The Big Game

Respectfully tucked away to one side of the casino floor, far from the throng of tourists gaping in wonder at the fountain show, or at the Picassos and Monets in the fine art gallery, lies the Bellagio poker room, the poker pro’s home away from home. At one end is a raised platform where the higher stakes games are played, and beyond that is a small unassuming room with glass windows; the kind of room you might mistake for a large utility cupboard, unless you stopped to take a closer look. This is, in fact, Bobby’s Room, named after veteran high stakes player Bobby Baldwin. And this is where the greatest players in the world play the biggest game in town.

“If you’re in Vegas during one of the big tournaments, you could come and sit down and watch it for yourself,” says Lyle Berman, who has been playing the game since the mideighties. ”We’ve all played together for a long time, so it’s much more casual than you would think. There’s a lot of storytelling and joking around. And if you’ve got $100,000 floating around, you can sit down and join in,” he adds cheerily.

OK, so for you foolhardy billionaires who wish to be relieved of your money by the best players in the world, what do you need to know? Well, the game is usually eight-handed, and has evolved into a mixed game, comprising eight different forms of poker. This makes for a well-balanced game, in which no one player gets to play only their game of expertise.

Spread purely by word of mouth, the game just needs a group of starters to begin, usually about five or six players who show up at noon, committed to playing. There is no key figure in the game as such, and the line-up changes depending on who’s in town; but some the of usual suspects are Lyle Berman, Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Barry Greenstein, Johnny Chan, Phil Ivey, Chau Giang, Jennifer Harman, Minh Ly, Sammy Farha, Gus Hansen and Daniel Negreanu.

The structure will also vary. When there are no major tournaments in town, the game is mostly $2,000/$4,000 limit. Around tournament time, they get juicier, often $4,000/$8,000 limit. Tournaments also bring players like Lyle Berman, who prefer the No limit and Pot Limit games.

“The Pot Limit and No Limit games we play are capped,” says Lyle. “The most anyone can lose in a hand is $100,000. We play, perhaps, $1,000/$2,000 blinds with a pretty big ante. That changes the complexity of the game quite a lot. So when we play No Limit, it’s usually not anything like what you see in tournaments, where there’s a lot more play on the flop and on the turn.”

At those stakes, over a reasonably long session, you could quite easily find yourself stuck for a million dollars, which could be difficult to explain to the wife.

“You could win maybe $2million dollars in one sitting. Of course, that means you could lose $2million, too,” says Phil Ivey. “That’s never happened to me though,” he adds quickly.

“In a session of maybe fifteen to twenty hours,” Berman concurs, “I think the most a player can win in that time frame is about $2 million.”

Ivey laughs when we innocently ask him what it’s like to play against these legends. “You look at it a little differently from the way I look at it. I don’t think, ’Oh wow, look at them; they’re great players.’ I just don’t think like that. I sit down and play my game. One day you might be slipping and it’s gonna cost you tons of money. So you always have to stay on your game, keep it focused. You have to be
constantly making adjustments to how you play. There’s a lot you learn about yourself.”

But the question is, why would you want to participate in the Big Game at all? I mean, isn’t cash game play about picking softer spots? And how does it work from the point of view of poker economics? Wouldn’t the best players in the world just pass their money back and forth to each other?

Well, first, it’s about the psyche of a top player: the ultra-competitive streak, the need to play against the, and the hunger for highstakes action. Daniel Negreanu, for instance, recently terminated his lucrative contract as poker ambassador for the Wynn, because it stipulated that he could only play cash games at the Wynn cardroom, and that meant no Big Game. It seems that the half a million dollar heads-up matches Daniel was offering to allcomers weren’t enough to assuage Kid Poker’s thirst for action.

“I need high-stakes to have an interest in poker,” agrees Berman. “They don’t have to be that high, but I can’t play low limit. I just don’t enjoy it. I couldn’t say I support myself playing the Big Game, but I hold my own – maybe I’m a small winner – but I just enjoy it so much.”

And secondly, the soft spots do come. There are the billionaire whales that hit town and want to take a crack at poker’s ruling classes; there are the guys who don’t normally play in the Big Game who have put their bankrolls together to take a shot; and every so often, a complete stranger will walk in with $100,000 and take a seat. These guys keep the game rolling on.

“Has a mysterious stranger ever walked off with everyone’s money, never to be seen again?” we ask excitedly.

“No,” says Lyle flatly. “That, I do not recall. They’ve come along and lost a lot. It’s a pretty hard game for a stranger to do well in.”

And this is why the Big Game is played, albeit discreetly, in public. Anybody with the required bankroll can play. As well as providing publicity for the casino, which charges the same rake as it does for the smaller games, this openness is needed to attract the happygo- lucky high roller. As Doyle once said, “To attract customers, you have to open up shop.”

And the history of the Big Game is like a history of the high roller – these strange and colorful characters that materialize periodically and then disappear without a trace. In the early days, back in the seventies, it was drug lord Jimmy Chagra, who was happily blowing off his millions playing poker before the heat closed in. In the eighties, it was a guy known only as “The Frenchman,” who had an extremely expensive penchant for 7-Card- Stud. The story goes that The Frenchman would lose over a million dollars per visit to Vegas – a fortune in the mid-eighties. Throughout its history, it’s been the wealthy whale’s desire to play the best that has fed the game. They come, they have fun, they lose, and they don’t really care.

One billionaire who gave the pros a run for their money, however, was Texas banker Andy Beal. His adventures were chronicled in detail in Michael Craig’s excellent The Professor, The Banker and the Suicide King. Andy was no frivolous high roller, though. A fiercely intelligent and practical man, he aimed to negate the pros’ edge, by insisting on playing only heads-up limit-poker at the highest stakes ever. He realized that, at earth-shattering stakes, the big swings could cripple the pros; lose four hands and you’re downtick a couple of million. He opted to play hyperaggressively, figuring that an average bad run of cards for his opponent could hurt him severely.

Andy made his billions from pure ingenuity. Sensing that the professionals played from instinct rather than from pure mathematics, he developed a complex computer program to analyze the outcomes of thousands of heads-up hand combinations. Concerned about their heightened ability to gather information, he developed a way to utterly randomize his decision-making process by attaching a tiny battery-operated motor to his foot that would emit a small vibration every eight seconds. He would only act when he felt the vibration, and thus, apparently at random.

Beal played several such match-ups against a team of players led by Doyle Brunson. At its zenith, they were playing $100,000/$200,000 – the biggest poker game of all time and, while the pros eventually found their edge, there were times when Beal had them against the ropes and was ahead millions.

Today, the poker explosion has brought with it softer competition for the big gamers, especially around tournament time, when even Doyle Brunson can find himself waiting in line for a seat.

”It used to be a real select group,” Doyle told us. “But as the poker becomes more and more popular, and as people become more comfortable playing high limits, it’s just expanded. The other day, there were three games at the Bellagio of $4,000/$8,000, which is unbelievable. I didn’t know there were that many people who could afford it. There are guys in there that I’ve never seen before. I don’t know where they come from… it’s incredible.”

So the big gamers are licking their chops and enjoying the fresh money injected into the game after so many years of stiff competition. But the old guard aren’t infallible. Word has filtered down from Bobby’s Room that a certain “French Kid” has been cleaning up the Big Game. Deeper research reveals the “kid” to be none other than the thirty-something WPT winner, David Benyamine, who has surprised the regulars by turning up and winning millions over the past few months.

“Since this boy from France has been here, he’s come off a big million-dollar winner. He plays two or three days at a time – like I used to when I was his age,” says Doyle, somewhat wistfully.

And so the old guard makes way for the new, but as long as there are fish to fry, and world-class players craving the highest action money can buy, we’ll all be gossiping about the biggest game in town.