Cover Story: One of a Kind

?The bet is $250,000 to Josh Arieh and the situation is getting desperate. For six days, he has bullied or bluffed or just plain outplayed every opponent he’s come across in the 2004 World Series of Poker. Now only two more stand in his way.

A few minutes earlier, workers here at Binion’s casino in Las Vegas carried in cardboard boxes full of hundred-dollar bills and dropped them onto a nearby table. The $5 million first prize. A mountain of money.

But just as important as the cash - no, more important, really - is winning the gold bracelet. The bracelet signifies the winner as a world champion. Think about it. First prize in the biggest poker tournament in the world. Bragging rights forever. To have bested a field of 2,576 players in No-Limit Texas Hold’em, a game where luck isn’t half as important as balls and brains. All that at 29 years old. A long way from the pool halls and home games in Atlanta, from delivering Chinese food, from that stupid job cold-calling suckers from the phone book to sell them frozen meat. Frozen meat! He’d walked out after a day.

But now, looking at the measly pile of chips in front of him, Arieh knows things don’t look good.

Six hours and more than 100 poker hands ago, nine men sat down at this table. Now only three remain. At the far end is David Williams, a 23-year-old college student and certifiable genius, inscrutable behind his wraparound shades, his mother a nervous wreck in the gallery. Williams sits behind a stack of chips worth $8.5 million. Which is nothing compared to the chips piled in front of Greg Raymer. Raymer is a patent attorney from Connecticut, a massive 300-pound bear of a man whose nickname is “Fossilman” for the rocks he sets down over his cards. Like Williams, Raymer also wears glasses, but his are novelty-store shades, the lenses embossed with unblinking reptilian eyes. The effect is unnerving, precisely Raymer’s intention.

Finally there’s Arieh. (It’s pronounced AR-ee-ay.) He began the day with the third-highest number of chips, and that’s where he stands now. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t lost ground. He started with $3.2 million, but now his total is down to about $1.4 million. The difference can be attributed to just one hand, when Arieh slid $1.65 million into a pot against Raymer, only to fold in fear of a possible flush.

But it’s precisely that boldness that has carried Arieh this far in the tournament, when literally thousands of other poker players fell by the wayside. Now is not the time to back off.

Arieh peeks at his cards. A pair of nines. He waits. He thinks.

He says it: “I’m all-in.”

A flutter of excitement ripples through the crowd. Either this will be Arieh’s second wind or the tournament will be down to just two players.

Raymer turns to Williams. “Call,” says Raymer. Arieh takes a sip of water, waiting for Williams to call or fold. He’s taking too long. Arieh springs from his chair, whips off his own sunglasses. His eyes are blazing.

“Call!” he tells Williams. “Let’s triple him up!”

But Williams won’t bite. He folds. With the tournament in the balance, Arieh flips over his cards. Raymer does the same. Ace, queen. Arieh turns toward the gallery, where his wife and father and poker buddies sit behind the rail.

The goal in Texas Hold’em is to make the best five-card poker hand from any of the two cards you’re dealt - the pocket cards - and the five community cards the dealer lays out on the table. The community cards are dealt in three stages: the flop, which is three cards; the turn, which is one card; and the river, which is the final card. Bets normally come after each stage, but since Arieh is all-in, we’ll be seeing the five community cards in quick succession.

Here comes the flop. It’s queen, jack, queen. Raymer raises his hands. He has three of a kind. Arieh digs his left hand deep into his pocket. Only one card can save him now - a nine, which, combined with the two queens on the table, would give him a full house.

The turn is a 3. No help. Hope is slipping away. Finally, the river. It’s a 4. Arieh musters a weak smile, congratulates Raymer, then goes to Williams, who stands to embrace him. Arieh pulls Williams close.

“Bust this motherfucker,” he says.


ARIEH CHUCKLES, but it’s a hollow laugh. His finger taps the pause button of his VCR. He is standing in the media room of his 4,400-square-foot house, down a quiet cul-de-sac not far from the Marietta Country Club. It’s an overcast afternoon in late May, and the gray light coming through the basement windows barely illuminates the dark corner where Arieh stands, looking up at an image of himself making his exit from last year’s World Series of Poker.Arieh is back in Atlanta after a few days in Vegas, a place that has become - to his chagrin - a second home. Although he was born in Rochester, N.Y., Arieh is at heart a Georgia boy. While friends and fellow poker pros Erick Lindgren and Daniel Negreanu have left their own cities to settle in Vegas, Arieh has decided to remain in his hometown. It is in Atlanta where he and Angela will raise their two young daughters, Sierra and Emily.

Still, Vegas is where the action is. So every other week, it seems, he’s making the four-hour flight there or back, renting a car or taking a cab to his hotel and plunking down $10,000 to play in another No-Limit tournament.

This latest trip was a bust. The latest in quite a few busts, actually. So many that Arieh is facing a depressing reality: He’s in a slump.

Play poker long enough and well enough, and a slump is as inevitable as seeing your set of aces lose to a flush on the river. In poker, slumps are sometimes called “statistical deviations,” a clever euphemism that lays blame for a dry spell not so much on the decisions of the player as on the immutable mathematics of the game. But for pros such as Arieh, no amount of rationalizing can dull the sting of coming up short in tournament after tournament. David Williams says that professional gambling is the only job where you can put in a full day’s work and come home with less money than when you began.

Arieh is home for just a few days, preparing for this year’s World Series of Poker, the biggest poker tournament in the world. Not that there’s much time to relax. He has to firm up plans for a poker school he’s starting in Atlanta in late July. He’s putting the finishing touches on a line of T-shirts he wants to sell on his website and at the World Series. He also wants to spend as much time as possible with his family before he has to leave again.

In other words, he doesn’t have the time - nor the inclination - to sit through four hour-long tapes of the World Series of Poker, scene of his biggest payday and, oddly, his biggest disappointment. Sure, the $2.5 million he won for third place allowed him to pay cash for this house, with its airy dining room and wet bar and massive pool table. And yeah, it bought him a blue Corvette with a vanity plate that says “ALLL IN.” And OK, so it made him one of the richest professional poker players in the world, with endorsement deals and an agent. (He says his tax bill this year was roughly $500,000.)

No, forget all those things. What Arieh can’t escape is that he was so close to winning it all. Last year’s World Series had its biggest field ever, making it that much harder to slog through a field where one bad beat at the hands of a lousy amateur can send even the best player packing. And this year’s World Series will likely have twice as many entries. To watch a tape of himself at the final table is to be reminded that, no matter how great he becomes, he may never get that close again.

Then there’s the other thing. In one sense, Arieh was made for the ESPN cameras that covered the World Series finals. He’s telegenic and well-groomed - more than can be said for a lot of poker players, whose idea of exercise is hefting a Big Gulp to their lips and trudging to the men’s room once an hour. But Arieh brings something else to the table: his mouth. Playing the table bully served him well at the World Series. What he didn’t realize is that it also served ESPN producers, who found in Arieh precisely the villain they were looking for.

Take the infamous Harry Demetriou hand. When the World Series field was down to just 19 players, Arieh bet $400,000 on his pocket 9-10 of hearts. (In tournament play, the chips don’t have any true cash value; the only thing that matters is what place you finish in.) Demetriou, a mild-mannered Brit who at that point was ahead of Arieh in the chip count, put him all-in for another $610,000. Arieh called. Demetriou flipped his cards: ace-jack, of different suits.

Arieh rolled his eyes, incredulous that Demetriou would put him all-in with a hand Arieh thought was vulnerable. The flop revealed an ace, which paired the one Demetriou held in his hand. But the flop also turned up two hearts, putting Arieh one heart away from a flush - which is precisely what happened on the river. The gloating began.

“That’s right!” Arieh said, raking in his winnings as he stood over a shell-shocked Demetriou. “You’re gonna put all your chips in with ace-jack like that, huh? We can gamble. It’s on now. It’s on now!”

“You got lucky - simple as that,” Demetriou said.

“I didn’t get lucky. You put your hand in - whoo-ee!”

“You should show a little humility. You’re not supposed to rub it in. You’re supposed to show a little humility. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Well,” Arieh said, as he sat back down, “I apologize.”

The commentators, as they had during the entire telecast, pounced on Arieh.

“I’m tired of seeing guys act like punks and then apologize,” said Norman Chad.

Of course, Arieh’s last words before leaving the tournament didn’t help matters. Speaking of which, why did he say “Bust that motherfucker” to Williams?

“Because it seemed like he didn’t care,” Arieh says now, still looking up at the flat-screen TV mounted on the wall above him. “It seemed like he was accepting what he’d already won. I was trying to light a fire under him. It’s easy to give up and let the fight be over and win $3.5 million. I was like a lineman telling the quarterback, ‘Kill this motherfucker.’”

As it turned out, his words held no magic; Raymer prevailed just a few hands later. Arieh says Williams is haunted by his second-place finish.

“He regrets it so much.”

As for Raymer and Demetriou, Arieh says they understand why he acted the way he did. With millions of dollars at stake, every player is looking for an edge. For Raymer, it’s his reptile glasses. For Williams, it’s his impassive face and knowledge of the odds. For Arieh, it’s his exuberance and, yeah, his grandstanding.

After the telecast, Arieh found himself vilified on poker message boards.

“I’m reading how big of an asshole I am. I’m like, ‘What the hell is going on? I was always the nice guy. Now I’m the asshole?’ It was really hard for me. My friends told me it didn’t matter, but to me as a person, it does matter.”

The response left Arieh so shaken he actually considered withdrawing from a tournament in Atlantic City. But in the end he played. Good thing, too. In a field of more than 300 players, he won third place again, taking home a $286,900 paycheck. It was proof his World Series finish was no fluke, and that Arieh was here to stay.

When that tournament hit the air, viewers saw an Arieh who was subdued and cool - nothing like the loudmouth we’d seen on ESPN.

“Does he talk crap? Yeah, sometimes he does that,” says older brother Jeremy, who works in public relations in Atlanta. “That’s how he deals with pressure. He kind of exudes confidence and lets people know what he knows, that he’s not the rookie. It’s a little bit of flair. We were just disappointed they portrayed him as this new guy who had no experience acting like he’s the best player.”


IN FACT, Josh Arieh has been a gambler for half his life. Before he was even old enough to drive, he was a regular at Hot Shots, a pool hall on Buford Highway not far from his dad’s house near Cheshire Bridge Road. He’d take his $5 allowance and partner up with a friend to wager $2 on a game of eight-ball. Josh’s goal was to win $4, so he could buy a pack of Camel Lights and a 40-ounce can of Colt 45. He tried to hide his gambling from his father, with mixed results.

“We had a lot of talks,” recalls his father, Jacob Arieh, who had divorced Josh’s mother when Josh, Jeremy and their sister, Shuli, were young. “I did not like what he was doing.” Once, Jacob was summoned to the pool hall to fetch his son after police broke up a game.

Within a few years, Josh had become a shark. It wasn’t the pool he loved so much, but the action. And the best action of all was in poker. In the early 1990s, after Arieh’s graduation from Druid Hills High School, poker was still a game for older men. Cary Foster remembers being surprised to see Arieh and a few other teenagers show up at an old warehouse in Atlanta, where members of the Progressive Club, a Jewish social organization, hosted regular poker games.

“He didn’t know too much about the game,” recalls Foster, who owns a construction company and who was a regular at the games. “But Josh is a quick study. He was interested in it. He just progressed.”

Arieh attended DeKalb Community College (now Georgia Perimeter College) briefly, but found it wasn’t for him. He took a job as a legal courier and began augmenting his day job by dealing at home games around Atlanta. It was a valuable education. He’d watch players to learn their “tells,” the physical mannerisms that reveal the kind of hand they’re holding.

“Eventually,” he says, “I could push the pot toward the guy that I knew was gonna win before the hand was turned up. It just got easy.”

After a long night of dealing, he might play a few hands himself. “Let’s say one of the rich guys at the game would be a loser and he’d want to keep playing. But everybody else would want to go home. So screw it, I just took off my dealer shoes and I started playing him head up. And I would pick spots like that. I’m not playing a guy when he’s on his best game. I’m playing him when he’s vulnerable. And that’s what I’ve tried to do my whole life - put my money in good spots.”

In January 1999, Arieh quit his day job and began supporting himself full time through gambling. He was dating Angela by that time; she worked as a paralegal at one of the firms he delivered to. Four months later, he won his first World Series of Poker gold bracelet. It wasn’t for the $10,000 Texas Hold’em final, but a smaller offshoot - a limit tournament with a $3,000 entry fee. First prize was more than $200,000.

Only after that payday did Jacob Arieh realize that gambling wasn’t just a phase his son would grow out of.

“When he won that nice-sized pot, I started accepting the fact that this is what he’s going to be doing,” the elder Arieh says, who speaks of Josh’s poker accomplishments with equal parts awe and pride. “But deep inside, I keep hoping he’ll start a business.”

Josh’s climb through the local poker ranks brought him to games with higher and higher stakes. His opponents were no longer college kids on summer break but high rollers with fat wads of hundreds in their pockets. Some of them became friends, like John Roveto.

Roveto is a former place-kicker for the Chicago Bears. Today he owns a car dealership, Premier Auto Sales, on Stone Mountain Highway. Roveto remembers the first time he played against Arieh.

“Josh was real confident,” Roveto says. “He felt like he could always be in control of the situation. I don’t know that he felt like he was better than everybody else. But he definitely knew he was as good as anybody in the game. He was able to read people well and figure out who’s weak or who’s strong.”

“He’d play very fast,” Foster recalls. “He would be disposed to raise if he had nothing. He’s sort of an emotional player more than some. He’d be happier when he won and sadder when he lost than is the norm.”

Foster was struck by how quickly Arieh could process information. That, combined with Arieh’s obvious guts, made him a formidable opponent.

“He has the ability and courage to take risks at the appropriate time,. To have the courage at times to bet a hand that’s not what we poker players call the ‘nuts.’ Josh has courage when it’s needed. He has a willingness to learn. I don’t think he’d be as disposed to study a book as I might be. But playing with people, he’s better than I am. He can remember what an opponent did in a similar situation.”

Arieh explains the secret of his success with the same odd combination of humility and bluster that he displays at the table.

“Dude, I’ll be the first one to admit there’s a million poker players out there that play poker better than me. They know all the math, all the probabilities. But I understand competing. I understand momentum. I know how to make people vulnerable to their brains. And I’m convinced that’s why I do well. You wait till somebody’s off their game, then you attack.”

When slumps came along, as they always do, Arieh found backers in players such as Roveto.

“We were in games where the most somebody’d really win or lose was $2,000 or $3,000,” Arieh says. “So it went on like that for three months where I was losing every day. And John was lending me my bill money.

“We finally made a little bit of money. With somebody like John, he doesn’t care. He wants me to play for him because he knows I’m going to make money for him, but he also wants me to do well on my own. It’s people like that a gambler really needs in his life.”

As it turns out, Arieh’s career has depended to a large degree on the kindness of friends with keen eyes and thick wallets. At last year’s World Series of Poker final, Arieh’s $10,000 entrance fee was picked up by fellow poker pro Erick Lindgren, who got a share (Arieh won’t say how much) of the $2.5 million Arieh ended up winning.

Arieh’s recent successes have made him more than able to stake his own way in tournament play. But he’s not messing with the formula; Lindgren still stakes him. Nor is he playing in cash games anymore, where friends like Daniel Negreanu - Card Player magazine’s 2004 Player of the Year - can easily drop $200,000 of their own money in one bad night at a Bellagio table.

“For me there’s no reason to play in a cash game,” Arieh says. “I have responsibilities to my family. There’s no way I could go home and be myself if I were to go lose $200,000. I don’t see what people are trying to accomplish. All they can do is make themselves miserable and screw up a good thing.”

Besides, Arieh admits he doesn’t have the temperament to stomach such a big loss. “Emotionally, I don’t think I could take the swings, knowing I have X amount of dollars in my bank account and then a month later seeing it’s $100,000 lighter. I’m the first to admit that I don’t think I could perform as well with those big of swings. I’ve competed all my life. I know when I’m down that I don’t perform as well as when I’m up. Getting staked is a way that makes money not a factor. It helps me perform to my best ability and makes my backer some money along the way.”


THIS YEAR’S World Series of Poker began June 2 and runs through the middle of July. So many players are expected over the course of the six-week tournament — around 15,000 — that organizers moved the events from Binion’s in downtown Las Vegas to the Rio casino, just off the Strip. Gambling may still be illegal almost everywhere in America, but thanks to the Internet, private home games, and a culture that has made heroes out of high-rollers like Arieh, the total purse at the 36th World Series of Poker is estimated to top $75 million. There will be about 40 events leading up to the No-Limit Texas Hold’em games that close out the tournament. Entry fees for all of them combined total more than $110,000.As organizers like to tout, no other sport - and hell, if billiards is a sport, why not poker? - offers amateurs a chance to go head-to-head with pros, and possibly beat the pants off them. In 2003, Chris Moneymaker, a Tennessee accountant, parlayed a $40 buy-in on an Internet poker site into a seat at the World Series No-Limit Texas Hold’em tournament. He went on to win the whole thing.

By mid-June, Arieh had been in Vegas since the tournament began. Just before he left Atlanta early this month, he posted an entry on his blog, at www.josharieh.com. The blog has become a form of therapy for him, a sort of transcript of his inner monologue, in which he details his struggles and second-guesses bad decisions at the poker table. Such candor is disarming, especially from someone whose livelihood depends largely on his ability to lie.

“I feel like I am more mentally and emotionally prepared for this than I have been for anything my entire life,” he wrote just before getting on the plane bound for Vegas. “Once I set my mark on the poker world this year, I can be remembered forever as one of the greats of all time (my honest opinion).”

Arieh’s blog isn’t read only by his fans, but by others in poker’s peanut gallery who still haven’t forgiven him for his behavior at last year’s World Series of Poker. Their response to his latest posting was quick and merciless. “Greatest asshole of all time,” went one posting in an online poker forum. “A really stupid equation of short-term results with skill,” said another. “What the fuck is this obsession with being ‘great’ at a game which is so luck-dependent?”

Sure enough, Arieh busted out early in the first few events he entered. With his slump holding fast, the fans who love to hate him were raking in their own pot of schadenfreude.

Then a funny thing happened. On June 13, Arieh faced off against 300 other players in an Omaha pot-limit event. Omaha is like Texas Hold’em, except instead of two pocket cards, players are dealt four. The extra pocket cards often reward aggressive players - such as Arieh - who stick around for the flops.

Twelve hours into the action and Arieh was on a roll, taking big pots and busting his competitors. At one point he was the event’s chip leader.

The next day’s play ended with the field down to nine and Arieh with more chips than all but one opponent.

Last Wednesday afternoon, June 15, the final nine sat down at a table to battle it out. ESPN cameras started rolling. Surrounding Arieh were some of the best poker players in the world. One of them was Chris Ferguson, a math whiz whose long hair and beard have earned him the nickname “Jesus.” Ferguson has six World Series bracelets to his name, and in head-to-head play is without peer.

But as the day wore on, and short-stacked players dropped away, an Arieh-Ferguson showdown looked inevitable. Sure enough, four hours into the action, they were the only players remaining.

By then Arieh had amassed $878,000 in chips - more than double Ferguson’s total. Ferguson was relentless, though, going all-in on one hand and winning with three eights, doubling his chip count. After just an hour of head-to-head play, the tables had turned: Arieh now trailed Ferguson by $365,000.

But Arieh kept betting and raising, forcing Ferguson to fold time and again. Eventually, Arieh regained the chip lead. On the 128th hand of the day, he put Ferguson all-in after the flop gave Arieh a pair of twos. Ferguson called. But the turn and river cards didn’t give Ferguson a thing. Arieh’s twos had won him his second World Series bracelet, plus $381,600.

Slump over.

Steve.Fennessy@creativeloafing.com