Vegas or Bust: A Family Man Takes On the Poker Pros

By Johnny Kampis

Can a former semi-pro win against the best poker players in the world? In 2006, Johnny’s pie-in-the-sky dreams of becoming world champion were dashed when his kings ran into aces in the World Series of Poker Main Event. But lady luck was with him when he met Amy, the woman of his dreams, who soon became his wife. Like many players, he drifted away from the game after Congress passed a law later that year that cut off funds to online poker and harkened the decline of the game. But even as Johnny returned to the working world, the itch remained. A decade later, now with two small kids in tow, Johnny convinces Amy to take a six-week family trip from their home in rural Alabama to Las Vegas, where he will risk his $10,000 bankroll in hopes of playing in the Main Event again and winning millions. Along the way, he examines how the game has changed since 2006. Although the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was the beginning of the end of the poker boom, the game still thrives, and WSOP is Exhibit A. Johnny also muses on the outlandishness of the adult fairyland that is Vegas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: May 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781773051581

Book preview

Vegas or Bust

A Family Man Takes On the Poker Pros

Johnny Kampis

Contents

Introduction

One

A Colossal Undertaking

Two

Some People Just Can’t Handle Vegas

Three

I Wanna Be a Millionaire

Four

Grinders, Freaks, and Stakers

Five

The Main Event

Epilogue

Appendices

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

About the Author

Copyright

For Amy.

Without you none of this was possible.

Introduction

I don’t remember what river card fell.

Through the fog of time, the rank and suit of the card that eliminated me has faded from memory. But it wasn’t the long-shot king I needed to double my chip stack and survive deep into the third day of the 2006 World Series of Poker Main Event, and that’s the only thing that matters.

My best shot at poker infamy? Dashed. With nearly 800 players still in the tournament, my odds of winning the $12 million top prize were infinitesimal. But in poker, as long as you have a stack, you have a dream.

After a year living another type of dream — away from the daily grind of the cubicle farm, mostly playing poker for my bread — that river card meant a wakeup call for me.

Having just turned 30, I returned home to Alabama. Over the course of the next decade, I attended graduate school, got a steady job, fell in love, got married, and had two children. You know — the standard family-man stuff.

But that river card always lingered in my mind.

Ten years later, I still share that story with little provocation, how I got all in at the world’s most prestigious poker tournament with pocket kings, only to run into pocket aces. What could I do, I always say. Nothing, they all reply, that’s just poker.

And 10 years later, the game has experienced a seismic shift, after an ill-timed law by Congress stamped out poker’s booming growth just months after the massive success of the 2006 World Series of Poker — WSOP — signaled the continued proliferation of the game.

Most online sites immediately pulled out of the United States or went belly-up. A federal raid of Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars in 2011 proved to be the death knell, at least temporarily, of online poker. Players either left the game or moved to other countries to continue to ply their skills at the virtual tables.

But then the game began its resurgence. Nevada, Delaware, and New Jersey legalized online poker, as other states, including California and Pennsylvania, considered legislation. PokerStars planned to return to the U.S. for the first time since 2011 with a website for New Jersey players. Attendance at the WSOP continued to tick up, as players continued to dream, just as all the optimists who visit Las Vegas pray to beat the long odds.

Then, early in 2016, my wife, Amy, spoke the five words I wanted to hear, the words that could put our lives on a new course.

You should go for it, she said.

Our most trying year had just wrapped up: our six-year-old son, John Harper, had been diagnosed with a form of autism. On top of that, my job was in peril, as a loss of funding for the non profit I worked for, Watchdog.org, forced the layoff of most of my colleagues. At Watchdog, we write about waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money at the local, state, and federal levels. The downsizing meant I’d serve as both reporter and editor, as I hoped the funding for my job didn’t dry up.

I had told Amy that now might be the time to pitch a book proposal long gestating in my mind, a Hail Mary if you will, with the unemployment line in view. The plan: pack up our bags and drive the 2,000 miles west from our home in Cullman, Alabama, to Las Vegas, where we’d live for the summer and I’d play a number of tournaments at the WSOP, often referred to as summer camp for poker players.

Maybe, just maybe, we’d come out of it much richer.

It was, no doubt, a bold plan — and, perhaps, the lazy man’s dream summer — but I’m no slouch at the poker tables. In addition to that earlier Main Event cash, I have several other tournament scores to my credit and plenty of success in cash games, the grinder’s bread and butter. I spent several years after 2006 playing the game on a semiprofessional basis, mixing poker income with freelance writing to make a living. Even though I shifted into a new role where journalism brought in most of my income, I continue, today, to make a little side money at the game.

Still, with financial uncertainty in our future and tables full of hardened poker pros looming, it was definitely a Hail Mary — but what city is better for a last-ditch gasp than Vegas?

You should go for it.

I could tell from the gleam in Amy’s eye, a face trying to hide a smile, that this wasn’t just for me — she was also itching for adventure. Despite her seeming love-hate relationship with Vegas because of this player’s every-summer eagerness to go to the WSOP, she has a fondness for Sin City herself. It was in Vegas, after all, that we fell in love — albeit remotely.

After months of chatting on that one-time bulwark of social media, MySpace, we met in our hometown of Cullman for our first date on July 1, 2006. But only days later I would leave for my six-week Grand Vegas Adventure, so, understandably, she didn’t get too excited about the dorky-looking fellow she had just met.

But despite the pale complexion and first-date propensity for nervously chatting too much, the adventurer in me must have had some effect on her. After all, most single men my age in Cullman probably hadn’t been west of the Mississippi. I, on the other hand, had spent the past year on a poker sabbatical, jet-setting to Connecticut, Atlantic City, Reno, and, of course, Vegas (twice) to try my hand at professional poker play.

I can’t say the journey was a rousing financial success, but, hey, I didn’t go broke — and I got the girl. Amy and I talked by phone every few days while I was stationed in the desert, and I cut my trip a few days short because I was eager to see her again. We hit it off immediately when I returned, were engaged within four months, and married the next summer.

Apologies to Bogie, but we’ll always have Vegas.

As Amy encouraged me to write the book proposal — and having gone to Vegas with me twice herself — she ticked off all the things for the kids to see and do: Mirage dolphins, Mandalay Bay aquarium, Bellagio fountains, Circus Circus amusement park, Red Rock Canyon, the new High Roller observation wheel on the Strip. And of course we’d rent a place with a pool: the kids take to them like ducks to water.

After forming the preliminary plan for the family and our housing, it was time to focus on the poker. I scanned the just-released WSOP schedule, checking off the events I wanted to play, while ignoring those I couldn’t fathom taking a seat in — $50,000 Poker Players Championship, anyone? Or the $1,500 Dealers Choice event, where players can seemingly pick any game this side of War and Old Maid?

Not so much. But that new $1,500 event featuring three forms of Omaha Hi-Lo looked enticing, and the $1,500 Monster Stack, in which players get twice as many chips as in other No Limit Texas Hold’em tournaments at the WSOP, I dubbed a must-play.

I printed out calendars for June and July, listing on some days possible tournaments — higher buy-ins if the summer started going well, lower buy-ins if I got off to a rough start — and noting family day on those dates I planned to take a break from poker.

It wouldn’t be all WSOP, all the time, though. Several Vegas casinos offer parasite-like summer tournament series to capitalize on the masses of players the WSOP draws to town. So I planned to head everywhere from Binion’s, the birthplace of the WSOP, to the Venetian, owned by online-poker foe Sheldon Adelson, in search of fortune and glory in 2016.

Inspired by Andrés Martinez, who convinced a publisher to give him a $50,000 advance with which to gamble in Vegas for 30 days in 1998 as he explored 10 casinos for his book 24/7: Living It Up and Doubling Down in the New Las Vegas, I would cobble together a $10,000 bankroll from my own poker winnings, a book advance, and stakes from well-wishing friends. That would be enough to buy me into the Main Event again, but before I reached that point in mid-July, I’d have to survive a six-week gauntlet of Vegas poker.

Before I headed to Vegas, I needed to get my tournament game in shape, as I’d spent the vast majority of my time at the tables in recent years playing cash games. In Vegas I planned to focus on tournaments, so I had to get the rust out.

In tournaments, players put up a specific amount and can’t lose any more than that total (as opposed to cash games, where players can keep reaching into their pockets for more money if they lose). The blinds, or forced bets, increase over time, putting the squeeze on players’ chip stacks. As players are eliminated, the remaining lot divvy up the prize pool — the higher they finish, the more they get. Win a major event at the WSOP and you get not only a bracelet, but also a six- or seven-figure payday.

Tournaments feature much higher variance than cash games because only 10 to 15 percent of players make the money. A solid tourney player might cash one-quarter of the time. That still means they’ll fail in 75 percent of their events, whereas a good cash game player can usually win two-thirds of their sessions and therefore shows a profit more often.

It really boils down to this: in tournaments, you often risk less with the chance to win a lot, but most of the time you’ll come out of it empty-handed.

That speaks to the boom-or-bust nature of my trip: If I just played cash games, I’d be more likely to win or lose a little. By focusing primarily on tournaments, I would have a greater chance of either losing it all or winning big.

I quickly discovered the challenge of playing online tournaments in my current life. As I tried to click buttons to call, raise, or fold, my two-year-old daughter, Sarah Beth, crawled all over me. Between hands, I rushed to fill sippy cups with milk.

Fortunately, as I began to put my plan together, I hit a hot streak at the tables, winning a decent amount to add to the roll every month, both in underground live poker games in the area and on the online site Bovada. I hit a hot streak in life, too, as my job situation solidified. We also found a house for rent in the upscale Summerlin area of Las Vegas Valley with a pool out back.

Could it all be a harbinger of a solid summer at the tables?

I would soon find out.

One

A Colossal Undertaking

On a sunny March afternoon, John Harper held on to the black chain-link fence, watching boys his age take fielding practice in the grassy area between fields. The players, wearing gold baseball shirts and white pants, gloved grounders, throwing them back to their coach before heading to the back of the line.

One walked over. What’s your name? he asked my son.

John Harper didn’t speak, but he waved.

He does that a lot these days, just watching and not speaking. Two years ago he played on a T-ball team with boys and girls his age, learning how to use a glove and having fun rolling in the dirt. Now he’s playing on the Field of Miracles, which is designed to accommodate children with special needs.

The first clear signs of John Harper’s metamorphosis began in March 2015.

He was staying overnight with my parents but was largely uncommunicative as he paced the floors. We were enjoying dinner in Birmingham with friends when my dad called to let me know what was going on, and I told him John Harper had exhibited some of that type of behavior lately and not to worry too much about it. But that night at bedtime, John Harper couldn’t sit still and stayed up for hours squirming in bed.

As this behavior continued into the next week, I remembered that he’d shown more sensitivity lately, crying often, and he’d gone through a phase where he chewed his T-shirts.

As days grew into weeks, things continued to worsen: John Harper began exhibiting extreme separation anxiety, having meltdowns sometimes when Amy simply left the room. He spoke very little and was easily upset. He was nothing like the quiet, curious, and intelligent boy he’d been less than a month before.

We took John Harper to a series of doctors over the next several months, and those doctors ran a multitude of tests. The best-case scenario: an infection might have resulted in a neurological syndrome that would improve over time. But the most likely explanation was that John Harper had developed childhood disintegrative disorder, an extremely rare form of autism that affects only about one in a hundred thousand children. Kids with CDD develop normally before experiencing a severe regression in cognitive function at an early age. Even with treatment or therapy, most of them don’t see significant improvement over time.

Imagine your young child, full of promise, with much of that promise suddenly taken away. Amy and I shared many tear-filled nights.

But, as Amy sometimes says to me, our son is not a tragedy. Children are stricken with incurable diseases and parents lose their children every day. John Harper is a healthy little boy, and he has demonstrated improvement in some areas. After being frustrated at a regular kindergarten that wasn’t able to accommodate him, he now attends a special-needs school and is eager to go every day.

His speech has improved, and he’s started spending the night with his grandparents. John Harper plays well with Sarah Beth, although sometimes she drives him crazy by trying to tackle him. Like many kids with autism, John Harper generally shies away from physical contact.

Still, despite some improvement over the past year, it’s hard not to take a virtual gut punch when a Facebook memory pops up, a picture of John Harper staring back at me with a huge grin in the days before the CDD took hold.

He rarely smiles like that anymore.

Amy stored many videos of John Harper at ages three and four on a private YouTube channel. In them, he cuts up with his mommy, making faces at the camera, joking, singing. They are fond, if heartbreaking, memories.

I keep a video of him on my laptop, saying a bedtime prayer at age three: "Now I lay me down to sleep,