Cover: Pokers Vanessa Rousso and Chad Brown - Paired Up

Vanessa Rousso and Chad Brown, combining poker and romance on the tournament trail.

LOS ANGELES IS, NOTORIOUSLY, A CITY OF BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE. Which is why the photo shoot barely registers a ripple, even among the tourists who have flocked to the Santa Monica pier.

He’s ruggedly handsome, his brown hair cut short, tousled, and gelled in a style that wouldn’t look out of place on Jude Law. His form-fitting shirt accentuates a linebacker’s body that could probably snap Jude Law in two. She has long blonde hair, strikingly pretty features, and the kind of enormous eyelashes that suck you in and don’t let go. Her accessories are Prada and Dolce, and she handles her spiked heels like a pro, despite the dangers posed by the Pier’s rickety planks. They could be fashion models or soap stars.

Except that most fashion models and soap stars can’t calculate pot odds on the fly and change gears three times in 20 minutes just before the bubble bursts. Or hold their own among the world’s best poker players because, well, they are among the world’s best poker players. But Chad Brown and Vanessa Rousso aren’t really like anyone else, which might just be what drew them to each other.
***
Growing up in the Bronx, Chad Brown knew he had the looks to become an actor. He also knew that if he wanted to do something other than emceeing swimsuit pageants and cabarets, he was going to have to try his hand in Los Angeles. In 1990, he packed up and moved across the country, hoping to find work as a bartender a couple of nights a week, leaving his days free to pursue his big break.

“I didn’t realize that there were legalized poker casinos [in L.A.],” said Brown. “I was already, for fun, playing in Italian cafes in the Bronx with my friends.” By “fun,” Brown means impoverishing his opponents: “You realize after a couple of years, hey, I win most of the time and everyone always makes fun—‘Aw, Chad’s here, gonna be another winning night.’ You know, giving me shit.”

Brown didn’t exactly tear up the tables in L.A., but he ground out enough to keep him afloat while grinding through countless auditions. In 1993, his good looks and experience hosting pageants helped him to land his first major role—Ahmad Rashad’s co-host on a new gambling-themed game show called Caesar’s Challenge. “All the guys were great-looking guys, well-built,” recalled Brown, “but I had emcee experience.” Dressed as a Roman Centurion, Brown’s duties were more or less limited to introducing the show and turning letters with a sword. “I was sort of the male Vanna White.”

The show didn’t last, but it provided him the experience and recognition he needed to pursue larger roles. During a pivotal two-week period in 1995, he read for the producers of a new Kevin Pollack sitcom and was one of three finalists for a major role in a Carl Reiner movie. The opportunities “were like making the final table,” except that “winning was the only thing that guaranteed you major success … Either one of those things, my future would have been different.”

What made these particular two weeks so pivotal was a promise he’d made to his best friend Nick, then the chief operating officer of a fledgling medical supply company in Florida. Nick wanted Brown to join his company as the vice president of sales. It was a far cry from his Hollywood dreams, but Brown was and remains a committed realist. “I love acting … but either you’re Tom Cruise and you’re making $20-million a movie or you’re a working actor that struggles from job to job. It’s gambling.”

Brown pledged to Nick that if he hadn’t found full-time work as an actor by the summer of ’95, he’d take the sales job. Neither the sitcom nor the movie panned out, leading Brown to make an emotional visit to his manager’s office, where he announced his sabbatical from acting. He joined Nick in Florida.

Four years later, Brown was back in L.A., the company having gone belly up due, in Brown’s opinion, to the misguidance of the chief executive officer. He quickly discovered that two things had changed during his absence: He was no longer a “name” and would have to resume his acting career from square one; and poker had become much, much bigger.

“I was playing cash games, doing well. I was still sort of pursuing acting, but not with the same enthusiasm. And I was psychologically preparing myself to be content. I could have a good life playing poker.” When Chris Moneymaker won the World Series in 2003, Brown sensed just how big the game was about to become and devoted himself to tournament play. A year later, he found himself at the final table of the WSOP’s first televised Stud event, ultimately finishing second to Ted Forrest. And in a nifty bit of circular irony, a TV producer who happened to see the event decided that Brown would be the perfect host for a new show, The Ultimate Poker Challenge. “So indirectly,” observed Brown, “I got my first big job in front of the camera because of poker.”
***
While Brown was flipping letters in a glorified toga, Vanessa Rousso was getting ready to enter high school in Florida. It was a rare period of inertia for a girl who’d lived in 20 different cities by the time she was 18, the hand dealt to the daughter of a French father and an American mom who loved to travel. She graduated at the top of her class and accepted a full ride to Duke, where she studied economics. One of her professors used poker as a tool for teaching game theory. Rousso, her interest piqued, started using game theory as a tool for crushing poker, at least the low-limit games she found online.

Here’s the thing about Rousso: Her internal clock is faster than yours. “I’m all about efficiency,” she sputtered, fueled by one of the Monster energy drinks that help keep her going. “It’s something that marks my progression in life. I really don’t like to waste time.” With the help of AP credits, she graduated college in just 21/2 years. Duke offered her admission and a partial scholarship to their law school, but she opted for a full ride at the University of Miami. (“It’s a freeroll,” she said. “I’m all about the freeroll!”)

Her decision to return to Florida wasn’t purely financial. She also considered the proximity to both the Hard Rock Seminole Casino and a busy international airport servicing the cities that hosted major poker tournaments. She was still a year away from her 21st birthday, but Rousso, dreaming of the circuit, wanted to hit the ground running. Actually, hit the air flying—upon turning 21, she applied for a pilot’s license.

“We’d fly on a Cessna or whatever from Florida to the WSOP Circuits that were nearby. Where we could make a little flight over, get some hours in on the plane, and then go play a tournament.” Efficient? “Very efficient! Everything has a purpose.”

During one such jaunt to New Orleans, she made the final table of a $200 buy-in, earning $6,500 and her first legitimate bankroll. Several subsequent cashes convinced her that she could she could compete on the Circuit. In early-2006, a vision began to take shape in her mind.

“I basically get this hare-brained idea to play the World Poker Tour $25K main event,” she recalled. “Hare-brained,” because her earnings to date barely exceeded the entry fee.
“So being the businessperson that I am, I sell shares of myself to friends and family, like a thousand dollars a share.”

Rousso turned out to be a pretty good investment, finishing seventh and earning more than a quarter-million dollars against one of the most competitive fields in tournament history. Just 23, she’d captured the attention of the poker world, including the guy who finished ninth: Chad Brown.
***
“There were five tables left,” recalled Brown. “We were already in the money … and so I’m sitting at this table and this pretty young blonde girl comes and sits down in Seat One. I’m like, Who is this girl? She’s a pretty girl, but wait a second? Who is this girl in the $25K with only five tables left?

“And the first thing she does is she acts like she’s some ditzy blonde. She’s like, ‘Oh, do I have to post?’ That was the first sign to me that she’s trying to act like she’s some ditzy blonde … That put the radar up for me to be careful not to underestimate her. But at the same time, I was fascinated by her and also attracted to her and wanted to get to know her.”

Like any good poker player, Brown looked for an edge. “I saw that when she took a couple of beats … she lost her cool a little bit.”
“To put it nicely,” interrupted Rousso.

During a break, Brown approached her, offering to help her with her composure. Maybe over dinner.

It’s not that Rousso wasn’t interested; she was just a little skeptical. “Yeah, right, you can help me with that.”

Brown’s next play didn’t seem to help his case—with no cell phone or scrap of paper to exchange digits, he suggested that she call his room after the tournament.

“If you think that I would ever call some guy’s room,” Rousso remembered thinking, “that I’m that girl, who, you couldn’t get my number because you didn’t have your phone on you? Yeah right. Don’t hold your breath for that … My mom didn’t raise me like that,” she laughed.

“So I didn’t see her afterward,” said Brown, who was the first player to be eliminated from the final table. “We didn’t cross paths again and she did not call the room. So I was like, eh, blow off, no big deal.”

“No big deal,” snorted Rousso.

“Not meant to be,” he continued. “No big deal, wasn’t meant to be. So I run into her like a month and half later, just by coincidence, at the airport.”

“He was doing a photo shoot,” said Rousso, “like a 20 sexiest poker players magazine thing … and he came up to me and he was like, ‘Do you want to be a part of the shoot?’ He was like, all business.” They finally exchanged phone numbers. A month later, Brown called to schedule the shoot. “I was still feeling kind of awkward,” she remembered. “I didn’t want him to think I’d blown him off. So I was like, ‘Don’t I owe you a raincheck or something?’”

It suddenly dawned on Brown that she might be interested after all. During that summer’s World Series, they finally went on their first date. When the Series ended, they decided to travel together to the next stop on the tournament trail. And the next …

They were still traveling together in December 2007, when Brown proposed to her over dinner. They plan to wed this October.
***
When your job keeps you on the road 24/7, as today’s tournament poker does, relationships are not easily forged. “You’re traveling so much that you’d have to be extremely lucky,” observed Brown, “because distance just doesn’t make a relationship grow.” Both feel fortunate to have found a partner in the same line of work.

That’s not to say that poker romance is without its own unique pitfalls. For one thing, there’s the potential of having to compete against your partner in an activity so rooted in individual success. “Early on in our relationship,” recalled Rousso, “we had to acknowledge the possibility that we’d end up at the same table.” Both considered the idea of soft-playing one another to be unethical—not to mention antithetical to their competitive instincts. “We basically have an agreement that in the rare occasions we’re at the same table,” said Brown, “the one thing that we don’t do to each other is to trap … That can, uh, ruin the romance.”

To date, the issue’s been more philosophical than practical—in their two years of dating, they’ve only been seated at the same table twice, something they attribute to what they jokingly call the “Day Two Curse.”

“Basically every tournament,” said Rousso, “one of us makes Day Two, but we never make a Day Two together. It’s always funny. If one of us builds a big chip stack early in the tournament, we’re like, uh oh, it must mean [the other is] going to be out before the day ends.”

Then there’s the issue of separating the work life from the home: “When we start talking poker, we’ll start disagreeing,” said Rousso. “At the end of the day, there’s no right answer. It could lead to an endless debate. We have a rule where basically if you bring up a poker hand, then the other person can talk about it or have an opinion … [We’ll] see what we can learn from our discussion, and move on.”

What’s interesting about these discussions is that the two approach the game with very different styles.

“I’m a lot more aggressive than he is,” observed Rousso. “You’ll see my chip stack going big-small-big-small-big-small-big. Whereas his will slow-climb.”

“I think I change gears more than she does,” countered Brown. “She knows how to change gears very well, but I think I change more. And I think I adapt to the climate of the table.”

“I’m a lot more mathematically, game-theoretically oriented,” she said. “He’s a lot more player-oriented, plays his opponent … I get very emotional. He is the most stable guy you ever met. With poker, that’s an awesome skill set to have.”

He said: “I think that my experience will pick up how other players are playing quicker than she will. She might disagree with me, but that’s not anything lacking in her skill, it’s just experience. You can’t buy experience, you have to experience it.”

All of which raises a frightening conclusion. Many couples, once married, are accused of adopting one another’s habits and manners of speech. What if Brown and Rousso wind up adopting one another’s skills at the table, combining aggression and math-savvy with emotional balance and player-reading skills? Could anyone stop such a poker juggernaut?

“I’m sure that we’ll, like, gradually, what do they call it, regress towards the mean?” surmised Rousso. “Where you slowly adapt to the information that your partner will give you, like he’ll teach me things about reading people, and I’ll teach him things about game theory, and we’ll gradually become more alike.”

Then she laughed, adding, “But I’d say that we’re always destined to have pretty opposite styles.”

Jonathan Grotenstein is a writer living in Los Angeles. He is the co-author of All In: The (Almost) Entirely True History Of The World Series Of Poker, and has collaborated on books with Phil Gordon and Scott Fischman.

The Secret To His Success
Brown’s poker success hasn’t done anything to diminish his love for the entertainment industry. In fact, it still plays a critical role in his success as a poker player.
“One of the things that I learned when I started playing tournament poker, especially when you get deep into like big events, is that it’s hard for a lot of people who are playing to get a restful night’s sleep. If you’re playing like 13 hours of poker in a main event of a poker tournament, it’s not just a regular 13 hours. It’s an intense 13 hours that wears on people.
“So what I discovered is that the only way to get a restful night’s sleep is to go see a good movie. You get absorbed in the movie, which actually sort of like erases all those poker hands. And you get a good night’s sleep and, all of the sudden, now you’re in Day Two or Day Three of the tournament.”

Vanessa Rousso: Career Highlights
YEAR TOURNAMENT SERIES PLACE PAYOUT
2006 $25,000 NLHE Five-Star World Poker Classic 7th $263,625
2006 $5,000 Short-Handed NLHE World Series of Poker 8th $61,955
2006 $5,000 NLHE Borgata Poker Open 1st $285,450
2007 $9,700 NLHE Ultimate Poker Challenge 2nd $65,863

Chad Brown: Career Highlights
YEAR TOURNAMENT SERIES PLACE PAYOUT
2002 $1,500 Limit Omaha Hi-Lo World Series of Poker 3rd $45,400
2004 $1,500 Seven-Card Stud World Series of Poker 2nd $62,320
2005 $9,500 NLHE WSOP Circuit Atlantic City 7th $94,620
2005 $10,000 NLHE WSOP Circuit Harrah’s Rincon 3rd $198,550
2005 $2,000 Stud Hi-Lo World Series of Poker 2nd $89,838
2006 $10,000 NLHE Bay 101 Shooting Stars 6th $200,000
2006 $25,000 NLHE Five-Star World Poker Classic 9th $205,040
2006 £3,500 NLHE European Poker Championships 5th $110,345
2007 $5,000 Pot-Limit Omaha World Poker Open 2nd $84,565
2007 $20,000 NLHE National Heads-Up Championship 2nd $250,000
2007 $5,000 Deuce-To-Seven World Series of Poker 2nd $324,777
2007 $10,000 NLHE World Series of Poker 97th $67,535