button in SafariGuitarist Scott Ian's Epic Story of Playing Online Poker During Anthrax Concerts
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Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian has sold millions of records, played to 50,000 metal-heads at Yankee Stadium, and even been credited with bringing mosh pits into the public lexicon. The metal legend has also multi-tabled high-stakes online tournaments, partied with poker legends in the Caribbean and played poker while on stage with the band he has led for 45 years.
Nearly 20 years ago, Ian, whose band Anthrax is credited as one of the "Big Four" of thrash metal alongside the likes of Metallica, stumbled into a side career as a sponsored poker pro. Ian's poker run, which began in the late 2000s and ended in 2011, saw him playing as much as 90 hours a week and profiting thousands of dollars in online poker games that he said were "like an ATM machine for me."
"I became one of those (poker) degenerates that I was so fond of," the Anthrax guitarist said. "And it was such an amazing ... anomaly in my life."
During an April trip to Las Vegas to give guided tours at the Punk Rock Museum, Ian, who is back on tour with Anthrax and preparing to release the band's first album in a decade, spoke with PokerNews about his four-year stint in the poker world.
Laying the Godsmack Down
Poker wasn't a part of Ian's early life growing up in Queens, New York. In 1981, 18-year-old Ian was busy founding Anthrax, a band that would go on to sell millions of records and be recognized as the biggest metal bands of all time. Ian's iconic grey (and sometimes black or red) goatee, still intact to this day, would also become an instantly recognizable metal emblem.
Other than playing Seven Card Stud a few times as a kid with his mom, the guitarist was a complete poker newbie when he was invited to play in the 2006 VH1 Classic Rock 'n' Roll Celebrity Poker Tournament, an event at Flamingo Las Vegas featuring a lineup of rock stars including KISS' Ace Frehley and Pantera's Vinnie Paul.
"I went into that VH1 tournament not even knowing how to play Hold'em," Ian said. "The only reason I played in that tournament was because a bunch of my friends were playing in it. And I knew people at VH1, and I figured, wow, what a great excuse to go party with some friends in Vegas for the weekend. So I kind of snuck myself into that tournament."
Ian prepared by watching episodes of Poker After Dark, where he studied poker players like Phil Hellmuth, Antonio Esfandiari and Phil Laak as they fought over six-figure pots. He'd meet all three at the VH1 tournament, which was run by World Poker Tour (WPT) Tournament Director Matt Savage.
"(That) definitely was a period of time that I remember," Savage told PokerNews. "That's when poker was at its hottest and more and more celebrities were playing."
Despite having done his homework, Ian did not have high hopes when he sat down against the likes of ZZTop's Dusty Hill and seasoned grinder Godsmack frontman Sully Erna, a serious player who would go on to finish runner-up in the 2007 Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic for $307,325.
"I just figured, I'm just going to bust out of this in five minutes and then go hang with my wife and go drink and hang out and have fun," Ian said.
But, as Ian put it, "the universe had other things in mind for me." He watched as his fellow rockstars were eliminated from the single-table tournament and eventually found himself heads-up against Erna, far and away the more experienced player.
Despite being "a rank amateur" and down "like four or five to one in chips," Ian, who entered the event as a timid and passive player, had enough intuition to know to be aggressive when he got dealt an ace the first few hands of heads-up play.
"Even as little as I knew about playing Hold'em, I knew that having an ace heads-up was really strong," he said. "So I went from being the tightest player on the planet who didn't know what the hell he was doing, to suddenly I was just being super aggressive ... It was like in Rocky when he goes from southpaw to normal."
Ian ended up beating Erna, winning a $25,000 check made out to a charity of his choice — he went with Lifebeat Inc., a nonprofit that partners with musicians to prevent HIV among youth.
Against all odds, Ian beat Erna to win a $25,000 check for a charity of his choice and a "funny little trophy that I took home" to Los Angeles. But his poker arc was just beginning.
Party Like a Poker Player
"I was like, these people are crazier than anyone I know in a band."
Ian was surprised a few months later when he got a call "out of the blue" from a representative of the poker site Ultimate Bet, who told him that, as part of his prize package in the VH1 tournament, he had won a trip to the 2007 Ultimate Bet Aruba Poker Classic, one of the premiere poker festivals at the time. He couldn't pass up on a free trip to the Caribbean.
Though he quickly busted out of the tournament — "I ended up shoving kings against aces" — he and his wife Pearl stuck around to spend the week partying with Hellmuth and Ultimate Bet online pros Mark “P0ker H0" Kroon, Gary "DEBO34" DeBernarndi and Shawn Rice, all of whom remain friends with Ian almost 20 years later.
"It was only when we went to Aruba that he and I started hanging out," Hellmuth told PokerNews in an interview. "And I'm like, this guy is so smart, so fun. I was just struck by how great Scott is."
"He's (a) really down to earth guy," agreed Rice, a longtime Texas pro who, despite admitting that Anthrax is "probably a little bit too hard for my liking," instantly bonded with the guitarist over their shared love of KISS. "We had a lot of common (musical) influence(s). He's really a music fan overall. He likes all different genres."
Ian returned to the Aruba Classic the next few years and documented it on a YouTube channel called "scottianpoker." A video taken during the opening bash ceremony of the 2009 festival shows Ian swimming, at night, around a pool crowded with poker players like 2006 WSOP Player of the Year Jeff Madsen, poker star Liv Boeree and Hellmuth, who kept his shirt on in the pool and held a microphone as he emceed the opening ceremony in waist-deep water.
"Ultimate Bet Aruba. Pretty f***ing sweet!" Ian cheers in the video.
Hellmuth even hosted parties in his three-bedroom Aruba penthouse that he said was "as big as the whole hotel." One year, he paid the guitarist to play live music at the party. "This was no normal penthouse," the 17-time bracelet winner said. "We'd have parties out on the rooftop."
"I (got) to hang out with all these super degenerate poker players," Ian told PokerNews. "Partying and prop bets and the whole thing. I was like, these people are crazier than anyone I know in a band. It was ... a world I was familiar with (as a musician), yet it was completely different."
Kroon remembers going out to "a pretty high-end steak place in Aruba" with Ian, Godsmack's Erna and an elite group of poker players that included Esfandiari and Dave "Devilfish" Ulliott. Like good poker players, they decided to settle the bill over a bet. The bill for the big party was around $2,000, but Ian, not knowing they were supposed to write down their answers, blurted out a lowball guess of $500 to bring laughs from the table.
"And it was just funny that Scott had no clue (what the price was going to be)," Kroon said. "He really thought it was going to be a $500 bill when it was a $2,000 bill. And we all were teasing him about that."
Signing With Ultimate Bet
Ian was about to get much more familiar with the poker world. Will Griffiths, the chief marketing officer of Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker, told Ian they wanted to sign him as a site team pro. Ian wasn't sure. After all, he was an inexperienced poker player.
"We're not signing you for your poker skills," he remembers Griffiths telling him. "It's your face and your name, and obviously people will want to come play with you and deposit money on the site."
Ian didn't like the sound of that. "If I'm going to do it, I want to know what I'm doing," he told the site executive. "You guy's gotta get me poker lessons."
Pushing for poker coaching paid off. After signing with Ultimate Bet in March 2008, the site set him up with coaching from Hellmuth and fellow site pro Annie Duke, who, like Ian, lived in LA. (Ultimate Bet was later revealed to be involved in a super-using scandal that cheated players out of tens of millions. While most sponsored pros associated with the site emerged with their reputations unscathed, Duke was accused of knowing about the cheating, which she denied. She has since pivoted to a career as a psychology writer.)
"Over the next month, a few times a week, I would go to Annie's house," Ian said, "and she would teach me how to play, and all the math and all that."
Duke may be persona non grata in the poker world today, both due to her association with Ultimate Bet and the failed Epic Poker League, but Ian described the player with $4.2 million in earnings as "a great teacher."
"Annie really kind of knew how to teach me and knew how to make me understand the game, like how my brain works. And I am very math-brained, so it worked very well for me."
"In my opinion, Annie Duke's probably one of the best teachers (from) back in the day there was," agreed Rice, while Kroon noted that Ian absorbed the poker coaching "like a sponge."
Poker on Tour — And on Stage
Ian developed into a seasoned online grinder throughout 2008 and 2009. He called in to the "Ultimate Poker Show" on Rounders Radio to discuss poker hands and appeared on the Best Damn Poker Show, a reality TV poker show where two teams led by Hellmuth and Duke competed over a seven-week period.
"My poker game just grew and grew very quickly," he said, noting that, when home in LA, he would play 16 to 20 tables at a time on a big computer monitor. "I knew nothing about anything (at first), and three months later I'm playing six-seat $100 and $200 Turbo Sit and Gos. And they were like an ATM machine for me."
Ian continued to document the journey on YouTube. One video shows him playing online poker from his hotel room at the Hard Rock Las Vegas Hotel & Casino, while another video titled "Texas Drunk'em" shows him playing poker at Hard Rock with Alice in Chains frontman Jerry Cantrell and Pantera drummer Vinnie Paul, who he'd played with in the VH1 tournament.
A poker career highlight came in March 2009 as Ian beat out 1,007 players in a $200,000 guaranteed Sunday tournament for $44,000. He had previously finished fourth, seventh and ninth in the event, where, as an Ultimate Bet ambassador, he had a $215 bounty on his head.
"He actually became a pretty darn-good player," said Kroon. "He was so tight you couldn't get him to put a chip in the pot at first, and then we got him loosened up ... He really picked up on it."
WPT's Matt Savage had a similar assessment: "He and Sully Urna were two of the better (celebrity) poker players that I remember from back in that time, definitely. They knew what they were doing."
Poker was also a needed escape for the Anthrax guitarist during a tumultuous period that saw the band unceremoniously parting ways with lead singer Dan Nelson. By the time Anthrax reunited with their classic-era singer Joey Belladonna in May 2010 to tour Europe and the U.S. with Metallica, Slayer and Megadeth, Ian was all-in on his new hobby. And on tour was when the real poker began.
While on tour with Anthrax at the turn of the decade, Ian played in dressing rooms, on arena stages during sound checks and on the back of European tour buses — often in the middle of the night, as the tournaments were scheduled around American players.
"There were weeks where I played like 90 hours," Ian said. "If I was on tour, I'm away and I've got nothing else to do, I'm sitting in a hotel room ... on the sites for just hour after hour after hour. It was so much fun."
Sometimes, he'd even play in the middle of concerts.
"I would be in a Sunday tournament and I'd be going deep ... and then it's time for the band to go on stage, and I'm like, what are we going to do? So I would literally bring my laptop on stage, I'd be up there playing (guitar and) my laptop would be right over there on the side, wherever my guitar tech was set up ... And then I would run back (and ask) what happened (in the tournament).
"There were actually a few times where he would get into hands and actually win a pot for me. And so if I cashed, I'd cash him out of the game, too."
Ian was flying high. He played in home games with A-list celebrities like Steve Martin and was poised to extend his Ultimate Bet sponsorship. But an infamous day that would forever become known to poker players as "Black Friday" was just around the corner.
