The World Series of Poker attracts every grizzled card shark and optimistic internet amateur to Las Vegas. John Butlergoes back for a second visit - but misses out on the $8 million prize
The hotel is the Rio in Las Vegas - 2,500 rooms, an 11,000sq m casino, 19 restaurants, four swimming pools and a wedding chapel. The event is the World Series of Poker. The room the tournament is being played in could house jumbo jets. I won't estimate the wattage required to generate enough light to satisfy the hundreds of television cameras that have covered every angle in the room - suffice to say it's a high number.
Here in the hangar it's rush hour. The actor Tobey Maguire has just walked by, blanked by the hordes, while, to one side, the professional player Phil Hellmuth signs T-shirts, programmes and money belts for a knot of fans. The dominant sound is that of chips being riffled by thousands of internet players, college kids, mums, aunts, pros and grandpas. It's louder than a plague of cicadas. Huge silk-printed photographs of previous winners hang above us on the walls, not unlike those of communist dictators. These murals are bigger, however, maybe 15m high, and mounted on light boxes. Joe Hachem. Johnny Chan. Carlos Mortensen.
This is the face of Las Vegas now. Sure, you can still find a seedy bar or a small casino where there's a fair chance of getting shot, but the governing story is that of citadel casinos devouring the Strip. Las Vegas has been the fastest-growing city in the US since the mid-1990s, and corporations are changing the way it looks and feels forever. The place is being repositioned as a PG-rated resort, and the old Las Vegas of gangsters and funny money has been buried in an unmarked grave somewhere out in the desert.
Like Las Vegas itself, the World Series of Poker used to have a whiff of cordite, but nothing lasts forever. Professionals are sponsored now; they advertise clothes and credit cards on television. Call it the Moneymaker effect.
In 2005 Chris Moneymaker, who was then an unknown amateur, parlayed an internet game worth $39 into a $2.5 million victory in the Main Event at the world series. He was the inspiration for millions, and the internet provided a forum for them to try their luck. A generation of internet players flooded the world of tournament poker. The gold rush was on.
Standing in the Rio, I notice that every fan is recording anything of interest on a mobile phone. When I watch a game on one of the million television screens, cameras under the table divulge each player's hand. There are no secrets now.
In 1998 I travelled to Las Vegas with a friend to direct a documentary on the World Series of Poker. Back then it was held in Binion's Casino, on Fremont Street, in the heart of downtown Las Vegas. To the uninitiated, this neighbourhood is distinct from the Strip. Downtown is a 10-minute drive northeast of the Strip - and a giant step back in time. The buildings are low slung, and the staff and customers are grizzlier. They pour a stronger drink and smile a lot less. These are all good things.
Until the final day of the Main Event in 1998 I don't think we saw another camera crew in the Horseshoe poker room. We had the event to ourselves, and we interviewed legends such as Amarillo "Slim" Preston and Doyle Brunson, and got ourselves something of an education. We even got near, but never got, the legendary Stu Ungar, who died soon after.
Andy Black and the other Irish interest gave way to the Vietnam-born Scotty Nguyen, who won the first prize of $1 million, and by the time the Irishman Noel Furlong won the same prize, the following year, our documentary had aired on RTÉ, Channel 4 and Discovery and went on to sell in 15 countries. My friend and I have continued in TV production, but nothing we have made since then has matched the level of interest in The Million Dollar Deal.
In the intervening years the title of my documentary has acquired a quaint veneer I could never have predicted. Thanks to prospecting internet players, Jamie Gold took down $12 million in the Main Event last year.
But, as much as the internet, it was the advent of the hole camera that fired the public imagination. In 1999 Channel 4's Late Night Poker set up under-table cameras for its televised game, which allowed viewers to see what the professionals were doing for the first time. Incredibly, the professionals were compliant, and you could watch, learn and become emotionally involved in the outcome of every hand, before any cards were flipped over. It was great television, and it gave birth to the poker star.
Back in 1998 I stole the dealer button from the final table at the Horseshoe. I wanted a souvenir from the event, and no merchandise was available then, but this year at the Rio commemorative world series dealer buttons are selling for $40 apiece.
So times have changed. So what? There's nothing worse than one generation of tourists complaining about the next. Sure, I was lucky enough to be there in 1998, but that doesn't mean it's over now. It's just different.
If you do get to Las Vegas for a holiday, I recommend playing poker - in as many card rooms as you can. If you want to go broke quickly you can play with the high rollers in the Bellagio, but if you're playing with a smaller bank roll you can find suitable action in casinos up and down the Strip and in downtown card rooms. You can find characters at every level.
Down on Fremont Street, at one of the old casinos, I enter a tournament and place 60th out of a field of 200, having played for four hours. Until you try it you don't realise how much stamina is required to go the distance in a poker tournament. Whether it's the force of concentration, the air conditioning or the boredom of folding hand after hand, as you must, it can be difficult to stay awake at the table. Then, before you know it, you find yourself in a hand you've no right to be playing.
Everyone at my table is moaning about Jamie Gold and how he was the luckiest guy, and the worst player, ever to win the big one. One player has a friend of a friend who was a dealer at that game and claims, improbably, that Gold never tipped her a dime. Another claims that a friend of a friend backed him for 50 per cent and had to go to court to get his share of the winnings. Everyone agrees he's nothing but an internet player. I look around and try to imagine one of these players winning $20 million in 2007. I have no trouble seeing it.
My chip stack is dwindling when I raise in middle position with king, jack. Everyone folds around to the big blind, who goes all in. He is an old sea dog, and he seems the worse for wear. I call the bet. He turns over an ace and an eight - his overcard a slight enough favourite against me.(I do not know the exact figure at the time. Twenty years ago I could have lived in denial, but, later, the internet tells me that the sea dog had a 57 per cent chance of winning this hand.) He goes on to catch an eight, and I'm out. Still, it's not a bad beat. I go for a sandwich at the White Cross deli, then I go to sleep, dreaming of pirates on the high seas.
The next day I take a spin over to the $1-$3 no limit game at the Luxor and walk out eight hours later with a $400 profit. This is real holiday poker: Midwestern businessmen, and kids wearing iPods and baseball caps. I buy in for $100 and within an hour get into a pot with a Scandinavian guy. I am in late position and I have a pair of sixes. He raises by $25 in middle position, and I now raise him by another $30. I don't know what I'm thinking about - Jamie Gold, probably. I saw him last night walking through the Rio. He looked . . . small.
Anyway, everyone else folds, and the Scandinavian calls me. A rainbow flop comes down, with one ace. The Scandinavian bets $25, but I think he would check if he has an ace, so I go all in for $120 - you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. He stares me down, but I'm not all that bothered, because I'm falling asleep again. He thinks, then stares some more. I drink my tea. Finally he smiles and says: "Your hands are shaking." He shows me a pair of kings, then mucks his hand. I am going to tell him that it's a family trait, this shaking of the hands, but I don't bother. He puts me on a pair of aces, and there's no hole camera here, so let him believe it forever.
I cross the moat into Excalibur and find another small no-limit game, and this table is being bossed by a real mouth. He's a typical bully, providing commentary on everyone's play, trying to put them on hands and frequently getting it all wrong. He's been drinking J&B on the rocks, and he's playing standing up, checking his Blackberry and droning about his Rolex. A quiet Scottish guy gets into a decent-size pot. The mouth is shouting about it, speculating on straights and flushes and the like, even though he folded hours back.
Suddenly the Scottish guy explodes in a torrent of expletives. The force of the outburst pins the mouth back in his seat. The mouth whispers to his friend: "Never in 15 years, in card rooms in LA and Vegas, has that happened to me." I find it hard to believe that. The mouth thinks he's going to be killed now, because what he doesn't realise is that Scots can read the phone book and sound menacing and that they, like the Irish, curse all the time. From now on the mouth speaks in whispers. I love it. Over the next hour I win a few pots and befriend the Scot. The Scot takes $1,000 from the mouth, and the mouth slopes off. Viva Las Vegas.
On the ride home the taxi driver says the Sahara won't be around in six months. Apparently, the Frontier and Circus Circus are fading, too. When a city evolves this fast, any time is a good time to go. If you're lucky you can watch an old casino being dynamited into the history books.
While the driver talks I count my money and calculate where I am for the week. I have frittered a few bob away on blackjack, but after leaving Las Vegas I'll be able to call myself a winning poker player. This I have in common with Jamie Gold. This and possibly much more, but we will never know.
Sadly, the 2007 World Series of Poker ends up running true to form. An amateur player from Temecula, California, wins the big one, and with the capture of his $8.25 million prize Jerry Yang is now listed among the top all-time earners in tournament-poker history. Yang has previously cashed at local tournaments a mere four times; he won his ticket to the big one in a local satellite tournament. This year's fairytale seems to bear out the argument that the Main Event at the world series is becoming a high-level crapshoot.
Antesup.com has done yeoman service in tracking the Irish players. Sadly, this year's Irish interest ends when Sylvester Geoghegan wins $58,000 for coming 122nd. Not bad at all, but we shall never know who won the most money in the cash games. Perhaps he, and not Yang, is the best player in the world this year.
Tour America organises packages to Las Vegas. www.touramerica.ie