Shadow And Light

The incredible story of world champion Jerry Yang, who overcame longer odds than you’ll ever see in poker

BY JONATHAN GROTENSTEIN

THERE WERE MANY EXTRAORDINARY MOMENTS on the final day of the 2007 World Series of Poker Championship Event, but the tournament saved its most enduring image for the end, a few minutes before four o’clock in the morning, Jerry Yang took off his sunglasses.

For nearly 16 hours—the longest final table in World Series history—Yang had been a poker assassin, personally eliminating seven of his eight opponents with relentless aggression. Aside from a few very vocal appeals to a higher power (more on that later), he uttered few words. The dark sunglasses and black baseball cap that concealed his features and the complete still with which he considered each decision—often for excruciatingly long periods of time—was more than a little unnerving. He appeared to absorb not only chips, but the light by which to see them, leading some observers to dub him “The Shadow.”

The moment he took off his sunglasses, however, transformed the scene from tense thriller to something closer to an episode of Scooby Doo, when the villain is unmasked to reveal … huh?

Most poker players have eyes like sharks. Jerry Yang has the eyes of a puppy dog, soft, kind, and full of hope. He has a round face with a dimple on one cheek, and a warm and inviting smile. He stands much closer to five feet than to six. Finally freed from his disguise, Yang looked less like a shadow than, say, a social worker, which is exactly what he was until he took down the second-biggest prize in the history of tournament poker.

Now that face will join the others that line the rafters of the Rio’s Amazon Room, the champions of the World Series of Poker.

***
The tournament had yet to air on ESPN, but Jerry Yang’s face was already familiar. Seated at an empty table at the Bicycle Club in Los Angeles in August, where he was preparing to play in the Legends of Poker tournament, he was approached frequently by strangers hoping to shake his hand, offering their congratulations, jokingly asking for a piece of his action. Fans. Just a few weeks earlier, he was one of them.
“I had always dreamed of going to the World Series just to meet some of the top players,” admitted Yang.

“Just to be able to get some autographs and pictures.” His frequent phone calls to his wife during the tournament’s early stages were breathless accounts of the poker celebrities he’d met. “I’d say, ‘Guess what? I took a picture with Jennifer Harman today, or Howard Lederer today.’ She was laughing on the phone.”

He would have been happy to return to his home in Southern California with a handful of memories instead of the platinum bracelet that now adorns his wrist. He toyed with it self-consciously as he said, “Obviously, it hasn’t really sunk it yet. To be honest with you, every day I look at my bracelet and say, ‘Wow.’ I’m very grateful.”

Gratitude is a dominant theme in Yang’s life, which began nearly 40 years ago in a small village in Laos, part of an ethnic tribe known as the Hmong. “I grew up very, very poor,” he recalled. “No clothes, no food, just barely getting by. I grew up without a ball, without a marble, without a bike, a basic toy. Whenever my parents would slaughter a pig, all the boys would try to be the first in line to get a hold of that bladder. We’d inflate it and kick it around—that’s how we played soccer back then—until the bladder would pop!” About the time he turned five, he began working on his father’s farm, performing whatever chores he could to help his family.

Outside the village, however, was a land torn by strife. Since its inception as a sovereign nation in 1949, Laos had been an active front in the politically-driven wars that dominated Southeast Asia for so long. The Communists in neighboring North Vietnam not only used Laos as a conduit (via the famed Ho Chi Minh trail) to the war in South Vietnam, but supported a local Communist insurgency, a rebel group called the Pathet Lao. The American C.I.A., in turn, trained a force of Laotian counter-insurgents, most of whom were drawn from Yang’s tribe, the Hmong. The two sides battled one another to what was more or less a standstill until, in the early-1970s, the Americans pulled up stakes from the region. The Pathet Lao swept into power and immediately began to exact a brutal revenge against those who had opposed them: the Hmong. Jerry Yang was seven years old.

“We knew once the Communists arrived in our town, there would be a lot of torturing, execution, raping. I heard very, very scary stories. They would force men like my father to carry ammunition, heavy ammunition, to their camps. They would make the ladies sex slaves. Young boys, they would brainwash them, turn them against Western society.”

Yang’s father decided that the family had to escape Laos. Their first attempt ended in failure when they were captured by Communist soliders. “AK-47s were pointed at me, at my face. And my cousins and my relatives. I was like, Wow, what if they pull the trigger? I would be dead.”

On their second try, they succeeded in escaping to Thailand, where they were immediately placed in a refugee camp. Their situation hardly improved. “The nutrition was very bad, the water was poor,” said Yang. “I used to have a bloated stomach due to malnutrition. Very skinny to the bone. At one point, I was going to die. I saw some of my cousins die right in front of my eyes.”

The camp would be their home for four years, until Yang’s father was allowed to emigrate with his family to the United States. “The day that they called my father’s name, ‘You can come to America,’ that was the happiest day of my life.” They were relocated to a housing project in Nashville, Tennessee. “I was part of the ghettos,” he laughed. Yang’s father worked hard, saving his money while learning whatever English he could. The family relocated to Kansas City, then to Central California, where Yang went to school, got good grades, and eventually earned a masters’ degree in health psychology from Loma Linda University.

Upon graduation, however, work was not easy to come by. “To be honest, in the health psychology field, it’s hard to get a job. So you almost have to gear yourself to be open to social service.” He worked as a corporate social worker for a time, but was laid off. About a year ago, he found a new job at a Southern California agency that worked with foster children. “Human service is very important to me,” he said. “Obviously, social workers are some of the least-paid professionals. But it got my family by, put food on the table for my [six] kids, paid the bills. I was happy with what I was doing. Seeing the foster kids going to a good family, or being taken out of a very bad situation and placed in foster care, it was a very rewarding experience for me.”

***
Yang discovered poker about three years ago, sucked in by the allure of televised tournaments. “I said, ‘You know what? Maybe I can do that.’” He read a couple of books and began making regular trips to the local cardrooms. He played $1/$2 Limit Hold ’Em and, when he was feeling flush, took his shots at the $15 and $25 buy-in tournaments. “With six kids, you can’t really afford to buy in too much.” Buoyed by his improving play, he decided, in May 2007, to enter Pechanga Resort & Casino’s Big Showdown, a $225 buy-in super-satellite that represented his last opportunity to win a seat to the World Series Main Event. He won.

The seat, however, did not include accommodations, and there was no room in the Yangs’ family budget for a Las Vegas hotel room. He shared his dilemma with a manager at the Lake Elsinore Hotel & Casino, the place that calls itself “California’s Friendliest Cardroom.” They lived up to their name: Yang would wear clothing promoting the casino; the casino would pay for his hotel room. Yang insisted that he didn’t need anything fancy. “Just find the cheapest motel in Las Vegas,” he told them. “And they found it.” Yang politely declined to name for ALL IN the specific establishment where he was housed. “Trust me, you don’t want to be in that neighborhood,” he laughed. “Every time I parked my car and walked to the room … ”

It was in that room, the night before the final table, that Yang—a devoutly religious man—prayed to God. He had already decided to tithe a tenth of whatever he won the next day, which would be at least a half-million dollars, to his favorite charities, but imagined what it would be like to win a lot more. The biggest obstacle was the size of his stack: His $8.45-million was the next-to-smallest at the table, where the three chip leaders each sat behind more than $20-million. Vegas oddsmakers had labeled Yang a 10-to-1 longshot. “I did a lot of meditation. I strategized. I said to myself, In order to have a chance, I have to be aggressive tomorrow.”

There was a moment when all strategy went out the window as he took his seat at the final table. “I’m an ordinary man. A family man. I have not been in front of a TV camera,” he recalled. “I wasn’t sure what to say, how to sit, or how to position myself.” Yang, seated under the gun, would have to make the first decision of the day.

Then the cards hit the table, and he remembered what to do. He raised. His continuation bet on the flop took down the pot. Facing a pre-flop raise on the second hand of the tournament, he re-raised, taking down another pot. Yang’s aggressive raises quickly became a familiar pattern. Less than an hour after the start of the final table, he had rocketed into the chip lead, a position he’d hold for the rest of the day.

When an opponent had the temerity to counter with a re-raise of their own, Yang more often than not seemed to have the goods to call. Not content to leave the outcome of these confrontations to the fates, he supplemented his chances with some of the most direct appeals to God ever heard at a poker table: “You have a purpose for me today,” he announced after calling an all-in raise from Lee Watkinson. “With the money I make, I will glorify your name. Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, let me win this one.”

“You actually heard that?” grinned Yang, a little embarrassed, when asked a month later about his poker prayers. “To be honest, I’ve been getting some heat, actually.” He laughed. “I want to thank God. I believe God brought me to this country. I could have been dead a long time ago. I could have been in a concentration camp somewhere in Laos or Vietnam. So I put God first in my life. And my faith, my belief is strong.”

To his credit, Yang has backed up his words with action. He’s already made his promised donations—nearly one million dollars—to Ronald McDonald House and the Make-A-Wish Foundation; his commitment to Feed The Children will be fulfilled in September. He’s had to ignore the advice of financial planners—and several friends—who suggested he wait until December so as to earn more interest on his principle before parting with the cash. “There is a need out there,” he said. “And I made that pledge, in front of the camera, and in front of God. They need the help right away, so I want to give that help right away.”

Yang quit his day job, but plans to continue a life of service. In fact, the only significant poker he’d played in the month before the Legends of Poker event had been a pair of appearances at charity events. He also hopes that his newfound celebrity will allow him to give back to the game that has brought him such success. “I plan to be a good ambassador to poker. Anything I can do for the poker community, not only in America, but worldwide, I will be there.” (Hey, Poker Players Alliance, are you listening?)

And in perhaps one last bit of charity, he offered hope to all those disappointed professional poker players who can’t seem to wrest their most coveted title away from the queue of amateurs who have held it for the last six years. “It’s just a matter of time. So don’t give up … If someone like me, from out of nowhere can win? I’m pretty sure [the professionals] have a greater chance than me.”

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.