Michael Craig's Journal

Waking Mike Matusow

I just returned from 24 hours in Vegas, most of which was spent in the company of Mike Matusow. It was a nice time, very productive (I got part of an interview on Omaha Hi-Lo, Mike made $70,000). But I feel like I aged about five years.

Of course, because of the false alarm the last time I tried to interview him in Vegas, I called BEFORE I left. Naturally, I woke him up. The sleeps, like, twice a week and every time I call, I’m waking him up. But he was home, he slept through the night, and we could sit by the pool and do the interview in five hours when I arrived.

Home is Where the Notebook Is

Fast-forward five hours. I’m driving through his neighborhood in a well-to-do Vegas suburb. The houses and the yards all look almost the same. Even the street names, which have adjectives like “whispering” suffixes like “manor,” all sound alike. But Mike’s house, I bet, is the only one paid for by Scotty Nguyen’s 1998 World Championship.

Fortunately, for identification purposes, it’s the only one where the bottom of the garage is exposed so his cats can get in and out.

I rang the doorbell, which I learned by now is a fruitless gesture. I have long ago, where Mike is concerned,Â overcome my traditional reluctance to open the door to someone’s house and just saunter in. The main floor, all black and white and plush and leather and marble, is immaculate.

That’s because it is unused. (This isn’t completely accurate. Mike has a roommate, a very nice woman who takes care of his house when he is gone. I met her once before, forgot her name, and again forgot it. But she lives in a room downstairs and is part of this small but essential support mechanism for the professional poker player: The Link to the Responsible World.)

A living room coffee table visible from the front door has Mike’s 2005 Tournament of Champions trophy perched atop.

I yell my presence up the staircase. The response, “I’m just waking up,” surprises me not in the least.

[If some of this seems like well-trod ground, I wrote about spending the day and night with Matusow when he won the ToC last November. It was one of my favorite columns during my short-lived time as a CARD PLAYER columnist.]

His bedroom is, by now, familiar territory for me: large bedroom with a canopy bed, 60-inch television which is probably ready to fry itself because it runs 24 hours a day, debris on every surface, a small sitting room with a giant computer monitor and more debris on every surface.

For sport, I always inventory the contents of Matusow’s bed. Large tray with the remains of breakfast (his chef, Mike’s mom Gloria later told me, was by), two telephones, two remote controls, an uncapped 64-ounce bottle of water, and his notebook computer.

Eye Spy

The first crisis of the day concerns Mike’s eyeglasses. He remembers waking up to answer the phone - probably my call, though he sleeps weird hours even for a poker player and always keeps a pair of phones nearby, so it could be anybody (note: he received about 20 phone calls while we were in his bedroom) - and accidentally flinging them off the bed.

The problem, though, is that he can’t SEE to FIND his glasses. While he goes to the bathroom, I crawl around his floor.

I don’t know what he pays his cleaning woman, but it’s too much. There were dust-bunnies under that bed the size of Komodo dragons. A copy of STUFF Magazine from July 2005. Several cat toys. Four different-sized towels. And, finally, thank god, Mike’s glasses.

Naturally, I had to try them on. I used to wear a pretty heavy eye-glass prescription, but I had the laser surgery about 10 years ago. I’m of the age - 47, okay, but an amazingly YOUNG 47 - where I’m now using glasses for reading, but when I lost the $400 ubertitanium reading glasses I had custom made, I discovered the $10 pair at Walgreens worked just as well.

Mr. Magoo’s got nothing on Mike Matusow. If I didn’t find these - and they were deep under the bed - Mikey would have been cursing out the bad beats he was getting while standing in front of his toaster. (Actually, few bad beats and not much cursing. Wait - plenty of cursing, but not much about cards. Matusow is playing well and on a heater besides.)

Cat Man DoÂ

Cat fanciers will appreciate this next part. Mike is very loving toward his cats. He picked up one of them and accused it, CLUE-style, of stealing the eyeglasses. He even favored the feline with his English-detective accent and used terms like “drawing room” and “library”.

Swimming to Omaha

Eventually, he decided we should do the interview - my purpose for coming out was to get his input for a chapter in THE FULL TILT POKER STRATEGY GUIDE - TOURNAMENT EDITION on Omaha Eight-or-Better - in his swimming pool. It’s not the best place for an interview, but nowhere in his house is really a good place for an interview. The floorplan and design probably weren’t planned this way, but it’s basically a place to play online poker with the bare bones of a traditional house layered over it.

The interview: I have to start by saying that Mike Matusow is a brilliant poker theorist. I know that the number of people who discount him as nothing more than a circus-sideshow have diminished in the last year, but few people want to give him his due as anything beyond a streaky player who undertstands the game and either falls apart of squeezes maximum value out of his rush. Maybe the people regarding him one tier higher admit that he is great at reading opponents in tournament situations.

But brilliant? A theorist? Matusow is generally regardedÂ as a seat-of-the-pants pro who sometimes gets it all right.

When I interviewed Chris Ferguson on Pot Limit Omaha and he explained why he likes middle connecting cards more than any other hand, and why he’d rather make a straight than a flush, it opened up my mind to the game. And I thought, The guy’s a brilliant Ph.D. who has thought seriously about the game for years.

Believe it or not, it’s the same thing talking Omaha Eight-or-Better with Mike Matusow. He thinks very carefully about these things and has very specific ideas about how the game should be played. (Later, I watched him win about $45,000 in Omaha cash games, in some instances explaining his plays in connection with the theories described earlier. Several times, the hands played out exactly as he predicted because he has an excellent understanding of what his opponents’ actions mean. That doesn’t always happen, but he is definitely capable of thinking these things through at an extraordinarily high level.)

Now that I’ve told you how great Matusow understands Omaha, I can also mention that a couple things made the interview a rotten experience. First, it is going to be torture transcribing that tape. Mike’s swimming around as he’s talking, often not in the vicinity of the voice recorder. From the little bit I listened to, the wind sounded like it was howling and the pair of waterfalls in the pool didn’t help.

Second, even though I have attention-related psychological issues and all three of my kids do as well, it can be maddening to get Mike to stay focused. He had something important and worthwhile to say about every aspect of Omaha Eight or Better, but he constantly jumped between starting hands early in the tournament, play on the bubble, short-handed play, the importance of patience, when to bluff.

If I write it exactly as Mike said it, the chapter would be one 27-page paragraph. But it would have some great insight.

Hemingway Had Havana

Mike wanted to illustrate some of the things he had talked about and drew parallels between the $1000-$2000 Omaha Eight-or-Better game he was playing on Full Tilt. OK, I’m sure he was itching to get back to the game, too. He’s been playing very well in that game and a Pot Limit Omaha game on the site for the last month. I’ve watched him win a couple hundred thousand dollars in the last several days.

While he was playing, I struggled to set up my computer in the sitting room.

Describing this isn’t going to be easy. There are two flat surfaces, one place to sit, and one place to sit that was turned into a flat surface.

Flat #1 - Dresser. Giant computer monitor on top, certainly no room for my computer. A CPU and a spider web of wires and components lays on the floor nearby.

Flat #2 - Card table in the corner. Completely covered with layer upon layer of magazines, logo tee shirts and hats, old hotel keys and business cards, mail, bills, bank statements, legal documents, empty boxes, etc.

Seat #1 - A low white leather love seat in front of the computer monitor. This is good seating for slouching in front of the giant monitor zombie-like for 30 hours straight, but that’s it.

Seat #2/Surface #3 - This is the ottoman that went with the love seat. It handles overflow from the card table and is the napping place for the cat.

I made myself a “work space” by piling up items on the card table and balancing the yellow pages on top. I put my computer on top of that.

But finding a chair was tough. There wasn’t one in the sitting room, bedroom, or master bath. The second bathroom had nothing, and that includes no light. The toilet seat was cracked, which had to be a bad omen, and I don’t mean just when I sat down on it. No chairs in the second bedroom or in the exercise/bar/game room. (There was a large framed cheetah poster and some 2 1/2 year-old magazines in there, though.)

There were no folding chairs in any closets or the garage. There were four black iron kitchen-table chairs, plus two stools under an island in the kitchen. I thought the stools would be easier to carry so I took one.

Bad move. It was about three feet higher than the slag heap I was trying to type on.

Craig: Mike, you’ve probably never heard this before, but your bedroom is not the ideal set-up for a writer.

Matusow: Really? Because no desk?

Craig: No desk. No chair. No lights. A $10 card table with every unpaid bill you’ve gotten in the last 3 years.

Matusow: I haven’t picked up my mail in a month. They stopped delivering it. They’re holding it at the post office.

Craig: You know, if you don’t actually receive it, that means you don’t owe the money.

Matusow: That’s what I’m counting on.

Craig: I guess the tip off is the roll of stamps you have on the table. Thirty-SEVEN cent stamps. Didn’t they raise the postage rates, like, a year ago?

Matusow: How the fuck do I know? WhyÂ are you using that fucking stool for?

Craig: I know, it sucks. It’s like the dunce stool. It’s three feet higher than this rickety table.

Matusow: Moron.

Craig: I had to haul something upstairs. The stool looked easier to carry.

Eventually, I brought up one of the kitchen chairs. Then Mike’s brother Scott and his mom, Gloria, arrived. What a trio of insane, lovable people. All talking, all the time. Worried about Mike, worried about each other, complaining about Mike’s swearing, complaining about too much money, complaining about too little money, worried about Mike’s computer not being secure, worried he doesn’t know his password, worried someone else set it up, worried about terrorists.

Great scene, but not one where I got an ideal amount of work done. None of it stopped Matusow from stomping through the high-stakes games on Full Tilt and winning 70 dimes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 5:41 pm and is filed under My favourites:.