A Poker Life: Justin Young

You’ve heard it all before. A young guy hits a big score in a tournament, drops out of college to turn pro, and within years has donated all the money back to the poker community and is never heard from again. Justin Young is not that guy.

In Young’s short seven-year career, he has already won more than $3.6 million in tournaments, with 148 cashes and nine career titles. While he enjoys winning major tournaments, Young also supplements his poker income by grinding away at the cash game tables at his adopted casino home, Bellagio. In addition to being his go-to cash game location, Bellagio was also the site of Young’s first ever tournament win in 2004. Since then, seven out of ten of his biggest tournament scores came at Bellagio, including his most recent win at the 2011 Festa al Lago main event for $349,590 in October. These seven cashes alone account for $2,038,265 in earnings, or almost 60 percent of Young’s lifetime winnings.

In a time where many poker pros are traveling from Los Angeles to Macau and everywhere in between for tournaments, the fact that Young has taken to one place and had such great success there may provide some insight into his down-to-earth and focused nature. It also shows that he is committed to spending time with his wife, who moved to Las Vegas with him from North Carolina, so that he could play more tournaments without leaving her alone for too long. While many aspire to a jet set lifestyle, Young has found satisfaction and great success living a more grounded life. This is his story.

Youthful Games

Young was born in Boulder, Colorado but his family soon moved an hour north to the city of Loveland. His mother was an interior decorator and his father was an entrepreneur and former member of the successful folk singing group the Serendipity Singers. Despite the abundant creative and musical influences in his childhood, the arts were not what captivated Young.

“There were always instruments around the house,” he remembered. “I think I took six months of piano lessons and a month of guitar lessons, but outside of that I wasn’t all that interested in it.”

What really captured his interest were strategy games. “Every Friday night was game night,” he recalled. “I learned chess when I was four or five years old. We played a lot of backgammon, hearts and spades. We played all night, until it was time to go to bed. We did play some small gambling games like Tripoli and poker, and we would play with our own money, which was pretty fun for a kid as young as I was.”

Young learned the hand rankings for poker when he was eight years old from his father, who would go to play poker every couple weeks in a local game. His family would play mostly five-card draw and five-card stud, and although they were all competitive, it was never too serious.

Higher Education, High Stakes

It was not until college that Young singled out poker as a game he was particularly good at. He was attending North Carolina State in Raleigh, studying to be a mechanical engineer. While there he joined the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity, and would play in the house’s home game. He had modest success in the game, with his years of experience playing strategic games competitively no doubt serving him well.

“It was dealer’s choice and we would sometimes play stud, but mostly it was non-conventional games like ‘iron-cross’, ‘screw your neighbor’ and ‘guts.’ I think the most I ever won was $40.”

While many young professional players these days became interested in poker as part of the boom brought on by the “Moneymaker Effect,” Young says that his inspirational moment came just slightly ahead of the curve.

“When Robert Varkonyi won the WSOP main event in 2002, I watched that final table over and over again. I was enthralled by how much money was at stake and it inspired me to play more. At the time, I was a cocky 21 year old and I thought to myself, ‘I’m better than these guys!’”

He deposited $50 on Party Poker, and quickly quadrupled his money. He began by playing $0.25-$0.50 limit hold’em, and within a year was playing $1-$2 no-limit hold’em. Young’s lifelong love of games had found a more concentrated outlet, and the obsession grew.

Engineering a Career

Young graduated in 2002, and worked for a number of months with children with disabilities in Raleigh before eventually pursuing a job in mechanical engineering. During his senior year he had completed a dozen interviews with various firms, but nothing worked out. Eventually his stepfather helped to secure him a job at the Marine Corps air station at Cherry Point, NC.

“It’s like a big auto-repair shop, but for jet fighters,” Young explained. “It was a sweet job, where I essentially got to play around with planes. I knew when I went to college that engineering is what I wanted to go for.”

Young was enjoying work in his field of study, but at the same time he was steadily climbing higher and higher in stakes playing online poker. It got to the point where he was almost putting in more time playing poker than he did at his job.

“I’m a numbers and stats guy, so every day I would write down how long I played, at what stakes, and how much I won or lost. Seeing the chart, which showed how well I was doing, really made it fun. Within a year of starting my job I was playing $25-$50 online. As soon as they came out with a higher stake, I would play. That was about the time that I decided that I should seriously think about playing professionally.”

Young Love and the List

The decision to leave a comfortable job with good pay and benefits in order to play poker professionally is never an easy one to make, but Young had more than his own livelihood to consider: he also had to think of his girlfriend and future wife, Morgan, who he met during his junior year of college.

“We actually met at a frat party, as cheesy as that sounds,” Young admitted. “We made a date for the next weekend, and later I found out that she didn’t exactly remember what I looked like. She had asked me what car I would be picking her up in, so she could figure out that I was the guy. That’s as romantic as it gets.”

While he may downplay the romance of their first meeting, it is clear that his relationship with his wife and her financial security is incredibly important to Young. Before he would allow himself to quit his job, he made a list of 30 things he had to accomplish. The list included getting Morgan’s approval, getting their parents approval, saving and investing a certain amount of money, and achieving a certain level of success in his engineering job. On the day he achieved the last of his goals, he went in to give notice that he was quitting his job.

“The whole time my wife was my biggest fan. When I made my list, number one was to get her approval. I hadn’t even said half a sentence before she told me to just do it. The whole time she has been super supportive, and loves the fact that I love what I do.”

Moving On Up

Directly after quitting his mechanical engineering job, Young went on the biggest upswing of his life. He was living with Morgan in Moorehead, NC, but frequently was on the road to Foxwoods and Tunica chasing cash game action. He began to get more and more into playing tournament poker after winning the first tournament he ever entered at the Bellagio.

“It was a $1,000 buy-in nightly event, which back in the day would attract about 140 entrants. I won that and it was just a blast.”

In 2006, Justin and Morgan got married. While he was having great success playing online and on his poker trips, Young didn’t feel right about all of the time he spent away from his wife. They decided to make the move from North Carolina to Las Vegas in 2007, so that he could apply his trade without having to spend as much time on the road. Young played $10-$20 at the Bellagio, pretty much playing the same hours as his wife’s 9-to-5 day job. After struggling a bit directly after the move, Young caught a huge break.

He had made friends with Shannon Shorr, who suggested that he play in the upcoming 2008 WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic. At the time the $15,000 buy-in was too high for Young to comfortably enter, but Shorr offered to buy a large piece. After selling some more of his action to fellow Bellagio cash game regulars, Young entered the main event and ended up finishing runner-up to Chino Rheem, cashing for $936,760. Despite having to pay out to his investors, the money and the confidence gained from the impressive score were invaluable to Young.

Party on the Lake

Young continued his success in tournaments, finishing eighth in the 2009 $25,000 WPT Championship and improving on his performance by finishing sixth in the same event in 2011. Young won his largest title to date in October, when he took down the 2011 Festa al Lago $5,000 main event for $349,590. Young outlasted a re-entry field with 228 entries and defeated a final table with experienced opponents like Chris DeMaci and Michael Katz.

With online cash games currently unavailable, Young’s big win came at the perfect time. With years of experience playing live cash games, Young is better prepared for the poker climate post Black Friday than many of his peers. He continues to play no-limit cash games and recently has ventured into the $400-$800 mixed games that have been running at Aria’s “Ivey’s Room.”

While Young thinks that setting a goal to win a particular tournament might be unrealistic and a waste of time, he admits that competing for the title of Player of the Year would be something that he aspires to.

“If I got off to a good start one year, I would do what my buddy Eric Baldwin did and go after it all year. I think that would be a lot of fun, and watching him do it was incredible. For me to sit here and say that I want to win a WPT title or something like that… of course I want to, but what title you win doesn’t always depend on if you played well.”

For now, Young is continuing to play cash games and the biggest tournaments that come through Vegas, happy to live the life he leads with a great job, friends and family. ♠