Lee Watkinson Living The Good Life
A shirtless man takes his position behind the panther and puts his arm around one of the two naked women at his side. “Grab her boob like you mean it!” shouts his fi ancé.
This is when most men might wake up. To say it’s another day in the life of a professional poker player, we’re sorry to say, would be a misrepresentation. Especially when that player is Lee Watkinson. Most people are used to seeing Watkinson as… Well, most people aren’t used to seeing him at all. That’s his style.
In an era when many tournament players will do anything to catch the attention of the television camera, from outlandish outfi ts to running around with a chair on their heads, Watkinson disappears at a table. He’s the silent assassin, cloaked by a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses, who goes unnoticed until he’s announcing a reraise. Even those who have played regularly with Watkinson have trouble distinguishing him.
“Is that ‘Chimpanzee Lee’ or ‘Rodeo Lee?’” asked Phil Laak, who saw Watkinson almost daily at a Pot Limit Hold’em game at Commerce Casino near Los Angeles in 2002. “It’s funny because I’ve known them both for so long and I still get them mixed up.”
“Rodeo Lee” is Lee Markholt, Watkinson’s good friend and fellow professional poker player, who not only shares his fi rst name but also his shaved head and quiet table demeanor.
Many confuse the two players, though they should be easier to tell apart with Watkinson, the 2007 World Series of Poker Main Event fi nal tableist, stepping out of his shell and showing another side of himself. Perhaps Watkinson can now be known as ““Leopardspot Lee.” Las Vegas residents may have seen billboards of Watkinson with similar racy photos to the ones in this magazine scattered around the city.
“He looks like he’s some sort of pimp,” said Timmi DeRosa, Watkinson’s fi ancé. “It’s so natural, it’s hysterical. He’s so much different in regular situations than he is at the table. You need to have a lot of confi dence and really feel comfortable in your own skin to pull these pictures off or they would come out phony and ridiculous. When people see the photos, they’ll say it has to be part of his personality or he couldn’t pull it off.”
Watkinson, who attributes his ease with unknown naked women draped on him to his experiences at strip clubs when he was younger, did the photos to promote his and DeRosa’s new jewelry line Hardcore Elegance, which he and the female models wear in the shots. The pictures also mark a change in his approach to a public image, at De- Rosa’s urging.
Watkinson, 41, is the all-time money winner in Omaha games at the World Series of Poker, with a bracelet in Pot Limit Omaha in 2006. He has nearly $4 million in tournament earnings even though he started on the tournament circuit less than fi ve years ago. Yet his name-recognition is less than many players who don’t possess near his credentials but have talkative table habits and catchy nicknames.
“I didn’t try to stay out of the spotlight, I just didn’t seek it out,” Watkinson said. “I didn’t get a shark and shove it in people’s faces or whine on TV when I got busted out of a tournament. I wasn’t hiding or anything, I was just being myself. I didn’t do anything for the cameras and didn’t not do anything because the cameras were there. I know I can try to put on some kind of fake persona to garner more attention or be outrageous, but I always felt like I should concentrate on winning and then the rest will follow.”
DeRosa convinced Watkinson that it was okay to place himself in position to get attention, and that putting himself out there could help generate interest for his other ventures, which include the jewelry line, a record label, and a charitable foundation that helps chimpanzees.
If he would let people see what she sees every day, DeRosa knew they’d fi nd a cool guy buried underneath that gray hood and expressionless stare.
HANG TEN
Anyone shocked to see the photos of Watkinson with the nude models would be made speechless by the pictures he has boxed up at a storage unit in San Diego.
Before he hit the tournament circuit, Watkinson was a California surfer dude — his long hair blowing in the wind as he caught a wave. During much of the 1990s, playing poker in live cash games was his means to get by fi nancially while doing what he loved.
“Surfi ng was the priority when I lived at the beach, whether it was Oceanside, San Diego, or Manhattan Beach,” Watkinson said. “Poker would fi t around the waves. If there were no waves, I’d play poker in the daytime. If there were waves, I would play a few hours at night until I got tired. That was really the best thing about poker, aside from not having a boss, was it fi t your schedule. It gave you the freedom to play where and when you wanted. Now, with the internet, I’m really envious of the young people today who can go anywhere in the world and make a living playing poker. They’re not just limited like I was to places that had casinos.”
Watkinson would rent a house right on the beach in Oceanside or Carlsbad, near San Diego, for $1,000 a month during the fall and winter months. Between surf outings, he would hit the Ocean’s 11 or Sycuan casinos for Limit Hold’em games.
“I kind of had a beach-bum phase for a lot of my twenties,” Watkinson said. “I wasn’t a competitive surfer but I could surf in pretty much any conditions. Maybe not everywhere in Hawaii, but pretty much anything that hits San Diego or L.A.” Another reason surfi ng, and not poker, was Watkinson’s focus was the tedious side of Limit Hold’em.
“I didn’t enjoy playing Limit,” Watkinson said. “It was just a job. I would play enough to pay my rent and live comfortably. The fi rst time I started playing Pot Limit, which was similar to No Limit, was when I found a game in Oceanside in 2001. I really started to enjoy poker again. I started to make a lot more money, too. I see Pot Limit and No Limit as more of an art while Limit is more of a science. In Limit, there’s a right way to play and a wrong way to play, and if you have too much imagination you’re going to wind up losing.”
ORIGINS OF A POKER PLAYER
Watkinson had played nickel and dime games with his friends in high school, though it was a different game that made him pack up and head out to Reno the summer after he graduated from Eastern Washington University with a bachelor’s degree in economics.
During a job fair at the college Watkinson’s senior year, a recruiter came through looking for blackjack dealers for Harrah’s. Watkinson got a book on blackjack and started to read about counting cards, then headed to Reno for some summer fun before starting graduate school. When he arrived at Harrah’s, he found the blackjack dealers school had already fi lled up. The hotel hired him on to carry change around the slot machines instead, a job he couldn’t stand. He left after two weeks when he got a job as a bellman/ security guard/parker at a small timeshare hotel. All the while he was playing blackjack on the side, but he found it hard to make money on a small bankroll.
“Your edge is like one percent,” Watkinson said. So he gave poker a try and quickly turned $600 into $4,000 in his fi nal weeks before having to head back to Eastern Washington to get his teaching credential or master’s degree — he hadn’t yet decided.
Watkinson never made it to class. He found a casino nearby and won thirty days in a row. Poker was his new career.
CATCHING TOURNAMENT FEVER
After discovering Pot Limit Hold’em, Watkinson’s interest in poker picked up. He moved to Los Angeles and started playing six days a week in a big game at Commerce Casino that included such poker professionals as Laak, Antonio Esfandiari, Bobby Huff, and Gabe Thaler.
“He was very quiet and very reserved, but a cool quiet,” Esfandiari said. “He had personality, he just didn’t turn it on very often. He was very patient and seemed to win money all the time. I’m down lifetime to Lee for sure.”
Though he had played poker professionally for nearly fi fteen years, Watkinson had never gotten into tournaments. “Back in the 90s, if you look at the prize pools and buy-ins, Phil Hellmuth was probably barely getting by,” Watkinson said. “After 2003, now he’s a multimillionaire. But in the 90s, I was making more money than him playing cash games.”
When he saw the tournament poker explosion in 2003, with the ESPN coverage, the hole cards, and amateur Chris Moneymaker taking home the loot, Watkinson’s opinion started to change. Then Paul Spitzberg, another player in the Commerce game, offered to back Watkinson for tournaments.
“It wasn’t a hard decision,” Spitzberg said. “Lee didn’t have enough money to be entering into all these things in the beginning until he started winning, and I was able to do that. Lee’s as good as they come at tournaments. He’s unreadable and very good at reading other people, and always has been. I was working then and had no time to be able to play myself, so I’d get my thrills that way. He made me a lot of money.”
Spitzberg paid for half of Watkinson’s entry fees as he started on the tournament circuit in December of 2003. Watkinson immediately took third in a WPT Pot Limit Omaha event, then broke through for a second-place fi nish to Ted Lawson in a Pot Limit Omaha event at the World Series, the same event he would win a year later. In August, he fi nished second in back-to-back WPT events for more than $1 million in earnings, and his tournament career was off.
Even with his success, Watkinson continues the same backing deal to this day, though he now has a different investor. “It’s good to lay off some of the risk in a tournament,” Watkinson said. “It’s like paying commission on the sale of a product. It’s the best check I ever write. I’m always happy to pay my backer and my backers have always been friends.”
WORLD SERIES MEMORIES
Watkinson’s greatest success, and biggest disappointment, might have been outlasting 6,350 people for his eighth-place fi nish at last year’s WSOP Main Event. As the only well-known professional at the fi - nal table, there were high expectations for Watkinson, who entered with a somewhat short stack that ranked sixth among the fi nal nine.
But Watkinson never was able to capitalize on his advantage in experience as amateur Jerry Yang bulldozed the table from the get go.
“I was pretty surprised,” Watkinson said. “I had played with him some the last day before the fi nal table and he came in as a totally different player. He’s not a great player. He had virtually no experience. But, whether by accident or not, he just played the perfect strategy for his skill level. If he continued to try to play tight and outplay the players who were at the fi nal table, he had really no chance. But by taking that hyper-aggressive, fi erce style, he maximized his potential. It really showed the role confi dence plays in No Limit Hold’em, whether it’s confi dence in your playing ability or confi dence in God or luck, or whatever he had. That confi dence was really hard to deal with.”
As Yang ran over the table with raises and reraises pre-fl op nearly every hand, people expected the pro to step in and stop him. Finally, a little over an hour into the fi nal table, Watkinson took a stand when Yang raised from 240k to 880k from the small blind after the table folded around. Watkinson pushed all in another 8.7 million chips with an off-suit A-7. Yang, who already had a t r e m e n d o u s chip lead, made the call with A-9 and his hand held up. Watkinson collected $585,699, his second-biggest payday, but could have had so much more.
“I think it was a small mistake,” Watkinson said of pushing. “I don’t think it was a big mistake either way. I talked to Mike Matusow at the Poker After Dark table about it recently. He said, `Why did you want to tangle with somebody who had been pushing every pot? Why don’t you wait and pick your spots?’ But, to me, sitting at Yang’s left and with him pushing every pot, whenever you play you’re going to be going against him. If I wait for a spot I know I have him dominated, I might have anteed off half my stack and would only getting back to where I was. I fi gured pushing at that point, I’m probably going to get him off the hand and maybe slow his momentum down try to stop the steamroller and maybe get something going for myself. I felt like, at that point, if Jerry kept going where he was going he would dominate the table and I wasn’t going to have a shot to win.”
Watkinson also was playing a different strategy because winning was his only focus.
“In a normal tournament, I probably wouldn’t have done that because I’d want to move up in the money,” he said. “But I was getting $10 million from Full Tilt if I won because I came in through a Full Tilt satellite. Eighteen million plus winning the Main Event, which is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. To come in third wasn’t even fi ve percent of coming in fi rst. So I was playing like it was winner take all.”
A NEW YEAR, A NEW LOOK
Watkinson will be harder to miss at this year’s World Series Main Event, whether he goes deep again or not. Hiding behind hooded sweatshirts is out. They don’t match his jewelry.
“His whole wardrobe, his whole demeanor has changed,” said Lawson, who became friends with Watkinson at that 2005 Omaha World Series fi nal table and will be the best man at his wedding. “He’s one of the sharpest dressers in poker right now. That’s becoming his new image, really. He looks good all the time now. That’s not the way it was when we fi rst met. He was your typical poker player — grubby t-shirt and jeans or whatever, disheveled in some ways. Now he’s extremely immaculate. It’s been quite a transformation.”
Watkinson’s poker is shining along with his new attire. He was off to his best start to a season ever entering the World Series, including a Pot Limit Omaha championship at the Aussie Millions, and ranks sixth in BLUFF’s Player of the Year standings.
A few years ago, Watkinson wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing jewelry. It doesn’t exactly fi t his tough-guy image. Watkinson was a college wrestler at Eastern Washington. His favorite television programming is mixed martial arts, in which he roots for fi ghters Georges St. Pierre and Randy Couture.
“He’s not a guy you want to mess around with,” Lawson said. “I can tell you, he’d kick your ass. When I was coaching high school wrestling in Florida, he came out to practice and kicked all their asses — and I had some really good kids.”
Watkinson said that’s the best part about his jewelry line — that it works for a man’s man. “It’s really the only kind of jewelry I would wear,” Watkinson said. “I’m not into diamonds or bling-bling jewelry. I like chunky, silver, rock-n-roll type of jewelry. The stuff for men is not feminine. It’s hardcore.”
PET PROJECT
The only wrestling Watkinson does these days is with primates. He and DeRosa started the Cortland Brandenberg Foundation to support chimpanzees that have been discarded by Hollywood or medical research laboratories. He directly takes care of two chimpanzees, Buddy and C.J., in a roomy habitat he had built in Las Vegas. They even have their own television.
“Wrestling is their favorite thing,” Watkinson said. “They’re pretty much unbeatable, even though you outweigh them.”
Chimpanzees in captivity have an average lifespan of sixty years, but are only useful as actors or test subjects in their early age because they get more aggressive as they get older.
“It’s really horrible when animal actors get all dressed up and everyone loves them for fi ve or six years, then they show aggression and they’re thrown in an 8-by-8 foot cage for life,” DeRosa said. “They’re warehoused. These guys are very similar to us and it’s horrible what we do to them. Imagine being told how adorable you are and then be put in a cage never to see anyone again.”
Watkinson fi rst became interested in chimpanzees in 2004 and donates money to their cause whenever he has a big tournament score. He hopes to build large, staffed sanctuaries in Las Vegas and California to house the animals in the future. To do so, he’ll need others to support his foundation as well. That’s the main reason he has put himself out there in ways no one ever imagined seeing him.
The photos will be a talking point at this year’s World Series, and Watkinson expects to take some ribbing. In time, he’ll be happy if that hype fades away and Laak’s nickname of “Chimpanzee Lee” becomes his lasting impression.
