Gavin Smith: Poker's Modern-Day Samson - Two World Poker Tour Final Tables Down, More to Follow

For some athletes, superstition is a part of the game. Michael Jordan used to wear North Carolina shorts under his Bulls uniform for good luck. Wade Boggs would only eat chicken on game day. Similar superstitions carry over to poker. Some players wear that lucky hat or use a card protector they believe is the physical embodiment of Lady Luck. Sometimes, however, these superstitions can carry over into one's appearance.

Take Gavin Smith, for example. His hair is kind of long. It's not Chris Ferguson long, but he definitely would not cut it as a Marine. And this all has to do with superstition. Let's back up a little. Last year he was running very well. He had a successful 2004 World Series of Poker and played well at the Plaza's Ultimate Poker Challenge. Then, his girlfriend told him to get a haircut. He obliged. "After that, I ran horribly for months," he groaned. "So, I said, I'm not going to cut my hair anymore." The last time he had a trim was in October 2004.

Meet poker's modern-day Samson. While it is still to be determined if Gavin does derive strength from his flowing locks, he has kicked his game into high gear in late 2005, making two World Poker Tour final tables, capturing one title and pocketing nearly $2 million in tournament winnings. So, while he hasn't quite gone biblical, killing a lion with his bare hands or anything crazy like that, there is no question that he is laying waste to tournament fields, both large and small, with his extremely aggressive and unpredictable play.

Roots
Gavin was born in Guelph, Ontario, about an hour outside Toronto, in 1968. While growing up, he played tons of cards with his father, mainly cribbage and rummy. But his true love was sports, and soccer, baseball, hockey, rugby, and golf satisfied his competitive nature until poker entered his life when he was 26. At that time, he would get together with co-workers for regular home games that involved crazy mixed games. Soon thereafter, he began frequenting Ontario's charity casinos. These charity casinos changed locations and benefactors every few days. When the gamble-mobile rolled into Gavin's town, he gave poker a shot.

"The first time I played at the casino, I got totally lucky and actually won. Then I started going on a regular basis," he stated. "Luckily, right from the beginning, I met a couple of people who taught me how to play." Gavin credits Grant Pittman, a friend who, at the time, had a lot of live Vegas action under his belt, and Jeremy Balka, a mathematical wizard with a Ph.D. in statistics, as the mentors who took him under their wings and provided him with the fundamental understanding of what it takes to be a successful player.

Bitten by the poker bug, Gavin became a poker dealer in 1996. However, just two years later, the charity casinos across Canada were closed down by the government. Never distancing himself from the action and education that comes with exposure to the game, he kept the action alive by opening a private poker club in Kitchner, Ontario, which ran for about eight months.

In November 1999, he traveled to the World Poker Finals at Foxwoods. He fared pretty well, winning the $500 no-limit hold'em event and pocketing $14,280. The tournament circuit lured him in hook, line, and sinker, and he has remained a poker road warrior ever since.

One table at a time
From 1999 up until a year ago, Gavin said he held quite a unique distinction on the tournament trail. "At one point, I was probably the best single-table satellite player in the world," he boasted. "During my first two or three years on tour, I was pretty much a single-table satellite specialist. I played them like they were going out of style, sold the chips that I won, and very occasionally played a tournament."

One could say that the advent of the single-table satellite changed poker. Back in 1980, former World Series of Poker Tournament Director Eric Drache was scrambling to register more players for the main event. He approached a table of 10 players who all had about $1,000 on the table. "Why don't you guys play a freezeout, and the winner gets a seat in the main event," he said. That concept worked, and that year about 15 additional seats were added to the main event via the "satellite" idea. Fast-forward to today, and the satellite is a fixture at any given tournament, giving smaller-bankrolled players the ability to play with the big boys and helping players rapidly improve their game.

By dedicating himself to satellite mastery, Gavin said that he honed many important advanced skills. "You learn a lot about shorthanded play, when you need to get aggressive and when you shouldn't get aggressive," he stated. "You also learn when to strike and how not to let your chips get down too low before making a move, when it's too late. That is a big problem for lots of people in tournaments; by the time they finally make a move, it is too late anyway."

It has been only about a year that Gavin has played in every event. His good friend Erick Lindgren began backing him in tournaments, enabling him to begin playing in all the big events. Gavin met Erick at Casino San Pablo, where Erick worked as a prop player. The two became sounding boards for poker strategy discussion and analysis. "We asked one another a ton of questions about tournament poker and immediately developed a very good friendship," Lindgren said. "I am proud to call Gavin my partner, am confident in his skills, and think the poker world is going to see more and more of him as he continues to succeed."

Gavin Smith in World Poker Tour final-table action

Getting Aggressive Early
Referring to the very first time he ever played poker, Gavin laughed, "I thought any king was playable. It didn't matter what the action was to me, I was going to play that hand." While he might not play quite that loosely today, he does have a reputation as an unpredictable, aggressive, and sometimes maniacal player. "I'll play any two cards, and those who have played against me know it. This makes it hard to put me on any hand."

Gavin said he honed his aggressive play in his early days of play as an online player. "I've been playing online steadily from day one," he commented. "I started playing online way back when PlanetPoker was the only site around, in like 1997, and when Paradise opened, I also played a lot there." True to his roots, when not on the tournament trail, he plays about 50 hours a week online, mainly at FullTilt. No-limit hold'em is his game of choice, and he can be found at the $10-$20 tables mopping up under the screen name "birdguts," an old high school nickname that, had he chosen to enter professional wrestling, would have been his handle.

His aggressive online play has translated over to a superaggressive live-tournament strategy. "The experience I have picked up online has monumentally improved my game," he said. "Overall, I think the game is at a much higher level now than it ever has been. It used to be that years ago, if someone limped in from under the gun and there was a raise and a reraise, the player almost always had aces. Now, he could have anything."

Another aspect of Gavin's game that gets lots of attention is his table presence. Self-admittedly, he says his game involves "lots of talking and causing s—-." He used to listen to music, and then Lindgren suggested that he should stop. "He said that my personality could enhance my game by talking to people, getting them to talk to me, getting reads and getting under my opponents' skin. Lots of players get ticked off when I play with them, and I cause a lot of people to go on tilt. It works in my favor. Some people don't want to have fun, and take this way too seriously."

How to make a million, WPT style
At the 2005 Mirage Poker Showdown, a first-place finish in the $2,000 no-limit hold'em preliminary event provided Gavin with a huge psychological boost. He beat Juan Carlos Mortensen heads up to take home the $155,880 top prize. Defeating the 2001 World Series champion gave him a huge rush of momentum. "I have always believed in myself, but before winning that tournament, I was starting to think that maybe I was not good enough."

Chris Bell (left) and Gavin Smith

That boost paved the way to a million-dollar victory when Gavin topped 317 players in the Mirage's WPT main event. He hit the ground running, making hands and reading situations perfectly, and built his stack up to $70,000 within a few hours. With one level left in the day, he had $120,000 in chips. He commented to the players at his table that he would have $200,000 by the end of the day. Three hands later, he played a huge pot with Allen Cunningham. "I had two jacks, he reraised me from the blind, and I shoved in on him," Smith recalled. "He called me with ace-king and the jacks held up. That put me over $200,000, and I ended the day second in chips."

Day three came, and Gavin said, "It was a bad, bad day … it sucked." He couldn't get anything going, and with 15 players left, he was the short stack. "Then," he said, "I began a series of about four pretty big suckouts." He hit two two-outers, getting it in twice with pocket sevens and finding himself up against a better pair. But a lucky 7 came on both occasions. He headed to the final table in fifth place with $687,000.

It was an incredible final table. Once play got down to three players, Chris Bell, Ted Forrest, and Smith played threehanded for about an hour. A series of big hands gave Gavin the commanding lead. He won a $1.2 million pot against Bell after hitting a three-outer on the river. Bell brought it in for $200,000 from the button and Gavin reraised to $600,000 from the small blind with A-J. "Chris started talking to me, and he hadn't talked the entire tournament," Smith recalled. "He said, 'Well, you're going to shove in after the flop no matter what anyway,' and when he said that, I thought for sure that he did not have a made hand. I was certain he had a worse ace than mine, and I was thinking that I am in a dilemma, because if we did see a flop, I didn't know which card would hit him." The flop came 9-7-5 and Gavin did push in. Bell called with A-9 and was way ahead. When the river brought a jack, Bell was crippled and Gavin became the overwhelming chip leader. Eleven hands later, Gavin knocked out Chris after his A-Q won the coin flip against Bell's pocket eights. This gave Gavin approximately $4.6 million in chips to Forrest's $1.7 million. Four hands later, both players picked up big hands for heads-up play; Forrest had A-J and Smith pocket queens. The queens held up and Smith walked away with $1,128,278 and a $25,000 seat in the season-ending WPT Championship.

Gavin nearly followed up with another $1 million win at the recent WPT Doyle Brunson North American Poker Championship. With four players left, Smith had $4 million, about half of the chips in play. Second place, Minh Ly, had only $1.8 million. The tide turned after Ly won a pot of more than $1 million against Gavin when Minh, holding 5-3, hit a 6-high straight on a J-4-2-6-Q board. Ly then crippled Smith when his K-8 flopped a king to beat Smith's suited A-7, leaving Gavin with only $300,000 in chips. Dan Harrington knocked him out on the next hand with a lowly 8 4.

His third-place finish ($327,610) also netted him 1,280 Card Player Player of the Year points, and pushed him into the No. 4 spot – formerly held by Lindgren, who was on hand to sweat Smith and root him on during his second WPT final table of the season.

Gavin Smith studies an opponent.

More than 15 minutes
While his recent success and impending television notoriety will come from no-limit hold'em, Gavin said he is working on every aspect of his poker game. "I am always working on improving every game I play. As soon as you stop trying to get better, you can pretty much call it quits."

He is excited about what the future holds: fame, and notoriety. "There is so much at stake now, it is amazing," he remarked. "Who ever would have thought people would care anything about poker players?"

One thing is certain. It isn't about a quick 15 minutes of fame for Gavin Smith. He is confident the best is yet to come. "I want to win enough World Poker Tour events that nobody second-guesses whether or not I am a great player," he stated. "Right now, I am certain there are people who second-guess my skill as a player. I am going to keep on winning so that nobody has any doubts about my skills."