The Brothers' Dang: A Success Story
I flew in to Dulles International Airport in Washington D.C. on Wednesday afternoon and was greeted in the passenger pick-up area by a royal blue BMW M5. Two brothers jumped out to greet me. They were different people and had real names, which of course I knew, but it was still hard to shake that I had always thought of them collectively as “Urindanger” and “Jinsokkp,” their online screen names.
For those not already aware, Hac and Z are nosebleed-stakes cash game players on Full Tilt Poker who have won millions of dollars beating up on some of the toughest competition on the internet. The brothers, Di (pronounced “Z”) and Hac Dang, own and share the account. “This is going to be a really boring story,” claims Hac. “We’re not as interesting or as baller as Tom and Dave.” (Editor’s Note: Hac is referring to a story written about internet players Tom “durrr” Dwan and David “Raptor” Benefi eld in our Jan. 2007 issue.) Oh, really — not baller? I ponder this as I look around the sporty interior of the $70,000 BMW. “We really like driving this Car,” Z tells me. “We bought it for our dad But he never wants to drive it. He prefers His old minivan. We also bought our mom a Lexus, but she doesn’t like driving hers either. She is afraid she will do something to it.
We decide to grab a bite to eat, but Ruth’s Chris Steak House doesn’t open for another hour, to the disappointment of all three of us. However, the place we decide on ends up being surprisingly good. We immediately engage in a conversation about sports, and they tell me that they like to play basketball a few times a week. Having just met them and understanding the rivalry between brothers (I have a brother one year younger), I carefully avoid asking who would win in a one-on-one match. I’ll save that question for later.
It’s usually difficult to determine the defining qualities that make a person a very talented poker player. Sometimes the qualities are glaring and easy to notice, such as self discipline or a strong mathematical background. However, there are those players who just have an indiscernible quality that puts them on a different level from those with whom they compete. When speaking with Z and Hac, however, it becomes apparent where their talent and success rise from.
“When we first started playing, we were constantly in competition with one another,” Hac tells me. “Z would play a ton and move up and I would realize that he was getting a lot better than I was, so then I would play constantly until I had matched him or got better, and it would just keep going back and forth.” When Z started really killing 3/6 No Limit on Party Poker, Hac would put in marathon sessions and improve and start beating even bigger games. Eventually, the brothers realized it would be more profitable for them to share their bankrolls. This is a rare situation because it requires 100% trust in your partner. The brothers put their money together and began playing sessions together to help them improve each other’s games. Pretty soon, their personal strengths also became strengths of the other, and their weaknesses became few and far between.
It was at the University of Virginia where the brothers cut their teeth, quickly moving up the stakes. Hac played mostly No Limit, while Z was more proficient in Limit games. Hac began to win more playing in the No Limit games, and Z made the switch. Pretty soon, they were playing in games and bringing in an amount of money weekly that their colleges degrees might allow them to make in a year. Amazingly, they decided to stay in school. Both brothers graduated with degrees in mechanical engineering; and while they both admit it was very difficult to focus on schoolwork while playing so much poker, neither of them regrets the decision to stick it out and finish up. Z spoke to me, “Getting a college education just meant too much to our parents — there was no way we could have dropped out. It didn’t matter how much money we made, we knew we had to finish school.”
After graduation, Hac and Z decided to move back home with their family. Their younger brother, Au, was getting ready to go to the University of Virginia himself. When I asked them if Au was a poker player, they told me that he “played a little and was pretty good.” They also have a much younger brother named Quyen and a little sister named Mimi. It became clear how important it was for them to be around for their younger siblings and, later in my visit, they told me, “It is really important for us to be around them right now and to watch them grow up.” Hac and Z bought the family a new house in Fairfax, Virginia, where the family lives together most of the time. The brothers make routine trips to Las Vegas for various poker things, but they prefer to spend a lot of their time at home in Virginia.
We get to the house and the two youngest siblings are downstairs in what you might call an office, or maybe the game room. The room consists of multiple PCs and laptops situated on a series of tables that form a circle. There is a giant plasma TV on the wall where they can play video games when poker becomes aggravating or they just need a break. The kids are doing their homework, and they constantly come to Z and Hac for help with it. As is often the case, the younger brothers and sister very much look up to the older siblings and emulate them. Even Mimi has played a little poker. “She has this computer game she plays where you can play a sit-n-go for fun, and she has done that a few times. She’s pretty bad, though,” Z tells me. Even at nine years old, your poker abilities are up for evaluation in this household.
They decide to put in a short session for me before we make plans for the evening. Z decides to play some $25/$50 Pot Limit Omaha while Hac finds a game on Full Tilt Poker that he likes. A player, “ip_control” was sitting at a heads-up $100/$200 No
Limit Hold’em table. Before long, Hac was completely immersed in the game. In between helping his little brother with homework or telling me different things about heads-up strategy, he was dragging in pots as big as $50,000. He went up $100,000 in the first hour he was playing, and his opponent asked to play higher. Next thing I know, I am watching a $300/$600 No Limit game with over $150,000 on the table.
When all was said and done, Hac had booked a win over $150,000. He was surprisingly passive after the big win, whereas I knew that if I had just won that kind of money, I would be doing laps around the house screaming at the top of my lungs. I soon realize that keeping a moderate temperament is one of the qualities that makes for great high-stakes players.
It was about that time that I met the third poker player in the family.
Au, their 18-year-old brother and now a student at University of Virginia, came to visit for the evening. Immediately Au is on one of the computers and has six tables open. The brother I had assumed was a moderate middle stakes player is playing $10/$20 and $25/$50 No Limit. Z sits with him and talks him through a couple hands — and all of his advice is so accurate that it seems uncanny to an observer.
While a high-stakes wizard, Z also has a passion for coaching. Twice a week, a group of aspiring players in the area come to their house for a lesson. With a white dry-erase board and all, Z goes through various scenarios with his students, answering questions and creating hypothetical situations. He then lets them open their accounts and play on the computers in the room, while he walks around the room to talk with them and help them with tough situations.
He even had a small televised brush-in with a different coach this summer at the World Series of Poker. Daniel Negreanu, well known for taking on his “protégés,” was seated at a table with Z in the Main Event. The cameras caught Negreanu telling Z that he should be doing some things differently while Z was reading his copy of Harrington on Hold’em. Daniel obviously had no idea he was talking down to a high-stakes No Limit player, but I still ask Z if maybe he wished he had chirped back. “I guess I kind of wish
I had said something to him. I think maybe I should have challenged him heads-up or something. That might have made for good TV.”
Finally, I ask them if I could get the brothers to play some heads-up against one another. They tell me that they actually have been planning to do that because there is still an argument over the rooms in the house. They haven’t been in this house long, and it seems both brothers are interested in the same room, so they decide to play a series of games to decide who gets the room. The games they will play are undecided except one, which will be 1,000 hands of heads-up No Limit Hold’em at the $1/$2 stakes. They tell me Halo 3 might be one of the others. So the brothers load up six tables each at the low stakes, which prompts Mimi, their little nine-year-old sister, to come stand by Hac and say, “Why are you playing $1/$2 as ‘Urindanger’? People will think you are busto!”
I wouldn’t imagine that they could take these stakes seriously. One full buy-in in this game is the size of one of their blinds in their regular games. I imagine myself playing $.01/$.02 Hold’em and realize there is no way it could keep my attention. But one thing becomes clear quickly: When it is competition between the brothers, the stakes have nothing to do with it. Both of them take the game very seriously. They occasionally point to hands for me and laugh some, but their expressions go back to ones of intense focus. I kind of wonder to myself if booking a win versus a brother here is as significant to them as booking a win at the bigger stakes.
The match ends incredibly close. The variance is so insignificant that I won’t even mention who won. After 1,000 hands, one of them is up one half of a buy-in. We spend the rest of the evening shooting pool with a group of their friends, many of whom they coach in small-to-mid-stakes cash games. We bet $1 or $2 on pool games or different shots, which is quite the change from watching them play with nearly $500,000 across various tables earlier in the evening. The next morning, the brothers pick me up for lunch before my flight out of D.C. We hit an excellent sushi buffet, and at this point I get to hear a little more about how their family is so important to them.
I ask if the future might hold different things for them, if perhaps they will take on their own respective bankrolls and do things on their own. “For right now, I think we are exactly where we want to be. We are around our family and we get to see our little brothers and sister all of the time. We get to help them with their homework and be there for them,” Hac tells me. Z adds on, “I think we’re both really happy helping the family and being able to play together and helping each other out. It’s just a really great situation for us.”
Seems like a smart idea to me. Right now, as I write this, “Urindanger” is sitting across six different tables with hundreds of thousands of dollars collectively on the felt.
