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YOU'VE PROBABLY SEEN HINTS OF IT ON TV. Maybe on one of the WPT specials, or
on Poker After Dark. Antonio Esfandiari and Phil Laak have a very competitive relationship.
In truth, it's actually much deeper than that. They are an old married couple. They
finish each other's sentences. They read each other's minds. They even have what
Hollywood calls a "meet-cute," an awkward but ultimately charming story about how
their relationship began.
They also love, above all else, to gamble with each other. Starting in April, assuming
you have accessto the iNHD network, you'll get to see a lot more of it, as they make
wild, humiliating, and occasionally painful proposition bets against one another on their
new show, I Bet You. ALL IN recently caught up with the duo to discussthe show, the
state of the game, and how it feels to be poker celebrities.
ALL IN: Tell us how you met ...
Phil Laak: This is what happened. In '99, I
started playing cards in New York, around
the same time he was playing cards in the
Bay Area. In the summer of 2000, we both
went to the World Series of Poker for our
first time ...
Antonio Esfandiari: Let me tell you how
we met. That year at the World Series, I
wasn't doing much poker-I was doing
more magic than anything else. And so
I was known as "The Magician." I was
walking by a table, and a friend stopped
me and said, "Antonio, do some magic for
us." So I started to do magic. And everyone
at the table was kind of interested. Phil was
sitting behind Gus-this is before he was
Gus Hansen, he was just a normal guy-and
while I'm doing the magic tricks, I notice
that Phil is not doing what he should:
looking away when I talk. He's always
looking at my hands and I'm thinking,
This guy is trying to figure me out.
PL: I'm trying to get myself behind him
and trying to get the best angle ...
AE: No, that comes later. So I cut the magic
session short. I don't like it when people
try and figure out how I do it. About 10
minutes later, I'm doing magic for another
group of people. All the sudden I see Phil,
just standing around, trying to look at my
hands, and I think, This frickin' prick. He's
really trying to heckle me, right? So the
group breaks, we start chatting, we went
out that night, we started drinking ...
PL:Actually, what happened was, I remember distinctly, I was like a magic enthusiast
in seventh grade. I remember reading all
the magicians' books that existed in the
library of my hometown, learning how
they cut the woman in half with the saw,
all the stuff. I read the life works of Houdini.
I was always fascinated by magic. So when
I saw him doing his magic, the first words
An Outrageous Interview With Poker's
Wackiest Twosome And Newest RealityTV Stars, Phil Laak & Antonio Esfandiari
I ever said to Antonio-I just thought I was
going to compliment him on his magic and
pass on my way-I went up to him, after
two days of seeing his little improv shows,
and I was, like, "Sir, I've watched a lot of
magic in my time, and that was some of
the tightest, coolest, close-up magie-I
couldn't figure out most of it. I thought it
was slick, polished." I was just giving him
a compliment. And then Antonio, being
humble, deflected the compliment and
said "Hey," and we got a beer. One thing
led to another ...
AE: Yeah. We started drinking ...
PL: The next day we were wandering
around Vegas with a deck of cards ...
AE: And that was it.
PL: When we were both single guys, it was
fun, because we would drift around with
the deck and have fun meeting people.
AE: He would do the talking and the bullshitting, I would do the magic.
PL: That World Series of Poker was the
end of a one-year journey to find out if I
wanted to play poker for a living and I
realized-this was in 2000-you could
probably make money at poker, but not
as much as I could probably make on Wall
Street. And I was really having a tough
time because I wanted to have fun and I
knew that Wall Street wouldn't be as much
fun. But there's a certain point, where
the money-fun equation ... Whatever. I
ended up drifting off to Wall Street. And,
literally, a month later, I started getting
calls every three days from Antonio saying,
"What are you doing joining the real world?
You should be in California playing poker,
I'm making this much money, this much
money." And I tell him, "Look, Antonio,
no one makes that kind of money." I went
to every casino in the world, practically ...
AE: I had a little nest in San Jose that no
one knew about.
PL: It was like a little game, I never even
went to this casino.
AE: I told him he had to see for himself.
And the first day he plays, he breaks the
record for the biggest win in, like, five years.
It's just sick! He comes back and plays the
next day, and he breaks that record! It was
the sickest.
PL: That week, I just won a ton of money.
I was very aware that I just got lucky that
week, but I knew that I was in a game
that was super-juicy, that the world didn't
know about it, no pros knew about it,
and it had missed me. I had gone to casi-
nos on the east and west coasts, in Europe,
and I'd never seen what was happening.
This little bubble at Bay 101-the game's
dead now-a spread-limit game where
there were some sick people. Every time
they bet, they'd bet the max, and if you
checked, they'd bet. That was the algorithm they went by. It didn't last long, but
they went through, like, 20 dimes a day
for six months. So five days later, I looked
at my numbers and realized even if I was
running average, I'd be crushing whatever
numbers I could make as a Wall Street guy.
AE: So we looked for an apartment.
PL: I said, "Antonio, if I choose to move
out here ... "
AE: I was living with a friend of mine at
the time, but Phil said, "If I move out
here, can we get a place together?" The
next day ...
PL: Five miles or less away from the game.
AE: Five miles or less. And the next day
we go and prepay rent for six months to
this lady ...
PL: I told my buddy in the Wall Street world,
"I'm taking a sabbaticaL" So I'm on a sevenyear sabbatical from the finance world.
AE: (laughing) He'swaiting for that call back.
PL: (laughing) It's going to be another
seven years, probably.
AE: And that was it.
PL: Thank you Antonio ...
AE: Until Jennifer [Tilly, Phil's girlfriend]
stole him from me.
PL: That was much later. That was after
Antonio never spent quality time with
me because he had a girlfriend and I had
to find somebody to ...
AE: Remember porch time? We'd turn off
the phones and hang out on the porch?
PL: There was a time, actually, in 2000, it
was kind of still busy but I enforced it. Every
Sunday, from four to five p.m., no phones,
hang out, have a barbecue, or whatever.
But those were the olden days, when ...
AE: He wasn't a superstar. Now he doesn't
hang out with me anymore.
PL: That's B.S.!
AE: The only time we hang out is when
we work together.
You've answered our second question,
"How did you fall in love?"
AE: (laughing) It's such a love-hate relationship. By the way, we like to hurt each
other, financially, more than anyone else
in the world.
PL:That recent win over Antonio on Poker
After Dark, that was the most pleasurable
win I've had in my life. You have to understand that if I had lost that final hand, if
Antonio had taken that final match from
me, it wasn't that I wouldn't have won,
it's that I would have lost to Antonio.
Losing to Antonio is like somebody sticking a hot poker through your chest. It's
just terrible pain. The winning was nice,
but defending against losing ...
Have you guys always made prop bets?
PL: Right away. I remember going to get
fish tacos with Antonio at Rubio's, near
our first apartment in San Jose, the guy
was just as sick as me. I'd found a fellow
degenerate. We were pa~king and he said,
"You can't park here, it's a fire lane." And
I'm, like, the chance of getting a ticket ...
it was probably $600 to $100.
AE: Seven to one.
PL: Seven to one. You're a 'dog to get a
ticket, but if you do ... You know. We
were making bets like out of the gate in
our relationship, on just anything.
AE: We always made bets.
PL:And that relationship, that pattern never
left us, and somebody noticed it outside
the poker games: You guys are always
trying to pick each other off. It's funny, if
you develop a relationship where you're
betting a lot, you also develop a strict moral
ethos. You can't set up the guy.
AE: It's up to you to find out what he
knows. He can't lie to you. If we have a
bet developing, it's up to me to find out
if he has any information. He doesn't
have to tell me, but if I ask him ...
PL: You can't, like ...
AE: Hustle.
PL: You know, like in the old days, YOU'd
move signs and say, "Oh, I think that sign's
wrong. It's, like, 20 miles, not 25 miles."
None of that stuff. It's just straight up.
What's the biggest stupid bet you guys
have ever made?
PL: I don't think we've had a stupid bet ...
AE: I'll tell you what the stupidest bet was.
PL: Oh my god! That was so bad!
AE: At the Commerce [Casino], like five
years ago, this guy, let's call him Mr. X.
PL: He would play, like, two- or three-day
sessions all the time.
AE: He'd sleep at the table. Just take naps.
PL: He wasn't the worst player. Some of the
players were so hopeless compared to him.
AE: He goes broke at the table. Phil loans
him money.
PL: A thousand. Then he asks to borrow
another thousand. And I loan him that
thousand. And he offers me collateral,
like jewelry, and I'm, like, "That's okay."
And on the ride home, Antonio says,"That
guy might not pay you." I say, "No, he's 100
percent to pay me back." And Antonio's,
like, "100 percent?" And this was the worst
bet I've ever made in my life ...
AE: He gave me 50-1 that the guy would
pay him back.
PL: The most retarded bet I've ever made
in my life. The smartest thing I did ...
AE: And I fell for it ...
PL: He had six months to pay me back,
and, like, four months go by and I realize
I'm going to lose $5,000-the bet was $100
to $5,000-and I said, "Antonio, why don't
we make it $2,0007"
AE: It was New Year's Eve, and he said,
" At the time it seemed like the most ingenious idea in the
world, that we'd pay the producer of the show money to
"I'm doing my records for '05 or '04 or
whatever." Records my ass. He said, "Can
you let me off for $2,000?" And $2,000
was a lot of money for me back then. So I
let him out.
PL: Of course Mr. X stiffed me.
AE: He still hasn't gotten paid. Not only
did he not get paid, but he lost money
on not getting paid.
PL: The moral of the story is, don't loan
money. Oh, and don't bet on it.
Your new TV show, I Bet You, is all
about the two of you making wild
proposition bets. What's the funniest
bet you guys made?
AE: In my opinion, panhandling.
PL: I agree. That was the most embarrassing. No, second-most embarrassing ...
AE: Dancing was probably the funniest to
other people.
Tell us about the panhandling.
AE: It was who could get more money in
10 minutes ...
PL: ... in a little quadrant on the street.
You couldn't leave this little area on the
Venice Beach catwalk thing. You both had
10 minutes. You could say whatever you
wanted, do whatever you wanted. It is
incredibly embarrassing going up to some-
body and trying to get 50 cents from them.
AE: People shit on you.
PL: They look at you ...
AE: ... like you're nothing. I have new
respect for bums.
PL: I felt so bad. After everyone paid us,
right afterwards, the show's producers
gave them a buck or two back. Anyone
who gave us 25, 50 cents got a buck or
more. But there was this one skateboard
kid, who was completely felted. You
could tell the guy might have had two
bucks to his name. It turns out he had 60
cents to his name. And he gave me his
net worth. He said, "Yo bro, I feel the
plight." And I thought, at least these
guys are going to give him his money
back, but he was like a Marvel comic
book character on a skateboard:
Whoosh! Dropped the 60 cents, gone.
Evaporated into thin air. I felt so bad.
And the dancing?
AE: We each had an instructor and had to
take a lesson on how to dance, then had
to dance against each other in front of a
judge. And it was so embarrassing! We're
both the worst dancers in the world.
PL: And I did some classical stuff. And I
can't do classical anything.
AE: It was really bad.
PL: You'll see it on TV. Some of the bets
had humiliation things attached. The roller
derby bet, the loser of that had to take a
pie in the face. One humiliation bet, the
loser had to jump into an ice-cold lake.
But the dancing thing, we figured it was
so humiliating in itself, there would be
no additional humiliation.
AE: My highlight of the show, at the very
end, the last show, our director ...
PL: Oh my god. This is so brutal. We were
doing a paintball war, heads up, this and
that, and this guy Thom, he's a great guy,
the producer of the show, but he would
get us up at eight in the morning, and
prevent us from playing tournaments
because we'd have to be somewhere for
a week, and we just kept missing stuff ...
I missed, like, the last third of the year for
tournaments, and I love tournaments. I
don't know why we thought this was
such a great idea, but at the time it
seemed like the most ingenious idea in
the world, that we'd pay him money to
unload bullets, those paint-pellet bullets,
into his body at close range, like 15 yards.
AE: We offered him two grand, he finally
says yes. He gets down ...
PL: Ten seconds we were going to get to
do it. And these guns were fully automatic.
AE: He was trying to get into the best
position ...
PL: Psychologically, he was trying to get
ready to have literally around 600 bullets
fired into him.
AE: He used a garbage bag to put a
lining around himself.
PL: Which, by the way, the instructor told
us, that lining is meaningless! It's like air.
AE: So while we were sitting there, waiting to do it, I make the biggest mistake
I've ever made. I accidentally let one go.
PL: One bu lIet shoots off ...
AE: And he's like, "Aaaaaah!"
PL: It hits him in the forearm, and it just
instantly turns blue. And it's incredibly
painful to get hit with one of those
things from 10 yards.
AE: Imagine 200 of them. So he paid his
assistant $500 to stand in for him.
PL: So we shot his assistant. It was, like,
everyone wanted to seesomebody get shot.
AE: If you ever want to release anger, or
built-up stress ...
PL: It's a really weird thing, from like a
psychological, primal, post-analysis kind
of view, the caveman thing. It's weird. I
would think, psychologically, that's sick
and I would never want to do it. But then
when it's actually a guy who put you
through hell, and you start unloadingand we didn't even get to unload on the
guy we wanted to, it was a guy we liked,
Chris, he wanted us to do it, because he
was going to get paid for it.
AE: So after one goes off, we offer Thom
$3,000, then $4,000. Phil's, like, "$5,000!"
PL: "$6,000!"
AE: I said $7,000. I wanted to pay him
$7,000!
PL: He wouldn't do it.·
AE: (shaking his head in disbelief) I
offered him $7,000.
PL: It was like the Milgram's experiment
[where participants were told to administer
a series of what appeared to be increasingly painful electric shocks to a subject,
and nearly two-thirds of the participants
complied.] And while I was taking responsibility for the bullets going into the guy,
it felt good. Which was wrong.
AE: One fun one: We each had to teach a
stripper how to play poker. And they played
strip poker. That was pretty fun.
Do you guys see this as an expansion of
your image as poker players?
PL: It's more like actual real life.
AE: I think it's just us, you know? There's
nothing made up about it. It's what we
would do anyway, just bet on stuff. And
now we have to look for things to bet on.
PL:Those guys would send us to places
where we'd never end up naturally.
AE: He had to jump in the coldest water .
PL: ... up at Big Bear. It was, like, minus .
AE: He lost a bet. He had to jump in. Lost a
$400 pair of sunglassesand couldn't be bothered to get them. And it was shallow water.
PL: I was so cold I couldn't hold a towel
around my body. I could use my mouth to
say, "Push the towel around me."
AE: An Indian guy who works on the lake
said, "Do not jump in the lake. You're going
to freeze. You're going to die." He's telling
the producer, "Don't let him jump, because
he's not going to be able to walk out."
It's that cold. And I'm like, "Jump! Jump!"
PL: I knew that I could make it. But I know
this: If I was in there for maybe two minutes
I'd have gone into hypothermia. Maybe it
was a stupid thing to do. There were some
bets I said no to doing. They were like,
take ex-lax pills and see who can hold it
the longest, and I was like, "No way."
AE: By the way, I did a bet with a friend
of mine and whoever lost had to get the
other guy's name tattooed on his body ...
PL: Or pay $50,000 to get out.
AE: So I was paying $50,000. No way I'm
ever going to get "Brian Coopersmith"
tattooed on my body. But I won that bet.
So he has" Antonio Esfandiari" literally
tattooed on his body.
PL: I was at the tattoo parlor thinking,
These people are just so sick.
Which of you guys is stronger?
PL: He is.
Faster?
PL:Thinking or running? I think thinking
me, running, well, I used to run ...
AE: We're good at thinking different things.
Like social settings, networking, it's me.
But numbers, spatial thinking, brains ...
PL: He's the best networker of all-time. I
mean, the guy is a machine. He loves
relationships. But if we took an IQ test ...
AE: ... he would crush me.
PL:That was me, in seventh grade, reading all the puzzle books. I was that kid. I
needed puzzles. If somebody had just
told me, in high school, you could play
games for money, I could have cut out
college, the whole engineering thing,
and gone straight into the degenerate
life. And if we were both to run 10 miles,
I think I could beat you in that.
AE: Oh yeah. I don't have endurance. But
AE: Once you've started playing poker,
you never stop. I don't know anyone who
started playing poker then said, "Oh no, I
don't want to play anymore."
PL: Who do you know that has that first
drink of alcohol and says, "Oh, I'm never
going to have a drink again"? Prohibition
tried to snuff out drinking. But you can't
snuff out man's desire to play games,
entertain, gamble ... it's as much of a
right to a person as breathing, or walking
without chains on his body.
AE: Where there's a will ...
PL: Online has taken a hit, but the casinos
are pumping with action.
AE: There aren't going to be as many TV
shows without online advertising, but I
think that ...
PL: Instead of 10 shows, there'll be like
three or four. Who knows? I'm just happy
that the casinos are open 24 hours a day,
they have eyes in the sky ...
AE:
security guards ...
PL: you have a casino cage, a box, it's
insane. I remember when I was gambling
in New York, four days a week, it was
gamble at your own risk. The police could
raid the club, no eye in the sky, no security, wow. You come to California, Vegas,
it's legal! It's legal!
What goals do you have left to achieve
in the poker world?
PL: What I want to do is ...
AE: ... have a bracelet. Like his girlfriend.
PL: Yes! That would be nice, wouldn't it?
AE: I don't set goals. I just play. Whatever
happens, happens, you know? I don't
ever think, Oh, I want to win another
WPT title. I just want to play poker.
PL:What I want to do is this: I just want
to play well. Long streams of time, days,
months, where I'm playing well. It's not
about winning or losing; I'm very familiar
with the fact that if you play well, the
winning comes after that. If you're
always trying to hunt for the optimal
moment, it feels great, it's like surfing.
You learn how to play "Raindrops Keep.
" There are times when I'm driving, and I'm, like, Wo~ Phil,
be very careful today, because things are so good. I'm, like,
a short distance ...
You guys are oddly evenly matched.
PL:There were some days when he
would crush me ...
AE: But it finished up almost even at
the end.
PL: I was crushing him at the beginning,
then he was crushing me, and I was, like,
Oh my god, it's going to end with him
having the best of me. Then, the last
couple of shows, there was one two-day
period where I just won every bet. Which
is, like, impossible. It's like winning 12
sessions in a row of No-Limit Hold 'Em. It
doesn't happen. But some stuff that
doesn't happen, happens. Betting with
your friends. It's fun.
AE: We're not friends. We're acquaintances.
PL: Let's get that straight right now.
Where do you see poker headed?
AE: Well, ever since Bill Frist came into
the picture ...
PL: The thing that Antonio says a lot, and
it's true, is that if someone learns the
game, it's hard to let it go.
Falling On My Head," and if you don't
choke, and freeze up because it feels
good, if you can stay in the moment,
you're falling in synch with nature and
it's just beautiful. So that's all I want out
of poker. To be in synch with it. I want to
hit it. Be in flow with it.
Do you guys feel like you have a special
relationship with the WPT?
AE: Yeah. We were there from the early
going, both won titles back to back, actually. So we both have this friendship with
most of the WPT. Mike [Sexton] is a
genuinely cool guy.
PL: I speak for myself, and Antonio as
well, but I am very, very happy to be an
ambassador to poker. It's pretty arbitrary,
I think that it's sort of roughly true that
it's pretty arbitrary who the poker stars
are. Not completely arbitrary-you're
always going to have the guys were
around forever-but the guys under 40
years old, who happened to win when
the TV stuff got started, you almost have
to want to ... I think ...
AE: I think he doesn't know what he's
talking about. He likes to ramble.
If you could teach a college class, what
would it be?
AE: How to have the most amazing nightlife experience. How to party correctly.
And how to talk to women.
PL: Mine would be this: I'd take a distillation of all that I've learned about paranormal sciences ...
[Interviewer's Note: Laak's answer turned
out to be an eight-minute long and very
passionate, if meandering, monologue
that touches on the latest Princetonresearch
in engineering anomalies, an 11th-grade
experiment using dowsing rods to search
for water and energy fields, the idea that
your body's magnetic waves change when
other people look at you, and the possibility that, like Keanu Reeves in the movie
Constantine, Phil has a guardian spirit
that helps him to elicit horrible calls from
his opponents. We've included the (greatly
abbreviated) answer here for two reasons:
to present the reader with the mental
image of Antonio rolling his eyes for
virtually the entire time; and to allow the
be very careful today, because things are
so good. You know how it is. If there is a
inclusion of Phil's concluding sentence,
the most unlikely stringing together of
words this interviewer has ever heard
uttered from the mouth of a poker player:
and hold up everyone, or, This is where
the car,all of the sudden, gets side-swiped
by another car. I've been on high alert,
PL: ... There's a lot of stuff we don't understand about the fact that we are electric,
alive, magnetic bio-units that can transport ourselves through this physical world.
AE: So that's what he's teaching? Jesus
Christ. I've got to go to sleep.
How surprised are you guys by where
you are in life?
AE: It'sso sick.I don't know how it happened.
PL: I'm totally stunned. There are times
when I'm driving, and I'm, like, Wow, Phil,
god, or an infinite radiance, or however
it's all designed, it's always like a trick door.
Something bad is around the corner when
things are really good. Things are so good
that when I'm in a completely normal
environment, I'm, like, Thisis where terror-
ists come running into the casino and try
trying not to let that misstep happen.
You've taken precautions?
AE: Not really.
PL: I still cruise along on my motorcycle.
But I'm extra careful. Cl
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 collabo-
rated on books with Phil Gordon and
Scott Fischman.