Several years ago, I met Doyle Brunson at the World Series of Poker. He was, and still is, an icon of the game, and I’d grown up hearing his name and reading his celebrated Super System. I don’t tend to get nervous or star-struck when meeting famous poker players, but this was one of those rare times. I left wondering why I was jittery, why I’d approached with apprehension and felt awkward when attempting to embrace him in conversation.
To me, poker players aren’t celebrities. They haven’t changed the world, and the industry is so niche, that your average member of the public will have never heard of Doyle Brunson. But, like most industries, the media is a manipulative procedure, and it’s inevitable that certain people and characters are placed on a pedestal for others to treat as ‘special’ or ‘elite’, regardless of their actual poker talent. Essentially, ‘poker celebrity’ is little more than a term fashioned by the modern world to create a thirst for gossip and scrutiny, dissecting even the most trivial of actions a certain person makes.
The longer I’ve been involved in the industry, the more ‘poker celebrities’ I’ve met, and the less overawed I have become. These days, I genuinely have little interest in the trivialities that once enthralled me. I really don’t care about what durrrr’s new girlfriend looks like or why Isildur is such a degenerate gambler. The truth is that these details are desirable as they form a sense of escapism, speculating on a rung of the industry that you are likely to never reach or experience. However, once you’ve encountered the subjects at live tournaments and in the media, you realise they’re not particularly special, they’re not superheroes – they’re just poker players. In a flash, that fantastical aspect vanishes.
After several years in the business, I thought there was nobody in poker who could induce the feelings of uneasiness that I experienced upon meeting Doyle that day.
Then I met Phil Ivey.
Phil Ivey is the epitome of ‘celebrity’ in poker; never before in the game has one man caused such a frenzied fanfare among poker enthusiasts. It takes just one muttered word, a single glance, or a slightly misplayed hand for someone to comment. Poker forums are awash with frivolous threads about anything Ivey-related, and magazines and websites will go to great extents to get their hands on even the briefest of quotes. The poker world quite literally hangs on his every word and action, and anything he does is inevitably analysed to its fullest extent. It doesn’t matter what he says, or how he says it, this is Phil Ivey, and people want to hear him speak.
As I approached the Soho Hotel, I started to feel that same apprehension that I experienced with Doyle. It had been the first time in a number of years that I had felt like this, but Ivey had been put on such a lofty pedestal that even to a full-time journalist immersed in poker, he didn’t seem to share the same world. Ivey is renowned for being a private person and rarely doing interviews, so there was the slight pressure of extracting a good interview in a short space of time. An Ivey interview is considered gold dust within media circles – he is widely believed to be the best player in the world, yet is highly inaccessible - so just asking him a few questions is highly valuable content. I’d also only been given a small amount of time to come up with some questions due to being invited at the last second. Interviewing Phil Ivey is potentially a once in a lifetime opportunity, so you want to ensure you are well prepared. My biggest dread, however, was that he would be intimidating. Ivey has a reputation for being foreboding, for staring a hole through his opponents. What would he be like with me? Would he warm to me? Would he even answer my questions? Would this be the second instalment of Parkinson’s frosty and awkward encounter with Meg Ryan? I had no idea as I knew so little about Ivey as a person. In short – I didn’t want to fuck it up.
When I entered the room, my fears weren’t extinguished: there he sat, stoically, on a tall chair as if a king perched on his throne. He’s a tall man, but he has a presence. It’s hard to explain, but you just feel that someone important, someone mega-rich, someone who is the best in the world at what they do is in the room. As I approached, Ivey seemed immersed in a magazine, reading what looked to be an article about himself. I introduced myself and offered an outstretched paw. He looked up from his magazine momentarily and shook my hand. As I fumbled around for my notepad, Ivey returned to his magazine. He clearly had no interest in interviews, and you could sense right from the off that he was here under duress and couldn’t wait to get back out onto the golf-course or the high stakes poker tables. The magazine was simply a way of keeping his mind occupied whilst he waited for the interviews to end.
I didn’t enjoy the best of starts. With Ivey’s eyes still fixated on the magazine, I attempted to divert his attention with my first question: “Could you tell us about that record-breaking pot you played recently?” I probed. Ivey stirred momentarily, like a canine whose ears perk up upon hearing the scream of a distant feline. He looked at me intently before saying, “Sorry, could you start over.” I repeated the question with a gulp. “Do you mean the one with me and Tom [Dwan]?” he said, searching for clarification. I suddenly realised that whilst a million pound pot might be foreign to me, it was probably a weekly occurrence for someone like Ivey. “It’s pretty simple really,” he proclaimed, braced to rattle off the hand with unhindered memory. “He raised on the button with six-seven, I reraised with ace-deuce. The flop came jack-five-three, I bet 35,000, he called. Four came on the turn, cooler card, I bet 90,000, he raised, all-in, call, and that was it. It played itself, not a big deal. If people are going to make it into a big deal, then they really don’t understand poker.”
At this point I realised why my question was, in essence, flawed. Not only was I making it a “big deal” by simply inquiring about the hand – thus suggesting that I “really don’t understand poker”, but I was also just asking him to describe a scenario that people were already privy to. If you offer Greg Raymer the same question, he’ll talk for hours about every single detail and how he felt at each precise moment; ask Ivey to retell a hand and that’s exactly what he’ll do, retell the hand, nothing less, nothing more. What was worse, however, was that I suddenly realised that on my very first question, I was giving Phil Ivey a rubdown.
What was strikingly apparent was that Ivey answered questions quickly and directly. He didn’t go off on tangents or enter into conversation. This meant that I had to be prepared to fire out another question in order to avoid being caught short if he just offered a yes or no answer. Fortunately, I had another in the bag, and one that was related to the minor things he does in his life, day in, day out, indeed being “made into a big deal”. “How do you feel about everything you do being tracked and scrutinised?” “It’s OK,” he replied nonchalantly. “It’s all right. It feels weird, but I’m used to it now so I don’t think too much about it?” Ivey looked back down at his magazine, perhaps waiting for a question of worth.
“Do you find it difficult to concentrate sometimes,” I continued, following up on the prior points, “when, say, it’s the World Series and you have people pestering you and bothering you all the time?” “While I’m playing poker,” he began, “they stay away. Most people know not to bother me while I’m playing. When I walk away from the table, they ask for autographs. It’s cool, you know. I mean, I’m not bitter or anything, I’m happy being in the position I am in, and I feel blessed, really, so the fact that I have to sign an autograph, or take a picture with someone, it’s all right with me. If it makes them happy, it makes me happy being able to do that.”
I’ve watched Ivey play numerous times, and although he has his fans, his admirers, and in particular the curious, elderly couple who watch avidly from ringside with giant badges and placards, he reflects an air of someone who you should be approaching with caution. People acknowledge this, and, on the whole, are respectful enough to not pester him too much. On the flipside, you have someone like Daniel Negreanu who can’t make it to the toilet during a break without being stopped umpteen times. Although it must frustrate him at times, he has a more welcoming persona, and one that suggests to your average poker fan that he is more approachable and wouldn’t mind if you shoved a camera in his face uninvited. But this doesn’t necessary mean that Ivey isn’t a people person, that he’s rude or not grateful for the support of his fans, it’s just that he’s doesn’t enjoy that side of the game. His love is playing, not signing autographs. Attention is not something he yearns.
After a shaky start, I felt like I had his full attention, and he seemed more receptive to my questions, so I decided to ask him why he does so few interviews and why, perhaps, he is less interested in raising his profile than others. Ivey sat back momentarily, clasped his hands together before saying, “I don’t really mind doing this interview, doing the media side, it’s just that I’d rather be doing something else. I’ve always been the type of guy who likes to do whatever I want, you know what I mean, so right now, I’d rather be out golfing, weather’s great, maybe having a beer, hanging out with my friends. I would rather be doing those things right now, but I’m here doing this interview, because that’s what they asked me to do.” Ivey took a breather before continuing: “I don’t want you take it the wrong way, you understand what I’m saying? There’s something you’d rather be doing right now. I don’t know. So, since I’m able to do that, maybe I might say, ‘You know what, I don’t want to do an interview, I’d rather go play craps, shoot dice, play poker online, I’m not going to do that interview.’ People have started to take that as me being media shy, unfriendly, not wanting to do interviews, but that’s not the case.”
I was close to interrupting him when he said, “There’s something you’d rather be doing right now.” The truth is, there wasn’t. For both a poker player and journalist, meeting Phil Ivey was pretty near the top of my list (my Angelina Jolie fantasies aside, of course) and I felt privileged to have been given the opportunity to probe the world’s greatest poker player. Perhaps Ivey simply doesn’t understand the level of fanfare he receives, the amount of respect his game garners, and how much people would like to meet him. Many actually marvel him. To them, he is the ultimate target: fame, fortune and respect.
It’s perhaps the second of those three ideals that people fantasise most about. Never does a week go by where I don’t hear about the latest Ivey splurge or tale of extravagance and indulgence. We adore these stories because they’re seemingly from another world, one in which money has no meaning and we can afford to buy virtually everything. It’s something we’d all love to do, yet Ivey has that luxury on a day-to-day basis. He can lose millions at the craps table and just shrug his shoulders, he can order hundreds of bottles of champagne and still be rich, and he can take private jets to Jay-Z concerts without giving it a second thought – no matter what we say, we’d all embrace that lifestyle. At the World Series of Poker Europe, Howard Lederer was telling his table of how Ivey lost over a million at Chinese Poker during the break, and that he barely battered an eyelid. Even Lederer, a man who is surely independently wealthy in his own right, couldn’t believe Ivey’s nonchalance towards losing such a sum. Ivey’s either a sick degenerate or even wealthier than we imagined. I think it’s both.
It’s a result of this dangerous combination that he appears to be vulnerable to the occasional proposition bets. Prop bets hold an almost legendary status in poker with various players wagering enormous sums on anything they can think of. Amarillo Slim, for example, was famous for his prop bets and once challenged a professional tennis player to a game of table tennis with one exception… Slim chose the racquets. He ultimately turned up with a huge frying pan which he had been practicing avidly with, and duly surfed to victory to pick up a five figure sum. More recently, Huck Seed boasted that he could stand in the ocean for 18 hours up to his shoulders. Phil Hellmuth shrewdly took him up on the claim. Seed lasted three hours.
Ivey is no different and loves a good wager. Who could forget his debacle with Marc Goodwin and Ram Vaswani in which Ivey extracted a gargantuan sum from the Brits at golf? Goodwin and Vaswani argued that Ivey had lied about his handicap when in fact he’d been receiving intensive coaching leading up to the event and improved considerably. The issue was settled privately and none of the players are allowed to speak about it. The question is, does Ivey place these bets for fun, or because he believes them to be profitable. I’d love to think that it’s solely because he’s a shrewd investor, but this is a man who spends millions at the craps tables when he knows the odds aren’t’ in his favour. Despite the respect he garners as a poker player, Ivey is a degenerate and a sick gambler and he enjoys putting money on the line. Ivey’s answer seemed to confirm my suspicions: “I like to do it, it’s something different, and it’s a way of staying in the action while I’m playing.” In other words, it saves him from boredom, something I sensed he often needs relief from.
“I have a bet with Andy Bloch at the moment,” he continued as I listened intently for that all-important figure. “He laid me 100:1 and I bet him $20,000 to win the World Series of Poker. 2,000 players left, and I had 350,000, and the average was 85,000, and he laid me 100-1 on winning the tournament.” “What’s the biggest prop bet you’ve been involved in?” I inquired. “This one, well, the largest amount I can win.” “And the strangest?” “Er... yeah, I dunno, so many. I’d have to think about it, I have no idea.”
Ivey didn’t quite win that two million dollars off Andy Bloch, but he came mighty close. Would it have made a difference to his life? Probably not.
To be continued…