t for luck, I guess I would win every tournament.”

No. If it weren’t for luck, he might not win any.