Poker News

Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson

The first thing you notice about former World Series of Poker Champ Chris “Jesus” Ferguson is the “look,” even before you hear a shortened account of his poker table successes.

But wait a moment . . . let’s get the name thing straight first. Actually, it’s DR. Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, More on that later.

Yes, it’s the “look” that stops people who don’t know him: the long dark hair, the black western hat and the dark glasses, all worn with just a touch of attitude.

An acquaintance was telling him recently, “You look like a figure in one of those old Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns . . . kind of dark and threatening.”

That’s when the “look” slips a bit and Ferguson breaks into a bit of a laugh. “I would love to have been in one of those movies. I love Clint Eastwood and (director) Sergio Leone.” So how did it happen? Is it something he thought carefully about?

“It didn’t happen naturally, but it is not something I thought carefully about.”

Huh?

“The idea was to look different. When I started playing poker and I’d go sit down at the table everyone knew I was a college student. I had this long hair and, well, I didn’t look like anything except what I was, a college student.

“But what happened . . . well, it’s strange. You put on a black cowboy hat and this weird transformation takes place. People look at you and see just about anyone except a college student. I’d walk around Vegas. People would stop me wanting to know if I was in a band, or if it wasn’t that they thought maybe I was with the rodeo.”

Had he put a lot of thought into trying to market a particular image?

“Not really. The fact of the matter is I was planning on cutting my hair short in 2000 because I had been doing that every four or five years, and 2000 seemed like the time to do it again, but then what happened is I went on to win the main event at the World Series and I thought that I couldn’t go cutting it short now because suddenly I had this image and . . .”

His words trail off in a sound that suggests he was happy to go with the feeling of the moment. You know how it is?

Ferguson is among the leaders in money finishes at the World Series. As of several weeks ago he had posted his 40th with four cashes this year, including a second in one of the pot limit Omaha tournaments, and more than a dozen events still to go.

Ferguson’s a tournament specialist. “The way things are now,you can play all the tournaments you want without ever having to touch cash games.”

How did he decide this is what fits his temperament?

“I got tired playing cash games. It’s always the same. You know, sit down with your money and eight hours later you’re still playing the same game, still four and eight or whatever it is. But tournaments are dynamic.

The beginning of a tournament is different from the middle, which is different from the end. Different strategies are required to be successful. The other thing is that tournaments are more competitive.”

Ferguson maintains that tournaments “bring out the best” in whoever is playing. “People play a lot harder to win in tournaments than they do in side action. In side action, particularly at the low limits, people are just out there just gambling. They’re playing any card.

They know they’re getting the worst of it, but they just want to gamble.”

Tournaments provide a great return on investment when a player’s lucky and good enough to get to the right place at the right time.

“They sure do,” punctuating that with a low chuckle, “but I also like the competition. People tend to bring their best game when they’re playing in a tournament and that does not usually happen in side action, except at the highest levels.”

Ferguson says he plays all the games, not limiting himself, and with that in mind he has been in most of the WSOP tournaments, except when schedules made that impossible.

He is the winner of five WSOP bracelets, including the big one. He took home the gold bracelet from the championship event, the $10,000 buy-in no limit tournament in 2000, not to mention the $1.5 million in prize money. There were 512 entries and Ferguson was the first winner to ever earn MORE than a million dollars in prize money from a single tournament.

That was also the year of the final table that included author James McManus whose best-selling Positively Fifth Street resulted from his fifth place finish there.

A year earlier Ferguson had chalked up another milestone moment, earning a PhD in computer science, specializing in artificial intelligence, but didn’t let it affect his passion for playing poker, which was very real by then. He wasalready established in the world of poker, “but not well known or anything like that.”

The success of 2000 enabled him to spread his wings and begin spending more time with what he really wanted to do.

Before 2000 he could not afford to play the entire World Series, which even then consisted of a couple dozen events, each with a separate buy-in. “I did not play more than about 10 events in any given World Series.”

Since then he has also gotten to know McManus. “We have talked a lot since then. He’s interviewed me a few times.”

Did Ferguson know what McManus was working on as they sat together at that final table five years ago?

“I don’t think he knew what he was doing at the time. I know he was out there to cover the Binion murder trial. I’m not sure that he had come out there already determined to write about what it was like to play in the World Series.”

Ferguson has an affiliation with fulltiltpoker.com, as do a number of other well known poker pros, people such as Howard Lederer, Phil Ivey and Jennifer Harman, to name a few. They are not owners of the on-line poker site, but do own the software used by the company and collectively help market the site. “What we do is lease the software out to a third party that actually runs the site.”

Is this making them rich?

“That’s a goal,” he laughs. “So far it has only cost us money, but obviously we do not expect that situation to continue. We have a huge amount of faith in the on-line market.”

The explosive popularity of Internet poker is not news to anyone at this point, but to keep business pointed in the right direction, he explains, sites such as Full Tilt have to give players the best possible bang for their money.

That’s what’s happening at Full Tilt, he says. For instance, the site has been running satellites to qualify players for a seat in the WSOP’s main event. The eventual winner was to get a $10 million bonus IF he or she won a qualifying satellite at Full Tilt.

Ferguson adds, “I don’t know of another web site doing anything like that.” Says a lot about the river of revenues flowing to the myriad sites.

Does Ferguson want to predict growth trends? “No, I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that but I can point out what we’ve seen over the last few years. It has been astronomical. It has gone up at least 10 fold in the last three years.

Will he agree with the predictions of some that there might be triple digit growth in the Asian market over the next two or three years?

“I can believe that. I’m pretty sure you will, but keep in mind that the Asian market (for on-line poker) right now is pretty small, but what this does do is bode pretty well for the future because the Asian culture is very much into gambling opportunities such as poker.”

He believes the U.S. (online poker) market has been pretty much penetrated, “and we’re doing well with the European market, so the next logical place to go is the Asian market where there is huge, huge potential for growth.”

Ferguson spent more than a dozen years of his adult life in the satisfying pursuit of various under graduate and graduate studies before he found a comfort zone in the poker world.

“But I never,” he insists, “made a decision in those early years to consciously pursue poker as a livelihood.

It’s just what happened.” Sometime in the mid- 1990s he decided he wanted to learn how to play poker well. “It’s just like some people decide they want to learn how to play chess and they want to play it well.” With Ferguson it was poker.

“So I looked around and decided I wanted to play against the best players, but the best players were spending their time in these high limit games that were waaaaay too expensive for me.”

That’s when the tournaments caught his eye. He knew he would find a lot of the best players in these tournaments and the cost of sitting down at the table would be a fraction of what was required to pull up a chair at one of the cash games.

Driving home his point, “You could get some very big names playing in like, even a $300 tournament.” All in all, it’s been what Ferguson calls a

Filed under: Poker News