Music Icon Steve Albini's Death Puts Fabled 20-Year Poker Home Game on Pause
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The death of musician, recording engineer and poker player Steve Albini hit the music world with a force like that of the incendiary device aimed at Earth pictured on Big Black's 1986 debut album Atomizer. It may have hit one group of Chicago poker players the hardest.
Albini, a two-time World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet winner who recorded landmark works by bands like Nirvana and Pixies and who The New York Times described as "one of the most admired, and most divisive, figures in rock," was a key figure in a friend group that bonded, joked and supported one another over the poker table. For 20 years, they played in a weekly low-stakes Chicago home game often held in Electrical Audio, the two-story recording studio where Albini recorded thousands of alternative, post-punk and industrial albums. Now, the game is on hiatus after Albini's death in May as the group of poker pros, musicians and audio engineers adapts to a world without its figurehead.
PokerNews spoke with two of Albini's closest friends who were regulars in the game, Brandon Shack-Harris and Andrew Kosinski, during the 2024 WSOP, a series they say Albini had been excited to play.
Music Icon, Two-Time WSOP Bracelet Winner Steve Albini Passes at 61
Dual Careers & Incomes
Born in California in 1962, Albini moved to the college town of Missoula, Montana at a young age and got his first exposure to punk music. It is also where he picked up poker, though it wasn't from the William S. Burroughs-reading leather jacket college crowd. He learned it from his grandmother.
“My family is a card-playing family," Albini told Bluff magazine in 2013. "The games we played as a family were cribbage, pinochle and poker. My father was a bridge master who played tournament bridge when he was younger ... Basically since a teenager, I’ve had a home poker game or private game where I could play for amusement."
Albini kept poker in his back pocket when he moved to Illinois in the 1980s to pursue a journalism degree from Northwestern University. It was here that he formed the pioneering noise rock group Big Black (and later Shellac), whose abrasive, metallic sound was defined by Albini's unconventional guitar playing, taboo lyrical themes and shrieking vocals. He garnered a reputation in the Chicago underground for his ability to capture a band's raw energy and found himself recording now-classic alternative rock albums like Pixies' Surfer Rosa (1988) and The Breeders' Pod (1990). Both were among Kurt Cobain's all-time favorite albums, which is why he sought Albini to record Nirvana's 1993 In Utero, a noisy departure from the commercial Nevermind.
In 1997, Albini opened Electrical Audio, where he recorded hundreds of artists — from fringe groups with names reminiscent of unmade student films like Guillotine Riot, Faceless Ones and New Brutalism to revered rock legends The Stooges and Cheap Trick and contemporary indie acts Joanna Newsom and Low.
Poker was critical to the success of Electrical Audio and, by extension, to the countless music careers across a dozen subgenres that Albini contributed to. He famously refused royalties and relied on poker to subsidize this artist-first, anti-establishment ethos that cemented him as an underground authority — and as a pariah among major record labels. "It’s a part of my livelihood," Albini told PokerNews in 2022. The same year, Albini described poker as "a necessary component of my income" in a House of Poker documentary. "If I didn’t play poker, I would need to find some other way to generate that money.”
The business publication Inc Magazine wrote in October that Electrical Audio has struggled with overhead costs in the wake of Albini's death, noting that "because Albini earned income ... from the kind of card playing that won him two World Series of Poker championship bracelets, he could afford to put some of his engineering fees into a general fund that kept Electrical Audio in the black."
Five Essential Steve Albini albums:
- Pixies, Surfer Rosa (1988) - An album that pushed Pixies into indie rock stardom and made Albini the go-to recording engineer for alternative artists.
- Nirvana, In Utero (1993) - Kurt Cobain sought out Albini specifically to record Nirvana's final album, which was a critical success despite its raw and uncompromising sound.
- Shellac, At Action Park (1994) - A landmark recording for the post-hardcore and math rock genres that features Albini's angular guitar riffs and trademark tone.
- Neurosis, Times of Grace (1999) - A punishing sludge metal album recorded at Electrical Audio that highlights Albini's ability to capture bands at their loudest and most primal.
- Low, Things We Lost in the Fire (2001) - Opposite the spectrum is a slowcore album, also recorded at Electrical Audio, that shows Albini could also record slower and softer dynamics.
Baseball, Audio Forums & a High School Paper
Like many Chicago teenagers, poker player and musician Andrew Kosinski was first introduced to Albini through Nirvana and as he got deeper in the punk underground. “You were just forced to become aware of this guy that was one of the big figures in the scene there," Kosinski told PokerNews in a June interview.
When a high school teacher assigned Kosinski a paper on the power design of recording studios, he thought to email the local recording legend. He was surprised when he got a quick reply from Albini. “He was like, 'That sounds like a really good project ... Come over on Saturday, I'll walk you through the studio and give you a tour.'"
Kosinski didn't know the interaction would spawn a decades-spanning friendship. Years later, Electrical Audio launched an online forum for Chicago musicians to discuss “audio stuff” and other interests. Kosinski and Albini were both big baseball fans and before long they were playing baseball (and later Whiffle ball) every Tuesday with a group that included studio engineer Russ Arbuthnot and Tim Midyett of the alternative rock band Silkworm.
One Tuesday night in January 2004, Arbuthnot called Kosinski and asked if he wanted to play in a poker tournament at the studio. The $20 tournament, a two-day limit/no-limit split event held in the studio lounge area, was Kosinski's first introduction to poker, but the host was already a seasoned player. "I was the first bust out,” Kosinski said. "It was just a gathering of all these dorks (and) nobody really knew how to play. Steve won, of course. He beat Tim heads-up."
The group played a few more sporadic studio tournaments before graduating to a weekly Tuesday cash game usually held in Arbuthnot's apartment. Early regulars included Chicago's Al Stern, Eric “The Bot” Ziegenhagen, Sean Cline and Rob Warmowski (a musician and sound engineer who passed away in 2019). They soon graduated to mixed games, drawing slips of paper from a hat to choose what to play. Their favorite game was Swingo, a shared-card variant of Albini's invention named after a song by Chicago punk band Naked Raygun.
The Tuesday Game moved around Chicago over the years, including to the defunct Semaphore studio on Chicago Avenue run by regulars Jeremy Lemos and Elliot Dicks. Electrical Audio became the game's primary location at the height of the Poker Boom, with a dozen-plus audio nerds, baseball fanatics and poker enthusiasts regularly crowding over a billiards table in the studio lounge. On a few occasions, they played in the Center Field of Studio A, the primary recording area of the esteemed complex. "We just got more and more serious, and Steve was really the driving force ... He was absolutely obsessed.”
Finding a Mentor
Brandon Shack-Harris learned at an early age not to rely on others. It's a coping mechanism the poker pro and two-time bracelet winner learned as a kid when he was estranged from his birth father and again as a teenager when his mother passed away. He "didn't really have much of a relationship" with his stepfather, who moved him and his stepsisters from California to rural New Mexico.
"There was nothing in New Mexico,” Shack-Harris told PokerNews in June. “All the kids went to the hills and did drugs or whatever, and that was it. And I was a momma's boy. I just never started on any of it ... (I began to) curate these environments where I never need(ed) to rely on anybody ever, because they're just going to eventually die or leave me. So I inundate myself with music, hobbies, sports, whatever."
In his early 20s, Shack-Harris moved to Chicago and had a chance encounter with the British band Muse, which was on its way to becoming one of the biggest bands in alternative rock. The trio's leader, Matt Bellamy, was impressed with Shack-Harris' unique synthesis of classical music and rock and asked if he was interested in becoming Muse's fourth member.
Months passed and Bellamy never followed up. Then Muse put out its 2006 single "Supermassive Black Hole," a dance-rock departure from its earlier sound which became the band's biggest hit to date. Shack-Harris knew they wouldn't be calling.
Though he didn't join the biggest bands in alternative rock, he did pick up one of the band's pastimes that would net him millions. One night in the back of a tour bus, Bellamy taught Shack-Harris how to play poker. “I wasn't interested in it at all, but that was their bonding aesthetic. So I just figured I'd learn what they like to do. And then things fell through with them and I just started playing poker seriously.”
Shack-Harris became a studied online mixed game grinder and found himself battling in Razz pots constantly against one specific player. "I played with Steve a lot on Full Tilt,” Shack-Harris said. “I just remember his name there."
"I wasn't really into punk music. I hadn't heard his music before we met ... But finding father figures kind of was a large part of my young adult life, I guess. Finding older male mentors, I suppose, because that just didn't exist for me at the time ... Eventually I just messaged him and was like, 'Hey, I see you're in Chicago, are there any live games?' And he was like, 'Oh yeah, we play at the studio. You should come by.'"
Here Comes Success
As a young adult, Shack-Harris found the father figure he never had in Albini, who was 18 years his senior. Albini encouraged him as he climbed the Chicago mixed game ranks and was in Las Vegas at the 2014 WSOP when Shack-Harris cashed for $1.4 million and won his first bracelet. In fact, it was Albini who pushed him to fire the prestigious $50,000 Poker Players Championship where he finished second for $937,975.
The career summer gave Shack-Harris a shot at Player of the Year and he geared up for the WSOP Asia Pacific festival in Australia that fall to chase the title. The lease on his Chicago apartment was up and he needed a temporary place to stay before the trip across the Pacific Ocean. "Steve's like, 'Dude, just stay at the studio.'"
"That was like the best little period of my life. Just living at the studio, hanging out with my best friend."
Flush with cash after his seven-figure summer, Shack-Harris remembers lining the thin foam mattress in the studio lodge that was normally reserved for out-of-town musicians with banded stacks of $10,000. "And they just had bands coming in and out (of the studio). It was incredible. That was like the best little period of my life. Just living at the studio, hanging out with my best friend."
The friendship caught the attention of Miikka "Chuck Bass" Anttonen when the retired Finnish poker pro flew to Chicago in February 2022 to produce a documentary about Albini for House of Poker. The two-part program, titled "Shack & Steve," focused almost entirely on the duo's bond.
"Their friendship, to me, was actually a better story than Steve being a poker-playing record engineer. I just sort of connected the dots in my head and figured out, let's actually do a long episode about their friendship instead," Anttonen told PokerNews, adding that "it's my favorite episode for sure of the entire series."
There were other success stories that emerged from Albini's orbit. Tech entrepreneur Andrew Mason interned at Electrical Audio and played in an early studio tournament before going on to start Groupon, an online coupon company that in 2010 turned down a historic $6 billion buyout offer from Google. No one was more thrilled than Albini. "Steve's like, 'That's a great idea!' He thought that was the best thing ever," Kosinski said. In an email to PokerNews, Mason, now CEO of Silicon Valley startup Descript, confirmed he “played in that game, like, once maybe” but added that he was “never a poker fan.”
"Our game got filled with a lot of successful, creative people. I don't know if their success was due to him, but they were definitely given a boost by him in every case," said Kosinski, who noted that Albini was equally supportive and enthusiastic about his Nitty Kitty novelty poker t-shirt business.
Albini often believed in his friends more than himself. "I don't think he was confident in a lot of ways," Shack-Harris said. "Because he would constantly be like, 'I don't know if I should sell at markup' or 'I shouldn't play this game.' But he would just say 'fuck it' and he'd do it ... I think there's a lot of self-belief, but I think there is like a layer of self-doubt as well."
"It Brought a Lot of People"
Shack-Harris wasn't the only bracelet winner in the Tuesday Game. Other regional grinders who joined the game include one-time bracelet winners Jason Gola, Matt Grapenthien and Eric Rodawig and six-time bracelet winner Brian Hastings. "All of a sudden it's like, how many bracelets do we need in this $0.25 game?" Kosinski said.
It also attracted players on the other side of the world like Australian high-stakes regular Martin Bradstreet. "We've got a $50/$100 PLO player playing in our $0.25/$0.50 game, and Steve is delighted to have him here because he takes music seriously and he's also a big poker fan," said Shack-Harris. "It brought a lot of people."
As the game grew, so did the friendships of its core members. They decided to try their luck in the $3/$6 limit games an hour south of Chicago at Indiana's now-closed Majestic Star Casino. By the time they reached the poker room, Albini was "bouncing" with excitement "like a little kid when it's Christmas morning."
"You would turn around and he would be gone because he ... would be walking as fastly as possible (saying), 'I've gotta get to the card room. Gotta get on every list,'" Kosinski said.
The crew of home gamers were promptly reminded they were in the presence of a music icon as they passed a blown-up photo of Chicago blues singer Koko Taylor. "He'd be like, 'Oh, she recorded at the studio."
The car rides themselves offered glimpses of Albini's personality. Kosinski remembers him "totally fanboying out" one drive in 2009 while they listened to the remaster of Liar by The Jesus Lizard, a noise rock album recorded by Albini in 1992. "He was singing along and air-drumming, which you never really saw ... Watching him sing along to these songs was hilarious."
"He Would Share With Anybody"
Albini was an avid learner whose knowledge extended far beyond cards and music. He built furniture, binged How Things Are Made and studied a progressive cooking technique called molecular gastronomy.
Albini was equally enthusiastic about sharing his insights. He was an avid poster Two Plus Two poster whose friends were always telling him to stop giving away mixed game secrets. "It was one thing that he researched everything and he was really excited about it, but he was just as excited about sharing that knowledge with everybody," Kosinski said. “That was him. He would share."
"It was one thing that he researched everything and he was really excited about it, but he was just as excited about sharing that knowledge with everybody."
When Shellac played at the 2009 All Tomorrow's Parties (ATP) music festival in New York, Albini hosted an on-site poker game where he shared his love of the game with bands and fans alike. One musician in the game was Jason Reece of the Texas-based ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, who couldn't pass on a chance to play with Albini — not after his band missed out on recording with him years earlier due to scheduling conflicts.
"I was just being a donkey and taking all these indie rockers' money," Reece told PokerNews. "I ended up getting a good amount of money from all these people there who barely knew how to play poker."
But Albini wasn't after a soft game of inexperienced guitarists, roadies and Shellac "fanboys" to exploit. "He was dealing the whole time. He didn't really play against us. I'm sure he could take everybody's money, knowing now that he was such a good poker player. But I feel like ... he got more of a thrill out of seeing people play."
An inebriated Reece left the alt-rock poker game, a two-table affair in a hotel conference room, "with a pocket full of money (that) all fell out" by the time he got back to his room. But he still had the memory of a lifetime. The next morning, Albini told Reece's bandmate, "That guy Jason, he's kind of an asshole. But he's welcome to my poker table any time."
"I took that as a big compliment," Reece said. "Coming from Steve, that's the perfect thing to say. He's such a spiny, real curmudgeonly kind of guy."
Albini shared more than his knowledge. For nearly three decades, he and his wife, Heather Whinna, operated the Letters to Santa charity, a nonprofit that raised money for families in need through concerts and comedy shows. Every holiday season, he, Shack-Harris and others drove around Chicago delivering bikes and toys to kids whose Christmas wish lists would've otherwise gone unanswered.
The Mariano Rivera of Poker
In poker, Albini proved to be "the ultimate closer" by winning two bracelets in his two WSOP final table appearances despite rarely playing tournaments. "He's the Mariano Rivera of poker," laughed Kosinski, referencing a legendary retired New York Yankees relief pitcher.
His first bracelet came in 2018 when he navigated a "ridiculous lineup" at a $1,500 Stud final table that featured heavyweights Chris Ferguson, Frankie O'Dell and Jeff Lisandro. When Albini got heads up against the 2009 WSOP POY, his friends were on the rail stomping and clapping every time a pot slid Albini's way.
"Because we would sit and watch (final tables on stream) and eat pizza and then play cards ... The thought of being at a final table playing these (tops pros) and doing very well was insane," Kosinski said. "And Steve had a great poker face, but he was like, 'Can you believe this shit!?'"
Lisandro eventually called the floor but couldn't halt the momentum that led Albini to a bracelet win worth $105,629. In a winner's interview with PokerNews, Albini downplayed the Stud skills he developed over a lifetime and overemphasized the role of luck, while giving most of the credit to his friends: "I owe an awful lot of my own development as a player to my peer group."
That peer group was on the rail again four years later when he took down the 2022 $1,500 H.O.R.S.E. for $196,089. Rather than clap their hands when Albini won a pot, they rang a small brass bell. "Eventually Steve walks over to the rail and takes it and puts it on the table," Shack-Harris said. "He apologized for us, and then Steve started dinging it when other people would win a hand."
The group had a tradition of wearing a polar bear costume during Stud 8 events. "We've all taken turns in it," Shack-Harris said. Albini won the H.O.R.S.E event during an orbit of the lowball variant, so his friends caped him in the furry white caniform costume as he posed for winner's photos. There was some debate whether Albini should don the polar bear costume during the final table. "But we didn't want to supersede the power of the (Georgia noise rock band) Jackonuts shirt. The Jackonuts shirt was going strong."
Then there were the red balloons. Another running gag of the group was handing balloons when someone busted a tournament, which originated from a home game birthday tradition. Shack-Harris brought a bundle with him as he railed Albini and they seemed to sway the cards. When the balloons came loose and flew into the rafters, Albini's chip stack "went straight down to where he was all of a sudden the short stack."
"It was a real mood swing," Shack-Harris said. "(Then) the balloons magically came back down. And as soon as they did, it was smooth sailing."
"I've got all the pieces. It's like if you have two halves of a dollar bill. It's still a dollar bill."
After he defeated heads-up opponent James Morgan, Albini shared an embrace with Shack-Harris that proved destructive. "He drops the bracelet. It shatters ... And he's like, 'Ah, who cares!'" Albini was indeed indifferent to breaking the coveted piece of WSOP hardware. "The bracelet took a spill and a piece of it broke off," he told PokerNews shortly after. "It doesn't matter, nobody wears them, who cares? I've got all the pieces. It's like if you have two halves of a dollar bill. It's still a dollar bill." But he had a use in mind for his broken bracelet. He dismantled it further and gave the golden fragments to his backers, along with letters thanking them for their support.
Tuesday's Gone
Albini died from a heart attack in his Chicago home on May 7, nearly a year to the date of the core group's last in-person game, just days before the release of Shellac's first album in ten years and weeks before the start of the 2024 WSOP. I interviewed Shack-Harris and Kosinski in a small storage room inside Horseshoe Las Vegas a hallway's length away from where the pair celebrated Albini's second bracelet victory two years earlier. "He was so excited to come down here," said Shack-Harris, who now lives in Las Vegas. "He was going to stay at my place."
Albini wasn't the only one looking forward to the World Series. Shack-Harris was "dialed in" and ready to grind the full summer, but that was before losing his best friend and mentor. "(I) wasn't sure I was going to play anything at all." Despite a light schedule of mixed events, Shack-Harris made three final tables and cashed for over $234,000. He finished third in the same $1,500 Seven Card Stud event Albini won six years prior and paid tribute by wearing the same black Cocaine Piss t-shirt Albini had worn. Home gamer Jason Gola also repped the obscure Belgian punk band when he and Shack-Harris ran deep in a $1,500 Razz event. Gola finished 13th, while Shack-Harris finished runner-up to Scott Seiver, narrowly missing out on a third bracelet.
The Tuesday Game was such a constant that it continued even as players dropped out or moved across the country. During the pandemic, they transitioned to an online game and discussed hands over Discord. But it's hard to picture the game continuing without Albini. "It's very strange to me to think about playing this game without him because he was such a big part of it," Kosinski said.
The group played together at Albini's memorial service in July, a four-day tribute in Zion, Illinois featuring musical performances, poignant elegies and a cash game running in the hotel dining room. Half the buy-in went to Letters for Santa, but most players donated the full amount. "It was a pretty good mix of all the different worlds," Kosinski said. Finland's Anttonen, who also worked on a yet-to-be-published mini-documentary about Letters to Santa, was among those at the memorial, alongside celebrities like musician Ty Segall and comedian Fred Armisen. "The vibe was really special," said Anttonen, who noted that he has admired Albini's music since his teens.
Around the time the Tuesday Game formed, Albini began a longstanding working relationship with the Japanese post-rock band MONO. Unlike the abrasive nature of much of Albini's recorded output, MONO's orchestral sound is cinematic, uplifting and transcendent. Yet like most of Albini's recording output, MONO is heavy.
The band recorded its 2004 album Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered and the Sun Shined at Electrical Audio and several more up to this year's Oath, which was released in June. The titular track to MONO's final collaboration with Albini is a five-minute crescendo that builds to a wall of sound blend of guitars, strings, horns, and bare, dry drums that only Albini could’ve recorded. The band filmed a music video for the track while recording at Electrical Audio, where a photo of that first poker tournament still hangs, on the same glossy wooden floor that supported routine poker games for two decades, against the same adobe brick walls that housed Shack-Harris one memorable and lucrative summer. Not to mention where thousands of records were recorded.
"(For) all of us, especially those of us in Chicago, he was really like the center; he was the sun to that world of that style of music,” Kosinski said. "So many people that I have grown up with in the past 20 years, half of their CDs were recorded by him. So it's kind of like he was just naturally there."
"So many people that I have grown up with in the past 20 years, half of their CDs were recorded by him. So it's kind of like he was just naturally there."
At Albini's memorial service this summer, Chicago officials announced the street passing Electrical Audio would be renamed "Steve Albini Way," an honorary gesture that the city officially unveiled on Nov. 25. Kim Deal, formerly of Pixies and The Breeders, paid tribute at the unveiling to her longtime friend and collaborator. “He was a flawed human," Deal said. "He would contradict himself in two sentences. But at his core he understood the value of each person." Kosinski also has plans to honor his late friend. He hopes to get the Tuesday Game group together for a Swingo tournament where the winner receives a sculpture version of Albini's 2018 winner's photo. "That was the happiest we'd ever seen him."
*Photos courtesy Andrew Kosinski & Brandon Shack-Harris
