Reaching beantown

	I had the best hand to the river all night long, but then I would lose on the river – Sam Farha

At poker’s highest level, where the potential to lose seven figures looms like a storm cloud, $1m is known as a ‘bean’, and losing this mega-sum in a session has been described as ‘reaching Beantown’. No matter how well you play, if you want to gamble for Big Game stakes, sooner or later it’s the kind of money you’re liable to drop. Here’s how a few of the world’s top poker pros have dealt with that mother of all losses.

Daniel Negreanu

Daniel Negreanu’s made just one visit to Beantown, and it was doubly unsettling because it came after he had been ahead by $400,000. He was playing in the Big Game, the cap had been raised to $150,000 per hand, and he felt like quitting while he was ahead. Then Negreanu started to run bad, dipped down to even, and things got increasingly gnarly. ‘I went through a sixhour period where I was stuck, like, $1m,’ he remembers, explaining that it gave him plenty of time to get used to the idea of losing a massive sum. ‘It had been a 24-hour session, by the end there wasn’t a lot of money in the game, and I knew I would go off for a big number. It wound up being $1.3m.’

What’s the aftermath of such a stinging loss? ‘I slept and watched TV the whole next day. Then I played great in the [2006] World Series and relaxed. I took time off from the Big Game and expect to play again in March.’ Negreanu has spent time re-evaluating what happened and why. He acknowledges that playing for 24 hours straight contributed to a softening of his focus and realises that his style of play wasn’t as crisp as it could have been. ‘I’m not ashamed that this happened, and I know I handled it well; most people would not recover from that kind of loss,’ he says, then explains that it illustrates why top-ranked poker players are willing to go up against each other for ungodly sums of money. ‘It’s like five piranhas swimming around a tank; one gets injured and the others all go in for the kill.’

Ted Forrest

Ted Forrest has made his own journey to Beantown, but it didn’t happen as a result of poker. In his own words, here is how he managed to lose $1m: ‘I was playing craps at the Bellagio, betting $5,000 at a time and taking full odds for $35,000. I was trying to make a score and wanted to bet higher: $10,000 with full odds. But the people at the Bellagio wouldn’t let me do it. So I got a couple of poker players to book me [that is, they played as the house and covered Forrest’s second $5,000 bets with full odds]. I was losing when they started booking me and got my losses down to the million-dollar range when they quit booking me. I probably stopped playing soon thereafter and felt stupid for doing it in the first place. Obviously I was an underdog.’

Does he still gamble at craps for those kinds of stakes? ‘Put it this way, I liked to play a lot more back then than I like to play now. These days I limit my losses to no more than $100,000.’

Sam Farha

Two years ago, Sammy Farha endured a nasty streak of running bad, often losing after getting his money in with the best hand, and dealing with the kind of adversity that can make poker players start to consider a regular day job. His first visit to Beantown took place during what he remembers as ‘one-and-a-half or two days in Tunica’. Over the course of the session, he says, ‘my play got worse. I lost so much money. But I always think that things are going to turn around for me’. And usually, that kind of glassis- half-full thinking works to Farha’s benefit. Not this time, though. He was up against the normal series of bad beat situations – ‘it was a nightmare; I had the best hand to the river all night long, but then I would lose on the river’ – though the normal becomes stunningly abnormal when you combine endlessly rotten luck with Big Game stakes. ‘Everyone at the table knows you’re throwing the party when you lose big,’ says Farha. ‘But they’re all professionals and they don’t rub it in. In fact, everyone is especially nice because they don’t want you to leave.’

Sooner or later, of course, you do leave. Maybe it’s because you’ve blown all your money, borrowed some, and want to borrow no more. Or else it’s simply a matter of the game breaking up. Either way, you’ve got to be alone with your thoughts and the memories of bad luck or sub-par play and the reality of how it affected your bankroll. But maybe there’s an upside: ‘Honestly, I sleep better after I lose, because I know I’ll wake up, go home, take a break and start over again.’

Amarillo Slim, Thomas Austin Preston

Back in the mid-1960s, when a million dollars was truly a watermark for serious wealth, Slim and his running buddies Doyle Brunson and Sailor Roberts took a shot at what was then the Big Game. It took place at the Dunes casino and was dominated by Puggy Pearson. These three guys were excellent poker players, but, as it turned out, they just couldn’t beat the game. Over a period of several months, they made five trips back to Texas to replenish their bankrolls. But it was to no avail, and eventually they got taken to Beantown. ‘We thought we got cheated,’ says Slim. ‘And I think it to this day. But we didn’t say anything. The idea is that if you’re going to be a sucker, be a quiet one.’

He maintains that they caught on to what was happening (he won’t go into specifics) and that they eventually won back what they had lost. Asked if it felt particularly bad to get beaten in such an underhand way, Slim answers in the negative. ‘Losing is losing,’ he says. ‘You see big losses every day, but I don’t do anything different from when I have a big win. The only difference is that I take something out of the box instead of putting something in. Then I go eat some quail and do a little fishing.’