The Man Who Might Have Been King

You've probably already read last issue's story about how Greg Raymer defeated David Williams in a seven-hand showdown at the end of the 2004 World Series of Poker championship event, and depending on what order you're reading this issue, you may or may not have read more about the event's top finishers' backgrounds. I was lucky enough to get to spend some quality time with David Williams a few days after the event was over, though, and I wanted to share with you some of the story behind "The Man Who Might Have Been King."

The first thing I wanted to know was whether he had at any point thought about taking the money and leaving poker, an odd question, but it turned out I'd been on the right track.

"I thought a little about, if I won, it might be cool to be the mystery man, show up, win, and leave poker," Williams said, "but I didn't win, and even so, I realized afterward that I just love poker too much. Right now, I just need a break from the seven most intense days of my life. I'm a little afraid of going back: What if I don't win the next tournament or make the final table right away, what are people going to think? But I know I just need to play to get that out of my system."

Williams has been influenced by a number of star players in his short poker career (most of his experience comes from money games), and he has adopted some of their wisdom. "I've become friends with Erick Lindgren lately, and he told me that you just have to get back out there and play again, that you can't always win and people know that, but you can't let fear of having set the bar so high for yourself that you can't live up to it keep you from trying."

In my daily online reports, I mentioned how I had been drawn to Williams early in the tournament, perhaps as early as with 150-200 players to go. There was just something about him, an air of quiet, calm confidence. I was curious if that was just a projection, or if it had been real. The answer turned out to be a combination.

"I hated the breaks," Williams said. "I was nervous, it was hard to eat, and I just didn't feel well, but as soon as they started dealing the cards again, I was fine, I was relaxed."

Williams started playing when he was 17. He had previously been into a game called "Magic: The Gathering," a strategy game that according to Williams "combines elements of chess, poker, and bridge."

"I was one of the best Magic players in the world; that's where a lot of my tournament experience came from," Williams said. "I had played only 10 or so brick-and-mortar poker tournaments in my life before the World Series, and most of those were small, but I've played in Magic tournaments in 37 countries. There's a worldwide pro tour, like golf, but obviously on a much smaller level."

Did he make enough money from Magic to cover all that travel?

"No, my mom is a stewardess," Williams explained. "I get to fly for free, and a lot of my friends who are well-off let me stay in their rooms at these events, so whatever I won was gravy. About six or seven years ago, Magic players (the game was invented in 1993) started getting into poker, and they even had their own little World Series of Poker for Magic players. There were only about 10 people, and I won that, which was shocking, because I knew almost nothing about poker. I remember when I got heads up, I wanted to split the money, and my opponent looked down at me and said something like, 'Why would I want to split with you? You don't know anything about poker.' So, that was a fun early piece of success."

How did the man who "knew almost nothing about poker" start learning?

"First, I read Lee Jones' Winning Low-Limit Hold'em, and I also read the Sklansky books. I played $4-$8 or $5-$10 limits, often in private Dallas games. I remember looking across the room at the people playing in the $15-$30 game and thinking I wasn't good enough for that game. I also knew I didn't have the bankroll for it."

Champion Greg Raymer had made a big deal of his online education. Had Williams benefited similarly? "I've lurked on sites like RGP and 2 + 2, but rarely if ever posted. Mostly, I just read everything I could get my hands on – every page of Card Player, every Internet site – and read it twice, usually."

Williams played for two years, but then stopped playing poker until about 18 months ago. "Actually, I picked it up again only because a friend wanted me to introduce him to the different Dallas private games, and that got me going again. By that time, I had read more and I had more money, so I tried the $15-$30 games and found out the players weren't as good as I had thought they would be. They were mostly self-taught, and you can only go so far without learning from others. When I started back into poker, I kept reading; I probably read the Sklansky tournament book about six times. I really think it's important to read, both to learn and to know what other people are thinking, whether that's right or wrong."

Although Williams was definitely short on tournament experience going into the "Big One," he wasn't quite a Chris Moneymaker. "My first big tournament was last fall," he said. "A few friends had qualified for the big Aruba tournament, so I played in some Internet qualifiers and made it. I felt OK in there; even though there were some big-name pros, it seemed like most of the players were Internet players (I didn't stop to mention the irony that Williams was an Internet player of a sort), and weren't that strong. I made a few mistakes, and in no-limit, that's all it takes, but it was a great learning experience for me, getting to play live with the best players in a big-money event like that."

Williams has always been a high achiever. He left the Dallas area first to attend college at Princeton, where he got great grades but left after a semester. "I was terribly homesick," Williams admitted. "I missed my friends and family. It felt wrong; I felt almost like some kind of failure for coming home and transferring to SMU, but my mom and my grandparents backed me all the way. They told me that if coming home was what felt right to me, I should do it.

Williams has missed few opportunities to mention family as his story has unfolded. His mother, Shirley Williams, was there to watch him play throughout the final event, and his grandparents on his mother's side "have been there for me my whole life," helping raise him when his mother had to travel for the work that later enabled him to travel to those 37 countries.

It was his grandfather who first mentioned the words "Texas hold'em" to Williams, explaining (when Williams was 14) that he had been off playing the game. Williams wanted to know how the game was played, and got good, if simplistic, advice. "The goal is to have the nuts," his grandfather said. "You want to get your money in when you have the nuts, the best possible hand." Williams has a sister, Tina, although their age difference (she's 15, almost nine years younger) has meant that he hasn't been around much as she has grown from a child into a young woman.

Williams has never known his father, who was from Iran. It was 1979 when Shirley Williams found out she was pregnant with David, and those were extremely difficult days for American-Iranian relationships. "It was difficult for him, I'm told," Williams said. "He was basically embarrassed by the whole thing and abandoned my mother when she was pregnant. He took off and has never returned."

The other important person in Williams' life right now is his girlfriend of two and half years, Brittany DeWald, who accompanied him to Aruba and to the WSOP, and who "does a good job of putting up with me when I'm in the other room playing Magic or poker on the computer," Williams said.

As you might imagine, now that the 23-year-old (24 by the time you read this) has been home for a few days, all kinds of people have been coming out of the woodwork, looking to involve themselves with his fortune. "I've had Magic players I haven't spoken to in years contact me and claim that I told them, 'If I ever win the World Series of Poker, I'll give you 1 percent.' Yeah," Williams paused, "like I'm going to give some guy I never met and I was joking around with one day $35,000."

The fact that 1 percent of his win comes out to $35,000 is half of what helped Williams put the size of his win into perspective. "I just came from the bank about 45 minutes ago," Williams told me. "Of course, I'm going to invest it better than this, but for right now, I just deposited the check into my account. It pays 2 percent interest, and the banker told me how much 2 percent of $3.5 million came out to. The interest alone is more money than I've ever had in my life."

You don't need to worry about Williams keeping his money in a 2 percent interest-bearing account, or that he'll give it to one of the plethora of stockbrokers and "financial planners" who have been calling him incessantly since his return.

"My family has some extremely wealthy friends in Las Vegas; it was at their estate that I stayed during the Series, actually," Williams said. "They're off traveling now, but I've spoken with them, and when they return, they told me they will put me in touch with the financial planner who works with their money, so it will be taken care of by someone I can trust and who knows what he's doing."

Williams and his interesting tale almost didn't make it to the final table. He stood 28th in chips when 29 players remained, and even after he got himself back into the game and made it into the final 10 players, it was touch and go.

"The game stayed 10-handed for a long while. Everyone was waiting," Williams said. "No one wanted to be the one who finished 10th. It didn't feel right just to sit there and ante off, though. Finally, I picked up A-Q in late position, and had about $1.2 million left. I made it $400,000 to go. Josh Arieh, who had lots of chips, came back over the top of me with a bet that would have put me all in.

"If I had folded, I might have been able to make the final table, but even though you never know for sure what can happen, I would have been getting there with such a small stack that I probably would have gone out ninth or eighth. I thought for a while about how Phil Ivey went out 10th last year, but I didn't want to go in as the shortest stack, and I figured if it was supposed to be, it was supposed to be.

"The flop missed me," Williams continued, "but Marcel Luske winked at me and said, 'The ace is coming.' Normally, I don't believe in fate or things like that; I believe in logic, but when he said it, I believed it, and when it hit, it was one of the scariest things I'd ever seen. I could tell Marcel was really pulling for me, which was truly selfless, because it's hard to pull for anyone else when you're in a situation in which the next guy out ends the day. I think Marcel is a special person."

Whether it was kindness, a desire to see the chips in Williams' hands rather than Arieh's, or precognition, only Luske can know for sure, but I like seeing poker moments like that, and Luske has certainly made a friend for life. Luske's good wishes came back to haunt him, in a sense, because he eventually was the 10th man out. Even though Williams lost some chips before Luske exited, he still reached the final table in sixth chip position. Better still, even though his $1,575,000 stack was well below par, Raymer and Matt Dean had more than half the chips between them, making the race for all other positions wide open from the start. Once Dean lost ground in the early going, Williams had as good a chance to get heads up with the chip leader as anyone.

I've already detailed the battle that got Williams into heads-up position in last issue's cover story, but there remains the story of "The Hand."

"Everyone has been asking me about the final hand (in which Raymer held 8-8 and Williams held A-4, with the flop coming 5-4-2)," Williams continued. "Marcel had already been nice to me earlier in this event. He had told me to watch for people's reactions as they looked at their cards, and even though I had of course heard of this before, the reminder came at a good time. I had been looking at Greg (Raymer) when he looked at his cards, and I got the feeling he had a good hand, but not something great. I put him on two big cards. It honestly never occurred to me that he might have a decent pocket pair.

"Anyway, once that flop came," Williams continued, "I figured I had the best hand, and if not, I had nine outs (four threes for a straight, three aces, and two fours). I had been watching Greg pressure people during the entire final table, and I thought that was what was happening here. When he bet the flop, I figured I was ahead, but I just wanted to call, because I didn't want to face a reraise for all of my chips then and there.

"When another deuce came on the turn," Williams explained, "I figured that didn't help Greg, so I called again. That's when I really thought he was trying to pressure me; I thought he had a weak hand and had to bet. On the river, I didn't like it when he bet out again, but I figured if I dropped out there, I'd be behind about 7-1 in chips; he'd have me about 22 (million) to three, and I didn't like my chances of coming back from there. If I called and won, I'd be ahead about 2-1 in chips. I figured I'd lose only if he had a deuce, a 5, or a pocket pair, and as I said, I just hadn't really envisioned a pocket pair.

"It has been hard afterward," Williams said, "reading on the Internet where people called me an idiot for calling off the last of my chips with that hand, but from my seat, with those cards, it felt right."

I tried to explain to Williams, a relative Internet-analysis novice, that he was the one with the $3.5 million, not his critics, and that once I had learned he was going to be behind by 7-1 or more – I had thought, from my seat, that it was more like 5-1 – everything made sense. Even though there were a few semilegitimate drawing hands, like 6-4 or pocket threes, that his hand could beat, by the time he'd reached the end, it mostly came down to a decision of whether Raymer was bluffing or not. If Williams was right about the bluff, he'd have a 2-1 chip lead. If he folded, he'd be behind by a 7-1 margin. And, of course, if he called and lost – the actual result – the tournament was over. All in all, it seemed solid. I thought the bigger – but not at all clear – question came on the turn, where he called $2.5 million rather quickly.

"I usually move fairly quickly," Williams said. "I have an active mind and am thinking before the cards arrive what I'm going to do if this card comes or if that card comes."

How did Williams feel afterward? "I was pretty depressed," he said. "I mean, I was thankful for getting to where I did, as a lot of big names didn't, and I certainly hadn't expected to get that far, but once I took out Harrington, I started thinking about winning, and that was really the first time during the tournament that I had thought about anything more than my immediate goal. The first day, I thought about making the second day; the second day, the third; and so on. I think maybe I lost a little bit of focus when I started to think about winning there instead of thinking about playing each hand or the next move up the ladder.

"I read somewhere, I think it was Phil Hellmuth who wrote it," Williams said, "that nothing hurts like busting out of your first Big One, and he was right. I felt like I'd blown it, and I wondered if I would ever have that chance again. I just wanted to go lie down, but I'd had 10 people fly in to watch me, I felt supported, and I thought it would have been pretty lame to lie around. By Saturday night, what I had accomplished started to hit me, especially when there were 45 messages on my answering machine."

Although the poker world is already quite accustomed to the notion of great African-American champions like Phil Ivey, the "outside world" isn't, and I asked Williams if he had thought at all about the racial impact a victory might have had.

"Only afterward," Williams said. "After it was all over, I thought a little about what it would have done for poker, what it would have done for diversity. You see what Tiger Woods has done in golf, and what Venus and Serena Williams have done in tennis; a win here would have increased poker's diversity. You didn't see too many African-Americans in the field. Even the second-place finish will probably help some, but nothing like a win would have."

Because Williams' achievement will undoubtedly encourage both more African-Americans and more young people to play poker, I wanted to know if he thought that was a good thing for us as a society.

"It's good for poker, that part is clear," Williams said. "As a society, it's not as clear. Some people can handle playing the game, and some people can't. My mother, for example, definitely shouldn't play, because she's too emotional. People like that, or people who don't have the mind for it, probably shouldn't play. I don't want to make any general statements, though, because I'm not the one to decide what's right for people. I hate it when I see people dictating to others what they should or shouldn't do."

Williams had first grabbed my attention because of that air (or aura, if you will) of calm, cool, focused confidence that he projected, and nothing he said in talking to me ever changed that impression. This is one very mature 23-year-old: He even showed that quality in admitting to fears about the high bar he's set for himself. Whether he decides to remain a high-profile poker player or go on to other things outside the poker world, I believe we were all privileged to see a very special young man stay within himself and do a terrific job of remaining focused on the job at hand when it came time to play cards, while letting the nervous tension release during the breaks.

Because of an incorrect line in an official press release, many stories about the event that claimed Williams "never wanted to have a boss" were wrong. "The line was taken out of context," Williams said. "What I said was that I didn't like the idea of someone else making my decisions for me or setting my schedule; 'You have to be here at 9 a.m. every day,' that sort of thing. I wanted, and still want, the kind of career in which I can take responsibility for my own decisions. Whether that means starting my own business or being a poker player, it's way too early to know yet."

Even though the odds say it's unlikely David Williams (or any other single individual) will ever win the world title, I think it's one of the easiest and safest predictions I've ever made that by the time David Willams' time is near done, he will be able to look back at a long list of achievements, with his finish in the 2004 World Series of Poker being only one, and very likely not nearly the most important.

Andrew N.S. Glazer, "The Poker Pundit," is Card Player's tournament editor, and he writes a weekly gambling column for The Detroit Free Press. He is the author of several books, including The Complete Idiot's Guide to Poker (Alpha Books, fall 2004). His tournament material and weekly e-newsletter appear at Finaltablepoker.com.