Michael Craig's Journal

Last Sunday morning, I ventured to Mike Matusow’s house. We would play the Full Tilt $350,000 Guarantee, watch the Sunday football games, and supposedly work on ideas for turning Mikey into a movie. I knew only to expect the unexpected.

Still, I was a little surprised at what I saw on his front lawn, especially because I had been to his house less than 24 hours earlier. He had three five-foot-tall plywood Loony Tunes characters on his lawn:

The Tasmanian Devil (reading a book titled “Bad Boys” and thinking “yum”);

Daffy Duck; and

Speedy Gonzales (wearing a sheriff’s badge on his hat).

It was just before noon, pre-dawn in Matusow time, but he was watching the football games with his friend Matt and his girlfriend Jessica. He was miserable, but in his unique way: complaining about his losses of the last week, complaining about how much he had already lost that morning, but bright-eyed, funny, caustic, energetic.

Still, there was a little more edge to his complaints about his online poker experiences. Maybe it was the first thing he said when he saw me:

“Mike, how much money you got with Full Tilt?”

To some degree, this was a test, even if he didn’t mean it that way. Matusow and I go back 2 1/2 years. I’ve been with him when everyone wanted to be his friend (winning the ToC in November 2005, making the final table of the 2005 WSOP) as well as the times when there was no rush of people to hang on his words and deeds.

Still, I’ve never loaned him money. On one hand, I’m an outsider to this world - sick gamblers, winning and losing huge sums, borrowing and lending day by day based on what just happened. On the other, Mike is an honorable person and my friend. His credit in poker is excellent.

I give myself a passing grade, but just barely. In late November, I finished fifth in the $350,000 Guarantee tournament, and most of that money was still sloshing around in the account. Instead of saying “$20,000,” I say “$3,000.”

We camp out upstairs in his bedroom. Mike played in bed. Matt was playing downstairs on a notebook computer while watching the football games in the family room. Even Jessica was playing in the sitting room.

I set up my computer on a folding table at the foot of Mike’s bed. This table had previously been in the small adjacent room, loaded down with old bills, contracts, and magazines. In fact, he pointed to its clean surface as proof that Jessica was helping him straighten out his life. She seemed very nice, but there’s a big difference between straightening out someone’s life and straightening out the mess in their bedroom …. On the other hand, with THAT mess, maybe they aren’t too different.

After about an hour consisting of horror stories of hands gone wrong - he really, truly has more than his share of miserable luck, at least from what I can tell - Matusow simply says, “Ship it,” and I send him the three dimes. (Mike doesn’t acknowledge it but I feel I’m part of the fraternity now, so I can use expressions like “three dimes.”) I imagine Mike going on a run that restores his confidence and his bankroll, making me forever the savior of his poker career.

It takes one hand for the three dimes to disappear. Against a familiar opponent who is always betting, always raising, Mike limps with A-Q. The guy predictably puts in his big raise. Mike re-raises all-in and the guy calls with A-K.

He is on th ephone with friends, describing it, angry. “The guy raises me every time. He raises me out of a hundred pots in a row. I play back at him one time and he has ace-king. I never win a hand online. Never never never never never never never.”

Where’s your messiah now?

I don’t say anything about when I’m getting the three dimes back, but Mike casually mentions, probably smelling my unease like a rotten egg, that he’s getting $50,000 into his account later in the day.

Somehow, he gets back into a game, so I start thinking about the Aussie Millions. There is a satellite guaranteeing twenty of the $18,000 packages. But it costs $535 to enter and who has that kind of money? (Not me, if Mike believes the baloney I fed him about how much money I have with Full Tilt.) For $75, I play a satellite to get into that tournament.

Punctuated by Mike’s awful beats, I make the final table with the chip lead. The top five win their way to the dance.

Suddenly, Mike asks, “So when do you want to work? You can ask me questions and I can tell you things for the story.”

Awkwardly, I have to beg off for the moment. I’m playing.

But not for long. On consecutive hands, I lose top-two-pair to a straight and an overpair to a set. As I turn back to Mike on the bed to complain - aren’t I entitled, after all the bad-beat stories I’ve endured? - he jumps off the bed and punches a wall, hard.

He is red-faced, telling the story of how he lost some amount of thousands of dollars like he’s spitting out poison. He reraised with a pair of eights and was called. The flop came 2-3-7, rainbow. He bet and the other player raised. He knew the other player had nothing but overcards, and called. The jack on the turn made the guy with Q-J a higher pair.

I keep my mouth shut and count down the minutes to the $350,000 Guarantee. He’s out of his game and I’m out of my satellite, but there’s no way I’m going to say, “How about an interview?”

We watch football. Remarkably, Mike doesn’t have any money on the games. He’s in some kind of football pool, so there’s a rooting interest in Tennessee vs. Houston, but it is nominal in MatusowBucks.

Of course, you know what happens when Mike doesn’t have any money on the games? HE had the right side of almost every game. It was nice that he did not compound his miseries of the day by spending much time calculating how much he WOULD HAVE or SHOULD HAVE won.

Because his Full Tilt account was cleaned out, he needed me to front him the $216 for the $350,000 Guarantee. I sent it. He wanted to put Matt into it but Matt didn’t have anything in his account, either. So I lent Mike another $216 for him to lend to Matt.

This led to a series of (relatively) nominal loans between me, Matusow, and Matt. The $350,000 Guarantee, Aussie Millions, $30,000 Guarantee HORSE. It was difficult to keep track of the amounts, especially with the odd few bucks for juice each time. As near as I figured, it was $3,900.

Not that I expected any of this to matter . We were each playing at least two of these tournaments. Matt was a solid player. Matusow was one of the world’s best tournament players. And me? Hey, fifth place? November 26? It was in the bag.

We drew a goose egg for the afternoon. No one finished in the money in anything, and we all had some ugly story to tell of our elimination.

At one point, we were eliminated from every tournament, were an hour from the next tournament, and had no money for the cash games (or so, for my part, I told them). I said to Mike, “Why don’t we take the next hour, pick a topic out of your life story, and start an interview.”

He motioned toward the giant screen of the family room TV. (We had moved downstairs by this time.) ”The Cowboys-Saints game is about to start.” So we sat and watched the game.

But there is always a silver lining. Mike Matusow’s loan arrived, I was repaid, and he went on a tear in Omaha Eight-or-Better and Stud Eight-or-Better. He actually recouped his losses for the entire day. In typical Matusow fashion, however, he told me this as I was leaving: “Yeah, I was even for the day, but like an idiot, I keep playing. Now I’m down ….”

I said my good-byes to Mikey, Matt, and Jessica, and hit the highways at 10 PM. I needed to be back before the morning Federal Express delivery.

The previous Wednesday, I asked my editor when I would receive the second one-third payment of the advance for the Full Tilt book. He said, “Oh, we sent that a couple weeks ago.” Over the course of the rest of the day, we discovered that our housekeeper had signed for the delivery but she had no idea where in the house it was. After tearing apart my already-disheveled office, we concluded that it had been thrown away.

It went without saying that I couldn’t “afford” - there are many ways to use that term in this sentence and they all apply - to miss this delivery.

Driving home under cover of darkness, I pondered the events of the day for lessons:

1. When I told Mike the total amount of his debt, I couldn’t handle all the math and rounded it to $3,900. He acted like I was gypping him by not providing the precise amount, or being able to itemize it. Looking at the e-mails on my cell phone at a gas station in Wickieup, Arizona, I discovered the total amount was $3,973. But I’m gonna let Mikey slide for the $73, at least for now.

2. It’s safe to loan Mike Matusow money, especially if someone else is about to loan him twenty times as much.

3. Finishing 5th in a tournament two weeks ago does not qualify you for an ambassadorship or to park in the handicapped spot next to the convenience store. Move on.

4. An afternoon at Mike Matusow’s is a fun time: good company, good food, more poker than anyone can handle. But don’t expect any work to get done.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 17th, 2006 at 12:45 am and is filed under My favourites:.