Cover: Howard Lederer - A Man For All Moments

Howard Lederer has been there, done that , and with a recent million-dollar win, isn’t slowing down.

THE MOVIE ZELIG WAS RELEASED IN 1983. If you haven’t seen it, or if it’s been a while, the Woody Allen “mockumentary” follows a seemingly ordinary guy with the chameleon-like ability to change his appearance to suit any situation. As a result, he manages to insert himself into nearly every major historical event over a 20- or 30-year period.

At the time of the movie’s release, Howard Lederer was a 19-year-old discovering poker for the first time. Demonstrating a chameleon-like ability to switch among games—both at and away from the table—he’s managed to insert himself in nearly every major event in poker history over a 20- or 30-year period.

The blossoming of the World Series? Two bracelets, dozens of final tables. The emergence of the WPT? Two titles. The Big Game at the Bellagio? Ten consecutive winning years, thank you very much. The famous game against Andy Beal? The birth of Full Tilt Poker? The Poker Players Alliance? Check, check, check.

Cut any swath from the fabric that is poker, and Lederer’s left his mark. Cash games and video games. Books, instructional DVDs, and fantasy camps. Television commentary and political advocacy. Weight-loss bets massive in both ambition and sum. It’s hard to write about him without it sounding like a eulogy.

But this is anything but a eulogy. At age 42, Howard Lederer is at the peak of his powers. Just last month, he won the $100K (Australian dollars) buy-in event at the Aussie Millions, earning what amazingly enough was his first million-dollar tournament prize. There were 25 players in the event, and with a buy-in that steep, there wasn’t an easy out anywhere. Lederer proved, on that day at least, to be the toughest out of them all.

There’s an old Japanese proverb that Lederer—a long-time fan of Zen philosophy—shares with visitors to his Web site: “He who has a hundred miles to walk should reckon 90 as half the journey.” Ask him where he is on his own journey, and he pauses for a moment to consider his reply.

“I think I’m at the 90-mile mark,” he finally answers. “Obviously I’ve accomplished a lot, but I’m not nearly satisfied. I love the journey, and I love trying to get better. I feel like the day you stop trying to become a better poker player is the day you stop playing poker.”
***
It’s probably fair to say that poker discovered Howard Lederer. He was in New York City, where he was supposed to be attending Columbia University. He’d been playing chess competitively for years, and he stumbled across a Limit Hold ’Em game in the backroom of a chess club, and, well, you know how it goes. Twenty-five years later, the passion for poker still blazes.

“It’s the best game. It is a true game. It might be the true game.” Lederer, a cerebral player famously nicknamed “The Professor,” doesn’t expect you to take his word for it—he’s got John Von Neumann, the famous mathematician who helped develop modern game theory, to help make his case.

“I love chess,” said Lederer, “but I do agree with Von Neumann in that he said he didn’t think that chess was truly a game. That it was really a calculating game where the player that can best simulate perfect play wins. There is a right answer to every position.”

What interested both Von Neumann and Lederer about poker was the concept of “the second guess”—a prediction of how your opponent is going to act based on what you think he thinks you are doing.

“The wonderful thing about poker is that your strategy is very much dependent on what you think your opponent’s strategy might be. And your opponent is doing the same thing to you. Basically, there are no right and wrong plays, because it’s a game of strategy, where anticipating and influencing your opponent’s strategy is vital to the game. You can even make intentionally wrong plays to try and influence your opponent’s future decisions, such as future emotional instability.”

As a 19-year-old poker novice, Lederer was making plenty of wrong plays, few of them intentionally. He knew he had to get better. Demonstrating some of the same luck and timing as Leonard Zelig, he found that opportunity when he happened upon what turned out to be the greatest home game in the history of poker.
***
The Mayfair Club was best-known for bridge—the recently deceased Alvin Roth, considered one of the most talented players of all-time (he gave name to bidding conventions that are still in use today), owned and operated the club for some 50 years until retiring in the mid-’90s. During the 1970s, the club made room for backgammon, as a renaissance in understanding the game’s strategic underpinnings attracted an influx of new players, including many Wall Street-types enamored by the relationship between probability and risk. A few of these financial minds, as the legend goes, started using backgammon chips to play heads-up Hold ’Em matches, an intellectual exercise that was as much about learning as it was competitive. This was the environment Lederer discovered when he wandered into a corner suite on the fourth floor of the Gramercy Park Hotel.

“We were all playing four or five times a week,” he recalled. “The game would start after Wall Street closed, around 4:30 or 5:00, and we’d play ’til maybe midnight, and then we would often retire to a bar and talk about the day’s play. It was a wonderful learning environment to be able to just spend a couple of hours analyzing the hands we had played that day … There was a real sense of camaraderie there as we were learning this game together, a very us-vs.-them mentality back then, which I don’t think is quite the same these days. These days, people who start to show some early talent get out on the circuit. There really wasn’t a circuit back then.”

Instead, the group decided to make yearly pilgrimages to the World Series of Poker, which was just starting to capture the notice of the world-at-large. They’d get their asses handed to them, return to New York, and spend the rest of the year attacking the game with renewed purpose. Eventually the Mayfair pilgrims would find success. In 1987, they comprised one-third of the final table at the Main Event, a pudgy, bushy-bearded kid named Howard Lederer among them.

Still, Lederer was hardly an overnight success. He’d make 13 WSOP final tables—in nearly every game spread at the rapidly growing tournament—before winning his first bracelet. “Sometimes you think it’s never going to happen,” he recalled. But by the mid-’90s, having moved to Las Vegas to pursue a professional career, he was already demonstrating the kind of steady consistency that every player strives for.

“There are some players out there who have done extremely well for a couple of years and we talk about them as if they’re the best players in the world,” he said. “But poker careers are defined over a long period of time. I was successful in New York for 10 years before moving to Las Vegas. This move allowed me to start playing in the biggest cash games and winning a tournament almost every year from 1994 to 2003. And I haven’t had a losing year since then.”

It was while playing the Big Game at the Bellagio—where hundreds of thousands of dollars routinely change hands in a mix of games designed to dissuade specialization in any one—that Lederer got a first-hand glimpse at what “success” meant in the poker world.

“When you really talk about poker, true success at poker, and a guy who hardly had a losing week, that’s Chip Reese. He was, without question, the most successful cash game player for 25 years. Now he may not have been the big winner every year, but he was one of the big winners every year, for 25 years. You just had to sit down with him for a few months—you may not have gotten it the first day that you played with him, but over time, you could see how tough he was.”

For Lederer, consistency defines poker greatness. It’s also a quality, he argues, that tends to get overlooked in this era of TV-centric tournament play, an environment that creates a lot of false impressions in the minds of the viewers as to the game’s true stars. He cites an example from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Fooled By Randomness:

“You get a letter in the mail from a stockbroker who wants your business and it says, ‘The Dow Jones is going to go up this month.’ And sure enough, it goes up that month. And then the next month you get a letter and it says, ‘It’s going to go down this month.’ And at the end of the month it goes down. Eight months later, you get another letter, and of course it guesses the direction of the Dow Jones again correctly, and then you can’t stand it, you break down, and you send this guy some money.

“Until you realize that this guy sent 6,000 letters saying it was going to go up, and 6,000 saying it was going to go down. And to the 6,000 guys who got it right, he sent another envelope … You’re just one of the 300 people that he got right eight months in a row.”

Lederer believes that the same thing happens in poker. “At the beginning of every year, there are a thousand players capable of having a great year. And a certain percentage of them are going to have a great year, and they’re really not great players.

“The guy who has that first great year hasn’t proven anything to me yet … If you can pull off the second big year, after your first big year, that means 10 times more to me in terms of whether or not you’re a good player. Because we’ve identified you … We aren’t looking at a thousand potential players to have a hot year anymore—you are one of one. And if you can do it again, that means something.”

Lederer’s not trying to dismiss the new generation of online players, anything but. “I am fully confident that this batch of young players who are being exposed to the game and having some hot results, that out of that batch, there will be a number of the all-time great poker players ever. Maybe the best ever. We don’t know which ones yet.”

But he has a few guesses. “Patrik Antonius. He’s the real deal. [Three years ago], he had a big hot year … Who is this guy finishing up there in all these big WPT events? And then, lo and behold, now he’s playing the biggest cash games, and he’s beating the biggest cash games. He’s beating the biggest online games.” Lederer would, however, prefer to hold off the coronation ceremony for a little while longer. “So we know now, for sure, he has the talent, but the question for Patrik Antonius is, can he keep it up for 20 years? How committed is he to poker? Can he maintain the emotional stability needed? Can he stay away from the things that can derail great poker careers, whether it be drugs or money management or all those other things? He is certainly on his way.”

If Lederer sounds like someone with an eye on poker’s future, it’s because he is. A board member of the Poker Players Alliance, Lederer has arguably become the most visibly active professional player in the battle to free online poker from the restrictions imposed upon it by the passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. Last October, he joined a group of fellow pros and advocates on a junket to Washington, meeting with lawmakers in an attempt to persuade them to enact what he calls a “clarification” to the Wire Act (the 1963 law that forms the legal basis for the UIGEA).

“It would be hard to describe a poker hand as a ‘wager’ in the traditional idea of a wager that is mentioned in the Wire Act. The Wire Act is about staking things of value themselves on the outcomes of events that the players themselves aren’t involved in. It’s such a different activity from playing poker online, where the bets that you’re making in the hand are actually creating the hand itself, creating the pots, and, usually, determining the results of the hand. The vast majority of the time, poker hands end without a showdown.

“You’re not making ‘wagers’ when you play poker … You’re ‘bidding’ for the pot. Maybe we should change that word ‘bet’ to ‘bid.’ We’d probably do better in D.C. trying to change public opinion of our game.”
***
Lederer’s busy dance card away from the tables—whether it’s his TV commentary, his poker fantasy camps and instructional DVDs, or his work with Full Tilt and the PPA, you’d be hard-pressed to find a pro with his fingers in more, er, pots—has had the ironic and unintended effect of disrupting his professional career.

“I made a very conscious decision to stop playing the big cash games because I was too busy on the business side of poker to feel like I could put the kind of time, energy, and attention into it that would allow me to be successful. I like to be a successful poker player. And at the end of the day, if I’ve been up since eight in the morning, doing e-mail and making phone calls, and I’ve had a long day, and I walk into the Bellagio poker room at 8:00 to play in the biggest game in the world with Phil Ivey, who probably woke up at like 11:00, worked out, maybe played a round of golf and had a nice meal with his wife—as much as he may have been doing everything else, he was still thinking about that poker game all day—I can’t beat that, and I’m not going to try.”

Whatever measure of relief his quasi-sabbatical might afford the rest of the poker world, no one should get too comfortable. “I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon. In fact, I would truly expect very soon to be able to devote a lot more time to the game.”

After all, he’s only at the 90-mile mark. “To me, poker is not a game where I am trying to win a certain number of bracelets, or a certain amount of money. I’m not still playing the game to prove anything to anybody else. But I’m still trying to prove things to myself, to accomplish things for myself when I’m at the table. And I think that’s a good thing.”

Jonathan Grotenstein is a writer living in Los Angeles. He is the co-author of All In: The (Almost) Entirely True History Of The World Series Of Poker, and has collaborated on books with Phil Gordon and Scott Fischman.

Monsters Of The Mayfair
A look at a few of the Mayfair Club’s notable graduates and their accomplishments:
Mickey Appleman 4 WSOP bracelets, more than $1.6-million lifetime tournament winnings
Noli Francisco 1 WPT title, $1.3-million lifetime tournament winnings
Dan Harrington 2 WSOP bracelets, 1 WPT title, back-to-back Main Event final tables, more than $6.5-million lifetime tournament winnings
Jay Heimowitz 6 WSOP bracelets, nearly $2-million lifetime tournament winnings
Jason Lester 1 WSOP bracelet, $1.7-million lifetime tournament winnings
Erik Seidel 8 WSOP bracelets, over $8-million lifetime tournament winnings
Steve Zolotow 2 WSOP bracelets, over $1.7-million lifetime tournament winnings

Reverence For Reese
He may have beaten the Big Game for 10 years, but that didn’t mean that Howard Lederer owned it. “Within the poker community, the people who’ve played with him, there isn’t a debate about who the greatest cash-game player of all-time was,” he said. “No one liked seeing Chip Reese at the table.”

There were no strategies for beating Reese, who passed away last December at just 56 years of age. Lederer recalled one pro who, when evaluating a game’s juiciness, would treat Reese as if he neutralized the worst player at the table. For Lederer, the plan was simply to lose as little to Reese as possible.

“Chip was the guy. He was a true poker player that understood what it was all about, playing the game day in and day out with a lunch pail. Except he had a shiny, gold-plated lunch pail. He was there every day with the lunch pail, playing his A-game. And it was special to watch.”