Poker Kings

Follow the trail of kings and queens and pocket aces long enough, and eventually you will find Ashok Surapaneni.

You can't miss him, really. He's a fairly big, fairly tall Indian guy, and his name comes up about every fifth sentence when discussing poker - Texas Hold 'Em, specifically - among Penn's rapidly burgeoning poker scene.

"My friend Ashok, he kind of mentored me," College junior Ari Paul says. "Ashok . he's the best player," Wharton junior and Penn Poker Club Co-President Dan Kline says, referring to his fellow co-president.

And from College senior Steve Jacobs: Ashok "took the leap to becoming a professional." Ashok, Ashok, Ashok. The name has assumed a deferential, almost Herculean, quality, and there are even rumors - which, in typical straight fashion, Surapaneni refuses to confirm or deny - that he's paying Penn's $30,000-odd tuition entirely out of his poker winnings.

Maybe it's just his near-constant poker face, but Ashok Surapaneni seems like an unassuming, albeit highly confident, Wharton junior. He certainly doesn't look the part of an Exeter boy -- which he is -- and with $10,000 worth of chips stacked in front of him at the Atlantic City Trump Taj Mahal's poker room, and $13,000 cash backing that, he's dressed not as a high-roller but as your average 21-year-old -- black Oakleys, a faded yellow Borgata casino hat, cargo khakis and a long navy blue windbreaker.

It's not exactly the uniform of a gambler, but then again, Surapaneni doesn't much consider himself a gambler.

"I wouldn't say we're any more gamblers than day traders are," he says, underscoring his calculated, business-style approach to the game.

For example, he's read nearly 40 poker books, and analyzes every hand he plays at the end of each day.

And he plays poker like it's his job. Last summer, the 4.0 student -- save that one A-minus -- moved to Atlantic City, N.J., where he shared an apartment with another aficionado and played every day, averaging 70 hours a week.

"There were some days when I didn't want to play, but I made myself," he says. "It's like work."

But he seems to be doing OK. Despite the fact that he once lost $27,000 in one night, he says, "I haven't gone broke, I pay all my bills and I have money to spare."

He has become the reluctant poster boy for the Penn Poker Club, not to mention the inspiration for any Quaker serious about poker. And lately, that number has been increasing daily.

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Poker -- it's so hot right now.

The Poker Club now boasts a listserv of over 500 and, since the beginning of the semester, Dan Kline estimates that three to five new members join daily. Surapaneni says that his e-mail box is clogged with freshmen that want to get on the listserv, and they're no ordinary enthusiasts, either -- they offer Surapaneni paragraphs about their own poker history, and use words like "poker fanatic" and "serious poker player."

This sudden upsurge in the game is a far cry from the club's humble beginnings. Back in fall 2002, in a second-floor Butcher dorm room, Kline, Ari Paul and a handful of their hallmates gathered to socialize and play cards.

"Freshman year, there'd be a game three to four nights a week, [and] it'd be the same three or four people playing," Kline says. "We all sucked at that point, but we started getting better."

As their skill level heightened, so did the dollar signs.

"We became more and more serious about it, and started raising the stakes," Paul says. "Instead of a $20 buy-in, we started playing with a $100 buy-in."

Then came the Student Activities Council funding, cementing their status as a Penn club. Next came the PokerRoom.com-sponsored spring tournament, complete with a $1,000 prize -- within 20 minutes the club received 500 responses for 200 slots. And now, the 500-plus listserv.

In fact, aside from organizing tournaments and bi-semester strategy sessions, the club is just a glorified listserv, where interested students e-mail out to organize nightly games or a trip to Atlantic City.

"Poker on campus has really exploded, partly because of the listserv and partly because of online poker," Paul says.

Indeed, poker is hotter than the cocktail waitresses at the Borgata these days, and ESPN's World Series of Poker deserves much of the credit.

First aired in 1994, the WSOP benefited from the 2003 advent of the "lipstick camera" -- a small camera that allows the audience to see each player's pocket cards. Now, the at-home viewer can tell when a player is bluffing, or if a player is about to make a potentially game-determining move. This type of real-time excitement has generated unprecedented enthusiasm for both poker and poker shows like the WSOP.

That's what 10 Poker Club members were talking about on a recent Wednesday night -- Penn alumna Annie Duke just won $2 million in the Tournament of Champions -- as they trickled into a Harnwell College House lounge for a casual game of Hold 'Em that came together through the listserv several hours earlier.

At times, all you can hear is the clank of chips, a satisfying plastic-on-plastic tinkle, and when the players do speak, it's the language of poker. They talk strategy, and recall past hands like sports statistics -- he had bullets and the flop came ace, king, 2; he caught a runner, runner flush; he went all in on Big Slick.

But if the tone is casual, the game is not. The chips are real, the money is certainly real -- on average, each player buys in for $100 -- and even the faux-wood table now boasts a felt surface, courtesy of a baby-blue fleece blanket one of the organizers has stripped from his bed.

And then, an interruption: "Can I buy in?" asks a newcomer, hovering by the door. "No, not now," comes the reply. There are too many people. The student turns to leave as someone calls out, "Are you gonna come back?"

"If I don't lose too much online in the meantime," he says, smirking.

Indeed, online poker is becoming increasingly popular, with sites like PartyPoker.com garnering up to 50,000 players at any given time, and Penn students are among those logging on.

Just take Paul, who at the peak of his online foray says he "got kind of obsessed," playing up to 15 hours straight.

"Basically, on my hall and on campus, there just aren't high enough stakes games ... and I felt to make more money, I needed to start playing higher-stakes games," he says of his decision to play online. "Also, online games are much faster. You can play three tables at once, and the games pass" more quickly.

But by the end of October, Paul says he hopes to be done playing online. Instead, he'll have 20 computers playing for him.

Paul wears glasses and has a dry voice that borders on pedantry -- many of his offhand comments become mini-instructional lessons on poker. He's the type of kid you might expect to program a computer to play poker.

"If my computer program works, that should make $200 grand a year," he says. "The goal is to have it at every [online] low-limit table," where the bets are small and newbies go to hone their skills.

And the program is a simple one -- literally.

"It's not going to be a very smart program," Paul says. "It's going to play low-limit poker where the players are pretty much terrible, it's only going to play the best cards and it's going to play them aggressively. At low limits, that's enough to win."

So win he will, or so he hopes. True to the poker world, Paul is taking a risk.

Steve Jacobs knows what it's like to win -- $65,000, to be exact.

That's how much he won one Sunday last January, playing in PartyPoker.com's Sunday Special tournament.

First, he called his girlfriend and parents. Then he bought a plasma TV and a Tempur-Pedic mattress. Then he went on a "bad run," and lost about $15,000.

He is, after all, a bit of gambler.

With his eager brown eyes and lanky 6'2" frame, Jacobs is half little boy, half gambler. He wears braces, doesn't look a day over 18 and dashes out of the Taj Mahal's poker room to buy a Mrs. Fields cookie.

But he has arranged his schedule so he has no Friday classes, "so I can play in Friday tournaments" in Atlantic City, talks about his girlfriend in gambling terms -- "she sees me as a long-term investment" -- and once bet a guy in his dorm $50 that he wasn't going to gamble until winter break. He lost within an hour.

Always an entrepreneur, Jacobs got his unofficial start in high school, scalping his family's extra 76ers tickets, and his official start during freshman year, with online blackjack. Jacobs says that many sites offer a promotion, wherein if players deposit at least $100, the site will match them with a $100 bonus, provided they use the money to gamble. So he developed a plan: Deposit $100. Receive $100 bonus. Gamble using initial deposit only. Cash out with said bonus. Repeat.

It was a perfect plan except that, as with any perfect plan, there was just one flaw.

"The problem was, I was too addicted to actually cash out," he says.

He says all this in a $100 cab ride back from Atlantic City -- "If I win, I take a cab. If I lose, I take the train," he says, grinning -- in mile-a-minute spurts and exclamations, alternately rejecting and embracing gambling.

"But I'm definitely going to law school next year," he says.

Pause.

"Unless I win one of those tournaments for a million or something. Then I can't make any promises."

And moments before: "There is nothing more pathetic than coming to [Atlantic City] with your last $100, losing it all and going back on the train, unshaven, unshowered."

And on the surrealism of poker: "If I thought of a hand in terms of a dinner at Morton's, it'd probably be tougher," he says.

Surapaneni agrees.

"You kinda lose perspective on money," he says. "Here, if I lose $1,000, I don't think about it."

"I bought in for $10,000 and then sold" the chips, Surapaneni adds.

That's because he wants the other players to have chips, not cash, in front of them -- it's easier to bet your next car payment when it's in the form of six black-and-green checkered chips, and Surapaneni is more than happy to pick up the pieces.

He plays a tight style, meaning that he plays only the best hands, and plays them aggressively, calling and raising and betting. In an hour at the Taj's high-rollers' table, Surapaneni only plays three hands -- ace-queen, king-jack, ace-king -- and wins two of them.

"Ashok is more of a success story," Jacobs says, and then he's off again, eating his cookie, reflecting on Atlantic City and thinking about all the hands to come.

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