Not Yet a Full House, But Poker Catching On
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Unfortunately for Gerasimov, his two 10s proved insufficient as the dealer revealed the final card -- and just like that, Russia's most accomplished professional poker player was done for the night and $2,000 poorer for his efforts.
"Good luck, everyone," Gerasimov said, although, perhaps thanks to the stoicism that serves him so well in poker, it was hard to tell if he was being ironic.
He stood up and walked briskly out of the second-floor game room at the Korona Casino while 23 other players continued to battle it out at the 2005 Russian Poker Championships. With 48 players and a $2,000 entry fee, the Texas No Limit Hold'em tournament was the culmination of the 11-day event, which ended Oct. 19.
Five hours after Gerasimov's exit, Valery Ilikyan, a cigar-chomping, trash-talking Armenian businessman from Tbilisi with a habit of yelling at waitresses for slow service, took home around $29,000 for his first-place finish, bringing his total winnings in the final two days to around $44,000.
While Ilikyan was the big winner of the championship, Gerasimov, a 34-year-old Muscovite, remains by far Russia's most distinguished poker pro, and his early departure from the tournament's main event could easily be chalked up to the bane of all gamblers: bad luck.
But Gerasimov could be facing increasingly stiff competition from his countrymen in the coming years. The game's global boom has begun to resonate in Russia, creating a small but growing class of players who earn their daily bread by heeding the advice
of country singer Kenny Rogers' most famous protagonist.
Fueled by Internet game rooms and television coverage of tournaments, poker has experienced an unprecedented spike in worldwide popularity in recent years.
The web site PokerPulse.com, which tracks the online poker industry, estimated that in May there were more than 1.8 million active online players betting $200 million every day, a tenfold jump since televised poker began to take off in early 2003.
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Rhys Jones, left, celebrating a win during the Russian Poker Championships. Valery Ilikyan, right, won about $44,000 in the final two days of the competition. Brian McDonald (right), the director of the 2005 Russian Poker Championships, which ran from Oct. 9 to 19, counting out $25,000 in winnings for Rhys Jones, a New Zealander in the online casino industry.
While poker was once the domain of flamboyant, hardened gamblers and rich businessmen looking to blow off steam with other high-rollers in backrooms and casinos, the surge in the game's popularity has created a new generation of young poker pros, relative rookies, honing their craft -- and padding their wallets -- on the Internet before testing their skills in major tournaments.
Online and casino poker in Russia is still in an embryonic stage. There are currently around 100 players in Russia, a majority of them in Moscow and St. Petersburg, whose income depends primarily on their success at the poker table, said Dmitry Lesnoi, publisher of the monthly magazine Casino Games and a ubiquitous figure on the Moscow poker scene.
Despite the relatively small numbers compared with the West, Lesnoi, who is also president of the Russian League of Intellectual Games, said poker's popularity had grown exponentially in recent years.
"Five years ago, there was a total of 200 people playing poker regularly in Moscow, and now there are thousands of players playing on the Internet and in casinos," Lesnoi said.
Vlad Shushkovsky, a burly hockey agent who emigrated with his parents to Canada from Soviet Ukraine in 1979, has also noted a surge in popularity in Russian online poker. Shushkovsky, 38, created the web site RedStarPoker.com after he saw a gap in the burgeoning online poker market.
"There are a lot of Internet poker players all over the world, but there were no Russia-specific sites," Shushkovsky said.
Shushkovsky estimates that a year ago there were around 1,000 Russians regularly playing poker at popular sites such as PartyPoker.com. Red Star Poker, which went online in June, currently has around 5,300 registered accounts.
"Given that some players register under more than one nickname, we probably have around 3,500 players registered at any given time," he said.
Shushkovsky predicted that the number of online poker players in Russia would grow along with the increasing number of Internet users.
"Poker is the perfect game for Russians," Shushkovsky said. "They love intellectual games, and they love to gamble."
Rhys Jones, a poker operations manager for the Gibraltar-based online gaming company Mansion, put the number even higher, estimating that Moscow alone has tens of thousands of online poker players.
Jones, a New Zealand native who beat out Ilikyan for the $25,000 first prize in the Texas No Limit Hold'em tournament held on the penultimate day of the Russian Poker Championships, is currently exploring investment opportunities related to poker in Russia, and he is confident Russia will catch up with the global poker boom.
"With exposure on television and as Internet access becomes easier, it's inevitable," Jones said.
Poker has a relatively short history in Russia, with most Soviet citizens experiencing the game vicariously through Jack London novels, Lesnoi said. "When I was young, it wasn't very popular," he said. "It wasn't played in public, and there were no tournaments of course. Some people played it in the kitchen with their friends, but the only game they knew was five-card draw."
Kafelnikov, a regular at Moscow's big-money cash games, hanging out in Shangri La's VIP poker room in August.
Card games like durak and seka, a three-card game that rewards the same combinations as poker, were more popular, Lesnoi said, but with the onset of perestroika and more freedom to travel, Soviet citizens got a taste of the game by frequenting U.S. and European casinos.
Moscow's first poker clubs opened up in the late 1990s at local casinos, and interest in the game has steadily grown, said Vince Conte, poker club operator at Casino de Paris.
On any given night, there are around 100 poker players competing in Moscow casinos such as Korona, Shangri La, the Cosmos Casino, Casino de Paris and the Jazz Town Casino, Conte said.
While the ranks of professional players in North America and Western Europe have been flooded in recent years with gamblers who got their start online, Russia's pros are primarily a mix of gamblers and ex-card dealers who happened to discover the game in the casinos they haunted.
Vyacheslav Karpov, 27, said he worked six years as a dealer at the Cosmos Casino before quitting to make his money playing poker and backgammon.
"You have total freedom as a professional player," said Karpov, who was one hand away from making the final table on the last day of the Russian Poker Championships. "You don't have to go to work. You're your own boss. That's the most important thing."
Gerasimov, who began playing poker four years ago after learning the game by hanging out at Moscow casinos, is by far the most successful Russian pro on the international scene.
Gerasimov, who is known for his aggressive style, has won more than $1 million in prize money in Russian, European and U.S. tournaments, according to the Hendon Mob Poker Database, a web site that tracks players' winnings.
Named Rookie of the Year at the 2002 European Poker Awards and dubbed the Red Square Rumbler by U.S. television poker commentators, Gerasimov's most impressive performance was a second-place finish at the World Poker Tour championship at the Bellagio in Las Vegas in April 2003, which earned him $506,625 in prize money.
Gerasimov, like most Russian players, is hesitant to talk about how much money he makes on poker. "The more important question is how much I lose," he said in an interview in August.
He has said most of his income comes from playing online and at Moscow casinos.
While money-wise Gerasimov is clearly Russia's leading tournament player, several of his peers have earned their reputations by toiling away in relative anonymity in high-stakes cash games.
Kirill Rabtsov, a former Cosmos dealer, is known in Moscow poker circles as one of the most formidable opponents in cash games, which, unlike tournament play, allow a player to keep purchasing chips until he runs out of money or loans.
While Gerasimov says he is a purist, concerned more about playing well and letting the chips fall where they may, the clean-cut, high-strung Rabtsov has a decidedly unromantic take on his profession.
"I don't care about playing well," Rabtsov, 28, said. "I just play for the money."
Rabtsov is equally pragmatic about his reputation. "Everyone is bad at poker, but some are worse than others," he said. "And those players lose to the players that aren't as bad as they are."
Other Russian poker players strive to make waves on the international scene, but they face the problem of many Russians trying to travel abroad: visas.
Alexander Kravchenko, a regular at Moscow poker tables, has earned more than $180,000 in Russian and European tournaments over the past five years, according to the Hendon Mob Poker Database.
But big-money U.S. tournaments, such as the annual World Series of Poker Main Event in Las Vegas, which Australia's Joe Hachem won in July, earning $7.5 million, have been off-limits to Kravchenko.
"I can't get a visa to the United States," Kravchenko, 34, said in an interview in the Shangri La VIP room, which regularly hosts cash games with a $7,000 buy-in for Moscow's elite players.
Trouble obtaining a U.S. visa, however, is of little relevance to Russia's biggest celebrity poker player: former world No. 1 tennis player Yevgeny Kafelnikov. (Other international celebrity players include Hollywood stars Ben Affleck, James Woods and Toby Maguire, all of whom have competed in the U.S. television tournament Celebrity Poker Showdown.)
Gerasimov may be Russia's most accomplished player, but Kafelnikov is clearly Russian poker's most prominent export, even if he's more famous for serving aces than drawing them.
Kafelnikov announced in November that he was giving up tennis for good to become a poker pro, and he can often be found honing his new craft in local cash games.
Kafelnikov, who has beefed up considerably since his tennis days, was on hand during the Russian Poker Championships, though he spurned the final days in favor of the big-money cash games in one of Korona's VIP rooms, emerging occasionally to lend moral support to his friend Ilikyan.
Kafelnikov declined to be interviewed for this article, and he painstakingly avoided being photographed, jumping out of way anytime a camera was pointed in his direction.
But in an interview with London's The Independent in November, Kafelnikov said his success in tennis had helped prepare him for the poker table.
"You need guts in poker, as in tennis," Kafelnikov was quoted as saying. "And if you don't believe in your ability, you don't win. In tennis I believed in myself, that's why I had so much success."
He said he found poker "exciting ... because you win not with the cards but with your skills. With body language you can win a game, but also you can lose a game."
Kafelnikov has already had some success in tournament poker, having won around $47,000 in Russian and U.S. tournaments over the past 12 months.
But don't look for big names like Kafelnikov to emerge as leading Russian players in the near future, said Karpov, the former Cosmos dealer. The next generation of Russian poker pros will emerge from behind nicknames on Internet poker sites, he said.
"There are a lot of young people playing online now, and they want to dedicate their lives to playing," Karpov said. "Poker has a big future in Russia. No doubt about it."
Gerasimov and Kravchenko were more tempered in their assessments, saying that the game's growth here would depend largely on continuing economic stability in the country and popularization through television and the Internet.
Lesnoi preferred to wax historic, saying that poker perfectly suited the social and economic climate of contemporary Russia.
"Every epoch has a game that reflects life in that period. During the reign of Catherine the Great, the entire ruling elite played shtoss," Lesnoi said, referring to a simple but risky game characterized by large all-or-nothing bets. "It was a time when anything could happen: A soldier could be appointed general on a whim, or an old general could be forced to become a soldier."
Poker suits the current attitudes of Russians eschewing the practice of storing money under the mattress in favor of banks, Lesnoi said, using an analogy that, in the immediate aftermath of the 1998 default, might have done little to popularize the game.
"When you take your money to a bank, it's like betting in poker: You expect to earn some small interest while waiting for bigger profits," he said. "And an experienced player makes good bets."
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