Poker News

Sam Farah, Professional Poker Player

Sam Farha’s got that certain look.

“Central casting’s idea of what a poker pro should look like,” is the way an acquaintance put it, right down to that “lucky cigarette” in one corner of his mouth.

He could double for the late Humphrey Bogart, if they ever want to do a remake of “Casablanca.”

It’s easy to imagine Ingrid Bergman, her hands draped over his shoulder, smoke from the cigarette drifting across their faces, Ingrid whispering sweet promises, “Bogart” with his look of rakish sophistication.

But getting back to reality . . . The Lebanese-born Farha, a Houston resident is also a very good professional poker player.

And people keep coming back to that look.

How does he respond to people wanting to know if anyone’s ever said he looks like Humphrey Bogart?

He gives this a goodnatured laugh. “Yes, I get it a lot. I did a magazine interview and they put my picture next to that of Humphrey.”

Punctuating this with a what are you gonna do shrug. But the look is there, right down to the cigarette dangling from his lips. By the way, that cigarette is not lit. Never has been. It’s a habit he got in to some time back.

How long has he been playing poker professionally?

“About 15 or 16 years.” Farha focuses on cash games although he has a 1996 first place bracelet in a World Series pot limit Omaha event and that second place main event to his credit.

The cash games represent the best use of his money and time. It’s that simple.

“Tournaments were not so popular when I began playing and, really, they are so expensive and time consuming. You really have to have a lot of money and it is not an easy thing to win? You probably have to win a decent tournament once a year to cover all the expenses.”

The right cash game provides a far better return for the money invested.

“I used to play all over,” he says. “Now I concentrate my efforts in Las Vegas. It’s where you find the best cash games.”

He spends about four months of the year in Las Vegas. For instance, he was there for the recent Doyle Brunson Championship at the Bellagio. He guesses he’ll make the trip again in December when a World Poker Tour event will draw a lot of players and their money to town.

Like moths to a flame. “I usually play the big games and the big games usually get a lot of the same players, but a few times I go to the smaller games where there are people I’ve never seen.

But they know Sammy.

How many times have they watched replays of the 2003 main event’s final table? Farha seeming to reach into Moneymaker’s head and play with his thoughts, staring him down with a world-weary look of cynicism, Farha eventually going all in with a pair of jacks to cap a grueling final day, losing to the Nashville accountant’s two pair.

“They say, Sammy, they says things like, I know I can’t beat you, but I’m gonna call, just so I can tell my friends I was beat by you. I know they want to call me so bad.”

A man can make a living off that kind of action and sometimes image is like money in the bank.

Farha may look them in the eye, the corner of his mouth twisting into a smile, those Bogart-like eyes seeing all that is necessary, telling them, they’d better do whatever it is they’ve got to do. After Farha’s round of heads-up play against Moneymaker he is one of the most recognizable faces to finish second in the big game, that main event.

When Farha has his choice of games he generally prefers pot limit, “because no limit can be so dangerous. The game won’t last as long when you play no limit.”

Even the best player in the world, he warns, sitting there with a million dollars is going to encounter rough moments and bad hands.

So Farha prefers pot limit where a good win is possible and the consequences of occasional bad judgment or bad beats are minimized.

His only goal is to go home with the money.

So what was the moment in time when this passion for poker and game playing took hold of his life.

“All my life I have loved games, especially cards. I was great in cards. All my family loved cards. When I was young, maybe five years old, I would sit with my parents as they played. “But I never played poker until 1988 or 1989. It was New Year’s Eve and it is a tradition back home, in Lebanon to play cards then, to see how your luck is going to be. One of my friends wanted to try pokerand I had never played poker. But my friend taught me how to play the game and I enjoyed it. I liked it.”

Farha knew he had a lot to learn but figured, “I think I can make some money. I wanted to learn the game, to get better.”

He kept inviting his friends over for what amounted to practice as far as Farha was concerned. “When I felt comfortable enough I started to play in private clubs in Houston.

I started learning a lot of moves. I made mistakes, but I focused on the best players at the table trying to learn from my mistakes.”

Farha hasn’t, so far, spent a lot of time on the ancillary opportunities that have attracted other successful pros.

There’s a possible book deal in the works, but he shrugs it off not saying much about that for the moment, preferring to see how it all comes together. He did, however, launch his own website — www. samfarha.net — four or five months ago with the help of a friend. It offers a variety of poker-related merchandise.

He doesn’t spend a lot of time with it, but says his friend did a good job. “I thought it was cool.”

But he recognizes that in today’s world websites and books are the sort of thing that attract the attention that attracts the players who are star-struck enough to decide that, win or lose, they want to be able to say they played a hand against Sam Farha.

A few words about that cigarette, the one countless pictures show hanging from the corner of his mouth. He does not smoke. The cigarette is not lit.

Not lit?

“That’s right,” and he pauses a moment, maybe pulling his response together. “It’s funny. A lot of people ask me about that cigarette. . .”

Particularly after his duel with Moneymaker when television exposure and Farha’s poker table style combined to help make him one of the best known players ever to finish second in the World Series’ main event.

“In 2003 it was just for luck. A friend of mine had given it to me. I was losing a lot in a cash game and the friend says, ‘Here Sammy, I know you don’t smoke.

Just put in your mouth.’ So I did. Every time I lose I put another cigarette in mymouth.”

Go figure, huh. He gives it a moment of thought. But getting back to 2003.

He got a lot of questions about the cigarette, people knowing smoking was not permitted in poker rooms but noticing that it somehow did something for his look, whatever it did for his luck.

“You want to hear the funny part about this?” Absolutely.

“You know the main event was a five day tournament and the day before the final day I Ieft the cigarette in my room, the same lucky cigarette I had been using. It was up there in my room. “The thing is, I was staying at Bellagio but we were playing at the Horseshoe. I mentioned this to Becky Behnen, about the cigarette and she said she would send a security guard for it.”

Behnen was the owner of the Horseshoe then, came from a gambling family and knew a gambler’s outlook could turn on seemingly inconsequential things. Farha briefly considered her offer: one guy driving a limo from the Horseshoe to the Bellagio to get one cigarette.

He told her thanks but no thanks. He would try to get by, maybe find another one somewhere.

By the way, what kind of cigarette was it?

“It was a Marlboro Light, always a Marlboro Light.” None of this high nicotine stuff for Sammy.

Farha says his championship bracelet in the 1996 Omaha tournament was the result of a run of bad luck in cash games; that and pressure from friends who said he ought to try something else and maybe change his luck.

They offered to put him in the tournament, He could pay his own way, and he did.

“That was the first time I tried a tournament. The way I looked at tournaments, there’s always about 200 players or more, many of them among the best in the world and I felt kind of like an amateur then. I looked at the list and wondered what my chance was of beating all these good players?”

But he took a shot and things worked out nicely.

So how did he decide to enter 2003’s main event? Did he win a satellite? Shaking his head, “Like I said, I always pay my own way. In 2003, I had never tried something like this in my whole life. It just happened. Replaying that final table in his head years later he says, “I was so close to winning it. What helped Chris Moneymaker was I had been in Vegas for two months and I had spent a lot of hours in the cash games and I was losing.”

So the final event, the $10,000 buy-in no limit Texas hold ‘em event, became a chance to make up some lost ground. Maybe even go home with a profit.

“I went in just hoping I could get to the final table.” Talking about one of the big hands of that final day, a hand he lost. “The mistake I made with Moneymaker was laying the hand down. He played this one hand so weakly, but on that day, at that table, things were working out great for him.”

He shakes his head, says, “A lot of people said what Moneymaker did was the great bluff of the year.”

Farha sees it differently.

“It was the worse lay down of the year on my part.” But it had been a long couple of months and Farha was tired.

“By the time we got to the end, I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t at my strongest.” Not a shabby payday, though: $1.3 million for second place and wide recognition. In Moneymaker’s success- He turned a $39 Internet satellite into a $2.5 million championship - tournament poker had a Cinderella story that would lure thousands of wanna-be champs to Vegas for the chance to test their skills against the Sammy Farhas of the world.

All in all, he hasn’t any complaints.

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