The November 9 Spotlights
“November Nine” Spotlight: Ivan Demidov
When Alex Kravchenko made the fi nal table of the 2007 World Series of Poker Main Event observers treated it as a novelty – a Russian at the fi nal table, that’s swell.
When Alex Kravchenko made the fi nal table of the 2007 World Series of Poker Main Event observers treated it as a novelty – a Russian at the fi nal table, that’s swell.
But it’s not Evdakov who’s in position to be the face of poker in Russia. The title of potential poster boy belongs to Ivan Demidov. When he returns to the Rio in early November as part of the November Nine he’ll unbag 24,400,000 chips – less than two million behind chip leader Dennis Phillips.
“It’s the fi rst year that a lot of Russians came,” says Demidov from his home in Moscow, where he’s been since late July. “They were inspired by Kravchenko’s results last year I guess, I don’t know. But there was over fi fty Russians playing the Main Event this year.”
The 27-year-old credits the Russian invasion to two factors – an exploding poker market in Russia and one businessman who saw the skill of Russia’s top players and staked a number of his comrades in this year’s event – including Demidov. “It’s booming here right now and it’s not underground by any means. We have a lot of $5/$10, $10/$20, and some very big games, but we lack the $25/$50-ish games.”
Demidov doesn’t play a lot of cash games and tournaments in Moscow haven’t enjoyed the same infl ux of players as the cash games, so he plays most of his poker online. Being successful in a competitive environment online is nothing new for Demidov. Before he discovered poker via a friend, he was playing Starcraft and Warcraft 3 professionally.
“I was pretty successful; in Starcraft I’d say I was very good. But there were no live tourneys in Europe. The only live tourneys were in Korea. You had to stay there for a long time and I was studying, so I didn’t play any,” says Demidov, who played in the limited European Warcraft 3 tournament schedule while attending Moscow State University.
“Some other players I knew switched to poker,” says Demidov. “And they helped me to get into it. A friend transferred me $50 on PokerStars, but it wasn’t until a year later that I started playing.”
After honing his skills online and through the dozen or so live tournaments he played in Europe, Demidov boarded a plane to Las Vegas last December for the Five Diamond Poker Classic at the Bellagio. Despite not recording a single cash, the experience he gained playing in the ten to fi fteen tournaments there gave him the confi dence to return to Las Vegas for the WSOP this past summer, where he played more than twenty events.
Demidov’s sole cash at the WSOP prior to the Main Event came in Event #44 ($1,000 No Limit Hold’em w/Rebuys) where he just missed the fi nal table with an 11th-place fi nish. Despite only cashing once, Demidov is guaranteed a positive ROI for himself and his backer. But being backed in the Series has Demidov thinking a little more conservatively about his post-WSOP spending spree.
“I’m only getting a percentage of my winnings and since a good house in Moscow costs well over $500,000, I’m waiting for November,” says Demidov. “So I’m going to buy a car, some other smallish stuff and that’s it.”
But the young Russian also sees the bigger picture and isn’t at all afraid of what lies ahead for him if he wins the whole shebang. He’s sharp enough to recognize that this position is of the once-in-a-lifetime variety and is happy to have an opportunity that most poker players only dream of.
“Poker is nothing like hockey. In hockey if you are good you are going to win all the time,” says Demidov of the sport that is among the most popular and storied in Russian culture. “In poker if you are good you just win more often than the other guy. I am pretty sure I won’t have any other good results in like a year at least.”
Poker’s growing popularity in Russia has led to some recent changes that can only bode well for Demidov as the face of the game in his homeland.
“Poker is now an offi cial sport in Russia. There is a sport poker federation now,” says Demidov. “That’s why I am only paying 13% tax on winnings, and not 27%. It’s considered an income tax and not tax on winnings.” Further, Demidov expects the new sport to make its mark on popular culture. “This sport thing just became legal, so it takes time for television networks to schedule some shows.”
As the world prepares to meet the November Nine – and the November Nine prepare to meet the world – there’s at least one poker show that Russian networks will be clamoring to get their hands on, and Demidov is the reason why.
“November Nine” Spotlight: Craig Marquis
When Tom “durrr” Dwan turned 21 last July, poker observers assumed that he’d make his presence felt at the 2008 World Series of Poker in a huge way. But after making two fi nal tables, posting eighth-place fi nishes both times, Dwan fi zzled out of the Main Event in the fi rst level of play. At that point it appeared that Dwan’s impact on the 2008 WSOP was over.
But not so fast. When the fi nal nine players went on hiatus for 117 days on July 15th, one of those players owed his presence there to Dwan.
The November Nine all have interesting stories about how they were turned on to the game of poker and what drove them to work so hard. For Craig Marquis, who will return to the Rio with the second smallest chip stack (10,210,000), it was a New Year’s Eve party in 2006 hosted by — you guessed it — Tom Dwan and his good friend and roommate David “Raptor” Benefi eld. Marquis, a student at the time, was invited to the party by a mutual friend and introduced to the dynamic duo of online poker.
“I saw this nice house and nice things and nice cars and these guys were younger than me,” says the 23-year-old Marquis of the then 19- and 20-year-old online poker phenoms. “I was like ‘How the hell does this happen?’ and I found out it was from playing poker. I thought ‘Wow, these guys aren’t any smarter than me, I could do that too.’”
That’s when Marquis set out to emulate the success of Dwan and Benefi eld, fi rst by opening an account on Full Tilt Poker (his fi rst online poker account) and depositing $100. He started grinding the $5.50 sit-n-goes and quickly began working his way up in stakes.
“I didn’t practice very good bankroll management at the very beginning and basically just played the stakes based on how much money I had at the time,” laughs Marquis. “But I never ended up having to redeposit after that $100 initial investment. I played all the way up to $200/$400 fairly quickly.”
After their initial introduction, a friendship quickly developed between Marquis, Dwan, and Benefi eld. Marquis found himself getting tutored by the best young players in the game. With barely more than eighteen months of playing experience, Marquis isn’t intimidated by the opportunity to be a part of history and isn’t at all anxious about the media onslaught that’s sure to follow once ESPN introduces him to the world.
“It should be fun. I enjoy all this interview stuff,” says Marquis. “I don’t get nervous around cameras; I mean, I don’t really get nervous. It’s not something I mind.”
Marquis doesn’t mind the obligations that come with being a part of poker history and that might have something to do with the $900,670 he left the Rio with on July 15th. All nine players were paid ninth-place money that day and the former fi nance student has found interesting ways to diversify his portfolio since returning home to Texas.
“My big purchase was my car. I ordered a brand new 2009 Audi S5. That was my big splurge or whatever you want to call it,” says Marquis. “I don’t even know if I’m going to have it before November. I had to have it built and it could take three to four months.”
In the meantime, Marquis has signed on with Full Tilt Poker and is now one of their featured pro players with his name in red — something that makes the whole experience seem even stranger.
“It’s really surreal. I’ve played almost exclusively on Full Tilt since I started; I haven’t really played on any other sites,” admits Marquis. “Being able to go from micro-stakes grinder to mid-stakes grinder to high stakes player and then become one of their red pros within a year and a half, it’s friggin’ awesome. It’s pretty hard to imagine it all. It feels pretty crazy.”
While he’s taken some time since leaving Las Vegas to relax and reset, he knows that the coming weeks will give him plenty of opportunity to get prepared to return to the Rio in pursuit of the most prestigious title in poker — World Champion.
“I’ll talk to Tom and Dave a bit, but I don’t feel a real need to revolutionize my game. I have a style that I’m very comfortable playing,” says Marquis. “I’m not going to worry about that kind of stuff until we get closer to playing the tournament.”
And what happens to the still-undriven Audi S5 if Marquis wins the Main Event and suddenly has an additional $8.1 million to spend?
“I’ll probably give it to my mom,” laughs Marquis. “I’m going to buy an Aston Martin DBS.”
“November Nine” Spotlight: Scott Montgomery
On Sunday, July 14 poker fans watching GSN’s coverage of the World Poker Tour’s L.A. Poker Classic were treated to one of those fi nal table blow-ups that happen from time to time. One of those train wrecks where a player comes in with an overwhelming chip lead only to bow out early, left to wonder what could have been.
As the episode aired, that very same player, Scott Montgomery, was at the Rio fi ghting his way towards the fi nal table in the World Series of Poker Main Event. He was hoping to avoid a similar departure as the event played down to the November Nine.
“I did watch some of it on the dinner break,” recalls Montgomery, who did survive that night and will return in November. “I was pretty focused on what was happening here though. I’m sure I’m getting ripped up in the forums right now.”
With 19,690,000 in chips, Montgomery sits in third place. He hopes that his experience at the LAPC fi nal table will not only give him an edge on the felt come November, but will help him better handle the attention that’s sure to come once his face is all over ESPN.
“I have made a fi nal table on the World Poker Tour, but that hadn’t even been on TV until that night of the World Series. I’ve done some smaller interviews, but nothing like this,” says Montgomery. “It will all be different once it actually gets on TV and people start to recognize my face. It will be different, especially if I win. It’s going to be strange knowing you’re not going to be able to walk around without lots of people recognizing you.”
Once that night was over – and tournament director Jack Effel put the nine players on a 117-day break – Montgomery returned home to his family and some much needed rest.
“I haven’t been doing much so far, taking some time off and visiting family. I was down there for the whole World Series, so after a couple months of playing poker every day I could use some time off,” admits Montgomery. “[Friends and family] were all super happy, everybody congratulated me, saying how proud they were. Lots of them had been following it online, so they knew exactly what was going on up to the minute. But my parents, my sister – they were just ecstatic, way happier than I was at the time probably.”
Montgomery is part of a collection of Canadian players that attended the University of Waterloo and have found success in big-time poker tournaments. That group includes 2007 European Poker Tour Dortmund winner Mike “Timex” McDonald, 2006 PokerStars Caribbean Poker Adventure winner Steve Paul-Ambrose, and WPT and WSOP winner Nenad Medic. But much to the chagrin of conspiracy theorists and UW recruiters, Montgomery says there’s nothing special going on at Waterloo, at least poker-wise.
“Honestly I don’t know any of those guys and I never played poker at Waterloo,” says Montgomery, who picked up the game while teaching English just outside of Tokyo, Japan. “I see all these Canadian poker players and they’re always from Waterloo. I don’t know what the connection is, but I don’t have anything to do with it.”
Montgomery has been playing on the professional circuit full time since his LAPC performance. Rather than spend some of the $900,670 he took home when play was suspended in July, he hasn’t splurged on anything beyond a new computer and a few wardrobe updates.
“I had just won the [LAPC] money a couple of months before and I went out and bought myself a new car then. But mainly I’m a pretty frugal guy, most of my money just goes into investments and paying for all the tournaments and travel over the next couple of months. I’m not the type of guy that’s going to go out and spend a couple hundred thousand on a car or anything like that.”
Another thing the 26-year-old won’t be spending any money on before returning to the Rio is coaching from other pro players, something a lot of poker industry observers assumed all of the November Nine would do.
“I’ve heard all the talk about it beforehand, but it seems kind of silly to me. If I got together with other pros I could discuss strategy and stuff, but I wouldn’t consider it coaching. I’ve had offers from people online saying ‘I’ll coach you for fi ve percent of your winnings’ and that just sounds crazy to me,” says Montgomery. “I never thought poker was the kind of thing you could be taught. I read some poker books, but I never found them helpful. And I never watched any of those poker training videos or got into long drawn-out discussions about poker tactics.”
With one major tournament fi nal table under his belt, Montgomery already has a leg up on his competition and doesn’t believe that any coach will help him come November. Instead, he’s focused on getting back on the circuit and playing as many live tournaments as he can before resuming the Main Event.
“Seems to me the way to learn poker is to play, not to have somebody tell you how you should be playing.”
“November Nine” Spotlight: Darus Suharto
Everybody’s been asked the question before... if you were to win the lottery tomorrow, would you go to work the next day?
The answer tends to fall into two categories — obvious variations on “hell no,” and the idealistic “yes, I’d want to stay and work, I love my job.” That answer normally draws raised eyebrows and the “sure you would buddy” look. But those doubters haven’t met Darus Suharto, the family man and accountant who also happens to be sixth in chips in the 2008 World Series of Poker Main Event.
Leaving the Rio in mid-July, Suharto took the ninthplace money that was paid to each of the remaining players ($900,670) and returned home to Toronto and his job at one of Canada’s top accounting fi rms, not to clean out his offi ce but to get caught up on work.
“Some people asked what my plan is and I said ‘go back to work.’ ‘Why would you go back to work?’ Well I have a job, I have a commitment,” says Suharto. “I cannot leave my boss stranded. But my boss knows that and those that know me well know what kind of person I am.”
While other members of the November Nine may have gone out and spent some of their winnings on wild purchases like cars and big screen TVs, Suharto did what you might expect of somebody who chose to go back to work.
“I actually just invested the money and I’m just going to pay off my mortgage. That’s basically it,” says Suharto. “I shared some of the money with my family. I paid my parents’ mortgage off as well.”
His path to the WSOP is similar to that of another accountant who went on to stardom. Of the six players who will be wearing PokerStars logos at the fi nal table, Suharto is the only one who qualifi ed via the online poker giant — just like Chris Moneymaker did on his way to winning the 2003 Main Event.
But Suharto hasn’t played much poker since returning to Toronto. He has instead focused himself on getting back into the swing of things in his day-to-day life.
“I haven’t really played any poker yet. I played one tournament because my friend asked me. I only lasted an hour or so,” laughs Suharto. “Because I’d been away for almost three weeks I had a lot of projects I was behind on. I put in a lot of overtime at work trying to catch up. Things are fi nally slowing down now that I’ve been able to catch up with my work. I’m also trying to deal with all the media, so that’s been keeping me busy as well.”
Included in that media attention was the chance to be a part of a commercial shoot for PokerStars, a completely new experience for the University of Central Arkansas graduate.
“That was exciting, I’ve never done something like that. I’m an accountant so I’ve never done any acting,” says Suharto, who only took the offer after confi rming that he wouldn’t miss another day at the offi ce. “It was fi lmed in Toronto. If it hadn’t been fi lmed in Toronto I don’t think I could have done it anyway. A few days after I returned [PokerStars] called me and said, “We want to do a commercial, can you join us?”
Suharto’s priorities are clearly in order with work topping the list. In addition to catching up on his work load, he’s been quite popular with co-workers wanting to hear all about how this quiet, hard-working accountant suddenly became famous. So upon returning to the number crunching, Suharto took some of his co-workers out for lunch and dinner and found them to be very interested, very supportive, and very surprised to see him back.
“Some of them did not know I was playing poker. My boss knew that I played poker, so when I was playing he was following online. He sent me an email saying ‘congratulations,’ recalled Suharto. “He was very happy and very supportive. Some of my co-workers are very happy for me. I took them for lunch and for dinner, so they asked me ‘are you going to quit?’ I said ‘no.’”
It was during one of those lunches out that Suharto had the kind of surreal experience that comes with sudden notoriety. After plopping down his credit card to pick up the tab for lunch, the restaurant owner recognized his last name as that of the poker player he’d heard interviewed on a Canadian radio station earlier that day.
“So after I had lunch he asked me ‘by any chance do you have a poker-playing relative?’ He mentioned he was listening to CBC radio and he heard the interview. ‘Oh actually that’s me.’ He was excited for me, he told me he played poker and he asked me ‘do you mind if I put your picture on the wall of fame?’ He wants to put a wall of fame of famous people that eat at his place.”
So if ninth-place money — nearly $1 million — and his photo on the wall of the local Indian restaurant isn’t enough to get Suharto to quit, would fi rst-place prize money of $9 million convince him to pack it in?
“Oh god. Don’t ask me that one. That’s such a hypothetical question, I’d rather not answer it. It’s a lot of money, right?”
