Phil Laak is insane; just spend five minutes in his company if you don’t believe me. Ask him a question and 10 minutes later you’ll get your answer… maybe. Either way, you’ll be entertained as he regurgitates whatever concoction of words springs into his mind, speaking with a passion and energy that you won’t find elsewhere, whatever the topic. In fact, you could ask him about watching paint dry and he’d bumble his way through some eccentric analysis of the process, and, suddenly, watching paint dry would sound interesting. In a nutshell, he’s a fascinating character, encapsulating at times. He’s like Tom Hanks in Big, a kid in an adult’s body, and he can’t help but let loose in an industry that allows him to do just that.
Phil wasn’t always this zany, well, not on the outside at least. Born in Dublin, Ireland, Phil jetted off to the States at an early age where he graduated from the University of Massachusetts with honours in mechanical engineering. He then adopted a variety of roles including stock day trader and real estate investor, even spending time on Wall Street. There was no dancing on keyboards there. Believe it or not, Phil was once straight-laced, suited and booted with neatly cropped hair – a respectable member of society and the ideal offspring.
Several years later and Phil is a superstar. He dyes his hair, dates a curvaceous film star, and rubs shoulders with some of the greatest players around. He even conceals his face like Kenny out of South Park, and from thereon in becomes labeled the Unabomber after the infamous forensic sketch of mail bomber Theodore Kaczynski. How did this all happen? What must Mrs. Laak think? Is this the real Phil Laak? Well, in a word, yes. He’s always been a ‘character’, an ‘entertainer’, and with poker he has the freedom to act however he wants, be his true self and enjoy life to its very max.
But beyond the guise of showman lies a truly talented poker player, and one that too many ignorantly deny. For years, Phil was a grinder, battling away at the $2/5 Pot Limit and $10/10 No Limit Hold’em games in New York, eeking out the pennies the hard way and gradually working his way up the poker ladder. He is good enough to hold his own amid the toughest of company on High Stakes Poker, and tournament wise, boasts almost $1.5 million in winnings including becoming the 2005 William Hill Grand Prix Champ, a 2007 Poker in the Dark title, and a near bracelet miss for $156,400. True, he caught the wave of the poker boom at just the right time, but the same night he did press-ups in front of millions on a TV stage, he also won $100,000 and became a WPT Champion. Phil’s certainly a performer, but he’s nobody’s fool.
“I think people possibly underrate me because of my erratic behavior,” he confesses. “I might be one of the few pros who watch the CardRunners videos, a couple do, but not many. I’ve spoken to players whose only regret was not spending their time watching these videos. I realise that it’s important not to give up on the learning tree. I think I’m lucky that these kids didn’t exist back when the games were juicy, but I’ve still learned a lot from them.”
Poker’s a game of deception, and Phil’s the most deceptive of them all. But never was he more delusive than at the World Series of Poker when he came disguised as an old man. In a sea of thousands of players, would anyone notice that Phil Laak – one of the stars of the show – was absent, and if so, would they realise that he was in fact present, and playing incognito, his identity concealed by the wonders of ‘special effects’? It sounded like a foolproof prank. Phil’s appearance may have changed since his Wall Street days, but this was a swerve of extreme proportions.
“A lot of people ask me about that,” he smiles. “I did it mainly for fun, but immediately afterwards I realised there were opportunities for deception. I’m a knowledgeable player, but knew I’d be perceived as an old fella, and not necessarily a great player. Sadly, I didn’t get one opportunity to make that count.
“I remember one hand where I tried to play on my image and raise it up with T-2 of clubs under the gun. The whole table was young guys, but this old dude called. The flop came A-K-3 with one club, which I thought was brilliant because if he’s got something like A-T I can scare him off the hand. Of course, I bet and he called. The next card was a small club, which was great, because now I actually have a draw. I bet, and he called again. At this point I realised that he was the type of guy who just can’t fold A-T, it’s not in his make-up. The river came a blank, and I decided to shut down and preserve my stack. It turned out that he’d been calling with J-T for the gutterball, which is so sick, ‘cos the math on it is ridiculous. I’d bet like 40 percent of his stack on the turn, and he proudly showed his hand like he’d out-witted me. Instead of mucking my hand, I tried to save my image by saying, ‘No, hold on, I have a flush,’ and making it look like I’d made a mistake. They all felt sorry for me then.
“I had fun on the breaks,” he regales with satisfaction. “During the intervals, there are throngs of people around. It’s totally insane. I love autographs and everything, but it was so much more fun being the invisible guy and not having people come up to me, including my friends, because I didn’t tell anyone except Antonio [Esfandiari] and Jennifer [Tilly]. I was really afraid of being outed, or outing myself. On the whole day, only two people figured it out, one was a dealer, and the other was someone who took my picture. It cost me $2,756 to get the whole thing done. We started doing it a 5.45, and by 12pm we’d barely got the face part done. Cards were in the air at like 12.20pm! They’ve made a new rule since that stops people playing in disguise, so I don’t think I’ll be doing it again.”
If Phil comes across something that’s both educational and fun, then it’s the perfect combination. Deep down he’s a geek, he knows his maths, but he also loves a challenge, and the chance to do something different to the norm. In 2007, he had the opportunity to do just that when he joined forces with Ali Eslami to take on poker bot Polaris, a product of the University of Alabama which claimed to be able to beat poker’s top pros. The challenge had been issued: 2,000 hands of heads-up Texas Hold’em played over the course of two days with $50,000 on the line. The computer world had already conquered backgammon and chess, but what about poker where human emotion and psychology come into play? Laak and Eslami pulled one back for the humans, but it was the narrowest of victories.
“Playing Polaris really helped my heads-up game,” explains Phil, “and I wish I’d done it before I played Johnny Chan for the bracelet. I did it initially as a bit of fun, and ended up playing it for 40 hours straight in four days. In the first 10 hours the hands were face-up, and I was really thrown by how it was playing. I had to rewrite my strategy for heads-up play. By the final 10 hours, I could predict its ranges quite accurately, but I was still amazed by it all. It really helped my game overall because I realised that the bot didn’t have the ability to adjust to a history and punish me for my game. If I played this thing without looking, it would beat me, and I saw how mathematics was being applied to the game. I never felt the urge to play heads-up tournaments until I played the bot. I would never have even considered it before, but now I felt really super comfortable.”
At this year’s World Series, Phil kept a much lower profile. There were no disguises, no tete-a-tetes against computers, and no impromptu press-ups. Of course, the cameras hunted him down during the Main Event for their 20 seconds of airtime, but over the course of the two months, he was rarely seen. He did, however, play the opening $40,000 event, although he would later hold reservation:
“It’s a huge event. It’s good value if you can win it, but not if you lose. The level of players in that field was phenomenal for break even EV at best. Starting the Series $40,000 stuck is never a good idea though. There’s a pattern that exists at WSOP where it’s raining, dry, raining, dry, raining, dry; great cash games at the start, then super trough when it’s thin, then back round again. This means there could have been a real justification to not play the $40,000 event. People are way too enthusiastic when they first arrive, which is why the first and last two weeks are so good, there’s a lot of money going around.
“The first time I ever went broke was because I didn’t know the Kelly Criterion and the math,” he continues, rising from his seat inexplicably, “and I invested too much on the stocks. I’d had some good wins and things were going well, but this idea I had was so brilliant, but then I discovered that there’s no such thing as a sure thing, and I went broke having putting most of my money in. I thought my ROI was massive on this play.
“My sense of achievement is whether I made a good bet, not whether I won or lost. I can’t expose myself ever again to ruin, and I know that. It’s correct to take shots though, if, say, your ‘roll is small. It’s when you get to $20,000, now it’s insane to put all that down on the table. You should be putting $19,000 in your pocket, and getting rich slower - it’s such an underrated technique. Getting rich slower does feel good, and you see people go broke, and you feel good about yourself. I’ve seen so many people go broke because they got bored of getting rich slower. I want the reader to know that these people exist, building it up to massive amounts, then losing it all in a very small period through things like sports betting, blackjack and various other leaks.”
Of course, I had to ask him if he currently had any leaks of his own:
“I don’t have leaks,” he replies, “like going to blackjack tables and so on. I put money into things like real estate and the stock market instead, I guess that would be my only leak, but it’s not one based solely on luck. I love the idea of making money through this way, by being intelligent and investing well. My ratio isn’t as strong as others though, but it’s all in a bid to make money. The greatest joy for me is making money from using my brain. It annoys me if someone has a part of my net worth that I can never recapture. I gamble because it’s fun, but also because it’s a strategy driven thing, and I like the idea of trying to outwit some of the smartest people in the world. It’s puzzles for money, that’s what it boils down to. Is it a good deal? It’s a puzzle to figure out the answer, even if it’s something like real estate.”
One thing that attracts people to Phil, that makes him so God damn likable, is that you’ll never see him grumbling, looking depressing or moaning about his luck or the fall of the cards. He may be an animated individual at the table, reacting to his surroundings in both a vocal and physical manner, but at the same time, he’s a very grounded being, and a real advocate of ‘that’s poker’. It’s an old cliché, but one that players must keep in mind if they’re going to survive the ups and downs of what is an emotional, roller coaster of a game.
“You have to be a bit philosophical in poker to survive,” confirms Phil. “If you let the emotions get to you, you are done. The trick is, how can you rebound? I like to rebound. When I first came into poker, I came with a backgammon background, and in backgammon there are 30 and 40 rolls and there are numerous switches in fortune, so bad beats were woven into nearly all games of backgammon. So, when people started complaining about an 80/20 beat in poker, I was like, ‘What, you call that a bad beat?’ I thought it was like the funniest thing I’d heard. I’d seen 100,000 to 1 events so many times, I even experienced a 4.5 million to one against once. I was going to check off 4.5 million times to 1, and it didn’t happen. I was like, ‘Wow, I just watched a bizarre probability event unfold.’”
It is maybe for this reason, this knowledge that your fate is often in the hands of the Poker Gods rather than your own, that he has such a relaxed relationship with Antonio Esfandiari at the table. They can win massive pots off each other and then proudly show the bluff, celebrate if an out arrives, or giggle if the other gets outdrawn for thousands of bucks. In their world, rubdowns are a right of passage, a reward for winning, and a way of winding each other up. It’s an agreement that no other players seem to have, especially best friends.
“There’s no greater joy than beating each other,” he explains with a devilish smirk. “He has no problem if I lose a pot and I get fucked, in fact he quite likes it. If you can’t enjoy your friends getting tortured, then poker’s not for you. No fucking lie though, basically, for 11 years, I’ve never seen a streak of heat last so long, from poker, flipping coins for the restaurant bill, whatever. It’s sick. Antonio’s luck is so sick.”
And on that playful, but ultimately vomit-related note, our brief, but fun-filled exchange drew to a close. Working on limited time, I’d gone in with a set of questions, one that hopefully evaded the usual dross of ‘how did you get into poker’, ‘who’s your favourite player’ and so on, but whatever plans I had laid out, they were meaningless. Interviewing Phil Laak isn’t something you can plan or be prepared for. You just ask him one question, then sit back and enjoy the show, the Phil Laak Show. He’ll go off on tangents, lose his way, gesticulate unnecessarily – it’s all part of his enthusiasm, and you can’t help but find it endearing, however bizarre it appears.
For all his intelligence, for all his knowledge, there’s no denying that Phil is a one-of-a-kind, and would probably remain a fixture in poker if he didn’t win a cent for the next 50 years. Poker is already full of stoic, colourless androids, and it’s the hidden gems, the occasional character that make the game such a joy. Without personality in the game, who’d watch televised poker, where would the new players come from, and where would we make our money? During the course of our exchange, I’d learned new things about Phil, but also cemented initial impressions: he really is a loon, and he genuinely is like the Phil Laak you see on TV. But if there’s one thing that I truly did know already, it’s that poker needs people like Phil Laak, and without him, the industry would be a lot duller place.