The Freewheeling Lee Watkinson

A throwback to old-school poker pros, Lee Watkinson is an activist and entrepreneur that only plays tournaments because he’s too good not to…

NOT SO LONG AGO, THE STEREOTYPICAL POKER PLAYER was a freewheeling sort. Unfit or unwilling to accept what society’s more respectable citizens would call a “real job,” he drifted like a predatory bird, descending when and where the feeding seemed ripe before soaring away toward the next adventure. Other than the daily business of survival, there weren’t any rules or hours, and that was just fine by him.

“Why hell,” the now-departed Puggy Pearson once boasted, “there ain’t a breeze in the sky floats freer than I do.”

Nowadays we have the tournament trail. Players move as a part of a predictable flock from one organized feeding trough to the next. Every two weeks, a big buy-in tournament. Same faces, different room. The story isn’t about who’s there, more often than not, but who has chosen to sit this one out.

With organization comes rules. No smoking. No swearing. English only, please. Be in your seat by noon or your chips will be blinded off. We have books that tell us how to play, corporate sponsors who tell us what to wear, media handlers who tell us where to go and, occasionally, what to say.

No one’s complaining, of course. Today’s best players aren’t just surviving—they’re enjoying riches and fame that would have boggled the mind of someone like Puggy Pearson. The idea that Doyle Brunson might once have kept his career as a professional poker player a secret, lest he damage his family’s reputation, seems almost laughable. Today’s Internet kids can graduate straight from college into a full-fledged poker career, often with encouragement from their parents.

There is a trade-off. The 21st-century poker player is, on a whole, a lot less interesting than his or her ancestors. Sure, we’ve got plenty of millionaires. But will we ever have another Amarillo Slim? Or Jack Straus, who, at the World Series’ close, might jet to Africa to hunt lions on safari? You’re far more likely to hear of someone using their off-time to play golf, catch up on videogames or DVDs in their hotel room, or make a few celebrity appearances before moving on to the next feeding station.

Which is what makes a throwback like Lee Watkinson all the more interesting.
***
It may not be possible for an American to grow up on the frontier anymore, but Lee Watkinson sure came close. His father was a cartographer for the U.S. Geological Survey, meaning that home was where there was wilderness that needed to be mapped. As a child, Watkinson’s family moved throughout the Western States. He’d spend summers in the field with dad, using surveying tools that today have been made more or less obsolete by global positioning devices and laser-accurate echolocation devices.

They settled in Vancouver, Washington, long enough for him to go to high school, and upon graduating, he moved across the state to attend Eastern Washington University. His major was economics—“I just kind of have a logical brain,” Watkinson said, “and economics is mostly logic”—but his passion was wrestling. He was one of the better grapplers on the team and finished with a winning record, even if, as he readily admits, that record was padded with wins against non-Division I opponents. His plan, as much as he had one, was to find a post-collegiate job at a high school where he could teach and coach.

Then there was the summer Watkinson planned to spend in Reno. Having read a book on blackjack, he headed south to try his luck at the tables. The idea was to support himself as a dealer, but by the time he arrived, the school was filled to capacity. Instead, he spent two weeks making change for the slots players at Harrah’s. “It was back when the slot machines still took quarters,” he recalled. “You wore, like, a change belt, gave the old ladies their nickels. That was horrible.”

Lee quickly found a new job as the valet/bellman for a local time-share. “I was just going to do it for the summer, but I wound up doing it for a year.” He also changed his mind about blackjack, settling into a $1/$3 Stud game instead and bringing smiles to another group of old ladies—the ones who mercilessly separated him from his paycheck. A few months later, he’d switched to Hold ’Em and began to enjoy some success. Finding himself with $600 in his pocket at the end of the year, he decided not to return to school after all. A life as a professional poker player beckoned.

Six months later and six-hundred dollars lighter, he was back at school. But he’d already caught the fever, if not the cards. Before attending his first class, he decided to try his luck at one of the card rooms in nearby Spokane. Thirty days later, having emerged a winner each and every one of them, Watkinson de-registered from college and moved to Las Vegas.

It was 1991, and the only game in town was at the Mirage. He spent three or four months working his way up from $4/$8 to $10/$20, before deciding what he really wanted to do was to learn to surf. Watkinson found a cheap off-season rental in San Diego’s Mission Beach. He spent his mornings getting pounded by the waves, his evenings pounding the competition at the Sycuan Casino. When summer brought tourists and higher rents, he returned to visit his parents in Washington, then returned to the beach that fall to do it all again.

The pattern continued for about three years before Watkinson decided to expand his horizons. “I started making a little triangle, San Diego County, Los Angeles, and Vegas … When I felt like a change of scenery, or the game seemed better someplace else, I’d move.”

His migratory habits weren’t the only quality that linked him to the road gamblers of old. He also despised tournaments. He tried one in 1994, entering a $500 Limit Hold ’Em event at the L.A. Poker Classic, finishing 10th, more or less doubling his initial investment. “This is not worth sitting around for,” he said to himself afterward. “I could be sitting in a cash game making $10,000.” Aside from a couple of stabs at the WSOP Main Event, Watkinson would spend the next 10 years avoiding the tournament scene unless there was a promise of a juicy side game.

The tournament scene, however, came to him. Around 2003, he was competing regularly in a brutally tough $10/$20 No-Limit game at the Commerce Casino. Once-lucrative cash games in San Diego and Colma had recently dried up, driving the professionals to Los Angeles. On any given night, Watkinson might find himself surrounded by Bobby Hoff, Phil Laak, Antonio Esfandiari, Gabe Thaler, and Scottie Lundberg. Watkinson played well enough to impress one of the game’s few live ones, New Jersey native Paul Spitzberg (who is now a distinguished player in his own right, having gone deep at the 2007 WSOP Main Event), who offered to back Watkinson in a few tournaments. And in 2004, everything seemed to click. Watkinson earned over $1.5-million in tournament prize money, despite failing to finish first or cash for more than $580,000 in any of them.

In fact, he wouldn’t win his first tournament until 2006—a WSOP bracelet in the $10,000 Pot-Limit Omaha event—despite a trio of tough second-place finishes in major events. “I was like a 3-to-1 chipleader going into heads-up in all of them,” said Watkinson. “Ted Lawson, Eli Elezra, Doyle Brunson, and I lost all three.” But as a long-time cash game specialist, he was anything but bummed. “I was still really happy to be making that kind of money and more or less become a famous poker player overnight.”

Maybe not famous famous, but he was still the best-known player to make the final table at the 2007 WSOP Main Event, an accomplishment he considers to be the proudest of his poker career. It was also, he readily admits, the most nervous he’d ever been at a televised table. Not only was he vying for an $8.25-million first prize, but as the only remaining player to have won his seat on Full Tilt Poker—the site that promised its online qualifiers an additional $10-million should they win it all—Watkinson was in a unique position: He alone was playing for the biggest payday in tournament history. “There was a lot of pressure with that $18-million. You win the World Series Main Event and … ”

He still regrets the way he played his final hand. After eventual champion Jerry Yang raised from the small blind, Watkinson—the big blind—opted to push all-in with A-7. Yang called, after a great deal of deliberation, turning over A-9. The board failed to connect with either hand, and Yang’s kicker kicked his opponent into a relatively disappointing eighth-place finish. “I’m not too proud of my play,” Watkinson lamented. “I think it’s a small mistake that could go either way.”

Despite the small mistake he still made an impressive $585,699, the third year in four he’d taken down a half-million tournament prize, ensuring, at least for time-being, that he’d continue to join his poker brothers and sisters on the well-traveled tournament trail.
***
What continues to distinguish Watkinson from the rest of the pack and link him to the colorful characters of old are his passions away from the table. And for that, he owes no small debt to his fiancee, Timmi DeRosa.

After a string of successes at the table, Watkinson was approached with a proposal by a few of his friends who were in a band: If he made a donation to something called the Cortland-Brandenberg Foundation, they would get the opportunity to spend three days recording with David Kershenbaum, a Grammy Award-winning producer with credits including Tracy Chapman, Duran Duran, and Joe Jackson. During a visit to the studio, he discovered two things: Cortland-Brandenberg helped find homes for chimpanzees, and that it was founded by Timmi DeRosa, who also worked to develop musical artists. Watkinson left the studio having fallen in love with both Timmi and the chimps.

“What people don’t understand about the chimps is that the ones they see on TV, they’re infants,” said Watkinson. “Chimps live as long as we do, but when they reach seven or eight years old, they become too strong and dangerous to work or to be kept as pets anymore. So people get rid of them. They give them to biomedical research, or places that purport to be sanctuaries but are really just prisons for the chimps with small cages.” To someone who’d grown up peering into the wilderness, this seemed an unusually cruel retirement. “They have all the emotions that people do, so it’s just as horrific as if you were doing that to human beings.” Through the Foundation—and their own personal efforts—Watkinson and DeRosa continue striving to place as many of chimps as possible into more comfortable sanctuaries.

What he probably won’t do again is take a chimp to a party, as he did during the 2007 WSOP. Watkinson thought it would be fun to bring “Buddy” to a Full Tilt gala and, for much of the night, it was. A natural flirt, Buddy charmed the ladies, even sucking on Suzie (Mrs. Howard) Lederer’s toes. But when his makeshift harem was intruded upon by David Sklansky, Buddy rewarded the famed poker author with a punch in the stomach. “[Buddy] thought he was trying to horn in on his action,” claimed Watkinson.

Using his poker winnings, Watkinson and DeRosa also partnered on a clothing line, Criminal Mind, which incorporated artwork from actual prison inmates. The business failed to fly, but a side-trip into jewelry—Hardcore Elegance—has enjoyed surprising success. They come up with their own designs, what he calls “silver, rock-and-roll quality chunky jewelry”—and work with noted craftsmen to carve and manufacture a line of pendants, rings, and belt chains.

Then there’s the record label, Rebel Yell. Their first artist—a “sophisticated pop” band called Pico vs. The Island Trees—just completed their first album, produced by Kershenbaum.

And, of course, there’s whatever comes next. “Timmi’s really finding something new to capture our interest,” Watkinson said. There are plenty more frontiers to be mapped.

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.

Mathletes!
While you don’t usually associate poker players with athletic prowess—witness the never-ending cycle of weight-loss bets—former wrestler Watkinson’s not the only famous pro with sports-related skills …
Doyle Brunson (Basketball): It’s hard to believe now, but Texas Dolly seemed headed toward a career with the Lakers before an industrial accident wrecked his leg.
T.J. Cloutier (Football): Developed that intimidating stare playing tight end in the Canadian Football League.
Gus Hansen (Tennis): Was a youth champion in his native Denmark.
Chad Brown (Baseball): Declined a minor league contract—too uncertain a career path. Chose acting instead.
Clonie Gowen (Track and Field): Was once Oklahoma’s seventh-best high jumper. Also played for her high school’s state championship basketball team.
Greg Mueller (Hockey): Played professionally in Europe.

Table For Nine
Watkinson calls just making the final table at the 2007 WSOP Main Event his proudest moment as a pro. Apparently, he’s hooked on the feeling; less than three full months into 2008, he’s already been to four final tables (and just missed a fifth, finishing eighth in a six-handed tournament at the Aussie Millions):
$3,000 Pot-Limit Omaha, Aussie Millions (January): 1st place
$9,700 No-Limit Hold ’Em, WPT Borgata Winter Open (January): 5th place
$5,000 No-Limit Hold ’Em, WSOP Circuit Harrah’s Rincon (February): 7th place
$9,600 No-Limit Hold ’Em, WPT Bay 101 Shooting Stars (March): 9th place