The Missing Chapter

Who are the Tiltboys? They are a close circle of unlikely friends that share a penchant for putting others (particularly other Tiltboys) on tilt – whether at the casino, in a home game, or in everyday life. Celebrity poker player Phil Gordon is a founding Tiltboy, as is Rafe Furst – who seems to be Tilt’s anti-matter, holding the group together. Dave ‘Dice Boy’ Lambert and Perry Friedman (a WSOP bracelet Winner) are tilt-generating machines, and Kim Scheinberg is the historian who has arranged select Tilt Boys adventures into a new book, aptly named Tales from the Tiltboys. Through a series of happenstance, misadventures, and sometimes by intention, the Tiltboys mix their gambling lifestyle with the principles of Tilt, going from the world Roshambo Championships all the way to the World Series of Poker.

Now, it’s important to read the Tiltboy’s tales in the correct historical context. Most of their adventures took place either while the original Tiltboys were in college together at Stanford (the spiritual home of Tilt) or in the years shortly after graduation (when the circle of Tilt began to expand). College-life is a dozen years behind them now, and as aptly pointed out by Kim ‘Tilt Mom’ Scheinberg, “What you can get away with in your twenties can get you arrested in your thirties”. The point is the Tiltboys did all their craziest shit way before poker was trendy. They just love gambling and setting the world on tilt.

Time to get Rafe on the phone for a spot of reminiscing:

Rafe, remember the time you were watching porn, eating Cheetos and playing internet poker? (I actually read the story in their book, but I ask him like I was right there).

RAFE: “You know that old joke – a guy walks into the doctor’s office and says: Doctor, my penis is turning orange. The Doctor says: Have you been doing anything different lately? The Patient says: Not really, just sitting on my couch, watching porn and eating Cheetos.

“But it was JK who walked in on me, not you,” adds Rafe. “And for the record, the only thing compromising he saw was me playing my hands too quickly – my poker hands. I didn’t actually buy the porn channel – I had one of those illegal cable boxes, so it came for free – so I’m not a porn guy or anything. It’s just one of those situations where you get caught watching porn with a Cheetos bag – no tilt factor there at all.

“JK is an interesting, and largely overlooked, Tilt Boy,” Rafe continues. “We met him at BARGE one year, (BARGE is a convention for internet poker players held annually in Las Vegas) and he was with a group called the Rollers, but spelled R00l3RZ. Then JK met Kim ‘Tilt Mom’, and pretty soon he was coming to our home game. But JK was a shoe-in to join the group, because he’s a natural tilter. Actually, you need to give him a call. Tell him you’re from Bluff Magazine and that you heard he crapped his pants on a flight from Vegas and you want to interview him about it.”

Now I’m in the mix. I am actually going to be used as an implement for tilting a Tiltboy – I’m digging this. So I get on the phone and call JK at home. Hi, JK? I’m with Bluff Magazine. I spoke to Rafe and he was telling me about the flight where you shit yourself…

Before I could say another word:

JK: “Which time? Just kidding. I know the story he is talking about. Kim and I were living in San Jose, one hour from Vegas. We had a newborn, yet being the degenerates and Tiltboys that we are, we decided that that didn’t matter, because we were going to see a Springsteen concert in Vegas anyway. So we hopped on this South West flight with literally no clothes, not even a toothbrush; the plan was to get into Vegas at 6pm, see the concert, crash at Penn’s house and take a 7am flight back. We had a friend to watch the baby who was like, four months old. Kim was still nursing her, so she pumped off enough milk to get her through the night and we made the plane on time.

“I ate some food at the MGM and went to the concert. Of course we wound up staying up to like 4am with Penn, shooting the crap in his hot tub. The hot tub may have contributed to the outcome of this story.

“When I woke up in the morning, I was unbelievably sick. I’m going to spare some of the details, but I have never purged like I purged on that morning. There were multiple sessions of this. I took some Pepto Bismol, and I made it to the airport. I was literally laying on the airport carpet in a cold sweat feeling like CRAP! It was 15 minutes before boarding, and only a 50 minute flight back, so I thought if I could just get home – and I had to get home because of the baby – then I’d be okay. We got the last two seats on the airplane, which was fully booked, and was me in a seat next to Kim, and this 17-year-old kid who had a McDonalds bag with him. At this point, I was sure I could make it home, until this kid pulled out a Big Mac from his Mc Donald’s bag and the smell hit me. I don’t remember this part because I passed out (and had a little seizure according to Kim), but when I woke up I was hunched over and I had a little white bag in front of me. I hadn’t really thrown up; it was just, according to Kim, some saliva and clear stuff. So I kind of woke up – and this is never a good sign – I feel something… umm, I guess it was like, something dripping on my leg, by my sock. And sure enough, I had purged a bit more after I passed out. I had basically shit in my favorite pair of blue jeans.

Now remember, I had massively shit out like, 50 gallons of stuff already, so there couldn’t have been much left, but there was enough left that it was bad. It was terrible at the time, but I can see why Rafe likes this story so much. We were in Vegas; it was Memorial Day weekend, and like, 1,000 degrees outside. We were parked at the gate, the engines were off and the air conditioning on the plane was off. People started fanning themselves with the little in flight magazine, not only from the heat, but also from the smell. At this point, they called me an ambulance to take me to the hospital. I still get a little chuckle when I think about the people that had to stay on that plane and fly to San Jose with that smell.

So I got out of the hospital, and the next flight they could get me on was at like, 6:30 pm. So I decided to go play some poker at the Bellagio. I get into the poker room looking like death warmed over. I had no color, and I had the hospital bracelet on my wrist, and there was this bandaid with cotton under it, where they were giving me fluids. And they never took off the little heart monitor stickers, so I had like four of these things stuck to my neck. So I had all this stuff on, and I was now wearing clothes from K-Mart that Kim got me after they had to cut off my shirt, and I’m carrying a paper bag with my shit-stained blue jeans that, like an idiot, I figured I’d just wash when I get home.

So I sit down at the 30/60 game at the Bellagio in KMart clothes with all the Frankenstein stuff on me, and a bag of shit and denim. Nobody would talk to me until, after a couple of hands, this guy looked over at me and said, “Bad day, huh?” Everybody was giving me these looks like I had three heads, and at that point I had to leave the table. I knew that all the guys at the table were thinking ‘This guy’s such a sick, degenerate gambler that he had to come straight from the hospital, after having what looks like a heart-attack, instead of going home to sleep for a week. And on top of it, the guy smells like he just shit himself.’

“They decided that this story shouldn’t go in the book, but I am sure it would be perfect for Bluff Magazine.”

Ah, a master tilter indeed. Instead of me tilting him, he tilts me with that Bluff Magazine comment. Used and abused and tilted eight ways from Thursday, I may never be the same again.