Printer-friendly version

Send to a friend

This Issue 02/26/2009

• Guilty Pleasures: Taylor Swift, "Love Story" (2008)
• Cuban Rhythms
• Flog About It
• Spring Breaking Up
• Defibrillator: El Topo (1970)
• Ego of the Week: Mike Zorger

Heaslip sits at his desk, connected to PokerStars.com, frenetically clicking through 13 different tables. The software he uses brings each table to the front of the screen when it is his turn. In rapid succession the windows spool to the front; Heaslip makes his moves instantaneously, rarely pausing long enough at a given window to see the outcome of his decision. It doesn’t matter; poker as he plays it is about the long-term, not individual hands.

In 45 minutes, he’s made $80.

Plastered to the wall above Heaslip’s trio of computer monitors — his “command center” — are two quotations. One is from Tommy Angelo’s Elements of Poker, a book Rick enjoyed so much that he gives a copy to Joe as a gift that afternoon. The other is a comment from one of the online poker forums Rick peruses. It is about a high-stakes player known as Leatherass, who calculated that it costs him $30,000 every year to take bathroom breaks. He now famously urinates into a bottle under his desk.

The forum commenter said: “Life is overrated with so much money if you spend all day angry, peeing in bottles.”

When asked, Heaslip explains that he keeps the quotation above his computer as a reminder that quality of life is just as important, if not more so, than earning money. “I feel like I owe it to the people around me, no matter what my result is any given day, to not either sound like I’m gloating or take it out on them if I’m upset,” Heaslip says. It is this calm logicality that makes his future plans to attend law school unsurprising.

But for now, he’s enjoying the entrepreneurial benefits of playing poker professionally. “In no other job can I sit in my boxers, eat a Pop-Tart, play on my computer while listening to music whenever I feel like it… Really, any hours I choose.”