POKER’S ICONOCLAST

Jeff Haney, Las Vegas Sun

Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2007 | 7:02 a.m.

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS MORRIS

Born: Dublin, Ireland

Raised: Wellesley, Mass.

Lives: Los Angeles

Homes away from home: Las Vegas, San Francisco

Tournament highlights:

Any professional poker player can expound on technical topics such as how to play pocket pairs under the gun or when to re raise the pot from late position.

Only Phil Laak is equally at ease discussing particle physics, glass sculptor Dale Chihuly and the philosophical implications of cannibalism.

One of the game's most creative thinkers, Laak plays regularly in big cash games in Las Vegas and Southern California. He has developed a fan following through his TV appearances on the World Poker Tour, "High Stakes Poker" and "Poker After Dark." He also stars with friend and poker pro Antonio Esfandiari in "I Bet You," a show based on wacky proposition bets that airs on Mojo, a high-definition cable channel.

Laak was tagged with the nickname "the Unabomber" when he made a splash in the World Poker Tour's second season, playing tournaments while wearing dark sunglasses and a sweatshirt with the hood up. (Although the nickname is in the grand tradition of "sick," or edgy, humor, some poker fans find it distasteful.) Laak is also known as the boyfriend of Academy Award-nominated actress Jennifer Tilly.

In a wide-ranging interview in his suite at Caesars Palace during the recent Caesars Classic, Laak explored some topical subjects from the world of poker as well as some idiosyncrasies from the world of Phil Laak.

Laak just concluded an audition for yet another TV project, this one centering on 10 contestants who would each put up $100,000 and vie for the $1 million prize pool by making a series of head-to-head wagers on a variety of challenges. The field would include a Wall Street investor, a trust fund kid, a golfer, a professional rodeo star, a couple of Hollywood types and perhaps a poker player or two, Laak said.

Laak: "I knew they were only going to pick maybe two poker players, and I knew the people making the decision might not watch poker, so I was like a performer. I was so on. In any puzzle-solving I know I'll score high. I can also ride a unicycle, snowboard, jump out of planes ... I can do all this stuff, and I've done it a lot because it's fun.

"And if they're going to try to scare me with 'Fear Factor' stuff, forget it. Whenever I saw 'Fear Factor' and (contestants) eating nasty stuff, I always thought, 'God, I can do that.' Even when I read the book 'Alive' and saw the making of the movie 'Alive,' I was always thinking, it would be zero dissonance whatsoever. If I were in a place where there was no food, and a friend or anybody that I knew was frozen to death, it would be like, yeah, that's biomass and I'm a human. If I were dead, I'd want it to be like, feed the people."

Laak recalled a marathon backgammon game that was a turning point in his gambling career.

Laak: "This was like 185 years ago, but it was a very interesting session in my life. I had been playing already for 48 straight hours when this gentleman joined the game. We were all at a tournament somewhere in some hotel. This guy was like a gold card, a standing member of the backgammon community who always paid (when he lost). I knew room service stopped from 2 to 6 in the morning, so at 12:30 I ordered a bunch of food for my room. I knew he'd get hungry at 3, 4 in the morning. He got hungry and I said, 'Oh, I've got a whole bunch of sandwiches in my room.' The next day, everybody was wondering where this guy went. I wasn't about to wave the flag and let on that I had him.

"I didn't tell him I was up for 48 hours because I didn't want him to have any psychological edge on me. He was an uber enduro guy. After 36 hours - which was 36 plus 48 from my paradigm - he was showing no signs of weakness. But the more tired and drifty and weird my brain got, the more focused I got. I was actually seeing math things. Things were being revealed to me. It was so trippy. I saw my brain just drifting off. I was like, 'This is the beginning of insanity.' Thank God, I know when I go to sleep it's going to be better. I mean, checkers were floating."

Laak eventually beat the guy for $10,000 - "which, like, tripled my net worth at the time."

Laak, 35, who took up competitive poker in 1999, once had a conversation with veteran poker pro Dewey Tomko on the importance of finding a balance between poker and other aspects of life.

Laak: "Dewey told me there were a lot of years where he played poker every day or six days a week, 12 to 18 hours a day. It was the longest session of poker I've ever heard of. He didn't watch the news, nothing else. He just played poker. He got all these accolades, won this (tournament), came in second in that, and one day he said that's enough. He's still out there (playing), of course, but it's not like, 'Every day. I'm a machine. I'll never miss a chance to hurt the people and take their money.'

"What's the point if you're 80 and all you've done is play cards 14 hours a day? OK, you've extracted money from other people using a game, but you've had no life.

"But I do believe there's a certain part of you that does have to go hard-core for the game. There were six months in my life I was totally sick for the game. I couldn't get enough. I once went on a ski trip and I started having withdrawals, shakes, because I had not made a bet with anybody over anything for 2 1/2 days. I came back (to Las Vegas), and I joined the game and I ended up playing poker for three days straight. I'm not like that anymore, but I went through it for about six months, nine months. There's something about being around intense human thought and activity that triggers something inside some people ... it's like a fuel."

Unlike some poker old-schoolers, Laak said he never underestimated the legions of young Internet-trained poker hotshots who learned the game online and are now a dominating force in tournaments and cash games.

Laak: "Of every 1,000 17-year-old kids who try Internet poker, 900 will fail, 50 will break even. The remaining 50 will have varying amounts of success. Of those, a few will be the uber geniuses who go to the 'nth' degree. Those are the Internet geniuses. Back in the day (a few years ago) you'd hear people trying to discredit these Internet kids. I knew right away. Wait a minute, didn't that Internet kid you're dismissing beat 400 people to get this ticket (to a big tournament)? Do you think that was an accident?"

Laak: "I always did my training in my own head. I never talked much strategy with anybody, not even Antonio (Esfandiari). Then, I remember, in 2005 at a tournament in Aruba, where you could be under 21 and play legally, there was this kid who was 16 and he had paid his buddy 50 bucks for a fake ID (showing he was 18) to fool the casino. As he was leaving, he was disappointed because he had only won $15,000. Only $15,000. That was when I started taking the whole online thing, that whole way of looking at the game, seriously.

"The thing I loved about these Internet kids was that it was routine for them to postmortem the hand right at the table, right after the hand. The old-schoolers, they don't postmortem anything - 'Oh, there's strategy in poker? Really?' I'd always say as many dumb things as I could come up with that would be bought by the other players at the table. But the kids, they'd be talking about hand-entry frequencies and voluntarily entering the pot rates and check-raising frequencies. They'd be freely offering the truth about what they had in their hand and the best way to play it. They'd show their hand, they didn't care. They would have these really illuminating conversations."

With the launch of various poker-teaching Web sites, the best way to learn poker has undergone a transformation even in the couple of years since Laak began tutoring Tilly, his girlfriend, in the game's finer points.

Laak: "Before two or three years ago, whenever somebody asked me to teach them poker, I'd always tell them the first lesson is free. Here, read this book. The next lesson was free, too. Read this book. Every lesson was free - read another book. I told Jennifer, 'R ead "The Theory of Poker " (by David Sklansky). Read it so that when you turn each page you feel you can express the concept to somebody in your own words without reading from the book. Read Harrington 1, 2 and 3 (a three-volume set on Texas hold 'em by Dan Harrington). Read (Alan) Schoonmaker's stuff. '

"Now these (teaching) sites like Card Runners, you pay your $20 or $30 a month and learn that way. Hey, here's a guy who turned $50 into a million playing online. Listen to what he has to say. Watch his video tutorial. He did it. It's like if you'd just start blowing glass yourself, or you could watch Chihuly giving a video lecture on his thoughts on how to do it. No comparison. Maybe you can't absorb it all right away, but it's going to be packed with a lot more nuances."

The recent cheating scandal at online site Absolute Poker, in which a player could see his opponents' hole cards in a tournament, underscores the risks of playing poker on the Internet, Laak said. Before Absolute acknowledged there was a security breach, respected Las Vegas gaming consultant Michael Shackleford estimated the outcome of the tainted tournament was 7.29 standard deviations above expectations, or 1 in 6.6 trillion.

Laak: "If you're a really smart, winning player, you will know when it starts entering two, three, four, five standard deviations. There will be pattern dynamics that just can't exist (in a clean game). When it becomes a fifth-sigma event, OK, it's just as likely as all the atoms in this console thing (a coffee table in his suite) lining up and making this teacup float in the air. If you see it start to float, you just know it's more likely there's some kind of device than all of the atoms lining up just so.

"Online small stakes is a great place to learn the game. Playing high stakes online I'm always nervous. No. 1, the guy I'm playing might be one of those uber geniuses that have filtered through. No. 2, if somebody's going to cheat, it's going to be at $50-100, not $1-2. That's why I love live play."

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