Poker Went All-In and Lost

Lost in the larger economic trainwreck-in-slow-motion of the past few years was the quiet death of online poker. Full Tilt and PokerStars, the largest poker sites on the internet—wonderful places where antisocial math whizzes could make thousands of dollars a day off of amateur losers without getting out of bed—were shut down by the US government on April 15, 2011, and hit with charges ranging from money laundering to fraud to (in Full Tilt’s case) being a full-fledged Ponzi scheme. (The sites are still active outside the US.) Poker players—many of them suddenly without their main source of income—drifted about in shock, raged on online forums, migrated to smaller sites where making a living was much tougher, or got out of the game entirely.

Douglas Tirola isn’t a poker player, but he was put in a pretty shit spot by the events of “Black Friday” as well. Doug had just finished making All In: The Poker Movie, which was supposed to tell the story of the game, especially the “poker boom” of the last decade, during which the World Series of Poker’s television ratings skyrocketed, professional poker players turned into bona-fide celebrities, and Chris Moneymaker, an accountant who won $2.5 million at the 2003 WSOP, became a symbol for those who figured pretty much any yahoo could strike it rich playing poker. Thanks to the government quashing the online game, though, Doug had to scramble and add a whole new section about how poker has, in many ways, been busted, at least for now. I used to play a lot of online poker myself, so I thought I’d pay a visit to Doug and get his perspective on the rise and fall of the game. He was also kind enough to provide us with a couple of exclusive outtakes: one of Ira Glass dismissing the “gambler-as-outlaw” myth, and one of legendary, recently deceased boxing writer Bert Sugar talking about the game as he knew it.

VICE: You aren’t much of a poker player—so what inspired you to make this movie?
Douglas Tirola: I just like poker. But maybe more importantly, I like the idea of poker. Or what poker represents in terms of someone living on the outside of society, like a more working-class guy’s version of a punk. To me, poker in some odd way relates to all of that outsider status.

Well, once you get to a certain level of online play, it’s really math-based. A while back I went to my friend’s apartment, and he was making thousands of dollars a month playing online and he had a setup that looked like something a stockbroker would have: 12 games open at once, software tracking all the action, and so on. Do you think it loses some of its outsider appeal when the game is played that way?
I think for the older guys—the Doyle [Brunsons], the Amarillo Slims, even Chris Moneymaker—there’s a desire to live outside the structure of society. There’s a level of that with some of the younger online players, but they might not recognize it as much. I think a lot more of them—and this is probably just the way our society is today—are focused on the money part of it. Obviously everybody wanted to win money, everybody wants to make money, but I think the older group was more like, “I want to make enough money to just do this forever,” and they know there’s going to be ups and downs. They all talk about going broke. The young guys compare it to day trading, like, “I could have gone to Wall Street, but I’m doing this.” The old guys weren’t thinking that because they never could have adapted socially.

Ira Glass:

One thing I learned from your movie is that Chris Moneymaker was this horrible, degenerate gambling addict, not a “regular guy.” Do you think a lot of these players are just addicts who have found a way to make it work?
I think you're exactly right. A lot of poker players are gamblers at heart. If it wasn't poker, it would be something else. We certainly have a lot of stories from the movie where people would win a tournament and go straight to the craps table or the roulette table and blow it. But a lot of them have curbed that instinct because they have seen themselves essentially become celebrities, and I think the lure of becoming a celebrity and becoming famous keeps them a little bit more in check.

Let’s talk about the government crackdown. A year ago, I heard rumors that casinos wanted these sites shut down because people wouldn’t play poker in person anymore.
I think during the time we made the film, that belief was debunked, or maybe the casinos just changed their view. I think the casinos realized, “This online thing was just recruiting new people that will eventually come to our casinos.” The universal conspiracy theory that a lot of online players believe is that the casinos were more against just the specific leaders in the industries being PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, and that they wanted those shut down, even if that meant shutting down online poker temporarily to get rid of them from the market, and that eventually poker would be legal online and the casinos would take over those businesses. So imagine if you wanted to start a new burger place and you’re like, “God, it’d be a lot easier if McDonald’s and Burger King went away.”

That’s a conspiracy theory, but it’s not especially far-fetched when you’re talking about casino operators.
We have this whole metaphor between Wall Street and poker in the movie, and the Wall Street banks influence the government to do bailouts and all this other stuff, so the idea of business getting involved with government is much more at the forefront of people’s minds now. Years ago you’d go, “Wait, casinos don’t even want to talk to the government because government attention for them can only be bad.” But now you see them lobbying for things just like IBM would.

Bert Sugar:

Want more poker? Read this:
A Eulogy for Online Poker

@HCheadle