oreogod
05-03-2005, 05:12 AM
its actually a book excerpt from a new release Aces and Kings.
Link (http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7280830?pageid=rs.NewsArchive&pageregion=mainRegio n&rnd=1114714559970&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1040)
or if u want here's the article verbatium:
On a cloudless May afternoon, Daniel Negreanu darted through the streets of downtown Las Vegas in a new white Lexus SC 430 convertible. With his highlighted blond mop-top and two hoop earrings blowing in the breeze, he looked straight out of a car commercial, the picture of 21st-century stylish prosperity. He showed off the global-positioning system, which gave him an alternate route when construction blocked the entrance to Highway 95, and toyed with the bumping stereo. Sporting his perpetual cat-that-ate-the-canary grin, it was impossible to tell that Negreanu had busted out of a 2004 World Series of Poker event minutes earlier.
The 29-year-old high school dropout, whose only real job was a three-week stint at a Subway sandwich shop, was utterly content--and why not? He pals around with ubercelebrities Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio, splashes $100,000 in poker chips on his desk like loose change, and paid for the Lexus in cash. He plans to upgrade from his three-bedroom house in the posh Las Vegas suburb of Summerlin to one that includes basketball and tennis courts, similar to the setup of his close friend Erick Lindgren. Lindgren's straight-out-of-MTV Cribs bachelor pad is furnished with six flatscreen TVs, a Galaga arcade game, a pool table, a swimming pool, and a framed picture of Seinfeld's Kramer over the living-room mantle. But even Lindgren's 4,000-square-foot manse doesn't match the massive spread Phil Ivey has overlooking the lush Tournament Players Club golf course.
The heirs to a burgeoning empire built on the shoulders of road-weary gamblers like Puggy Pearson and Doyle Brunson, Negreanu, Ivey, and Lindgren are the embodiment of the dream that has taken hold of thousands of teens and 20-somethings across the country. They are each under 30 and sitting on piles of cash earned playing a game that requires them to perform no task more strenuous than chasing straights and flushes.
Yeah, it's good to be one of the hot young stars of poker.
To say that the face of poker is changing is as obvious as raising with pocket Aces from early position. At the 2004 World Series, there were as many oversize throwback jerseys as cowboy hats, more earrings than cigars. A record eight championship bracelets went to players under the age of 32, including four to players younger than 24.
These poker whiz kids emerged from a different culture than their forebears, one in which legalized gambling is prominent across the country, bookstores are loaded with an overabundance of strategy books, and it's possible, by playing multiple games online at once, to compress years of experience into a few months. And, of course, they came to the game at a time when becoming a successful professional didn't just ensure a good living. It meant you could become something more than rich--you could become a star.
But as Negreanu emerged from downtown and pointed the Lexus west toward his home nestled in the shadow of the Red Rock Mountains, he offered this advice to the kids coming up behind him: Don't quit your day job.
"Everybody likes to say the poker world is this glamorous lifestyle, living in mansions with four Rolls-Royces in the garage," he said. "Of a thousand people who attempt to become successful doing this, maybe one makes it. And when I say successful, I don't mean playing 50 hours a week and grinding it out. I mean having a beautiful home, a car, and some money in the bank. You would be better off randomly going to Hollywood and trying to become movie star."
What to make of this? It's undoubtedly good advice, as the number of pros struggling to scrape together a bankroll far exceeds the handful who inhabit Negreanu's rarified tax bracket. Then again, in the weeks following his admonition, Negreanu captured the best overall player award at the World Series, and then bested a world-class field in a subsequent tournament at the Plaza. His take for roughly six weeks of work: more than $600,000. This is a man who lies for a living, and it suddenly seems entirely possible that he's trying to bluff an entire generation out of a pot he'd just as soon keep for himself.
If Negreanu is bluffing, the Toronto native with a passing resemblance to Rounders star Edward Norton is simply living up to his reputation as a loose cannon willing to win by even the most unconventional means. During the 2004 World Series, for example, he entered a $1,000 no-limit event that allowed players to buy back in as many times as they wanted within the first two hours--a structure that generates fairly loose play in the opening rounds. Negreanu took that approach to the extreme: He played almost every two cards he was dealt, and usually raised with them, laughing giddily all the while. Every time he busted out, he produced another thick wad of hundreds and reentered the fray. He ultimately bought back in a record 28 times, which meant he needed to finish fifth out of 538 entries just to get his initial investment back.
"People see me acting silly, it adds to my game," he explains. "It's good for my table image for the future. They will know I'm capable of going crazy. Because I will play with those people again, and they'll always wonder when I'm in there playing a lot of pots, 'Is he going crazy again?'"
In this instance, it worked. After the re-buy period ended, Negreanu continued to play aggressively--though he toned it down a tad--and ultimately finished third. His prize money was more than $100,940, a profit on the day of more than $70,000.
Negreanu clearly revels in his wild-card reputation, but he says there is a definite method to his madness. He believes it's becoming increasingly difficult to win with a traditional tight-aggressive style, in which you wait for big hands and play them forcefully. As a result, he enters more pots than almost anyone at poker's highest levels. While most players get involved in at most two or three hands out of 10, Negreanu doesn't mind playing five or six.
"It's the correct strategy," he says. "In the old days, there was this myth that you have to play tight and only play certain hands. Poker has evolved. The mathematics behind what everybody thought was correct--the 'book play'--is absolutely not correct anymore [because there are so many less experienced and often reckless players coming to poker]. It's way too conservative. The way the game was played in 1980, if somebody raised and then there was a reraise, that meant a premium hand. [David] Sklansky even wrote that you should lay down pocket Jacks in that situation. Well, the way the game is played now, the first raise could be 10-8 suited and the next raise Ace-8."
Although he's played professionally since he was 17, Negreanu didn't begin to develop his signature style until he was 23. It was 1998 and, as a newcomer to Las Vegas, he was playing with world champion Stu Ungar and Erik Seidel in a no-limit game at the Bellagio. Negreanu sat to Ungar's immediate left, which meant he was always forced to react to Ungar's play. Ungar was only months away from his drug-induced death, but managed to bully the table relentlessly even on autopilot. "He was in complete control of every hand," Negreanu says. "Every hand went through Stuey. Everybody had to be completely aware of him at all times."
Negreanu calls the evening "the biggest revelation of my poker life." The lesson: By dictating the action, you can knock other players out of their comfort zones.
"The majority of players are looking for reasons to fold. I am looking for reasons to play," Negreanu continues. "Even before I look at the hand, I am trying to map out the table and figure out where the strength is and where the weakness is based on the chip stacks and personalities of each player. Like in chess, I usually have my move already decided based on a range of hands that I might be dealt. As soon as I look at the hand, I am deciding whether this is ridiculous to play or not. If it's not, then I usually play it."It's worth noting that Negreanu's method of dealing with poker's new landscape is the direct opposite of that of Phil Hellmuth, who advocates playing supertight in the face of reckless opponents. Negreanu's strategy is a dangerous one, of course, because its risks equal the rewards--it's a mathematical certainty that if he plays more hands than anyone else, he starts without the best hand on a regular basis. It's a strategy that's viable only for the best players, those who are able to capitalize on weakness in other players while also recognizing when a good hand might not be the best one. It takes a lifetime of card sense to pull it off, and Negreanu has it.
The oldest son of recent Romanian immigrants, Negreanu was valedictorian of his junior high and a promising student when he discovered poker in the Toronto pool halls where he spent his free time. By his junior year of high school, he had abandoned all pretense of being a student. He left his books at home and arrived each morning with just a deck of cards and a stack of poker chips. He ran two games out of the school cafeteria, which typically earned him at least $100 a day, but he finally got expelled when one of his players paid him off with a check the boy had stolen from his mother. Soon he was playing professionally in home games and underground clubs.
In 1995, at age 21, he traveled to Las Vegas for his first World Series. Two years later, he became the youngest player ever to win a bracelet when he captured the $2,000 pot-limit Hold 'Em title.In 1998, he moved to Vegas full-time. By his own admission, Negreanu was a talented but wildly undisciplined player in his early years. He played the way he played back home: like it was a game, not a job. He made consistent money at the middle limits, but stretched to play higher even when his bankroll couldn't sustain him. He was frequently broke. He also sometimes drank heavily at the table, especially during what he dubbed "party day," when he would get drunk and play foolishly on purpose (not unlike the way he played in the World Series re-buy event, except with no brake). His rationale was that he needed those nights to keep poker fun, and not let the grind of constant playing wear him down, but it took a toll on his funds. The morning after his 26th birthday, he awoke unable to remember a single hand he'd played the night before--an embarrassing episode made worse by the fact that he had blown $70,000.
In the tight-lipped world of high-stakes poker, he developed a reputation as a bigmouth, writing a candid monthly column in Card Player magazine and posting frequently to the popular online bulletin board rec.gambling.poker. To the public, he was an approachable everyman, writing openly about "party day" and his troubles with alcohol, but he occasionally stepped on toes when he voiced strong opinions about other pros.
In one notorious example, Negreanu posted a blistering takedown of Annie Duke, commenting on everything from her table behavior to her personal hygiene. The diatribe stemmed from Negreanu's close friendship with Jennifer Harman, who he believed was the best female player in the world, despite persistent media reports awarding that title to Duke. In his post, Negreanu didn't name Duke, but the target was clear to everyone in the poker community. Howard Lederer, Duke's older brother, posted a lengthy response defending his sister. He closed by writing: "I will, from now on, ignore your entire existence, unless, of course, I am trying to bust you at the poker table. You have crossed the line, and I don't really care if you ever come back."
The exchange was a rare public rift between top players. Worse, at least for Negreanu, was that Lederer staked out the high ground (for the most part, anyway; he did accuse Negreanu of getting drunk and snatching the toupee off a player's head).
The episode was something of a wake-up call for Negreanu. In recent years, he has matured noticeably and become one of the more respected, although still outspoken, members of the poker community. "The thing about Daniel is that he made mistakes when he was younger, but he grew up before our eyes," says tournament veteran Adam Schoenfeld. "Unlike someone like Phil Hellmuth, who simply never grew up."
Negreanu's results started to reflect his newfound maturity. In 2003 he won more than $900,000 in tournaments alone, not counting the hundreds of thousands he won in cash games.
Negreanu uses his garrulous persona in much the same way Amarillo Slim did a generation earlier. Both men like to create a flood of information at the table, confident that they can employ it more effectively than their opponents. In Slim's case, he picked up tells from the way his opponents responded to his badgering. Negreanu talks more than most players, but he also resorts to other layers of gamesmanship, like forecasting a player's hand before it's been turned over or showing his own cards even if he wins the hand without a call.
Negreanu "is going to give you information, but he is going to know what he gave you," Lindgren says. "You may lay down a hand if it looks like Daniel may have made a straight, and he'll show you his cards to show he had it. When a similar situation comes up later, he is going to play the hand the exact same way, except he won't have anything."
At the Plaza tournament he won in June, Negreanu put on an impressive display of his table-management skills. When the tournament got down to three players, Negreanu got involved in a pot with the chip leader, Freddy Deeb, an accomplished Lebanese pro. On the river, Deeb made a straight that gave him the best hand--Negreanu held a pair of 10s. Deeb bet at the pot, which caused Negreanu to rub his goatee and audibly walk through the range of hands that he thought Deeb might hold.
"I think you've got Ace-9," Negreanu concluded. "But I've got to see it."
He called the bet, forcing Deeb to reveal his cards. On cue, Deeb showed an Ace and a 9 and took the pot, but the message was unmistakable: Negreanu had a rock-solid read on his man.
Later in the match, when the two players got heads-up, Deeb was dealt Ace-King and Negreanu Ace-7. The flop came King-6-2, with two hearts. Deeb bet $16,000 and Negreanu simply called with no pair and no straight or flush draws. The turn was a 4, and Deeb, who was leading the hand with a pair of Kings, checked. This gave Negreanu an opening, and he bet $30,000. It was a stone-cold bluff, and Deeb called it. But, to Negreanu, the fact that Deeb merely called, instead of raising, signified that Deeb was not convinced he held the best hand. A 4 of hearts came on the river, making three hearts on the board, and Deeb led out with a bet of $65,000.
Negreanu drilled through Deeb's possible hands in his mind: He knew Deeb didn't have the nut flush, because Negreanu held the Ace of hearts; Deeb had bet out on the flop, indicating that it improved his hand; and he only called on the turn when it looked as if the small card could have helped Negreanu make a straight.
After thinking it through, Negreanu correctly deduced that Deeb held Ace-King. Once he was confident in his read, he also realized, based on the cards on the board, that there was no way Deeb could call a sizable raise, since Negreanu could conceivably have a full house, a straight, or a flush. Negreanu calmly raised another $100,000--an amount just small enough that Deeb could interpret it as an indication that Negreanu knew he had the best hand and wanted to get called.
"You must have flopped a set," Deeb muttered, convinced that the second 4 on the board gave Negreanu a full house. Deeb folded, and Negreanu took the decisive pot in the tournament.
"The whole hand, I knew that there was no way he could believe I'd be stupid enough or crazy enough to bluff," Negreanu says. "But it was still a question of executing."
Lederer, Negreanu's old nemesis, who was doing commentary on the event for Fox Sports, called it "one of the great bluffs of all time."
Only 27 years old and one of the few African-Americans to penetrate poker's top ranks, Phil Ivey is the stylistic opposite of Negreanu. Whereas Negreanu wears his emotions on his sleeve and expresses himself loudly and often, Ivey is practically a cipher. A dominant force in the largest games in the world, Ivey carries himself with a near-sociopathic intensity that astounds even the battle-hardened veterans who make up the $2,000/$4,000 game of Seven-Card Stud at Larry Flynt's Hustler Club outside Los Angeles, where Ivey was among the big winners in 2004.
"We finally saw him slouch the other day," said Johnny "World" Hennigan, sitting next to Ivey at Flynt's game. "He was loser $750,000. He went like this . . ."
Hennigan dipped his left shoulder almost imperceptibly, and the other players chuckled along--all except Ivey, who picked silently from a plate of sushi.
"But he won it back," Barry Greenstein added.
"Oh, yeah, he won it back," Hennigan replied.
Danny Robison, Chip Reese's old running buddy from the 1970s, wanted to hear Ivey explain his performance (and victory) several months earlier in a televised tournament at Turning Stone casino in upstate New York. The final table was the first live broadcast of a poker event, but Ivey had blatantly refused to put on a show for the cameras. After he got heads-up with unknown 21-year-old John D'Agostino--a time when most players would talk each other up in an attempt to feel out their opponents or at least break the tension--Ivey didn't speak for two hours.
"You had this long, sad face the whole time. It was unbelievable," Robison said to Ivey.
Ivey stared back without a word.
Even more amazing, Robison said, was that when Ivey bested D'Agostino for the title, he ignored the announcers standing by with an oversize $500,000 check and instead walked out a side door in search of the nearest bathroom.
Ivey finally spoke up.
"I was sick," he said. "I had diarrhea."
Ivey's blank expression indicated that he saw nothing amusing about the situation.
"Yeah, but he didn't get mentally sick," Hennigan chimed in. "The guy's a rock." With mock seriousness, he turned to Ivey on his right and added: "You should go on Oprah." That finally got a brilliant white smile out of Ivey.
The truth is, Ivey is affable and engaging away from the table, but it's just hard to find him away from the table. "I play like 70 hours a week, treat it like a job," he says. "I put in a lot of time, a lot of hours, and try to get better every day. The best thing about poker is that you will learn something new every day. If you are really paying attention, whether it's somebody's body movements or the way they bet or how they play the hand, you learn a lot about the people you are playing against--and you learn a lot about yourself."
Ivey's peers say that, if anything, he is downplaying his work ethic. He is known to play all night in the Flynt game, drive to Las Vegas for the biggest game at the Bellagio, then unwind by logging on to the Internet for a few hours of high-stakes virtual action. A former videogame fanatic, he sees poker as a similar challenge--except the high score is measured in money.
"He plays as if poker is going to end in a week and he needs to get all the hours in while he can," says Erik Seidel. "He really wants to win all the money."
Ivey's single-minded approach is reflected in his refusal to indulge in the trappings of being a poker celebrity. He refuses almost all interview requests and eschews endorsement and sponsorship deals. In July, he visited Guyana with Greenstein to spend a couple of days working at one of Greenstein's pet charities there. He set one condition: no publicity.
For almost five years in the late 1990s, when he was first learning the game, Ivey was known around Atlantic City poker rooms as "Jerome"--the name on the fake ID he carried in case anyone asked if he was actually old enough to be there. "Jerome" was known as a good kid, respectful and courteous to other players, but almost foolishly aggressive. His go-for-broke style generated huge swings in his bankroll. He would go on a rush through the lower limits until he could afford to sit down in A.C.'s biggest game, a $400/$800 Seven-Card Stud game that was built around Roger King, who originally produced the Oprah Winfrey Show, and Henry Orenstein, the creator of both the Transformer action figures and the hole-card technology that drives televised poker. Even in that game, Ivey refused to put a governor on his aggression.
"He was willing to gamble his whole bankroll at any one time," says Cyndy Violette, the Atlantic City pro considered one of the top female players in the world. "Some days he would look like an idiot, playing every hand, but he was experimenting and getting creative."
Ivey, whose only regular job was a brief stint selling tickets to the policeman's ball over the phone, came at the game from a unique direction. Instead of starting conservative and picking the spots where he held an advantage, as most players do, his default move was ultra-aggressive. With experience, he learned to keep his impulse under control, if just barely.
Ivey's style reminds many of a young Doyle Brunson, who raised so frequently and effectively in no-limit games that he picked up countless small pots when the rest of the table declined to tangle with him. The result was that when a big pot arose, Brunson could afford to gamble with the worst of it because he was merely risking the chips he'd stolen before. Brunson was forced to adapt after he published Super/System and other players began calling his bluffs. But Ivey has yet to be reined in.
"I never played with Doyle when he was younger, but I would assume that Phil takes a lot more small pots than Doyle ever did," says Jeff Shulman, a regular on the tournament circuit and editor of Card Player magazine.
"He doesn't care that you understand that he bluffs a lot," agrees Negreanu. "He is looking to be the bully and be in our face. He will continue to push you around until you stand up to him. And when you do, he takes it to the next level."
Ivey's debut on poker's biggest stage came in 2000, when he made the final table at the World Series in the $2,500 pot-limit Omaha event at the tender age of 23. He was the chip leader starting the day but found himself surrounded by a formidable collection of talent, including Phil Hellmuth, David "Devilfish" Ulliott, and Amarillo Slim.
Not intimidated, Ivey repeatedly came over the top of Hellmuth and made him lay down big hands.
"Every time I bet, you raise," Hellmuth complained to Ivey at one point.
Seeing that Ivey planned to stay characteristically silent, Slim interjected. "Why shouldn't he? You keep folding."
Eventually Hellmuth busted out along with the rest of the table, leaving Slim and Ivey heads-up. Slim had grabbed an almost 4-to-1 chip lead by this point, and the announcer for the match informed the crowd that Slim had taken first place in his four previous appearances at a World Series final table.
"Very rarely do the sheep slaughter the butcher," Slim explained to the audience.
At 72, Slim had almost 50 years on Ivey. Poker writer Andy Glazer noted that the scene was reminiscent of The Hustler, when young, brash "Fast Eddie" Felson faced off with the venerable Minnesota Fats. Except in that case, the kid took down the wily veteran and, here, it seemed that Slim held an insurmountable lead.
The men represented markedly different styles, as well as different eras. Slim repeatedly tried to draw Ivey into conversation, but Ivey remained stone-faced and silent. "That's his game, not mine, and I'm not going to play his game," Ivey said afterward.
In the first major pot, Ivey went all-in with a flush draw, and caught it on the turn. Next he made a straight on the river. Then he check-raised Slim when he made the nut flush on the flop. In a 10-minute run of bold play and lucky breaks, Ivey had stormed into a commanding lead. On the final hand, Slim made a King-high straight on the flop. He immediately moved all in. Ivey pondered his options briefly, and then called. He hit an Ace-high straight on the turn and claimed his first bracelet.
The assembled media gathered around Ivey, hoping for a juicy comment about toppling the game's most famous player. All they got was a meek, "It feels good."
Two years later, Ivey won three gold bracelets at the 2002 World Series and made the final table in two other events, a performance considered among the most dominating in Series history. By 2004, he was in among the elite group of players who coolly avoid the frenzy--and big purses--of the World Series in favor of the Big Game, which is held across the street at the Golden Nugget. By several accounts, Ivey was the big winner in the monthlong game, taking home a sum deep into seven figures.
In his trademark oversize throwback jerseys, Ivey brings a touch of hip-hop to a game so long dominated by Texans and other rural westerners. But he proudly shuns the wraparound shades that have become de rigueur among poker's under-30 crowd.
"I figure if you can't stand someone looking at you, you shouldn't play poker," he once said. "Suck it up. If you have tells, work on them." (His wife once bought him a pair of $1,100 designer sunglasses, but he threw them in the trash after they contributed to his misreading a hand and losing a pot.)
Which isn't to say he's flawless. Like Brunson, his stylistic predecessor, Ivey has plenty of gamble in him--some say a little too much. He's a regular at the high-stakes craps tables and, although he has posted several big wins there, he once dropped more than a million dollars in a session. Brunson is among several established veterans who have warned Ivey to stay away from the pit games, where, unlike poker, the house has an insurmountable advantage. But few doubt his talent.
"The guy who is going to pass me up is Phil Ivey," says Barry Greenstein, who claims to have won more money playing poker than anyone in history. "He is hungrier than any of us. He has the most stamina and he has the killer instinct. Phil doesn't even play the games well right now. That's what's scary about him. He is a great gambler and he is just getting better. Right now, technically, he doesn't have it all down, but just on gambling smarts, he is able to stay even or win at most of these games. He just gets better and better all the time. By next year at the World Series, you're going to have a monster on your hands."
In many ways, Negreanu and Ivey are throwbacks to a previous generation. They earned their stripes in home games, underground clubs, and shabby casinos not very different in spirit from the ones that spawned Brunson, Hellmuth, Greenstein, and others. It seems likely, though, that the old-school route will be less popular in coming years, as players turn to role models more like Erick Lindgren.
On the surface, it seems as if the 27-year-old Lindgren came out of nowhere to capture the World Poker Tour's 2003 Player of the Year award, but Lindgren arrived with a wealth of experience playing both online and against live players.
With his blond hair and square jaw, Lindgren is the quintessential California golden boy. He grew up in sleepy Burney (population 3,000), and chased his hoop dreams for one year at tiny Butte Junior College, but quit the team after a disagreement with his coach. Lindgren found a job dealing blackjack at a nearby Indian casino, where he first started playing poker on his days off, and the next year he took a job as a prop at the Casino San Pablo, in the Bay Area. As a prop--a player paid by the casino to keep the tables full--he earned $160 per day, plus benefits, but had to gamble with his own money, which was a problem at the beginning.
Completely broke from betting on sports, he borrowed $500 from a friend just so he could play $6/$12 on his first day. He didn't harbor dreams of fame and fortune; he just hoped to make a living. "Back then, for the middle-of-the-road grinder guys, you were doing damn good if you could make $50,000. That's all I wanted," he says.
Lindgren studied Sklansky's books and Brunson's Super/System, but primarily learned from other players in the card room. Because he was there all the time, he knew which players were winners. He studied them intently and applied the lessons to his own game.
"I always wanted to see what the good players were doing," he says. "Any time you can find people who are better than you, you can pick up a few things."
Despite his steady improvement, he was barely surviving--and considering his parents' advice that he take a real job. Then, one evening in 1998, Lindgren logged on to a now-defunct website called poker.com. He deposited $300 through his credit card and found another player willing to play $20/$40 heads-up. Ordinarily, $300 is not nearly enough to play at that level--you can literally go bust in one misplayed hand. But the cards ran lucky for him and he ended the night ahead more than $1,500.
Within weeks, he quit his job as a prop and reconfigured the desk in his bedroom to accommodate three 19-inch monitors. "I had this tiny bedroom. You couldn't even walk in there," he says. "I just had my bed, a desk, and three computers. I would just sit in there and click all day long. Boom, boom, boom."
Lindgren did little besides play poker online and sleep for three years. By playing multiple games on each monitor, he could log on to six or seven games of $20/$40 at once. During those three years, he says, he won as much as $40,000 in a month and never less than $10,000.
Lindgren essentially compressed 10 years of experience into three. He developed an instinctive feel for which starting hands to play, always the most important decision in Hold 'Em-but, perhaps more important, he learned to beat a variety of playing styles. If his opponents were ultra-aggressive, he laid back and set traps when he found a big hand. If they were passive, he controlled the action and manipulated the table with constant aggression.
"You better learn how to play a lot of different styles, because you have to be comfortable at a lot of different types of tables," he says. "People don't experiment enough with their games. They just say, 'This is my game and it's the way I play.' "
Lindgren made a point to continue competing against live players as much as possible. He says that while the Internet is a great training ground, it can't prepare you for the nuances of playing live. "It's a whole lot harder to bluff someone when you have to look at them," he says.
When the World Poker Tour debuted in 2002, Lindgren was perfectly positioned to navigate the large tournament fields populated equally by longtime veterans, online qualifiers, and other amateurs looking to take a shot at the big time. He created a splash right away: He made the final table at a World Poker Tour event in Paris, then claimed his first WPT title in Aruba and a second win several months later on a cruise ship in Mexico (besting Negreanu, who took second). He celebrated his second victory--and the $1 million check that came along with it--the way any fun-loving 27-year-old would: by running up a $22,000 bar tab with Negreanu and other pals.
Lindgren is convinced that he and his good friends Negreanu and Ivey will be dominant for years to come. "We all love poker so much," he says. "There's no way we're quitting, so someone is going to have to come along and knock us off our pedestal."
Of course, poker history is littered with wunderkinds who captured a couple of tournaments or ran lucky for a year or two before fading into oblivion. As Doyle Brunson says, when asked to evaluate the latest crop of young studs, "Come ask me in 20 years and I'll let you know."
Excerpted from Aces and Kings
Link (http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7280830?pageid=rs.NewsArchive&pageregion=mainRegio n&rnd=1114714559970&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1040)
or if u want here's the article verbatium:
On a cloudless May afternoon, Daniel Negreanu darted through the streets of downtown Las Vegas in a new white Lexus SC 430 convertible. With his highlighted blond mop-top and two hoop earrings blowing in the breeze, he looked straight out of a car commercial, the picture of 21st-century stylish prosperity. He showed off the global-positioning system, which gave him an alternate route when construction blocked the entrance to Highway 95, and toyed with the bumping stereo. Sporting his perpetual cat-that-ate-the-canary grin, it was impossible to tell that Negreanu had busted out of a 2004 World Series of Poker event minutes earlier.
The 29-year-old high school dropout, whose only real job was a three-week stint at a Subway sandwich shop, was utterly content--and why not? He pals around with ubercelebrities Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio, splashes $100,000 in poker chips on his desk like loose change, and paid for the Lexus in cash. He plans to upgrade from his three-bedroom house in the posh Las Vegas suburb of Summerlin to one that includes basketball and tennis courts, similar to the setup of his close friend Erick Lindgren. Lindgren's straight-out-of-MTV Cribs bachelor pad is furnished with six flatscreen TVs, a Galaga arcade game, a pool table, a swimming pool, and a framed picture of Seinfeld's Kramer over the living-room mantle. But even Lindgren's 4,000-square-foot manse doesn't match the massive spread Phil Ivey has overlooking the lush Tournament Players Club golf course.
The heirs to a burgeoning empire built on the shoulders of road-weary gamblers like Puggy Pearson and Doyle Brunson, Negreanu, Ivey, and Lindgren are the embodiment of the dream that has taken hold of thousands of teens and 20-somethings across the country. They are each under 30 and sitting on piles of cash earned playing a game that requires them to perform no task more strenuous than chasing straights and flushes.
Yeah, it's good to be one of the hot young stars of poker.
To say that the face of poker is changing is as obvious as raising with pocket Aces from early position. At the 2004 World Series, there were as many oversize throwback jerseys as cowboy hats, more earrings than cigars. A record eight championship bracelets went to players under the age of 32, including four to players younger than 24.
These poker whiz kids emerged from a different culture than their forebears, one in which legalized gambling is prominent across the country, bookstores are loaded with an overabundance of strategy books, and it's possible, by playing multiple games online at once, to compress years of experience into a few months. And, of course, they came to the game at a time when becoming a successful professional didn't just ensure a good living. It meant you could become something more than rich--you could become a star.
But as Negreanu emerged from downtown and pointed the Lexus west toward his home nestled in the shadow of the Red Rock Mountains, he offered this advice to the kids coming up behind him: Don't quit your day job.
"Everybody likes to say the poker world is this glamorous lifestyle, living in mansions with four Rolls-Royces in the garage," he said. "Of a thousand people who attempt to become successful doing this, maybe one makes it. And when I say successful, I don't mean playing 50 hours a week and grinding it out. I mean having a beautiful home, a car, and some money in the bank. You would be better off randomly going to Hollywood and trying to become movie star."
What to make of this? It's undoubtedly good advice, as the number of pros struggling to scrape together a bankroll far exceeds the handful who inhabit Negreanu's rarified tax bracket. Then again, in the weeks following his admonition, Negreanu captured the best overall player award at the World Series, and then bested a world-class field in a subsequent tournament at the Plaza. His take for roughly six weeks of work: more than $600,000. This is a man who lies for a living, and it suddenly seems entirely possible that he's trying to bluff an entire generation out of a pot he'd just as soon keep for himself.
If Negreanu is bluffing, the Toronto native with a passing resemblance to Rounders star Edward Norton is simply living up to his reputation as a loose cannon willing to win by even the most unconventional means. During the 2004 World Series, for example, he entered a $1,000 no-limit event that allowed players to buy back in as many times as they wanted within the first two hours--a structure that generates fairly loose play in the opening rounds. Negreanu took that approach to the extreme: He played almost every two cards he was dealt, and usually raised with them, laughing giddily all the while. Every time he busted out, he produced another thick wad of hundreds and reentered the fray. He ultimately bought back in a record 28 times, which meant he needed to finish fifth out of 538 entries just to get his initial investment back.
"People see me acting silly, it adds to my game," he explains. "It's good for my table image for the future. They will know I'm capable of going crazy. Because I will play with those people again, and they'll always wonder when I'm in there playing a lot of pots, 'Is he going crazy again?'"
In this instance, it worked. After the re-buy period ended, Negreanu continued to play aggressively--though he toned it down a tad--and ultimately finished third. His prize money was more than $100,940, a profit on the day of more than $70,000.
Negreanu clearly revels in his wild-card reputation, but he says there is a definite method to his madness. He believes it's becoming increasingly difficult to win with a traditional tight-aggressive style, in which you wait for big hands and play them forcefully. As a result, he enters more pots than almost anyone at poker's highest levels. While most players get involved in at most two or three hands out of 10, Negreanu doesn't mind playing five or six.
"It's the correct strategy," he says. "In the old days, there was this myth that you have to play tight and only play certain hands. Poker has evolved. The mathematics behind what everybody thought was correct--the 'book play'--is absolutely not correct anymore [because there are so many less experienced and often reckless players coming to poker]. It's way too conservative. The way the game was played in 1980, if somebody raised and then there was a reraise, that meant a premium hand. [David] Sklansky even wrote that you should lay down pocket Jacks in that situation. Well, the way the game is played now, the first raise could be 10-8 suited and the next raise Ace-8."
Although he's played professionally since he was 17, Negreanu didn't begin to develop his signature style until he was 23. It was 1998 and, as a newcomer to Las Vegas, he was playing with world champion Stu Ungar and Erik Seidel in a no-limit game at the Bellagio. Negreanu sat to Ungar's immediate left, which meant he was always forced to react to Ungar's play. Ungar was only months away from his drug-induced death, but managed to bully the table relentlessly even on autopilot. "He was in complete control of every hand," Negreanu says. "Every hand went through Stuey. Everybody had to be completely aware of him at all times."
Negreanu calls the evening "the biggest revelation of my poker life." The lesson: By dictating the action, you can knock other players out of their comfort zones.
"The majority of players are looking for reasons to fold. I am looking for reasons to play," Negreanu continues. "Even before I look at the hand, I am trying to map out the table and figure out where the strength is and where the weakness is based on the chip stacks and personalities of each player. Like in chess, I usually have my move already decided based on a range of hands that I might be dealt. As soon as I look at the hand, I am deciding whether this is ridiculous to play or not. If it's not, then I usually play it."It's worth noting that Negreanu's method of dealing with poker's new landscape is the direct opposite of that of Phil Hellmuth, who advocates playing supertight in the face of reckless opponents. Negreanu's strategy is a dangerous one, of course, because its risks equal the rewards--it's a mathematical certainty that if he plays more hands than anyone else, he starts without the best hand on a regular basis. It's a strategy that's viable only for the best players, those who are able to capitalize on weakness in other players while also recognizing when a good hand might not be the best one. It takes a lifetime of card sense to pull it off, and Negreanu has it.
The oldest son of recent Romanian immigrants, Negreanu was valedictorian of his junior high and a promising student when he discovered poker in the Toronto pool halls where he spent his free time. By his junior year of high school, he had abandoned all pretense of being a student. He left his books at home and arrived each morning with just a deck of cards and a stack of poker chips. He ran two games out of the school cafeteria, which typically earned him at least $100 a day, but he finally got expelled when one of his players paid him off with a check the boy had stolen from his mother. Soon he was playing professionally in home games and underground clubs.
In 1995, at age 21, he traveled to Las Vegas for his first World Series. Two years later, he became the youngest player ever to win a bracelet when he captured the $2,000 pot-limit Hold 'Em title.In 1998, he moved to Vegas full-time. By his own admission, Negreanu was a talented but wildly undisciplined player in his early years. He played the way he played back home: like it was a game, not a job. He made consistent money at the middle limits, but stretched to play higher even when his bankroll couldn't sustain him. He was frequently broke. He also sometimes drank heavily at the table, especially during what he dubbed "party day," when he would get drunk and play foolishly on purpose (not unlike the way he played in the World Series re-buy event, except with no brake). His rationale was that he needed those nights to keep poker fun, and not let the grind of constant playing wear him down, but it took a toll on his funds. The morning after his 26th birthday, he awoke unable to remember a single hand he'd played the night before--an embarrassing episode made worse by the fact that he had blown $70,000.
In the tight-lipped world of high-stakes poker, he developed a reputation as a bigmouth, writing a candid monthly column in Card Player magazine and posting frequently to the popular online bulletin board rec.gambling.poker. To the public, he was an approachable everyman, writing openly about "party day" and his troubles with alcohol, but he occasionally stepped on toes when he voiced strong opinions about other pros.
In one notorious example, Negreanu posted a blistering takedown of Annie Duke, commenting on everything from her table behavior to her personal hygiene. The diatribe stemmed from Negreanu's close friendship with Jennifer Harman, who he believed was the best female player in the world, despite persistent media reports awarding that title to Duke. In his post, Negreanu didn't name Duke, but the target was clear to everyone in the poker community. Howard Lederer, Duke's older brother, posted a lengthy response defending his sister. He closed by writing: "I will, from now on, ignore your entire existence, unless, of course, I am trying to bust you at the poker table. You have crossed the line, and I don't really care if you ever come back."
The exchange was a rare public rift between top players. Worse, at least for Negreanu, was that Lederer staked out the high ground (for the most part, anyway; he did accuse Negreanu of getting drunk and snatching the toupee off a player's head).
The episode was something of a wake-up call for Negreanu. In recent years, he has matured noticeably and become one of the more respected, although still outspoken, members of the poker community. "The thing about Daniel is that he made mistakes when he was younger, but he grew up before our eyes," says tournament veteran Adam Schoenfeld. "Unlike someone like Phil Hellmuth, who simply never grew up."
Negreanu's results started to reflect his newfound maturity. In 2003 he won more than $900,000 in tournaments alone, not counting the hundreds of thousands he won in cash games.
Negreanu uses his garrulous persona in much the same way Amarillo Slim did a generation earlier. Both men like to create a flood of information at the table, confident that they can employ it more effectively than their opponents. In Slim's case, he picked up tells from the way his opponents responded to his badgering. Negreanu talks more than most players, but he also resorts to other layers of gamesmanship, like forecasting a player's hand before it's been turned over or showing his own cards even if he wins the hand without a call.
Negreanu "is going to give you information, but he is going to know what he gave you," Lindgren says. "You may lay down a hand if it looks like Daniel may have made a straight, and he'll show you his cards to show he had it. When a similar situation comes up later, he is going to play the hand the exact same way, except he won't have anything."
At the Plaza tournament he won in June, Negreanu put on an impressive display of his table-management skills. When the tournament got down to three players, Negreanu got involved in a pot with the chip leader, Freddy Deeb, an accomplished Lebanese pro. On the river, Deeb made a straight that gave him the best hand--Negreanu held a pair of 10s. Deeb bet at the pot, which caused Negreanu to rub his goatee and audibly walk through the range of hands that he thought Deeb might hold.
"I think you've got Ace-9," Negreanu concluded. "But I've got to see it."
He called the bet, forcing Deeb to reveal his cards. On cue, Deeb showed an Ace and a 9 and took the pot, but the message was unmistakable: Negreanu had a rock-solid read on his man.
Later in the match, when the two players got heads-up, Deeb was dealt Ace-King and Negreanu Ace-7. The flop came King-6-2, with two hearts. Deeb bet $16,000 and Negreanu simply called with no pair and no straight or flush draws. The turn was a 4, and Deeb, who was leading the hand with a pair of Kings, checked. This gave Negreanu an opening, and he bet $30,000. It was a stone-cold bluff, and Deeb called it. But, to Negreanu, the fact that Deeb merely called, instead of raising, signified that Deeb was not convinced he held the best hand. A 4 of hearts came on the river, making three hearts on the board, and Deeb led out with a bet of $65,000.
Negreanu drilled through Deeb's possible hands in his mind: He knew Deeb didn't have the nut flush, because Negreanu held the Ace of hearts; Deeb had bet out on the flop, indicating that it improved his hand; and he only called on the turn when it looked as if the small card could have helped Negreanu make a straight.
After thinking it through, Negreanu correctly deduced that Deeb held Ace-King. Once he was confident in his read, he also realized, based on the cards on the board, that there was no way Deeb could call a sizable raise, since Negreanu could conceivably have a full house, a straight, or a flush. Negreanu calmly raised another $100,000--an amount just small enough that Deeb could interpret it as an indication that Negreanu knew he had the best hand and wanted to get called.
"You must have flopped a set," Deeb muttered, convinced that the second 4 on the board gave Negreanu a full house. Deeb folded, and Negreanu took the decisive pot in the tournament.
"The whole hand, I knew that there was no way he could believe I'd be stupid enough or crazy enough to bluff," Negreanu says. "But it was still a question of executing."
Lederer, Negreanu's old nemesis, who was doing commentary on the event for Fox Sports, called it "one of the great bluffs of all time."
Only 27 years old and one of the few African-Americans to penetrate poker's top ranks, Phil Ivey is the stylistic opposite of Negreanu. Whereas Negreanu wears his emotions on his sleeve and expresses himself loudly and often, Ivey is practically a cipher. A dominant force in the largest games in the world, Ivey carries himself with a near-sociopathic intensity that astounds even the battle-hardened veterans who make up the $2,000/$4,000 game of Seven-Card Stud at Larry Flynt's Hustler Club outside Los Angeles, where Ivey was among the big winners in 2004.
"We finally saw him slouch the other day," said Johnny "World" Hennigan, sitting next to Ivey at Flynt's game. "He was loser $750,000. He went like this . . ."
Hennigan dipped his left shoulder almost imperceptibly, and the other players chuckled along--all except Ivey, who picked silently from a plate of sushi.
"But he won it back," Barry Greenstein added.
"Oh, yeah, he won it back," Hennigan replied.
Danny Robison, Chip Reese's old running buddy from the 1970s, wanted to hear Ivey explain his performance (and victory) several months earlier in a televised tournament at Turning Stone casino in upstate New York. The final table was the first live broadcast of a poker event, but Ivey had blatantly refused to put on a show for the cameras. After he got heads-up with unknown 21-year-old John D'Agostino--a time when most players would talk each other up in an attempt to feel out their opponents or at least break the tension--Ivey didn't speak for two hours.
"You had this long, sad face the whole time. It was unbelievable," Robison said to Ivey.
Ivey stared back without a word.
Even more amazing, Robison said, was that when Ivey bested D'Agostino for the title, he ignored the announcers standing by with an oversize $500,000 check and instead walked out a side door in search of the nearest bathroom.
Ivey finally spoke up.
"I was sick," he said. "I had diarrhea."
Ivey's blank expression indicated that he saw nothing amusing about the situation.
"Yeah, but he didn't get mentally sick," Hennigan chimed in. "The guy's a rock." With mock seriousness, he turned to Ivey on his right and added: "You should go on Oprah." That finally got a brilliant white smile out of Ivey.
The truth is, Ivey is affable and engaging away from the table, but it's just hard to find him away from the table. "I play like 70 hours a week, treat it like a job," he says. "I put in a lot of time, a lot of hours, and try to get better every day. The best thing about poker is that you will learn something new every day. If you are really paying attention, whether it's somebody's body movements or the way they bet or how they play the hand, you learn a lot about the people you are playing against--and you learn a lot about yourself."
Ivey's peers say that, if anything, he is downplaying his work ethic. He is known to play all night in the Flynt game, drive to Las Vegas for the biggest game at the Bellagio, then unwind by logging on to the Internet for a few hours of high-stakes virtual action. A former videogame fanatic, he sees poker as a similar challenge--except the high score is measured in money.
"He plays as if poker is going to end in a week and he needs to get all the hours in while he can," says Erik Seidel. "He really wants to win all the money."
Ivey's single-minded approach is reflected in his refusal to indulge in the trappings of being a poker celebrity. He refuses almost all interview requests and eschews endorsement and sponsorship deals. In July, he visited Guyana with Greenstein to spend a couple of days working at one of Greenstein's pet charities there. He set one condition: no publicity.
For almost five years in the late 1990s, when he was first learning the game, Ivey was known around Atlantic City poker rooms as "Jerome"--the name on the fake ID he carried in case anyone asked if he was actually old enough to be there. "Jerome" was known as a good kid, respectful and courteous to other players, but almost foolishly aggressive. His go-for-broke style generated huge swings in his bankroll. He would go on a rush through the lower limits until he could afford to sit down in A.C.'s biggest game, a $400/$800 Seven-Card Stud game that was built around Roger King, who originally produced the Oprah Winfrey Show, and Henry Orenstein, the creator of both the Transformer action figures and the hole-card technology that drives televised poker. Even in that game, Ivey refused to put a governor on his aggression.
"He was willing to gamble his whole bankroll at any one time," says Cyndy Violette, the Atlantic City pro considered one of the top female players in the world. "Some days he would look like an idiot, playing every hand, but he was experimenting and getting creative."
Ivey, whose only regular job was a brief stint selling tickets to the policeman's ball over the phone, came at the game from a unique direction. Instead of starting conservative and picking the spots where he held an advantage, as most players do, his default move was ultra-aggressive. With experience, he learned to keep his impulse under control, if just barely.
Ivey's style reminds many of a young Doyle Brunson, who raised so frequently and effectively in no-limit games that he picked up countless small pots when the rest of the table declined to tangle with him. The result was that when a big pot arose, Brunson could afford to gamble with the worst of it because he was merely risking the chips he'd stolen before. Brunson was forced to adapt after he published Super/System and other players began calling his bluffs. But Ivey has yet to be reined in.
"I never played with Doyle when he was younger, but I would assume that Phil takes a lot more small pots than Doyle ever did," says Jeff Shulman, a regular on the tournament circuit and editor of Card Player magazine.
"He doesn't care that you understand that he bluffs a lot," agrees Negreanu. "He is looking to be the bully and be in our face. He will continue to push you around until you stand up to him. And when you do, he takes it to the next level."
Ivey's debut on poker's biggest stage came in 2000, when he made the final table at the World Series in the $2,500 pot-limit Omaha event at the tender age of 23. He was the chip leader starting the day but found himself surrounded by a formidable collection of talent, including Phil Hellmuth, David "Devilfish" Ulliott, and Amarillo Slim.
Not intimidated, Ivey repeatedly came over the top of Hellmuth and made him lay down big hands.
"Every time I bet, you raise," Hellmuth complained to Ivey at one point.
Seeing that Ivey planned to stay characteristically silent, Slim interjected. "Why shouldn't he? You keep folding."
Eventually Hellmuth busted out along with the rest of the table, leaving Slim and Ivey heads-up. Slim had grabbed an almost 4-to-1 chip lead by this point, and the announcer for the match informed the crowd that Slim had taken first place in his four previous appearances at a World Series final table.
"Very rarely do the sheep slaughter the butcher," Slim explained to the audience.
At 72, Slim had almost 50 years on Ivey. Poker writer Andy Glazer noted that the scene was reminiscent of The Hustler, when young, brash "Fast Eddie" Felson faced off with the venerable Minnesota Fats. Except in that case, the kid took down the wily veteran and, here, it seemed that Slim held an insurmountable lead.
The men represented markedly different styles, as well as different eras. Slim repeatedly tried to draw Ivey into conversation, but Ivey remained stone-faced and silent. "That's his game, not mine, and I'm not going to play his game," Ivey said afterward.
In the first major pot, Ivey went all-in with a flush draw, and caught it on the turn. Next he made a straight on the river. Then he check-raised Slim when he made the nut flush on the flop. In a 10-minute run of bold play and lucky breaks, Ivey had stormed into a commanding lead. On the final hand, Slim made a King-high straight on the flop. He immediately moved all in. Ivey pondered his options briefly, and then called. He hit an Ace-high straight on the turn and claimed his first bracelet.
The assembled media gathered around Ivey, hoping for a juicy comment about toppling the game's most famous player. All they got was a meek, "It feels good."
Two years later, Ivey won three gold bracelets at the 2002 World Series and made the final table in two other events, a performance considered among the most dominating in Series history. By 2004, he was in among the elite group of players who coolly avoid the frenzy--and big purses--of the World Series in favor of the Big Game, which is held across the street at the Golden Nugget. By several accounts, Ivey was the big winner in the monthlong game, taking home a sum deep into seven figures.
In his trademark oversize throwback jerseys, Ivey brings a touch of hip-hop to a game so long dominated by Texans and other rural westerners. But he proudly shuns the wraparound shades that have become de rigueur among poker's under-30 crowd.
"I figure if you can't stand someone looking at you, you shouldn't play poker," he once said. "Suck it up. If you have tells, work on them." (His wife once bought him a pair of $1,100 designer sunglasses, but he threw them in the trash after they contributed to his misreading a hand and losing a pot.)
Which isn't to say he's flawless. Like Brunson, his stylistic predecessor, Ivey has plenty of gamble in him--some say a little too much. He's a regular at the high-stakes craps tables and, although he has posted several big wins there, he once dropped more than a million dollars in a session. Brunson is among several established veterans who have warned Ivey to stay away from the pit games, where, unlike poker, the house has an insurmountable advantage. But few doubt his talent.
"The guy who is going to pass me up is Phil Ivey," says Barry Greenstein, who claims to have won more money playing poker than anyone in history. "He is hungrier than any of us. He has the most stamina and he has the killer instinct. Phil doesn't even play the games well right now. That's what's scary about him. He is a great gambler and he is just getting better. Right now, technically, he doesn't have it all down, but just on gambling smarts, he is able to stay even or win at most of these games. He just gets better and better all the time. By next year at the World Series, you're going to have a monster on your hands."
In many ways, Negreanu and Ivey are throwbacks to a previous generation. They earned their stripes in home games, underground clubs, and shabby casinos not very different in spirit from the ones that spawned Brunson, Hellmuth, Greenstein, and others. It seems likely, though, that the old-school route will be less popular in coming years, as players turn to role models more like Erick Lindgren.
On the surface, it seems as if the 27-year-old Lindgren came out of nowhere to capture the World Poker Tour's 2003 Player of the Year award, but Lindgren arrived with a wealth of experience playing both online and against live players.
With his blond hair and square jaw, Lindgren is the quintessential California golden boy. He grew up in sleepy Burney (population 3,000), and chased his hoop dreams for one year at tiny Butte Junior College, but quit the team after a disagreement with his coach. Lindgren found a job dealing blackjack at a nearby Indian casino, where he first started playing poker on his days off, and the next year he took a job as a prop at the Casino San Pablo, in the Bay Area. As a prop--a player paid by the casino to keep the tables full--he earned $160 per day, plus benefits, but had to gamble with his own money, which was a problem at the beginning.
Completely broke from betting on sports, he borrowed $500 from a friend just so he could play $6/$12 on his first day. He didn't harbor dreams of fame and fortune; he just hoped to make a living. "Back then, for the middle-of-the-road grinder guys, you were doing damn good if you could make $50,000. That's all I wanted," he says.
Lindgren studied Sklansky's books and Brunson's Super/System, but primarily learned from other players in the card room. Because he was there all the time, he knew which players were winners. He studied them intently and applied the lessons to his own game.
"I always wanted to see what the good players were doing," he says. "Any time you can find people who are better than you, you can pick up a few things."
Despite his steady improvement, he was barely surviving--and considering his parents' advice that he take a real job. Then, one evening in 1998, Lindgren logged on to a now-defunct website called poker.com. He deposited $300 through his credit card and found another player willing to play $20/$40 heads-up. Ordinarily, $300 is not nearly enough to play at that level--you can literally go bust in one misplayed hand. But the cards ran lucky for him and he ended the night ahead more than $1,500.
Within weeks, he quit his job as a prop and reconfigured the desk in his bedroom to accommodate three 19-inch monitors. "I had this tiny bedroom. You couldn't even walk in there," he says. "I just had my bed, a desk, and three computers. I would just sit in there and click all day long. Boom, boom, boom."
Lindgren did little besides play poker online and sleep for three years. By playing multiple games on each monitor, he could log on to six or seven games of $20/$40 at once. During those three years, he says, he won as much as $40,000 in a month and never less than $10,000.
Lindgren essentially compressed 10 years of experience into three. He developed an instinctive feel for which starting hands to play, always the most important decision in Hold 'Em-but, perhaps more important, he learned to beat a variety of playing styles. If his opponents were ultra-aggressive, he laid back and set traps when he found a big hand. If they were passive, he controlled the action and manipulated the table with constant aggression.
"You better learn how to play a lot of different styles, because you have to be comfortable at a lot of different types of tables," he says. "People don't experiment enough with their games. They just say, 'This is my game and it's the way I play.' "
Lindgren made a point to continue competing against live players as much as possible. He says that while the Internet is a great training ground, it can't prepare you for the nuances of playing live. "It's a whole lot harder to bluff someone when you have to look at them," he says.
When the World Poker Tour debuted in 2002, Lindgren was perfectly positioned to navigate the large tournament fields populated equally by longtime veterans, online qualifiers, and other amateurs looking to take a shot at the big time. He created a splash right away: He made the final table at a World Poker Tour event in Paris, then claimed his first WPT title in Aruba and a second win several months later on a cruise ship in Mexico (besting Negreanu, who took second). He celebrated his second victory--and the $1 million check that came along with it--the way any fun-loving 27-year-old would: by running up a $22,000 bar tab with Negreanu and other pals.
Lindgren is convinced that he and his good friends Negreanu and Ivey will be dominant for years to come. "We all love poker so much," he says. "There's no way we're quitting, so someone is going to have to come along and knock us off our pedestal."
Of course, poker history is littered with wunderkinds who captured a couple of tournaments or ran lucky for a year or two before fading into oblivion. As Doyle Brunson says, when asked to evaluate the latest crop of young studs, "Come ask me in 20 years and I'll let you know."
Excerpted from Aces and Kings