Chau Giang has probably been the biggest winner in the Big Game over the past 10 years or so. He lives in a mansion next door to my father with his wife of 12 years and his three small children. You might say Chau leads a charmed life, but it didn't start out the bed of roses that it is today.
Chau's story began halfway around the world in war-torn Vietnam. Born in the late '50s to parents of Chinese decent, he learned various forms of poker in his youth. Perhaps Chau was going to be a poker pro in Vietnam, but we'll never know. In 1975, the communist North Vietnamese broke the peace treaty only a few years old by sending hundreds of thousands of troops south over the DMZ into the South.
As town after town fell to the advancing communists, anyone with any money or influence boarded planes or helicopters to "get the hell out of Dodge." Chau lacked influence and hadn't much money, but he too didn't want to live under an oppressive communist regime. "I didn't want someone telling me what to do all the time," he once told me at the poker table.
Chau took the only avenue of escape open to him; he bought a one-way ticket on a boat to nowhere. Sounds crazy, doesn't it? But if you're old enough (and I barely am), you might remember commercials raising money for the "boat people of Vietnam." I can only imagine the courage that a move like this must have taken.
Refugees often take boats to flee their homeland, true. But when, say, Cubans get in their boats to flee, they know where they hope to end up, Florida. The Vietnamese boat people were never quite sure where they'd wind up. Most shot for Thailand, but the Thai government wasn't crazy about taking on the responsibility of tens of thousands of refugees, nor did it wish to anger the often vengeful Vietnamese communists with their huge army. Cambodia was too close, and the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia were too far.
The best they could hope for was to be picked up by the U.N. and sent to international refugee camps. The U.N., however, wasn't equipped to deal with this type of situation, and dragged its feet until public outrage built up over the plight of the boat people and their worst nightmare, pirates. That's right, pirates. And I'm not talking about the cool ones you see at Disneyland or at the poker tables today (namely, Max Pescatori). These were throwbacks to the savages of the previous century.
Entire boatloads, often containing several hundred men, women, and children, were boarded and robbed, kidnapped, raped, and/or sunk. The Vietnamese couldn't care less what happened to these people, so it was a free-for-all. Many of these pirates were later found to be fishermen who turned out to be opportunistic predators.
Chau's boat was boarded an incredible five times! Each of the first four times, they appeased the pirates by giving them small amounts of gold or whatever they had been able to hide from the previous robberies. The fifth time, there was nothing left to give. The outraged pirates beat passengers and threw out all of their fresh water.
For five days, the boat drifted, and everyone thought death was inevitable. However, these people unknowingly had an ace in the hole. They had the luckiest man on the planet on their boat. Chau started his long streak of drawing out when they made the Thai coast and were taken to a refugee camp that had food and water.
The group spent four months in the camp before they were to be shipped to their new homes. When Chau was asked where he wanted to go, he shot for the moon, or at least the other side of the planet, the U.S. He was sent to a U.N. camp in the Philippines to learn English (he should sue them for incompetence, by the way).
After only another four months, Chau got lucky again! A Colorado man was willing to sponsor him. Chau came to the land of opportunity and got a job frying chicken at KFC. After six months, he moved to a Chinese restaurant, where he worked for a few years. While there, he made friends with a waitress who moonlighted as a poker dealer in a club. "Hey, I know how pray poker," he probably said to his new friend, so she took him with her to the club.
Although they played dealer's choice at the club, they didn't play any of the games Chau had played back in Vietnam; that is, stripped-deck five-card stud and draw. Chau stayed broke for six months, losing every paycheck at the club. "I never fropped a pair," Chau probably complained to anyone who would listen.
But, soon the tide turned, and after two years at the Chinese restaurant, Chau quit and played poker full time. After about a year, he accumulated a $100,000 bankroll playing in extremely small games, and was looking for bigger action. He moved to Florida for a year and a half and played with the likes of Dewey Tomko and Hilbert Shirey.
That action also became too small, so after a year and a half, Chau visited Colorado once more before making the jump into the big time. Las Vegas was a long way from home, but Chau took to it like a duck to water. He won his first
World Series of Poker bracelet in 1993 and another in 1998. "I never looked back," he said.
Chau, like me, switched to playing primarily live-action games in the mid-'90s. But, after poker took off with the new millennium, his kids wanted to know why he wasn't on TV when they saw the televised tournaments. Chau informed his kids that if they wanted to see him on TV, they would. True to his word, he quickly did just that. He won his third bracelet in 2004 and made more final tables than I can count.
Chau is now so famous, he is like Cher, in that he is known throughout the world by his first name. He is also like Cher in that he is extremely loose. I often joke that he calls three bets cold with hands that I wouldn't play from the small blind in an unraised pot. He somehow makes it work for him, though - so much so that he is the only player I have a standing "save" with in any tournament we both enter.
