Push-Up Contests, Kevin Hart, and $100K Tournaments: Inside the World of Poker’s Super High Rollers
“Come on, boy, 10, 11, you’re pushing it!” Kevin Hart is screaming. “Two more! Push it, push it, go! Twelve, 13…oh, you’re buckling! This is gonna fuckin’ hurt!”
Dan doesn’t buckle—that would invalidate the bet—and gets up to break for a few precious seconds.
“Shake it off, shake it off!” coaxes Igor Kurganov, a pro player who appears to have taken Dan’s side of the bet. “Let’s go!”
Dan is back on the floor.
“This is it right here!” screams Hart.
“One, two, three…” They’re counting off the next set.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, motherfucker!” Kevin Hart is loving this, even though it’s looking like he might lose. Seven. Eight. “Yeah, motherfucker! You get there.” Nine, 10. “Damn it, son of a bitch is strong. You fucking buckle. You buckle. You buckle right now, in the name of—!” Again, Dan doesn’t buckle. He makes it to 105, the timer reads 21:52, and the bet is won.
“Great job!” Igor yells.
“Motherfucker,” offers Kevin Hart with a handshake.
Ah, the decorum of the super high rollers.
This may be the first prop bet I’ve seen, but the bets themselves are ubiquitous in the poker world—and far older than Hold’em itself. Usually, they are a bit more of a sure thing than Dan Colman’s stand against Kevin Hart. As the fictional gambler Sky Masterson relates the advice his daddy once gave him in Guys and Dolls, “One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you’re going to wind up with an ear full of cider.”
Titanic Thompson—real name Alvin Clarence Thomas, the likely inspiration for Masterson, nicknamed Titanic because he sank everything in his way—is considered to be among the earliest of a long line of players whose interest in bets of any sort echoed and sometimes outweighed their interest in poker. Titanic scammed more than one round of golf and famously won a bet against Al Capone, when he wagered that he could throw a lemon onto a building across the street (he’d weighed the lemon down with lead beforehand). The stunt that earned him his nickname, or so the story goes, involved a jump over a 54-inch pool table. The poolroom owner had offered $200 to anyone who could jump over his new table, assuming that no one could make the professional-athlete-grade jump—and if they did, they’d be severely injured. Titanic took up the bet, dragged a mattress to the table’s side, and proceeded to flip himself over the table and onto his landing pad.
The modern prop bet is (usually) a different sort of beast. The old masters were, in a sense, cheats. Sure, they didn’t outright cheat. But they stacked the deck and set up their victims. It wasn’t an altogether fair bet because the information was asymmetric. They knew something you didn’t. They couldn’t lose. The new prop bettors are more interested in the uncertainty of the gamble: testing the limits of control. The push-ups, a bike ride from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in under 48 hours, a quest to stay in a pitch-black bathroom without phone or music for a month, a swim between two Caribbean islands: the modern prop bettor is looking for the proposition that will push him to the edge.
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