BY STORMS REBACK


AS INTEGRAL AS POKER IS TO Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi’s life, family has always been far more important to him. Raised in South Florida in a traditional Jewish household that speaks as much Hebrew as English, Mizrachi, who turns 30 in January, remains extremely close with his parents and siblings.

He credits his brother Robert for introducing him to poker during his teen years, and every time he makes a final table of a major tournament he flies his entire family to the event to cheer him on, a practice he started at the 2005 L.A. Poker Classic. Their presence, what he calls his “home-field advantage,” helped him win that WPT title as well as $1,859,909.

Whereas most 24-year-olds would have blown a large portion of that money on frivolous purchases, Mizrachi set about taking care of his family. He bought a tour bus so they could travel with him while he followed the tournament trail. When his wife Aidiliy (a.k.a. Lily or Mrs. Grinder) deemed the bus too small and its shower too cold, Mizrachi agreed to sell it in favor of buying a house in Las Vegas.

As devoted as Mizrachi has always been to his parents and siblings, his love of family reached a whole new level when his oldest child, Paul William, was born in 2004 (he and Lily have since had two more). In the hospital, Mizrachi dealt his infant son two cards, and the result, 10-5, became his favorite Hold ’Em hand, until it was suddenly displaced on February 1, 2006.

That day, with four players left in the Borgata Winter Open, Erick Lindgren opened for $300,000 with A-Q and Mizrachi moved all in with pocket fours. Lindgren called and hit a queen on the flop, but Mizrachi caught a four on the river to double up. An hour and a half later, he defeated John D’Agostino heads-up to win $1,117,373.

“My favorite hand will always be pocket fours,” Mizrachi said during a conversation with ALL IN between events at this year’s World Series of Poker. “I’ve probably flopped the most sets with two fours. There’s just something about fours. I’ve always done well with them.”
Superstitious to his core, Mizrachi embraces the number four every bit as much as he shuns the color red (while wearing that color, he has gotten knocked out prematurely from several major tournaments).

After winning his second WPT title in less than a year, Mizrachi signed a sponsorship deal with Absolute Poker. He had been officially ordained a poker star and it seemed like he might go on to win a major title every year, but, of course, winning poker tournaments is much harder than he made it look early in his career. As if anticipating the drought to come, Absolute Poker declined to renew his one-year contract the following year, even though Mizrachi had won $2.4-million while wearing their patch. He was almost immediately scooped up by Planet Hollywood, but when that deal expired, he remained unsigned for several years before Deliverance Poker, a fledging poker site with an amusing slogan (“Don’t Get Screwed On The River”), picked him up in August 2009.

His lack of sponsorship from 2007 to 2009 underscores just how fickle the online poker sites became as far as signing and maintaining talent was concerned in the years following the passage of the UIGEA in 2006. Yes, Mizrachi had experienced the worst results of his career during that span, but a bad year for him is a career-best year for 99 percent of the poker world. In 2009, he “only” made $335,686, but he also played fewer tournaments than most of the top players, preferring to stay at home with his wife and three children and play online rather than enter every big buy-in event on the schedule.

The erroneous perception that his career had fallen on hard times was exacerbated in March of this year when his wife jokingly posted on the Two Plus Two Forum that the statue he’d earned for winning the 2005 L.A. Poker Classic was for sale. The salacious rumors that emerged were given further momentum in May when the Orlando Sun-Sentinel reported that he owed the federal government $339,000 in back taxes and had foreclosed on two houses he owned in Florida. As it turned out, this was old news and, according to Mizrachi, not as indicative of personal hardship as it might have seemed. He blamed the tax issue on an accountant whom he subsequently fired and replaced with “a better one” and he described his choosing to foreclose on the houses as more of a smart business decision than a sign of financial duress.
“I had great advice about the foreclosures,” he explained. “I said, Why should I continue paying for a home when the tenants aren’t paying the rent and the property values are way down? It just didn’t make any sense to keep the homes.”

So he did what countless Americans have chosen to do in recent years and simply walked away from the houses.

After such a tumultuous spring, Mizrachi arrived at the 2010 World Series of Poker extremely motivated, making his decision to enter the first event on the schedule, the $50,000 Players Championship, an easy one.

Like Mizrachi, the $50,000 buy-in event at the WSOP has gotten continually dissected by the media in recent years. In 2006, its inaugural year, the news was almost entirely positive. The final table, which featured No-Limit Hold ’Em, boasted one of the strongest lineups in WSOP history, and the heads-up match between Chip Reese and Andy Bloch became an instant classic. But the following year, tournament officials decided to maintain the H.O.R.S.E. format all the way to the end, making the final table all but unwatchable to the general public. Freddy Deeb won, but hardly anyone noticed or cared.

That format continued in 2008 and so did the subpar television ratings, which was enough to convince ESPN not to film the event in 2009, and without television coverage, the number of players who entered the tournament declined sharply. Something needed to be done, and in 2010 it was. Tournament organizers changed the event from H.O.R.S.E. to Eight-Game Mix with only No-Limit Hold ’Em played at the final table, and they also gave it a new name, the Players Championship. ESPN responded by agreeing to air it once again, and the number of entrants jumped back into the triple figures.

Mizrachi first played in the WSOP’s 50K event in 2008, when he finished just a few spots outside of the money. The following year, he won a seat in the event via a satellite, but declined to play in it for fear of repeating what happened to him the previous year. In 2010, the financial burden of ponying up $50,000 was alleviated when Deliverance Poker and Patrik Antonius (who also backed his brother Robert) paid a portion of his entry fee. He derived further encouragement from the tournament’s format change.

“I like where it’s at now. I like the Eight-Game Mix because that’s all I play online. I play all the limit games pretty well, so I liked my chances going in.”

His confidence proved warranted when he ended the third day of the five-day tournament with the chip lead. On Day Four, he seemed to kick his game into an even higher gear. Just after the bubble had burst, he eliminated Brett Richey in a hand of Pot-Limit Omaha by flopping the nut flush with A-A-K-4.

In another hand of PLO just after the dinner break, he picked up aces once again and raised to $108,000 from the button. Lyle Berman, who had limped in from under the gun, called with 7-7-6-6, and the flop came A-J-6, giving Mizrachi top set and Berman bottom set. Berman checked, and Mizrachi bet the pot.

Berman shook his head. “Grinder, there’s no way you can have aces again.” He proceeded to re-raise Mizrachi all in, and Mizrachi quickly called.

“Oh my god,” Berman shouted when he saw his opponent’s cards.

Only one card in the deck, the six of diamonds, could save Berman, and it came on the turn. Berman shouted with equal parts incredulity and joy.

Suddenly, Mizrachi was in the same position Berman had been in just a moment before. Only the ace of clubs would win the hand for him. When it fell on the river, Mizrachi jumped out of his chair with his mouth open and his hands on his head. “Quads over quads,” he shouted to his brother Robert, who was also still alive in the tournament and sitting at the next table over.

With Berman’s dramatic exit in 12th place, the Mizrachi brothers were just three eliminations away from making history. Only once in the WSOP’s 41 years had a pair of brothers made the same final table. In 2002, Ross and Barny Boatman finished seventh and ninth respectively in the $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha event. The Mizrachis also had the opportunity to become the highest-finishing pair of siblings in a WSOP event; in 1995, Annie Duke finished sixth in the $1,500 Pot-Limit Hold ’Em event while her brother Howard Lederer finished ninth.

“That was something I was hoping for,” said Michael. “We were watching out for each other. When we were nine-handed, I said, ‘Robert just slow down. Don’t play many pots of limit because you need the chips for no-limit.’ I told him to play super-tight and solid because limit was playing a lot bigger than the no-limit and pot-limit rounds, but he did the opposite.”

After winning several big pots during the two rounds of Stud, Robert entered the final table as the chip leader with $3,125,000, with Michael just a half-million chips behind him. They were joined by a tough lineup of players who flaunted sponsorship patches from the biggest online sites, Full Tilt (John Juanda, David Oppenheim, and Mikael Thuritz) and PokerStars (David Baker, Daniel Alaei, and Vladimir Schmelev). The Mizrachi brothers were the odd men out, sporting Deliverance Poker and North 88 Outdoor (the Las Vegas patio-furniture company they own) patches.

As usual, the brothers had flown their entire family to Las Vegas to witness the historic final table, and, thanks mostly to their mother and Michael’s wife, they had the loudest cheering section for most of the evening. The only other fans who created anything close to the decibel level the Mizrachis produced were rooting for Baker, but when Michael busted Baker in sixth place after Baker shoved from the small blind with A-J and Michael called from the big blind with A-K, the room belonged entirely to the Mizrachi clan.

They grew particularly boisterous when Michael grabbed the chip lead with five players left. When it comes to closing out tournaments after making the final table, Grinder possesses one of the more impressive track records in poker, but just before the dinner break his momentum got stopped abruptly in its tracks by Oppenheim, who had started the day as the short stack and climbed his way all the way up to second place. After Oppenheim opened to $175,000 from under the gun, Mizrachi smooth called with A-Q from the big blind.

“David Oppenheim had no idea what kind of hand I had in that spot,” Mizrachi explained. “He didn’t know how strong I was. That’s why I check-raised on the flop. It came Q-4-5 with two spades. The turn came an eight. I led into him [for $1,000,000] and he raised all in. I knew he wasn’t bluffing his tournament off, but I felt like there might be a chance he could have a K-Q or J-Q and maybe he thought I had a flush draw. I thought to myself, If I lose this hand I’m going to be in pretty bad shape, but I can still recover.”

When Mizrachi called, Oppenheim showed him a set of fours. The loss was doubly cruel for Mizrachi, for it not only crippled him but also tarnished his long love affair with pocket fours. A lesser player might have fallen apart at that point, but one of Grinder’s strengths at the table is his fortitude.

“I made a bad decision I guess, but mentally I was strong. I’m not going to let one hand take me off my game. I never tilt. I stayed focused and grinded my way back.”

His comeback included a new and somewhat odd experience for him, knocking his own flesh and blood out of a major tournament. After Michael opened to $200,000 from the button with Q-J, Robert moved all in from the big blind for another $465,000 with A-10. When Michael called, the Mizrachi cheering section grew eerily quiet, except for one anxiety-ridden voice: Mom.

“The flop came out 2-3-8,” explained Michael. “My mother thought Rob had J-Q and I had A-10, so my mother was screaming, ‘Jack.’ I had Rob covered, so if Rob won the pot we’d both still be in.”

The jack of hearts fell on the turn, eliminating Robert in fifth place and threatening to set off a family feud.

“How can you do that to your brother?” Michael’s mother yelled at him from the stands.

“It’s poker,” he responded, shrugging. “What are you going to do?”

After Juanda’s elimination in fourth place and Oppenheim’s in third, Mizrachi entered heads-up play against Schmelev with a 3-2 chip lead. Before they sat down to play, Mike Matusow took Mizrachi aside and said, “C’mon, Grinder, you need to win this,” before leading him in a series of jumping jacks and a quick jog just outside the Rio.

Schmelev, a former chess prodigy from St. Petersburg, Russia who built his bankroll playing cash games at the Golden Ring Club in Moscow, came out swinging, a show of force that put Mizrachi back on his heels.

“I thought I would have an edge coming into heads-up, especially with the chip lead,” said Mizrachi, “but he was re-raising a lot. He was playing big-bet poker. If I had to do it over again, I would have played position more and kept the pots small.”
Thanks to his aggression, Schmelev wrested the chip lead from Mizrachi and expanded it to a nearly 3-1 advantage before Mizrachi four-bet shoved with A-7 of clubs and Schmelev insta-called with A-J of diamonds.

“My tournament was never on the line before that,” said Mizrachi. “That was the only time I could have gotten knocked out. I ended up making a flush on the river, and thank god for that.”

Having evened the contest, Mizrachi promptly switched gears. “I slowed down a lot. I changed the pace of the match. I played exactly opposite of the way I’d played before.”

From that point on, Mizrachi simply wore Schmelev down, frustrating him with small-ball poker, until, holding a sizable chip lead, he finally moved in with Q-5 and Schmelev called with Q-8. After catching a five on the turn, Mizrachi only needed to sweat one more card before he could rid himself of the label “one of the greatest poker players never to have won a bracelet.” And what card do you think fell on the river? A four, of course.

“Now everyone’s got to take me off that list,” he said. “It’s an unbelievable feeling, a poker player’s dream. A lot of bracelet winners can say they won a $1,000 or $1,500 No-Limit Hold ’Em event, but I can say my first bracelet came in the $50,000 Players Championship. Maybe I was saving it all for this.”

In addition to the gold bracelet, Mizrachi earned $1,559,046 as well as the Chip Reese Memorial trophy. “I heard you get to keep it for the year, kind of like the Stanley Cup, but I haven’t gotten it yet. They said they were going to mail it to me. But I almost feel like they can just put my name on it and leave it at the Rio. I don’t want anything to happen to it because I’ve got three kids at the house.”

By the time Mizrachi had finished posing for pictures and found his car in the Rio’s back parking lot, it was early in the morning. When he finally got into his car, a glance at the clock told him the time and confirmed his strange relationship with the number four. It was 4:44, a coincidence that he called “pretty spooky.”

Later that day after getting some sleep, Michael convened with his family to relive the highlights of the tournament. In a not-so-unusual display, his mother asked Robert if he would give her a “bonus” from the $341,429 he’d won for coming in fifth. Her request didn’t sit well with her oldest son.

“You’re not getting a bonus,” Robert told her, perhaps remembering her screaming for a jack on the hand that knocked him out. “You were rooting for Grinder.”

Having won one of the most prestigious events of the year, Michael had no problem giving her a portion of his winnings. She was his mom after all, and he was, above all, a family man.