Mike Sexton

The Ambassador of Poker Recognized for His Contributions to the Game

With his pockets empty and his spirit broken, a young Mike Sexton returned home. His mother looked at him and shook her head.

“Let me tell you something,” she told her 13-year-old son, who had just lost his entire week’s pay in another card game. “If you’re dumb enough to get up and work all week long and then come back here and give your money away, you don’t deserve to have any money.”

Sexton smiled as he remembered this story. “It was a funny lesson I always remembered,” he said.

The 62-year-old poker pro has come a long way since his days as a newspaper delivery boy in the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio. That boy grew up to become one of the most respected people in the poker industry, not just for his abilities at the table, but for his tireless promotion of the game he loves.

On Nov. 7, Sexton was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame, becoming just the 38th member to join that exclusive group.

An Inauspicious Start to an Amazing Career
Today, he’s known predominantly for his recognizable voice on the World Poker Tour, where he has been commentating on the action since 2003. But he was also on online poker’s frontier in the early 2000s, navigating PartyPoker from its tiny launch to its historic rise.

Sexton wasn’t just around during the poker boom; he helped shape it.

But before he became one of poker’s most famous ambassadors, he was just a kid from Ohio who couldn’t hold on to his money.

“Danny Robison taught me how to play poker. He kept me busted all the way through middle school and high school,” said Sexton, who didn’t think much of his poker abilities, since he couldn’t even beat the local competition.

Of course, little did he know that the “local competition” was actually one of the best seven-card stud and gin rummy players in the world. A few years later, Robison teamed up with another Ohio native — Chip Reese — and the two moved to Las Vegas and promptly destroyed the games there, becoming known as the Gold Dust Twins, as they won more than $1 million in their first summer.

So, Sexton headed to college, thanks to a gymnastics scholarship, unaware of how good he actually was in the game of poker. But at Ohio State, he quickly realized that he had potential.

“I could instantly see that I was better than these guys at all of these games,” said Sexton. “It was then that I realized that I had a real knack for cards that the other guys didn’t have.”

In his final two years at Ohio State, Sexton played bridge or poker “literally every day.”

Yet, upon graduation, he had no grand dreams of following in Robison’s or Reese’s footsteps and heading to Las Vegas. He chose a more practical and traditional occupation.

“I joined the Army, and got stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina,” Sexton said. A paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division in 1970, Sexton never saw any time overseas, because his division had just returned from Vietnam by the time he arrived. When his service was completed, he stayed in North Carolina to take a job as a salesman for a military-based company.

A Man of Many Talents Chooses a New Profession
But even as he fell into a regular workweek, Sexton couldn’t help but find the local poker games.

“I started playing in the home games in North Carolina,” he said. “And I was doing very well in those games.”

While he was doing well at poker, he wasn’t doing so well in other areas of life. He had married, “So for three years or so, I was a normal working family guy,” he said. But as the late nights added up, so did the strain that it put on his marriage. He and his first wife divorced. “I was playing too much cards,” Sexton admitted.

It always pained Sexton to leave the juicy games late at night to get a few hours of sleep for his job, especially since he was now making more money playing poker than he was at his job.

So, in 1977, he decided to call it quits. He figured that if poker didn’t work out, he could always go back and find another job.

“That’s how I quit the real world and started playing poker for a living,” said Sexton. “And for the next 20 years, I literally didn’t get a paycheck.”

Although he visited Las Vegas and occasionally stayed with Robison and Reese, it took him a while to make his World Series of Poker debut.

Sexton was a dedicated Little League baseball coach, and his seasons overlapped with the World Series. But after eight years as a pro in North Carolina, he decided that he owed it to himself to give it a try. So, he took a week off from his Little League duties in 1984 and headed out to the WSOP.

“In the Right Place at the Right Time”
“Back in those days, they had only one poker tournament every other day at the World Series of Poker,” Sexton explained. So during his one-week excursion to Las Vegas, he had three opportunities to make the most of it.

In the three events he played, Sexton made two final tables.

“Because of the success that I had, I said, ‘You know, if I’m going to play poker for a living, I should probably move to Las Vegas,’” he said.

And just like that, the North Carolina home-game pro was now a Las Vegas resident.

With an insatiable appetite for tournaments, Sexton soon became a regular on the tournament trail, and he made waves in 1989 when he began wearing “La Mode” gear to all of his events.

“It was a tiny little sponsorship, but I wore it in all the tournaments,” Sexton said of the clothing line. “Everyone was sort of laughing at me, saying, ‘Look at this guy. What a clown.’ But I envisioned bigger things for poker.”

Phil Hellmuth, who was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame two years ago, remembers Sexton’s sponsorship well.

“I remember that he had that La Mode deal. It wasn’t for a lot of money, but he was out there working it,” said Hellmuth. “In addition to being a great player, he was one of the first guys to bring sponsorship into poker.”

Sexton would tell anyone who would listen that big things were coming for the game, and he even landed himself on the cover of Card Player magazine back in 1992 for that sponsorship. Sexton’s predictions in that issue proved to be dead-on.

He talked about poker’s TV potential, saying, “The cards of each player would be flashed on a screen for the viewer. Knowing the hands and watching some of the big bluffs would be very exciting. … It would be immensely popular.” More than a decade before the poker boom, many of his fellow competitors dismissed his enthusiasm as naivety.

“I always believed poker could grow. It is the true American pastime,” said Sexton. “Back in the 1980s, when I was telling players about this, everybody laughed at me. Not one player, other than Phil Hellmuth, thought I knew what I was talking about.”

After Sexton won a big tournament at the Four Queens in 1996, Linda Johnson, the owner of Card Player at that time, asked him if he would be interested in writing for the magazine. Sexton agreed, and wrote a regular column for 10 years.

He credits the clout of Card Player for helping him to pull off his next project — the Tournament of Champions.

“I always thought poker should have an event that was patterned after the Tournament of Champions in golf,” said Sexton. “I had this vision that you would have to win a tournament in that calendar year to get in. You couldn’t buy your way in.”

So, Sexton embarked upon a personal mission to create this new tournament for poker in the late ’90s. Little did he know that he was inadvertently paving the way for himself to become one of the richest poker players of all time.

“I was in the right place at the right time to put on the Tournament of Champions,” said Sexton. “And by putting on that event, it led me to my job with PartyPoker and the World Poker Tour.”

The Tournament of Champions and the Birth of PartyPoker
Sexton traveled across the country, and even overseas, in the late ’90s to convince poker room managers to send players to this exclusive event. The rules were simple: If anyone had won a tournament with a buy-in of $200 or more in that calendar year, he or she was eligible to play.

“But to get all the big players — because I wanted guys like Chip Reese and Doyle Brunson, who didn’t play tournaments — I made a rule that if you had won a World Series of Poker bracelet, you were automatically eligible,” said Sexton.

Both players and casinos were skeptical of the event. Sexton said five casinos shot him down before The Orleans agreed to host the new event.

“Everyone thought, ‘Oh man, nobody will come to that,’” Sexton remembered, because he insisted that the championship feature a mixed-game format. “Well, my guess is that probably 90 percent of the people in the world who were eligible to play, came and played. We had about 700 entries.”

Brunson hosted the first Tournament of Champions as a favor to Sexton, and he still remembers how popular it was.

“It was a great tournament, a great idea, and really well-run,” said Brunson. “It should still be going on.”

Brunson said he was very happy that Sexton got the Hall of Fame nod, indicating that he was Mike’s biggest supporter.

“Mike has just done so much for poker over the years. He’s traveled around the country at his own expense a lot of times to promote poker,” said Brunson. “It’s not what he did after the poker boom as much as what he did before the explosion of poker. That’s what makes him so unique.”

While the Tournament of Champions was immensely popular amongst the players, it failed to make any money, and died after three years. However, the event raised Sexton’s profile at a time when online poker was just starting to get off the ground.

In December 2000, Sexton received a call in which he was asked if he was involved yet with any online poker sites. He said that he wasn’t, and within two weeks, he was helping to develop software for PartyPoker.

Sexton said that it all happened so quickly. He met Ruth Parasol, the owner of the site, and she had one pressing question for him: “If we hire you, can you be in India within 10 days’ time?” Sexton said that he could, and nine days later, he was put in front of half a dozen software programmers in India. None of them had a clue as to how to play poker or what the rules are, but the business believed that it could make some money off this “poker thing.”

Sexton explained the game to the programmers, and after four months of helping them build the site, the company flew him to the Dominican Republic to start all over again with customer support.

It was there that he first met the company’s CEO, Vikrant Bhargava.

“I had just flown for like 20 hours straight or something, and as soon as I got there, the first thing Vikrant asked me was, ‘OK, we’ve got the site. How do we get players?’” Sexton remembered.

Sexton said that it was his idea to create the PartyPoker Million, a big poker tournament in which players would compete for a $1 million first-place prize, and the only way to qualify was by way of $20 satellites on the site.

The executives in the company were less than thrilled with the idea.

“Keep in mind, when they started this site, they budgeted only $500,000 for the whole site,” Sexton explained.

While most people in the room balked at the idea, Sexton earned the support of Bhargava, and the PartyPoker Million was born.

The Explosion of PartyPoker and the World Poker Tour
Steve Lipscomb approached Sexton and PartyPoker about filming their event. Encouraged by the opportunity for extra publicity, they accepted, and the tournament was shown on the Travel Channel.

Sexton said that there’s no doubt in his mind that the ratings for that show helped the World Poker Tour land a subsequent deal with the Travel Channel. And, sure enough, as the World Poker Tour hit the airways, both Sexton and PartyPoker were presented with intriguing opportunities.

Sexton accepted a job as a WPT commentator. And PartyPoker, seeing a new poker TV show that was starring its main spokesperson, saw an even greater opportunity. The company bought as many commercial spots as it could afford for both the original airdate and the reruns of the shows — all at a pretty affordable rate.

“To tell you the truth, we paid less for an ad on television at that time on the Travel Channel that went nationwide than we paid for a full-page ad in Card Player,” said Sexton. “I’d like to bet that in the history of television, no one has ever gotten more value in a TV ad. Within the first two weeks of the show, we multiplied our business by 10, and we never looked back, becoming the No. 1 site in the world.”

The World Poker Tour was the No. 1 show on the Travel Channel for five years. Currently in its eighth season, it now airs on FSN.

Looking Back and Moving Forward
Sexton doesn’t have any regrets about his time with PartyPoker (he calls it “the smartest career move I ever made”), but one thing he gets teased about was his decision to forego his stock option with the company. With the tenuous laws in the U.S., no one was quite sure what it would mean to be a U.S. shareholder, so Sexton agreed to a lucrative buyout.

When the company went public for nearly $9 billion, Sexton lost his rights to about $600 million-$700 million.

“I remember walking into Bellagio [that day], and Mike Matusow stands up and screams out over the whole poker room, ‘Hey, Mike, what’s it like to lose $600 million?’ The whole place cracked up, and it really was sort of funny,” Sexton remembered.

Sexton remains a host and consultant with PartyGaming.

Upon reflection of his decades as a player, Sexton has two major pieces of advice for young players trying to make a living in Las Vegas: play more cash games, which can offer a more consistent win rate over tournaments, and watch your vices.

Having seen many talented players succumb to their vices, including his good friend Stu Ungar to drugs, Sexton also cautions youngsters about the pitfalls of Las Vegas. He even brought up his own sports-betting addiction, which kept him broke for decades, despite doing well at poker.

“If you have any vices, I don’t care what they are — drugs, gambling in the pit, sports betting, betting on horses, hookers, drinking too much — they will find you in Las Vegas,” said Sexton. “I never had any other vices. I never drank, I never did drugs, I never had a problem in the pit. Basically, my whole life, I had one vice, and that was sports. I’m not proud of it, and I lost a fortune doing it.”

Looking toward the future, he thinks that the development of poker’s charitable aspect is its next big step. While he applauds the individual charities for which so many pros raise money, he thinks the industry should organize its charitable outreach so that the public can see just how much money poker players donate to worthy causes. This, he says, could attract mainstream sponsors, generate bigger prize pools, and make poker more accepted, even by those who don’t personally play it. That’s why he created pokergives.org, along with Linda Johnson, Jan Fisher, and Lisa Tenner.

Looking back at his playing career, Sexton said that he is especially proud of his 1989 WSOP bracelet and his 2006 Tournament of Champions win on ESPN (where he donated half of his $1 million prize to charitable organizations), but nothing will ever come close to being inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame.

“Even if I won the main event of the World Series, getting into the Hall of Fame and being appreciated for what I’ve done over my career for the poker community is going to have the most special meaning,” said Sexton.

In the years ahead, Sexton will still ante up on occasion, but he admits that his life is moving in a new direction. He and his wife of nearly three years, Karen, are raising their first child — Ty Michael Sexton.

“I’ve been very blessed at this late stage in my life that I get to start a family,” said Sexton, calling himself a “proud papa” and his 1-year-old son “the cutest kid in the world.”

“My life is definitely heading in a new direction,” said Sexton. “My priority is to be a good father more than it is to be a good poker player right now.”