Poker Player David Williams and Five Things You Didn’t Know About Him

An up-close-and-personal look at the Poker Player David Williams, the man some are calling the all-around best twentysomething poker player on the planet.

“BEFORE YOU START,” says David Williams, “I’m trying to figure out a way to make this one different from all the other interviews.”

There have been a lot of interviews, and Williams is tired of having to repeat himself. Not that he’s ungrateful for the attention—for a 26-year-old multi-millionaire who drives a Bentley, dates supermodels and Playboy playmates, and sleeps until noon, he’s a remarkably grounded guy. It’s just that the man gets bored with routine.

Case in point: He hasn’t worn the same pair of shoes since April. (We’ll come back to that later … )

The exception, of course, is poker, the game he’s played almost every day for the last eight years. If you’ve read any of those other interviews, then you know he’s already enjoyed an incredible amount of success. That, in 2004, he finished second in the World Series of Poker’s Main Event, nearly becoming the youngest (and the first African-American) champion in the tournament’s history. That he’s built upon that success—a $3.5-million payday—with nearly $2-million more in tournament cashes. That, this year, he outlasted 477 opponents in the $1,500 Seven-Card Stud event to earn his first World Series bracelet.

But even the poker routine is subject to change. Williams won’t be a pro forever. Maybe not even for that much longer. What you may not know about David Williams is that he has bigger plans that extend far beyond the felt. There are a lot of things you might not know about David Williams. Here are a few:

1. He’s no Internet whiz kid.

Today’s game is full of twentysomethings. Most of them learned how to play poker—and built their bankrolls—in the same way: one click at a time. Online poker has become the proving ground for a new breed of young and fearsome players.

David Williams is not one of them. He’s young and fearsome, to be sure, but he didn’t learn how to play poker on the Internet. He learned the game the same way as greats like Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim, and T.J. Cloutier, in the backrooms of Texas’ underground gambling halls.

Raised outside Dallas by his mother Shirley, Williams learned how to compete at a very early age. “I grew up playing a variety of games with my mom, my family, my grandparents. You know, board games, video games, card games.” Around his 14th or 15th birthday, he discovered Magic: The Gathering, a new card game that cast its players as dueling wizards, armed with powerful spells, battling one another to the finish. The game’s strategic complexity appealed to the cerebral Williams, but, as it turned out, that wasn’t even the best part. Thanks to a rapidly growing tournament scene, its players could make an awful lot of money, especially for a teenager. Williams would go on to win tens of thousands of dollars on Magic’s pro tour.

It was during one of these events that Williams noticed a group of players fighting it out with a more traditional deck of cards. “I said, ‘Hey, what’s this?’” he recalled. “They said, ‘It’s poker.’ ‘Okay, I don’t know anything about poker, but can I play?’ I sat down, they explained the rules to me … Ever since that day, I’ve played every single day of my life, probably.”

For Williams, playing every day meant venturing into the Redman’s Club in Dallas, a quasi-legal cardroom with a storied past. Founded in the 1960s by the late “Cowboy” Wolford, it had once been a regular destination for players like Brunson, Cloutier, and Bobby Baldwin.

“There are pictures up of them playing back in the ’70s. I’d hear stories all the time. I was in a place filled with history … so I took it pretty seriously from the beginning.” Some of those stories made mention of a tournament called the World Series of Poker, which, thanks to a movie called Rounders and the occasional appearance on ESPN, was quickly growing in popularity. Williams, who was making decent money at Limit Hold ‘Em, knew he wanted to play the WSOP, but felt he lacked enough No-Limit Hold ‘Em tournament experience. In 2003, having dabbled a bit online, he decided to use the Internet to hone his skills. He won a trip to a WPT event in Aruba, where he “got dusted off pretty well.” But it sparked enough of a fire to encourage him to take a shot at the next World Series. After an unspectacular effort in the $3,000 buy-in No-Limit Hold ‘Em event—just his second major tournament—Williams felt ready enough to play in his third, the 2004 WSOP Championship.

You already know what happened next.

2. Winning the Main Event would be great, but …

… it’s not the title he covets most. Williams, more than anything else, wants to win a bracelet playing a game that most players his age have never even heard of: No-Limit Deuce-To-Seven Draw. “No-Limit Deuce is strictly about guts and psychology,” he said. “It’s raw poker.” Obsessed with the history of the World Series, Williams had spent hours poring over the list of past winners. “Doyle Brunson, Billy Baxter, Stu Ungar, Johnny Chan—there was no slouch who ever won the event. You’re a real player when you win that event. I mean, the people know it. Doyle Brunson would know, this Dave kid can play.”

Williams wanted desperately to enter, but was wise enough to look before he leapt. “It’s a $5,000 rebuy event, and the field’s always 50 people, 50 of the top players. I mean, no slouches at all. I don’t know enough about the game to just blow off $5,000 plus rebuys. Who knows how deep that can get?”

This year, however, having already won the $1,500 Seven-Card Stud event, Williams decided he’d fire one bullet at the tournament he considers his Holy Grail. “I’m not going to rebuy. I’m not going to go crazy. I’m not going to add-on. I’m just going to take $5,000, give it a try, get the experience under my belt, so, come next year, I can make a new evaluation about it. Maybe fire one bullet at it for the next five years until I’m comfortable enough to really get in and rebuy and play it.”

Whatever fears he harbored were only exacerbated when he took his seat. “There are 81 players, and [five-time winner] Billy Baxter’s on my left. The master of the game and I don’t even know how to play it.” Despite playing tight poker, Williams watched his stack get whittled down to $700, and the blinds and antes were going to eat him up before long. “So I’m like, Oh well, I’m just going to see what happens. Try to fight. If I go broke, I go broke.”

By the end of the rebuy period, three hours into the tournament, Williams found himself with $25,000 in chips, placing him among the chip leaders. As the first day came to a close, he was as surprised as anyone else to discover that he was the chip leader.

He entered the second day brimming with confidence. “I really felt like most of the world-class players had been knocked out. I mean, there was [1997 winner] Johnny Chan, but he was short-stacked, and [2001 winner] Allen Cunningham … but I felt like I had a great shot of winning. I was confident, I liked how I was playing the game, and I thought I had it figured out pretty well.” He reached the nine-player final table with about a third of the chips in play. With three players left, he held over half the chips. Suddenly, Williams found himself playing heads-up against Daniel Alaei for the Deuce-To-Seven title.

“He won a few even-money shots when we got it all in,” lamented Williams. “He won two or three in a row, and all of the sudden he’s got the chip lead.” After nearly five hours of brutal heads-up play, the increasing blinds forced Williams to move all in before the flop. Alaei called, turning over a nearly unbeatable deuce-to-eight, and Williams was drawing dead.

“I was so happy to get second in that event after never really playing it, but I was so close to the bracelet I wanted more than any bracelet in the world. It hurt.

“Screw winning the Main Event. That’d be cool, the money is awesome, yeah, the fame, but really, you’re a real player when you win the Deuce-To-Seven event.”

3. He doesn’t go on tilt. Ever.

Ask Williams to describe his “pit experience” at the poker table, and he’s likely to respond with a bewildered stare. It’s not that he doesn’t understand the question—he’s just never had one. Like the greats from Texas who preceded him, Williams plays poker with unflappable poise.

“I never really show much emotion. I might pump a fist if I win a big hand, but I never really let things bother me. I never go on tilt. I don’t really question myself. I just try to sit and stay focused. I mean, there’s times when a level will end and I’ll go to the bathroom and be like, Man, I had $50,000, now I have $30,000, what’s going on? You know, you’re splashing around too much. You need to change gears. You’re playing too many pots.

“I just make adjustments. But it’s not like I’m mentally shaken up or anything, I just have to reevaluate and change my game plan.”

4. His poker success has, indeed, changed him.

Williams would like to believe that the millions he’s won playing poker haven’t altered his life him to any great extent. But it’s just not true. “I look at where I am now, and where I was, and my life has definitely changed. I don’t have to worry about what-ifs … I’ve got the money to take care of any situation.”

A student at Southern Methodist University at the time of the 2004 WSOP, he’s since dropped out of school with about a semester’s worth of credits to go. “I want to go back, but I don’t really need it for what I want to do.”

The changes don’t end there. “I don’t have a set schedule. I can wake up late every day. I can do my own thing. I drive a nice car. Life is good.” It’s proven to be especially good in regards to the ladies. “Not to say that I didn’t hook up with hot chicks before, but now, the caliber and quantity is just ridiculous. No one is off-limits. There are playmates, models, actresses.

“So, definitely, my life has changed. It’s different. And I don’t know if it’s necessarily just the money, or if it’s the status. I think it’s the confidence level, too. I mean, all these things changing feed the confidence, which makes you a more positive person, which makes people around you more interested—it kind of feeds itself. It’s like a machine that just feeds itself and keeps going.”

There are, of course, some extravagances. His 2007 Bentley coupe set him back $180,000. “I kind of regret it a little bit. I love the looks, but I have buyer’s remorse real bad after I buy something. I feel like, What did I do? I just wasted a lot of money.”

Then there’s the shoe collection, or, more specifically, the Nike Air Force Ones. “I’ve got a pretty sick obsession,” he admitted. “I’ve got like 160 different pairs. Some duplicates, just in case I want to wear a pair and not mess it up and have an extra pair in case I do. I have a lot of rare one-of-a-kinds, or special collections where there were only five made.” His friend DJ AM, who has recently received a good deal of ink for his on-again, off-again relationship with Nicole Ritchie, is partly to blame for the madness. “He knew I was starting to like them,” said Williams. “He introduced me to DJ Clark Kent, who’s a pretty famous deejay in New York—he discovered Jay-Z. [Clark] is, like, the Air Force One guy. He’s got over 3,000 pairs. Anytime I want something hot and rare, Clark can find them, or he knows some people who can get me what I need to get.”

Williams pampers his collection with near-fanaticism. “My whole closet, I’ve got them all organized. I’ve got a picture on the side of each box so I know what’s in the box. I wear a different pair pretty much every day to coordinate with my outfit.” So far—he’s been collecting the shoes since April—Williams hasn’t had to wear a pair twice.

But in the most important ways, Williams is still the same, down-to-earth guy he has always been. “I don’t think I’ve really left anyone behind. I still keep in touch with all of my friends. I’m still a nice person, from what I can see. I take care of my family and my friends. I still do the things that I think someone in my position should do. I think I’ve handled it well.”

Just a couple of weeks ago, he met up with a bunch of his old friends from the Magic circuit to play a late-night game. They were interrupted by a group of girls who tried to cajole Williams into joining them at a club. “I turned them down,” he said with a laugh. “I wanted to hang out with my buddies and play Magic.”

5. But what he really wants to do is act.

Despite his increasing success—Williams truly believes that he has a shot at winning a World Series bracelet every year—he doesn’t plan on remaining a professional poker player forever. “I plan to play, to do it to make money for the rest of my life, but I definitely don’t want to have it be my sole source of income.” He recently started a real estate company with a friend, using some of his poker winnings to buy properties in the Las Vegas area. He’s also mulling over a number of entertainment-related business opportunities. “I’m getting into different areas, so I don’t have to count on poker. So I can just really relax and enjoy poker as a game.”

One of those areas has been acting. “I’ve done a couple of things. I played myself on Tilt, the show on ESPN. I just filmed a part in a movie coming out in the winter called Redline. It’s a big-budget auto movie, kind of like The Fast And The Furious for adults. Instead of Hondas, it’s Ferraris and Lamborghinis and Porsche Carrera GTs—you know, half-million-dollar cars. They have a poker scene where the main character plays a high-stakes cash game with me and Gus Hansen. He ends up beating us and going to buy a $1.4-million Ferrari.”

The film’s director was impressed enough with his screen presence to give him a few lines and suggested that, with acting lessons, Williams might actually have what it takes to be a star. “He said, ‘You know, you can be the next Will Smith. That smile, you can be in all my movies.’”

Now that the World Series has come to a close, Williams is giving the suggestion more than a little consideration. “Once everybody’s out of town, and I start to get a little dead time, I’m going to look into getting some acting lessons, getting a coach, getting more serious about it. Maybe I’ll end up on a TV show or something.”

Williams takes a moment to consider what he’s just said. “No, I’d want to become a big movie star. Everything I do, I want to take seriously. So if I do start doing it, poker will probably have to take a small break, because I get pretty obsessed with every project I take on, and I want to be the best at it.”

Given what Williams has managed to accomplish so far, would you really bet against him?