Re: Mike The mouth
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Last night I watched some old tourneys and a couple of them had "The Mouth" on the final tables and I was wondering how he's doing. I knwo he had a problem with the law and ended up in jail for 9 months(I think that's how long he was supposed to be in).
Sometimes I can't stand the guy......I hope he grows up some and gets back to playing good poker.
I often wonder about guys like him though. I wonder how good he'd be if he wasn't berating other players? I've only seen him play on TV so maybe he's only made a couple scenes and that was all that was shown.
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I wrote a book about high-stakes poker and Mike Matusow was one of my sources. We became friends last year, so what I tell you is colored by that, but if I didn't believe it, I never would have become friends with him:
1. Mike had a drug problem a few years ago. He admitted it to me and has been very candid in other places about it. Dumb, lack of self-control, too much too soon, whatever. Then he quit.
2. Another poker player whose name I won't mention got into serious trouble with the police. To keep himself out of jail, he said something like "Mike Matusow is tight with every big drug dealer in Vegas." Mike, seriously, was too nice a guy even to badmouth the guy who (falsely) ratted him out, so I'm 2d or 3d hand on this. In fact, Mike was a life-of-the-party type who bought a lot used a lot, gave away a lot. But he had practically zero drug contacts, and was clean by now.
3. The cops believed the guy, so they assigned an undercover cop to Mike: get to be friends with him (something that is incredibly easy to do with Mike) and get him to introduce you to all the Vegas drug kingpins.
4. The problem was there were never any drug kingpins, and even if there were, Mike was out of drug using. The police wasted months and months and months. So to salvage the operation, the cop, who had by now become a close friend of Mike's said he had some mob friends coming to town and he'd look terrible if he couldn't fix them up with some drugs. Could Mike, as a favor, bail him out? So Mike called up someone, get the drugs, and gave them to his buddy, who arrested him.
5. It was stupid of Mike to ever use drugs, and stupid to do that kind of favor to someone, but I believe his mistakes were mitigated by having been set up in such a dirty way. They could have sent him to prison for 20-30 years and offered him 6 months right before trial, so how strong do you think they thought their case was.
Mike is a wonderful guy and a flawed human being. As far as his tournament behavior, part of that is his lack of control, part is self-promotion (encouraged big-time by the TV people, but definitely originating with him), and part was his screwed up situation in 2004. He is responsible for the words coming out of his mouth, but with the prosecution hanging over his head at the WSOP and a week from going to a very rough jail for six months at the Aruba event, he put unbelievable pressure on himself to grab the brass ring.
He gets out next week, right before the Five Star, and the last time I saw him, he told me he was pretty much walking out of jail and into the tournament. Everybody is accountable for what they do, but they also deserve to be judged by the totality of the circumstances, and also on direct experience.
He's not entitled to a free pass, but if you say, (a) he did some really stupid things, (b) he talks too much, (c) he's a really nice guy to people who know him, (d) he's a very talented poker player, and (e) he's a work in progress, so let's see what he does with this hand, then you'll have given him all he deserves.
Sorry if I got too preachy.
MC
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