Table 1: Poker Villain? Shaun Deeb Trolled His Own Grandma

Shaun Deeb has never shied away from being the “villain” and that persona has served him well with a career that has so far seen him rack up $14.3 million in live tournament winnings, including six World Series of Poker bracelets, and the 2018 POY title.
The online poker pioneer from New York has always been one of the more outspoken players at the table, unafraid to call out bad behavior or shady individuals. But that hasn’t stopped him from getting down in the muck himself, inserting himself into cheating scandals, picking Twitter fights, and even enjoying the occasional well-timed slow roll. (There was also the misguided time he dressed in drag to play the ladies event at the WSOP, which still doesn’t sit well with some nearly 15 years later.)
Still, it is clear that Deeb deeply cares about poker and its future, and over the course of two decades as a pro he feels he is a good judge of what is and what isn’t good for the game. The family man joined the Table 1 podcast to talk about his life and career, and why he is fine playing the role of poker’s dark knight.
Check out some of the podcast highlights below and you can watch or listen to the entire episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or any podcast app.
Shaun Deeb: Poker and gambling was always a family activity for me. My grandmother taught me card games at a young age. She’s the oldest woman that ever played the World Series of Poker main event.
Justin Young: I heard she tried to rebuy after she busted.
Shaun Deeb: This would have been the most viral clip in poker. My grandma was 92 years old. For a Christmas gift, I bought her into the main event. I flew out all my aunts, siblings, dad, everyone… just to sweat her.
The WSOP was alerted she was coming. They had her do the “shuffle up and deal.” Nolan Dalla, the greatest media person ever, fed her this line like, “You’re all playing for second.” She said yes. Imagine a 92-year-old lady saying that. It was awesome.
I’m always trolling. I’ll even troll my own grandmother. I give her a $10k brick and say, “This is for a rebuy.” So, she plays day 1 like a cash game, sitting with the $10k brick behind her. She ends up going broke… the guy who had a set versus her was basically telling her to fold, but she was like, “I can’t fold this,” and called with top pair.
So, she gets felted, and then takes the $10k and wings it to the dealer, and says rebuy. The dealer pushes it back and says, “Ma’am, this is a freezeout.” She says, “No, I don’t want to go yet. I want to rebuy.” And she’s like, “Goddamn it, Shaun!”
Justin Young: So you really did fucking troll your grandma. (laughing)
Shaun Deeb: Equal opportunity trolling. She played it for two years. After the first year I was back home in New York… and I was driving around and she said, “That was the greatest day of my life.” That was awesome to me. That was great for my family.
When she passed away a few years ago, two-thirds of the video memoriam was just clips from the WSOP. I reached out to Mori Eskandani [at PokerGO]. He even sent some footage that had never been aired. They were great to her, great to our family.
Justin Young: That’s awesome.
(Deeb also delved into his penchant for trolling and being known as one of the game’s villains.)
Shaun Deeb: Poker’s had so many crazy iterations [of poker villains]. We went through the old school phase, and I feel like 10 years ago everyone just tried to be robotic. A few years ago, I was telling my wife that I was really considering rolling into the poker villain role, to just be the asshole at the table.
Art Parmann: But you didn’t go there? (laughing)
Shaun Deeb: I said to someone on Twitter, “Do you know how many tweets I’ve had that my wife had told me I can’t say?”
Art Parmann: If you could see his drafts.
Shaun Deeb: I don’t do drafts. I just come up with them off the top of my head. I usually think of the most vulgar, offensive thing possible initially. My wife has basically threatened to divorce me multiple times for many of my tweets.
But I really thought poker was lacking a ‘good’ asshole at the table. All the assholes in poker were fucking fish.
Justin Young: Give me some examples.
Shaun Deeb: [Mike] Matusow, Randall Emmett.
Justin Young: Asshole is a little strong, but Matt Berkey is someone who is also opinionated.
Shaun Deeb: I was going for more offensive than just opinionated. I want to be basically like Matusow, the way he was being the bad boy. At the WSOP in the $300 Gladiator, it’s 600-1,200 blinds. The guy under the gun opens for 3,600. I go all in for 4,000. I had just lost a big pot. First bullet, I’m like, “Alright, I’ll be out soon.” One of his good friends is in the big blind. They had said how crazy it was when he moved to his table and there are all these players.
I know they’re very good friends… and the guy in the big blind calls and the opener calls, and then the guy in the big blind checks dark, and the other guy said, “Oh, I check dark.” I’m like, “Come on, guys, you have got to play here.” So, I get the floor over. Keep in mind, this was one-eighth of a starting stack in a $300 tournament.
Justin Young: This is a dream, by the way, to play a WSOP event. It’s a $300 shit show.
Art Parmann: Sorry guys, you’re not stealing $10 of equity.
Shaun Deeb: It’s literally lower than $10, but I am a stickler for rules and wanted everyone to learn the lesson. The floor comes over and I’m like, “They’re checking it down dark, not trying to play the hand properly.” The floor is like, “Well, did they say anything?” I said no.
Then one guy says, “Isn’t the point of a tournament to try to bust people and check it down.” I’m telling the floor, “You’ve got to step up and do your job and give this guy a penalty because you can’t openly admit to colluding like that. Teach them a fucking lesson.”
Anyway, the floor comes over and they get mad at me. Matt Glantz said, “Why are you getting in fights with people in a $300 tournament?” It’s the rules. These people can learn from me what proper etiquette is. You’ve got to know that this stuff is not okay. I don’t care how much dollar equity this spot is. I want it to be a learning experience for these 10 players at my table, to learn that this is not how you play tournaments, and also you’re hurting your own equity by doing this at this stage of the tournament.
So, I get in a fight with them for like 20 minutes. I then run my stack up and now I cover them both, and my whole goal is to bust these two. I was trying the hardest I will ever try in my life in a $300 tournament, and I knocked out one of them. I was so mad when our table broke and I didn’t get the other one.
Justin Young: [You started online.] At what point did you really get heavy into live poker?
Shaun Deeb: I always played a little bit live. The first few years of my career… I was down $1.5 million. This was 18 years ago, before they had high rollers.
Justin Young: It’s really hard to lose $1.5 million [back then].
Art Parmann: He was funding future high rollers.
Shaun Deeb: I funded a lot of shit. The crazy thing is in all those years, I never had a losing month. While I was just down infinite live because I won so much online in those days.
Art Parmann: It was your tuition.
Shaun Deeb: The first thing that got me on the map live was the big satellite I chopped.
Justin Young: The big satellite, by the way, was the $25k that gets you into the $1 million buy-in Big One for One Drop.
Shaun Deeb: It’s 2013 and the night before I was playing a $300-$600 mixed cash game. I played mostly cash back then as I transitioned away from online tournaments. I’m playing with these guys and the big million-dollar tournament is the talk of the town.
I’m crushing this game. I’m winning every pot. I was up $125,000. I think I stacked Hasan Habib first and he said, “I have a really good feeling about you in that satellite.” I said, “I don’t want to sell. I just want to play.” This is like pre-market police, but I still cared about that stuff.
I was like, “It’s a turbo. You shouldn’t buy. I don’t want to sell. I’ll sell at 1.25, but you should not buy.” He pulls out $600 out of his pocket, hands it to me and then is like, “I’ll take 4%.” (Other players then followed suit.)
Art Parmann: So not only did you stack all of them, they also came out of pocket for a negative EV buy.
Shaun Deeb: I’m fine with telling people it is a minus EV buy if they want to do a lottery pick. I was completely upfront. I’d been playing for 30 hours and the satellite had already started. I late reg at the last possible moment. I was planning on showing up on time and going to sleep, but the cash game was so good.
I get to the final table and have a ton of chips. One of the big mistakes in my career, was when we were six handed. It was myself, Gus Hansen, I think Elky (Bertrand Grospellier), Will “The Thrill” (Failla), Jason Somerville, and I forget the sixth.
Anyway, me and Gus have like 80% of the chips and the payouts are a $1 million seat, which is worth $888,000 because of rake, $1 million in cash for second, and third place is $400,000. This is the biggest bubble anyone’s played in poker at this moment. The other three players asked if they could agree to a chop themselves. Me and Gus said okay to that, but I didn’t realize how much that fucks over my own equity.
Art Parmann: Interesting, how does it fuck you?
Shaun Deeb: Because they can call off wider… because they’re already guaranteed $100k-ish. They have flatter pay jumps. They can call off in spots they wouldn’t normally because it would have been a $0 to $400k bubble. If one or two of them got a seat, they were already guaranteed like $200k and they could play it more like a regular tournament.
Art Parmann: So, all their pressure goes away.
Shaun Deeb: Yeah, it was a big mistake. Anyway, they all go out and me and Gus get heads-up. It’s now 3 a.m., I’ve been up 52 hours. The tournament starts at noon the next day. Now I have 75% of myself because I sold 16% in the (cash) game, which is a huge percentage of my net worth in a million-dollar tournament if I win the seat.
I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can sell in time for this tournament.’ I talked to Gus and he’s like, “I already sold all my action for this. I was planning on playing. I didn’t wire correctly, so I want to play.”
So I said, “I’ll take second.” I raise all but one chip, he goes all in, I fold. Then he wins the next hand. I end up getting second, but I was the alternate for the tournament. I put out a tweet to sell action. I woke up six hours later… and I think I sold $1.2 million worth, oversold what I wanted. People always tell me it was the biggest fuck up by not trying to play. It would have been the softest tournament because it was like Guy [Laliberte] and 20 of his friends who barely played poker.
I ended up just collecting the money and got a million (with some of that going to the original cash game players). The cash game was really good that week, those guys loved me. A few days later, my now wife comes to Vegas. She had no idea I won the satellite, and we go on a couple dates and that was all she wrote. That whole week was the most insane week. ♠