LOS ANGELES _ One Friday last December, behind the glass doors of a studio inside the Bicycle Hotel & Casino in Bell Gardens, a well-mannered but strategically disruptive professional gambler named Matt Berkey reached for a pouch beneath his seat at the poker table.
High-stakes players harbor a curious relationship with money. Those who excel at accumulating it often become inured to its significance. Berkey wore an aloof expression as he upended the bag. A rush of lavender splashed across the felt, 40 chips in all, each worth $5,000, a sudden six-figure infusion into a rarefied no-limit Texas hold 'em game.
The table of seven already had more than $700,000 on board. The additional investment sparked an immediate reaction. A pro named Garrett Adelstein fished $100,000 in chips out of his own bag, raising his own stack to nearly a quarter-million dollars.
Inside a makeshift control room about 60 paces from the studio, Ryan Feldman's feet tapped beneath a poker table that had been converted into a broadcast station. It had taken weeks of planning and seven hours of play, but with the extra $300,000, his vision for this night appeared before him on the monitor.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Feldman told more than 8,000 viewers watching the streaming broadcast through YouTube, Twitch and Facebook, "we officially have $1 million on the table. Not something we've ever seen before on 'Live at the Bike,' or here at the Bicycle Casino."
The game represented the culmination of a marathon of texting and cajoling from Feldman, the 33-year-old co-owner and producer of "Live at the Bike." His task was sizable yet delicate: Persuade players to buy in for a minimum of $100,000 and play poker at stakes 20 times higher than the biggest game typically offered at the casino.
The lineup needed to be juicy enough to entice risk-adverse professional players and collegial enough to bring in deep-pocketed amateurs. Feldman assembled the seven players at the table, some considered the best in the city, others flown in from Las Vegas: Adelstein, a man described on another show as "the kingpin" of high-stakes poker in Los Angeles; Berkey, the volatile pro from Las Vegas; Prahlad Friedman, a fixture of ESPN's poker coverage in the 2000s; Art Papazyan, the reigning World Poker Tour player of the year; Nick Vertucci, an Orange County real estate investor who played often on the stream; Andy Tsai, another regular; and Ralph Wong, a former basketball analyst turned cryptocurrency investor.
The game had nearly collapsed earlier in the week, after three players dropped out and replacements were hard to find. Almost all the advertising for the show arose from word of mouth, and Feldman spent nearly two years trying to hustle advertising. The credibility of the brand depended on his ability to deliver. "I'd be screwed," he said, "if I didn't have a show."
He felt satisfied in salvaging this lineup. Adelstein acknowledged the "thankless job" Feldman undertook. "All day, every day, someone's mad at you about something," Adelstein said. "He's not getting rich off of building these games. He does it because he loves poker."
After Adelstein and Berkey raised the stakes to $1 million, Feldman wanted to advertise the moment. He muted his microphone and rose from his chair. He walked to a black lock box, where phones are stored to protect the integrity of the game.
Feldman grabbed his and marched to the door: "All right, I'm going to screenshot and tweet it out. I'll be right back."
