For Leon Chang '08, the big moment came sophomore winter in a Toulouse internet cafe.
He'd been playing poker since freshman fall, when he first played for money in one of the Choates common rooms. Casual, low-money, predominately male poker gatherings were frequent on campus at the time: the ESPN-fueled poker mania hit America when the '08s arrived at Dartmouth. Chang was not the only freshman guy to learn pong at around the same time he learned No Limit Texas hold 'em, the dominant variant then and now. (As poker goes, hold 'em is high-skill and unpredictable; it's no limit variant more so.)
The Choates games were $5 buy-in tournaments. Like everyone else, Chang lost at first, but he learned quickly and soon conquered the Bisco fishbowl, netting three or four hundred dollars by the end of freshman year.
Freshman summer Chang got a job in Taipei installing the Windows operating system on office computers. The easy, mindless work allowed him time to delve into poker online. Still getting better, he made a few thousand dollars over the summer.
"At the time, I didn't consider it real money. It was just competition, just a game," he said.
Then he went on the LSA+ to Toulouse. One internet cafe had a deal: buy a drink, get an hour of free wireless.
"One Saturday, everything clicked. Every poker player has that day or moment where it clicks, when you jump to the next level."
Chang played for six hours, downing eight espressos. He made $6,300. By the time he left France, he'd doubled his past year's earnings in two months. His life in poker had begun.
Conventional wisdom demands it: sooner or later, the gambler falls from grace. But hold 'em isn't gambling if you're good, and Chang only got better. The fall never came. Today, he is a full-fledged semi-professional poker player. His one-day gains and losses can now reach five figures, and his lifetime earnings are in the six figures. Earlier this fall, Chang won an online tournament, his biggest yet. The prize: a $14,000 trip to a live tournament in Australia, where he will compete for up to two million dollars.
As he is quick to admit, Chang did not get this good by himself. He is a member of a thriving online subculture that is, to my mind, one of this century's great untold collegiate stories. The short version: as poker exploded, students at the country's smartest schools got together on a handful of discussion websites and taught each other how to beat online hold 'em. In large part, they succeeded.
Chang showed me the most important website of the bunch. It was underwhelming, even amateurish in appearance. But the strategies exchanged therein have made dozens of young fortunes, and when I told him I'd be using the name of the site in my column, he insisted that I not.
"It's a big rule we have. Don't educate the fish."
Fish, it turns out, are bad players, targets: easy money.
"Fine," I said. "What can you tell me?"
"I'm good friends with a lot of these players. We meet up for live tournaments or Vegas trips or whatever. A lot of these guys are crazy."
Left to his own devices, Chang spends a tiny fraction of what he makes: a TV and a used Audi are his only big purchases so far. But when he joins the guys in Niagara Falls or Barcelona, he temporarily picks up their spending habits, which they half-ironically refer to as "baller." They always hit the best restaurants, and they play credit card roulette--exactly what it sounds like.Prop bets are even more fun. A prop bet is a wager on anything that isn't poker, and it can be as simple as guessing the gender of the next person to enter the room. More frequently, they are dares. In Vegas, the group's prop bets included $200 to jump into the fountain outside a casino and $100 to streak Denny's at 4 a.m. and grab toast off someone's table on the way out. Both were performed.
Famous prop bets are part of online poker culture: The Shark Tank Prop Bet came first to Leon's mind. A player was paid $5,000 to dive into a shark tank at an Atlantic City casino and touch the bottom. He survived. (It turned out they were whale sharks--harmless. According to legend, this was discerned after the fact.)
Chang has his share of stories. This past summer he worked at a real estate investment firm in Boston and hated it. On the day he quit, he went immediately to Foxwoods Casino. He got drunk, made $10,000, and was kicked out--money intact--for underage drinking and underage gambling. Leon Chang, I've so far failed to mention, is 20.
It is difficult to overstate the level of skill required to play online poker at Chang's level. Instead of tournaments, he usually plays cash games, in which money is won and lost in real time. In other words, rather than betting three purple chips towards the possibility of winning twenty bucks in two hours, Chang is betting a thousand dollars for the possibility of losing it--or winning two thousand--right now. The Choates this ain't.
These days, he usually six-tables six-max at 10/20. Translation: his laptop screen full of digital green fabric, he plays six tables at once, six players each. "10/20" are the blinds, meaning that the smallest possible move involves risking twenty bucks. But because it's no limit, the bets are never that small: just entering a game of 10/20 requires putting down at least $2,000.
So Chang's attention is split six ways, with each table running about 100 hands an hour. Depending on the website, he has twenty to thirty seconds to make a given check/bet/fold decision. That's easy if he's only betting on one table, which is rare, and all but impossible if four hands look good at once, which is not uncommon. Chang admits he sometimes goes into "autopilot." More than once, he's looked back on a recent hand that went well -- a hand which made him significant money -- and is not be able to remember playing it.
Leon will turn 21 in 2008, after which point he will finally enter the World Series of Poker. When I asked about his future in the game, he explained that there have been downsides: his grades and his social life have not gone unaffected. He doesn't want to play poker forever.
"But it's something I'm good at, something I like to do, and it makes me money. If someone offered me a million dollars on the condition that I could never play poker again, I wouldn't take it. Three million, maybe. Okay: five million."
