Scott Says

I’ve finally had some quality time to sit down and work on My Shot, the book I’m writing about my summer in Las Vegas and the poker scene out there. Here is a little three-paragraph peek, a bit of the rough draft from the tentative Chapter 3, which revolves around my interview last June with Jim McManus, author of Positively Fifth Street. “The very worst of it” in the first line refers to the worst of humanity who play poker, as opposed to the majority of poker players (who are, on the whole, good and honest). Enjoy.

McManus has seen the very worst of it. In 2004, he made a final table at the World Series in a limit hold’em event with a player named Ellix Powers. Powers, who was politely described by Norman Chad and Lon McEachern on ESPN as formerly homeless, often bet hands without looking at his cards and would casually stroll outside the casino to smoke a cigarette or make a cell phone call during the final table. In an event with a first prize of over $300,000, such tomfoolery - for want of a better word - is especially pathetic. The broadcast famously caught McManus’s obvious frustration with Powers. McManus told Powers he was disrespecting the game, then tried to catch Powers bluffing by calling him down with queen high. But Powers won the pot with king high, and chided McManus for the play.

“When we sat down at the table and just before, he was taunting David Chiu and T.J. Cloutier.” T.J. Cloutier is a man you don’t taunt. Even at his advanced age, his hair finishing the transition from gray to white, Cloutier looks about as tough as he was when he played professional football in Canada. He also happens to be one of the winningest tournament poker players of all time. But Powers was having none of it. “He was getting aggressively into the face of T.J., saying ‘You can’t finish,’ because T.J. has had a lot of famous second place finishes. I mean, he’s taunting a guy who could crush him with one hand. And also, T.J. had won the previous event, you know, like nine hours earlier. So this guy (Powers) was an out of control asshole.

“But as time went on, it became clear that he wasn’t an asshole, he was mentally ill. And that’s a very different thing. So… it went from rage to pity. And he’s homeless and… I guess, you know, when you win forty thousand dollars, you’re gonna sleep indoors that night. But I don’t think he had an apartment.” McManus even used Powers as an example of a farcically mentally ill individual in his book about health care, Physical: An American Checkup. “Ellix is a very unusual case,” McManus told me. “Certifiably insane homeless people are not playing big poker tournaments. As far as I can tell.”