Greg Raymer - No Fluke

GO AHEAD AND BLUFF GREG RAYMER. Give it shot. Feel free to expose yourself to a world of hurt. But after the hand plays out, be prepared to look like a complete fool.

Maybe he cripples your stack. Maybe you flee from the casino. Maybe you land in the slammer.

Little good can come from it.

Because it doesn’t matter whether you’re holding 9-4 offsuit or a .44 Magnum, he’ll cram it down your throat so fast you’ll wish you hadn’t gotten out of bed that day.

Yet they keep trying to bully him. Inaccurate perceptions have a way of tricking people into silly endeavors. They take what they’ve seen on ESPN and size him up as a doughy, middle-aged egghead who lucked his way to the 2004 World Series of Poker Main Event championship behind novelty glasses that might as well have come with a pocket protector. They remember a milquetoast with sweat rings, thrusting bundles of that $5-million bounty above his head.

No freaking way I wouldn’t crush that geek if I played him. Or at least that’s what some think. And if they don’t play poker … I’ll just kick his flabby ass and take that money. Whatever.

Observers have been quick to label recent World Series of Poker champions such as Raymer, Chris Moneymaker, and Robert Varkonyi as one-hit wonders, erstwhile amateurs who merely won the lottery. But the days of armchair rounders considering Raymer a pushover are coming to end. In the past year, the former scientist and pharmaceutical patent attorney fought off two men in an armed robbery attempt, harbored thoughts of killing a man who threatened his family, and vindicated his 2004 title by making a long run in this year’s World Series of Poker Main Event, where he finished 25th out of a record field of 5,619 players.

“Part of the attraction of poker is that people can sit at home and feel like they could do as well or better than the players that are having success,” said Erik Seidel, owner of seven World Series bracelets. “I think going so deep this year will give many more people the sense that maybe that guy with the funny glasses isn’t just a lucky goofball, but is a highly experienced and skilled player.”

True enough, Raymer’s reputation has evolved. Whereas many opponents previously have been tempted to test the unassuming fossil collector, he’s now viewed as someone not to be screwed with under any circumstances. An alarming situation unfolded during a World Series of Poker preliminary event in which Raymer, amid a sea of players and tables, stood up and loudly warned an unidentified man he would murder him if the creep didn’t stop harassing Raymer’s wife and making ominous overtures about their young daughter.

And those who witnessed the scene are convinced Raymer meant it. Cheryl Raymer had been watching her husband play cards when a deranged man squatted next to her and started asking questions about the Raymers’ daughter, Sophie, now nine years old. He wanted to know what Sophie looked like, where she was staying during the tournament—questions no parent wants to discuss. A tournament official asked the man to leave, and although the stranger left Cheryl’s side, he remained in the room. By this time, Greg Raymer had been informed of the menace.

“I look over and see him with this totally angry look, like he’s ready to get into a fist fight,” Raymer recalled. “His face was just twisted with hate. He’s talking to people near him and pointing to Cheryl and pointing to me. That’s when I stood up and said something to him. He said something back, and I said ‘If you mess with my family I’m going to f—ing kill you.’”

Even after Raymer had the chance to cool down, and with the benefit of measuring each word on a computer keyboard, he followed up the day’s disconcerting events with a post on the 2+2 Internet Magazine forum to address what happened.

“I told him that if he messed with my daughter or family, I would kill him,” Raymer wrote. “I shouted all this across a 20-foot gap, and, yes, everyone could hear it, and it happened.

“And I wasn’t lying. If anybody messes with my family, I’m going to kill them as certainly as I possibly can.”

Last December, he was walking back to his hotel room at the Bellagio in Las Vegas with $150,000 in chips and found himself staring down the barrel of a hand cannon. “We’re talking Dirty Harry-style,” Raymer told the Baltimore Sun.

Hotel hallways and poker tables apparently are similar settings in Raymer’s world because those chips were just as difficult to pry away from him as they would be in a tourney. Although Raymer declined to discuss with ALL IN the specifics of what transpired that night because of pending litigation, the Baltimore Sun reported that Raymer fought off his two assailants until they fled. Surveillance cameras led to their arrest in California, and they were extradited back to Las Vegas for trial.

“He looks like a big teddy bear, but he’s dangerous,” said young gun Antonio Esfandiari, making a statement that applies to Raymer both at and away from the table. “He plays without fear. He goes with his gut and is willing to put in all his money when he thinks he has the best hand. He doesn’t let anybody push him around.”

RAYMER ADMITS HE doesn’t understand fame. Now, don’t get him wrong. He appreciates most aspects of it. He just doesn’t fully grasp it.

“I enjoy it more than I hate it,” the 41-year-old poker icon said, looking very little like a celebrity while leaning back on a sofa in the living room of his soon-to-be-former home in Stonington, Connecticut. Raymer, wearing a baby blue PokerStars golf shirt, khakis, and sandals with white socks, was the picture of unpretentiousness while taking a break from arranging his family’s move to a golf-course community in the Raleigh, North Carolina, area.

Before Raymer moved down the Eastern seaboard, he kept his home number unlisted. But he gets a charge out of being recognized in public, shakes every hand thrust at him, answers the countless poker questions thrown his way, and graciously listens to the bad-beat tales.

Of course, there are jokers who run into him at the grocery store and ask him why he isn’t wearing his trademark reptile-hologram glasses, or autograph hounds who clearly intend to sell his signature for a profit.

“I always personalize everything I sign,” Raymer said. “People think I’m being nice because I’m taking the time to personalize it, but in reality I just don’t want you to sell it on eBay. That just annoys me.”

He says this with a smile because he knows these are trivial complaints. He realizes he’s living a dream.

“They say every dark cloud has a silver lining,” Raymer said. “I have a silver cloud with a gray lining. Things are mostly highly positive with little to complain about.”

It’s easy to have that sort of attitude when you’re moving from chilly New England to a new house along a North Carolina golf course. And moving is nothing new for Raymer. His existence has been that of a vagabond for much of his life. The son of a mainframe computer technician and a homemaker, he was born in North Dakota and bounced from Michigan to Florida to Missouri, where he graduated from high school in suburban St. Louis.

It wasn’t until after Raymer received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of Missouri-Rolla and started working on his master’s degree in biochemistry and a law degree at the University of Minnesota that he was introduced to the beauty of a 52-card deck. A relative had given him a blackjack strategy book as a gift. That helped him earn about seven dollars an hour counting cards at the native-American casinos in Minnesota.

Raymer was 28 by the time he finished school and began the frustrating pursuit of finding a pleasant career. He found he loathed the tedium of lab work, and took a job in Chicago as a patent attorney for a litigation firm. It was in the Windy City that Raymer discovered his affinity for poker. Unable to locate a good blackjack game, he stumbled across a $3-$6 poker game and studied David Sklansky’s masterwork The Theory Of Poker.

Raymer continued to move around the country, but he never stopped playing poker, always finding bigger and better action. He took a biotechnology patent preparation and prosecution job in San Diego. Thus he graduated to $10-$20 and occasionally $20-$40 games at the Oceanside Card Club. Cheryl, however, wasn’t particularly keen on her husband’s ever-growing hobby.

“I think she was afraid of the concept that people who get really involved in gambling, as a general rule, are degenerate, addictive gamblers who lose all their money,” Raymer said. “She doesn’t want to be married to that guy.” Her opinion slowly changed as Raymer’s proficiency climbed. One night at the Oceanside, he managed to pile up $2,500 in a $3-$5 Pot-Limit Hold ’Em game.

“It was by far the most money I had won in one day playing poker,” he said. “So I came home in the middle of the night and I wake her up by sprinkling $100 bills over her in bed.”

It was a thrilling moment, to be sure. Until …

“The next day, I wanted to go back and play in the game again and end up losing $500,” Raymer said.

His wife hit the roof.

“She said, ‘That money was in your pocket! You lost that money!’ I said, ‘Wait a minute. If I won $1,000 yesterday and $1,000 today, would you be mad at me?’ She said, ‘Well, of course not, but it’s not the same thing.’” The argument was a seminal moment in Raymer’s poker development. He and his wife made a deal. He would set aside from the family finances a $1,000 bankroll. If the fund ever got depleted, he would quit.

By the time he entered the 2004 World Series of Poker, he was maintaining a $50,000 bankroll. Shortly after he accepted a job at the Pfizer pharmaceutical research facility in Connecticut—Foxwoods became his home casino—he won a World Poker Finals tournament and used the $22,000 prize money as the down payment on their house.

“That was certainly the biggest turning point in terms of my wife’s view of poker,” Raymer said. “After that she was much more positive of me playing.”

RAYMER WAS AN accomplished tournament player before his monumental victory in 2004, but he wasn’t viewed as such.

Although he was lined up to pay the $10,000 entry fee to the Main Event and had already booked his flight and room at the Horseshoe, he caught a significant break six days before the tournament. He won his seat through a $160 double-shootout satellite on PokerStars.

His well-chronicled run to what was then the richest title in poker history was distorted slightly by the stigma placed on him as just another Internet longshot.

“From the point of view of almost everyone out there, I did almost come out of nowhere,” Raymer said. “But just because I qualified online doesn’t mean I only play online or that I’m new to this. People are totally amazed when they ask how many tournaments I played before winning the World Series. ‘Oh, about 500.’ They’re, like, ‘Wow!’”

And they were, like, “wow” when they saw Raymer come darned close to repeating this year. He was the chip leader at various times throughout the 2005 Main Event.

“Everybody would have been calling him a bum if he had been knocked out early,” said Tom Sartori, a true Internet thunderbolt who finished one spot behind Raymer after winning his seat in a $200 PokerRoom.com satellite. “A lot of people were calling his championship a fluke, but you don’t get that far on luck. With his performance this year he really solidified himself as a true pro as far as getting a lot of people’s respect and being taken more seriously.”

Sartori played alongside Raymer on ESPN’s feature table for nearly two straight days. The acoustic musician from Buffalo, New York, experienced first-hand what it was like to try to bluff “Fossilman.”

“As soon as he sensed weakness, he went after me hard,” Sartori said. “He was intimidating because of his reputation from watching him on TV. He’s got those glasses on, and he’s staring right at you from three feet away. It was surreal.”

So the image is changing. The more poker fans follow Raymer’s exploits on the tournament circuit or watch him on television, they’ll start to realize his championship was no freak occurrence.

Raymer gleefully recalls how in the days immediately after he won the bracelet, one Foxwoods regular who never moved above the $20-$40 game had belittled his skills. It’s safe to assume those perceptions are dying quickly.

“The World Series of Poker is a different tournament than any other tournament because of all the opponents you’re against, the structure, the exposure, the money,” said two-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner Scott Fischman. “Everything is different, and guys that play like Raymer are made for it. He’ll probably be good every year at the Main Event.

“He’s very aggressive, non-stop, relentless. At the beginning of the tournament, if he ever gets to double or triple his stack, it’ll be damn near impossible to get those chips away from him.”

Even if his opponent is holding a gun.