May all your cards be live

Publication date: May 2008 | Abbotsford News

Header photo: Danielle Kinvig

Author’s note: Yes, that gobsmacked doofus in the photo above is me. And yes, against all odds, that money is mine. I’ll leave it to you to read the article and find out more of the backstory, but in a nutshell, I received free entry into a $220 super-satellite poker tournament at the River Rock Casino with the understanding that I’d write a column about it for the Abbotsford News. There were 600 players in the field; the top 30 would earn a pair of tickets to big WPT Canada tournaments on the weekend – a $1,000 buy-in, and a $3,000 buy-in. Before I got started, I told my benefactor that I was unavailable that weekend as my fiancée and I had to drive to Edmonton to attend a friend’s wedding. He said that if I cashed in this tourney, they’d just pay me out the $4k, which was incredibly generous. Long story short, at the end of the night, I had $4,000 in my hand and my future wife was snapping the photo above. It’s a life event I’ll never forget, and I literally consider it a blessing from God – I was stretched incredibly thin financially with our wedding approaching that summer, and with the $4,000, I was able to cover the cost of our honeymoon and then some. The memory of knocking on Danielle’s door with the money in my hand puts a smile on my face to this day.

Have you heard the one about the journalist who wins his entry into a major poker tournament, improbably earns a huge payday and writes an award-winning story about it?

If you've read Positively Fifth Street, it's a familiar plot line. In 2000, author James McManus was assigned to cover the World Series of Poker for Harper's magazine, and elected to sink his entire advance fee into qualifying for the $10,000 buy-in main event. He ended up making the final table against all odds, earning $247,760 for his fifth-place finish, and the resulting volume is widely considered one of the best sports books of the past decade.

Last week, my status as a media celebrity (such as it is) afforded me a shot at my own mini-McManus moment. Jody Trainer, an Abbotsford poker pro whom I wrote a feature about in 2006, sent an e-mail offering me a free seat in a super-satellite tournament at the inaugural World Poker Tour Canada event in Richmond. 

Being a bit of a poker aficionado, I jumped at the chance, selling it to my bosses as an opportunity to take the pulse of poker in Canada. I've been playing the game since 2000, when my buddy Matt and I looked up the rules for Texas hold 'em on the Internet after watching the Matt Damon-Ed Norton flick Rounders. Being that we were poor college students at the time, we'd go down to the corner store and buy boxes of Smarties to use as chips. Then we'd play late into the night, with the winner taking home a bucket of well-handled sweets. 

In recent years, we've graduated to playing for vast sums of cash – 10 bucks per tournament, to be precise. Suffice it to say, I'm no high roller.

When I arrived at the River Rock Casino and found my seat, I glanced around to take stock of my opponents. To my left was Joy, a gregarious 77-year-old whose fashion sense echoed that of Johnny Cash, at least when it came to colour choice – black pants, black sweater, black faux-fur vest, black sunglasses, accented by a splashy silver necklace and matching earrings. She brightly informed me that she intended to become the oldest winner of the World Series of Poker women's championship. 

Joy took up the game four years ago, and she lost 30 pounds when she started playing online because it cut down on her trips to the fridge. Joy said that poker is a profitable venture for her, and she needs it to be – her winnings supplement a modest pension. 

"Find a good mutual fund, and put $100 in it every month," she advised me, using eye contact to emphasize her point. "You'll still be able to pay your rent."

To my immediate right was a young buck sporting a grey Billabong hoodie and a sparse chin-strap beard. He had just arrived at the River Rock after a 13-hour drive from Terrace. Like me, he'd never played in a big tournament before, but he said he'd had some success at $125 buy-in events at his local golf course. Unlike me, he liked to move all his chips into the middle with weak hands like J-10 and K-7. The poker gods must have been smiling on him, because he managed to build a huge stack in the first hour of play.

For the uninitiated, a super-satellite differs from a regular poker tourney in that everyone who finishes in the money wins the same prize. In this case, one out of every 20 players in the event would win a $4,000 prize package.

In the early stages, I seemed to have a horseshoe embedded in my DNA. On the fifth hand of the event, I was dealt pocket tens, and hit two more tens on the flop. The odds of flopping quads, I found out later, are approximately 407-to-1.

Unfortunately, I lost the next couple of hands I played, and I found myself on the razor's edge of elimination, barely treading water as the blinds rose. A couple hours in, I was down to about nine big blinds, and moved all in on the button with A8. I was gutted when the big blind called with AQ, but a miraculous eight materialized on the turn to keep me alive.

That doubled me up, but I was still mentally planning my drive back to Abbotsford when I picked up some massive hands. Twice in quick succession, I was dealt pocket aces and dragged huge pots to boost my chip stack. 

Meanwhile, I saw Joy make her exit with under 100 players remaining. And with 55 players left, my buddy from Terrace joined her on the sidelines. There had been 598 entries (including rebuys), meaning that 30 of us would finish in the money.

At that point, the increasingly realistic possibility of winning $4,000 stripped me of any semblance of composure. My table demeanor became less James Bond and more Steve Urkel, and I was literally trembling at times. 

Will, a young jet-setting pro from Toronto who was fresh off the plane from jaunts to Monte Carlo and Las Vegas, was seated to my left as the field shrank inside of 40 players. Taking into account my near-constant fidgeting, he started chatting with me in much the same tone that a suicide hotline operator might use to talk someone in off a ledge. 

"Hey, you're definitely in the top 15 in chips," he told me, eying my stack. "All you've got to do is avoid confrontations and cruise to the money."

It was sound advice. After eight-and-a-half hours of nerve-wracking play, the money bubble finally burst with the elimination of the 31st player. As I high-fived the other 29 survivors, part of me felt sorry for the guy who'd just been knocked out, but the other (more dominant) part of me was pretty stoked that I'd just won four grand. 

Jody said he was pretty impressed with my performance, calling it "a nice little win." I guess that's a fair assessment – to put it in perspective, Jody boasts upwards of $800,000 in tournament winnings since 2006. 

Indeed, I'm not the equal of James McManus as a poker player or a writer. But I've got a pretty cool story to tell my friends.