There was nothing in Al Rash's conservative upbringing and proper career that would have suggested he would become a legend at the World Series of Poker and a lifer in the poker media. No one would have predicted a metal band would give him a nickname he'd keep the rest of his life. Even Al himself would never have guessed he would end up being poker's most reliable wingman during the craziest years of the poker boom.
The metal band called him "Al Can't Hang" because he ordered his booze with a water chaser. They didn't know then that Al would go on to party with poker's most notorious roustabouts and metal legend Vinnie Paul. He made Shannon Elizabeth laugh. He watched Liv Boeree rock out on stage. He... relaxed... on the lawn of the Playboy Mansion.
In this installment of Inside the Boom, we step away from the table and head to the Boom's best bar to meet the man who had a seat reserved for him every night. During the boom years, Al Can't Hang was a walking party who listened to bad beat stories for free and was the friend everybody needed when things got too bad... or too good.
Today, coming up on 60 years old, poker's best drinking buddy has changed in many ways, but only for the better.
And he wonders if poker’s polished facade has lost some of the grit, humanity, and wanton stupidity that made those poker boom summers as legendary as they felt back then.
Before we get to the WSOP, explain your nickname, Al Can’t Hang. It’s probably the most awkward name of all time.
Back in the glory days of the late 90s when I was young, dumb, and invincible, friends in a local Philly rock band used to make fun of my drink order of choice: Southern Comfort neat with a water back. That's a water chaser for those who don't know.
Then, one insane night, someone in the band found me passed out in a rock club bathroom with alcohol poisoning.
I eventually recovered, didn't learn my lesson, and the band wrote a song called "Al Can't Hang" that appeared on an obscure hair metal CD released 30 minutes before the grunge explosion.
I used that nickname as my first gamer tag/AOL dial-up name, and here we are.
I know you have changed a lot since then, but when we met, you were probably the best wingman I'd ever known.
I have mostly happy memories from back in those days, and the not-so-happy memories usually came with a pretty solid life lesson.
For my first job covering the WSOP, I was as the sole writer for the Full Tilt Poker blog and had plenty of leeway with my content. A lot of my interviews were done sitting at a bar and that just carried over to good times after the recorder was turned off.
There were other nights where we would take over all the Pai Gow pits at the Gold Coast or pack the small, "secret" bar at the Gold Coast bowling alley with writers telling tales. Sometimes it would be a trek downtown for low-limit, high-variance mixed games at Binion;s after a steak dinner upstairs. If there was a good time to be had, we were always down to make fools of ourselves.
The craziest non-WSOP party memory from that time was getting an invitation to the Playboy Mansion. St. Patrick's Day landed on the first Thursday of March Madness, and our gang decided to make a full degenerate day of it. About halfway through a 16-hour bender, I got a call from Jason Kirk with an invite to the Playboy Mansion for a charity poker tournament. After confirming it wasn't a hallucination, I booked my flights the next day, and it turned into an outrageous weekend with other writer friends, full of stories only Dr. Pauly could do justice to.
Okay, explain to people how you got into poker and ended up at the WSOP in the first place.
Pre-Moneymaker days, I was running private poker tournaments in the downstairs of our local bar--silly games in a shootout format with fun and food and drinks. While researching some games and rules, I came across a bunch of poker blogs with stories about games and good times.
I started my own personal blog and had a lot of fun telling some stories. It was mostly silly, drunken tales from the bar, but it introduced me to the poker world. Fast-forward a few years, and I was tired of my longtime corporate job, so I quit to join FTP and run their dormant blog.
My first WSOP Main Event was 2006, so I missed all the old-school fun at Binion's, but I was there to write about the crazy days of the early runs at the Rio.
You were a founding member of the WPBT, which led to a lot of lifelong friendships. Explain what that was and what it ended up becoming.
The best part of having a personal poker blog during the early 2000s was finding like-minded people, and we all sort of joined into this merry band of degenerates. Most of us had day jobs and online poker was in its early Wild West days, and that was our outlet. But everyone had that itch for Vegas to play some live poker and all the other fun to be had.
I couldn't tell you who came up with the first ideas or plans or anything, but a bunch of us flew to Vegas in December 2004 for our first meetup. We arranged for a private poker tournament at Sam's Town, I think. Everything is a bit fuzzy from back then, and someone started calling us the World Poker Blogger Tour. The WPBT initials were having a little fun with the brand new World Poker Tour.
We held tournaments at Caesars and Aria over the years, filling seats on a Saturday morning one weekend each December. Those weekends were also drunken 1-3 spread games at the Excalibur while prop betting on Whiplash, the monkey riding a dog on the big screen, or absolute menace mixed games at MGM Grand where we would drink the nearby sportsbook dry while waiting for a seat. One year we rented a penthouse at the old Imperial Palace for some crazy reason and another time had a suite downtown at The Plaza with a private game running all weekend. We even had Phil Gordon and Rafe Furst show up once at Caesars to run a Roshambo tournament before we played poker.
For a lot of us, before we took our WSOP Summer Camp jobs, this was our one weekend each year to let it rip in Vegas.
The games and shenanigans were fun, but the best part was turning strangers on the internet into real-life friends. I threw massive parties every year in the Philly burbs, and these new friends would fly in just for a weekend of music and fun. We all went to Greenville, SC for your crazy Brad-o-Ween weekend, which was basically Drunk Olympics for suburbanites. A bunch of us even snuck across the Canadian border for an underground poker game in Toronto that descended into mayhem and near-frostbite.
It was poker that introduced us, but it was the friendships that held it together. Until we all got old.
Then next thing I know, you’re on media row. Explain what your previous career was and how you ended up a media veteran.
I was a systems architect for Siemens, a mammoth German tech company, and a small cog in their massive global machine. It was a soul-sucking job, I was in the middle of my divorce, and I was burnt out on everything. One of the WPBT bloggers was also a pretty important member of the FTP team, and he knew I was going through it. He offered me a position to run the dormant FTP blog, and I jumped at it, quitting a high-paying job for a low-paying spot doing something I enjoyed.
It wasn't a tough decision.
My first full year at the WSOP was in 2007, and I was way out of my depth. I was sitting between the PokerStars crew on the right and MeanGene Bromberg on my left for UltimateBet – real writers with actual talent and journalism backgrounds, while I was a blogging hack in my first year trying to figure it all out. The impostor syndrome was real, and it's still there.
Everyone helped me through that first summer as I found my voice, my niche, and my place on Media Row. All of us packed up on the risers surrounding the room where I annoyed the Wicked Chops Poker crew with my early morning desk drumming and listened to as many Pantera stories as Joe Giron had time to tell. It was long days in the Amazon Room followed by early mornings at the bar grinding video poker or sitting in the smoky Gold Coast playing Pai Gow. Many nights it was both.
We all worked for different companies but looked out for each other. I spent a decade covering the WSOP at the Rio, made a ton of friends, and met so many talented people.
Find a way to explain what the Hooker Bar was and how it came to become significant to that era’s WSOP culture. After all, you were pretty much the mayor there.
During the summer of 2006, a year before I joined the media team, I flew to Vegas just to hang with Dr Pauly and friends. While I waited for them to finish work, another friend, Grubby, said, "Let's go to the Hooker Bar and wait for them."
The what bar?
The official name was Shutters Bar and it was located on the main casino floor inside the Rio. That summer it earned its nickname because late at night it was something like two-to-one women on the clock versus joes, but by the time I returned the next year, the casino mostly cleaned it up. And our nickname for the bar stuck.
The bar was the perfect spot to meet up with friends after a long day in the Amazon Room. The first place you would see when you walked from the Convention Center to the main casino and you could always find a group gathered after play ended for the night.
The location and 24-hour service made it the perfect spot to unwind after the grind, somewhere to celebrate a bracelet or tell a bad beat or just a place to catch up with friends before heading home.
I had my corner seat and it became my office where I hung out with my friends (usually Jen Newell and Joy Miller during those early days) while bouncing between the poker action and my crusty room across the street at the Gold Coast. We knew every bartender, they bent a lot of rules when it came to the free drinks, and a few even gave us control of the music.
It seems pretty outrageous to think about that today: unlimited free booze and control over the sound system in part of a casino, but it all felt perfectly normal back then since we were basically paying their rent during our eight-week summer.
I know I met Gavin Smith for the first time because I was hanging out with you. A lot of the big-name pros of the day became your running buddies. How did that happen?
How did it happen? We were all like-minded and had a total disregard for responsible behavior. A lot of us were driving that bad-decision boat – some of them were famous, and some were just me.
The gang met Gavin during the Playboy Mansion trip, and he road-tripped with our friend BobbyBracelet after that weekend. He put up $10,000 of his own money for a charity sit-n-go at my local bar, and grabbed a mic with Brandon Schaefer to sing Mr. Brightside with my friend's band. When Gavin was on, his personality was the biggest thing in the room. But when he was chilling, he was a dad who loved his kids more than anything. Shaun Deeb once called me the Gavin Smith of the poker media and I took that as a compliment.
At the Hooker Bar, we had our spots on opposite ends; I was at the first corner where everyone walked by at the end of the day, while he was all the way around on the other side. You had to know he was there to join the party, or just hear his laugh over the crowd. I have more ridiculous stories with him than almost anyone else in the game, and it was a wicked gut punch when Gavin passed.
Jason Young is another friend from that era, and we absolutely did things back then that wouldn't fly today. If he saw me first, he would send ten shots across the bar and I would return the favor if I caught him not looking. No chance we could do that in today's casinos, but our bartenders then just shrugged and poured ten shots of Jameson (each). We still talk on a regular basis, but since we're old men now, it's mostly funny memes and restaurants we want to visit.
One of my braindead moments came after spending a long day at the bar with Joe Reitman, a great actor and ex-husband/friend of Shannon Elizabeth. He was flying through these frozen drinks and was perfectly fine while I was melting in my seat from the SoCo. I asked him how he could handle so much, and he looked at me like the moron I was. "I've been in the program for years; these have no alcohol."
Then there was a PokerListings party with Todd Brunson when one friend (she shall not be named) knocked a dude out cold for getting out of line with her. Another night watching Steel Panther when poker pro and literal genius Liv Boeree hopped on stage to sing with the band. Sneaking into PokerStars parties with Nelly and Snoop because I was with the competition and couldn't get an invite.
So many silly, insane, unbelievable memories. It was a great time.
You’re still working in the industry today. What’s your current gig and how many different poker companies have you worked for?
I began with Full Tilt Poker, and that ended because of Black Friday. Also the site was basically a Ponzi scheme. From there, I moved to ChipTic, which burned out so spectacularly that it was the only time Charlie Cerisi ever yelled at me on the tournament floor. After that, it was on to Epic Poker and Global Poker Index (GPI) as their content manager, running the website and rankings and such. Of course, that company got shot straight into bankruptcy and lawsuits within a year.
So my first three gigs in poker: a scammy poker site, followed by a shit show of an operation, and then topped it off with the implosion of Epic Poker.
I was running pure.
Luckily, the talented PokerListings gang had an opening and called me. Matt Showell and Arthur Crowson were running the show, and they are two of the sharpest people I've ever met. With Alex Konves and Alex Villegas also on the team, we had a lot of fun, and those guys created a whole lot of special content.
Around that same time, I got a call to join the team for the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open in Hollywood, FL. It was supposed to be a gap job to fill time between other gigs, but I loved it there. I recently finished my thirteenth year with them. Combine that with another decade at the Hard Rock in Tampa, and Florida is my second home. I've worked for so many great people over the years and watched firsthand as poker exploded in Florida.
Our current team is locked in with old-school BJ Nemeth, the legendary Mickey Doft, and the amazing Lizzy Ramirez on the camera. My formula for success is to surround myself with brilliant people and ride their coattails.
Give me one AlCantHang story from the WSOP that sounds completely made up today but absolutely happened.
A popular way to let off steam was to go see Steel Panther play at Green Valley Ranch on the weekends. An irreverent hair metal cover band playing songs that made my Gen-X heart happy. We usually got a VIP suite and settled in for a fun night. (The suite wasn't because we were high rollers or fancy or anything – bottle service was more cost-effective for us than paying for one Vegas-priced drink at a time). Drink smarter.
One night we arrived at the suite early and waited for the band to come on stage. Two guys grabbed a table in front of us and I locked up and couldn't speak. I don't get starstruck. We see so many famous people that it's never a big deal.
One of the guys at the table was Vinnie Paul, drummer for the band Pantera, one of the hardest bands in metal history, and brother of the late great guitarist Dimebag Darrell. I froze on the couch, and some of our guys kept pointing him out, but I knew who the hell he was. I just didn't know what to do about it.
After some liquid courage, I came up with a plan. Vinnie Paul (always both names) and Dimebag loved Jägermeister, so I had our server send a bottle to their table. He came over to thank us, and we all did plenty of those nasty shots during the show.
But the party didn't stop there because Vinnie Paul invited us out for shenanigans after the show. Eric Ramsey was the only one to come along, and it turned into a night of shots and stories and blackjack at the Hard Rock until the sun was up. I don't remember many of his stories. I'm only marginally sure it was the Hard Rock, but it ranks way up there as one of the more epic nights in Vegas.
Thankfully, legendary Dutch writer Remko Rinkema grabbed a pic of the occasion before things went blurry.
Knowing all of the old stories, a lot of people might be surprised to know that you don’t drink anymore.
Just like most people, my outlook on life was different when we came out of (COVID) lockdown. I decided to make some lifestyle changes, and it started with going dry for a month in 2021.
It was something I used to do all the time; drop my tolerance and go right back to the crazy after 30 days. But that one month turned into two months, then it was the entire summer, and it kind of just stuck ever since. A year later, I gave up the nicotine, started eating better, and worked to be the healthiest I've been in my life. Now I'm running 5Ks as an old man and can confirm that running is still stupid.
For something that defined a lot of my life for so long – literally the origin of my nickname – I never missed the drinking after I stopped. I'm healthier and happier, and it was definitely worth the change.
What do you think of the modern WSOP culture? Does it seem as fun to you as it used to? If not, is that because you’ve changed, the WSOP has changed, or both?
I don't really know much about the current WSOP culture since I don't see the inner workings anymore or know where the fun is after the day is done. I get my information from PokerOrg and social media, but I don't really follow the day-to-day too closely, mostly watching for results and deep runs from friends.
The live update part of the series is still a game for the young. The hours and the grind to put out content must be even crazier now with more events than when I was there. I'm sure everyone has their own way of blowing off steam and having fun away from the action--probably healthier than us in our prime.
The series itself is so much more polished now than it was during my time. When the WSOP put up the first Mothership (or whatever you want to call it) main stage in the Amazon Room, everyone was excited for the bright lights. It was a big stage with cameras pointed everywhere. That was a big change from the tiny main stage area from the first few years at the Rio which couldn't handle a big crowd if there was an interesting final table.
That stage pales in comparison to the slick setups and production they have now, and the WSOP has done a great job improving the player experience while putting together a great product for the fans at home.
But I miss the stories about the grit and graft, because that's where I spent a lot of my time. I'm not sure you can have a version of Dr. Pauly or Wicked Chops Poker in the current environment but it would be fun to try.
Maybe a few of us old-school boomers need to band together for one more summer and bend some corporate rules – remind folks that while it is a big business, it's still a game with flawed humans playing for a lot of money. Old man yells at clouds.
Looking back over your career, what do you hope people think about both you and the jobs you did?
I don't think anyone in the world would remember a single thing I wrote back in my FTP era. It was mostly standard recap stuff, though I nailed the interview with Gavin after he won his bracelet.
I had some fun interviews during my PokerListings time, including Vanessa Kade a decade before she won the Sunday Million and the late great music producer Steve Albini on the 20th anniversary of Nirvana's In Utero.
In my current job at both of the Seminole Hard Rocks, I really like making as many daily grinders feel like high rollers when they're in our room. The team loves it when a player tells us they were excited about having their name and picture in an update or they come over to say, 'Hey my mom saw my picture. Thanks'.
I think I help promote the game much better now than when I was a goofball getting my interviews at the bar. I still miss that time, but my content has better intent and reach. I hope to make a few players happy each shift, and that is a successful day in the poker room for me.
