Player Profile 2002 WSOP Champion Robert Varkonyi

Robert Varkonyi's biggest pay day as a poker player came on May 24, 2002. It was $2 million . . .

first prize money the day he won the World Series of Poker championship at the Horseshoe in Las Vegas.

Poker was on the verge of a lot of big things and Varkonyi sometimes thinks it might have been nice to have timed events a little differently. Maybe win the big game a year or two or three later when the number of entries paying $10,000 had climbed into the thousands and the ancillary money-making opportunities associated with winning poker's biggest event had mushroomed.

But the thought seems to pass quickly and he says with the sound of conviction, "I have been have been lucky, very lucky . . . in poker, in school, with my investing, in life, but sometimes you make your own luck, you know, thinking about the right reaction to a particular moment in time."

It's not as though he grew up intent on a career as a gambler, but nice things, good things happened as he embraced the opportunities that life and circumstances brought him.

The fledgling World Poker Tour had filmed its first tournament week's before Varkonyi's 2002 World Series win. It would be aired early the following year and poker would suddenly be on its way to places it had never been before.

The 2003 World Series would be the launching pad toward instant celebrity for an unassuming Nashville accountant with the unlikely name of Chris Moneymaker who had ridden a series of Internet satellites into the World Series and the chance to outlast the far more experienced poker pros in the tournament room with him.

Moneymaker's surprising win, as everyone knows by now, put the growth of the World Series on Steroids.

Thousands of amateur poker players savored the possibilities they found in his achievement, thanks to stepped up ESPN coverage.

The fact that Varkonyi, a then-40-year-old son of Hungarian immigrant parents had won his World Series entry a year earlier via a one-table satellite didn't resonate in the same way. But the 2002 World Series did contribute to the poker boom in one significant way. It was the first televised World Series that allowed home viewers to see the hole cards.

Some of the players were not happy about the use of this technology that showed their hole cards to the world, What Varkonyi remembers, is that the carefully edited version of final table action took about nine months to go through the process and at least one scheduled airing was missing because, "There was a snow storm or something and the tape did not get from wherever it was to where it was supposed to be."

The network ended up showing the Jack Binion tournament from Tunica and Varkonyi's friends who had been alerted to look for the World Series tuned in saying "Where's Rob, where's Rob?"

Several years later, he shrugs it off with a what are you gonna do kind of sigh. It seemed like his 15 minutes of fame were being condensed down to almost nothing.

Over the next several years the number of people clamoring for an association with the WSOP's big game would mushroom from the 631 the year Varkonyi won to the 8,773 who plunked down their $10,000 for the chance to participate in this year's just-completed main event.

But the fates were hard at work in Varkonyi's life and not all of the results had anything to do with poker although it was difficult to it ignore the satisfying feeling that came with winning $2 million.

Olga Varkonyi was several months pregnant with their first child as she fidgeted nervously at the Horseshoe, watching carrying her husband win poker's biggest tournament. They would decide to name the baby Victoria in honor of that win.

Varkonyi started taking poker seriously during the years he was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had been traveling annually to Las Vegas for the World Series since the mid-1990s, always trying his luck with one of the main event satellites but never winning until 2002.

This year was no exception and he was at the Rio, the site of the World Series for the last two years playing in a few of the early tournaments before going back to his Long Island home for a couple of weeks.

He returned for the finale, making it through most of two days before being swept away.

With less than an hour to go during his first day he was among the top fifty or so chip leaders with about $80,000 a stack that he felt would give him a decent start on day two.

The way he would later tell it, "I was thinking seriously about leaving my chips on the table and going to bed."

He would have paid relatively little in blinds as the button moved around the table during the last hands of the day.

"I'm talking to one of the floormen, sort of half jokingly about what I was thinking and he said, yeah, to just go ahead and they would bet for me."

Varkonyi thought it over and decided to remain at the table.

"Turns out I should have followed my first instincts. I ran into a couple of tough hands. For instance, I had ace-king and someone else had aces. Stuff like that."

He bounced back close to the lead on day two but eventually busted out just before the dinner break when his set of queens got chewed up by someone else's a straight on the river. An acquaintance consoled him with the thought that "You lose a hand like that and you pretty much know this is not your year."

There has always been a lot more than poker going on in Varkonyi's life and he shakes his head at some of the Internet summaries of his life, summaries that describe him as a former investment banker who has since become a full time poker player.

Getting the storytold accurately, he seems to say is not easy.

The truth is that he did work on Wall Street for a number of years where he became a project manager and vice president with Goldman Sachs in the information technology department.

He worked on trading systems and money management systems.

Yes, it is true that he and Olga both play a good bit of poker and have an Internet affiliation with InterPoker. com but they do not consider themselves fulltime poker players, preferring to carefully pick their spots, so to speak.

They try to get to as many of the big tournaments as possible now that there is a sponsorship, but, well . . .

Life has a way of developing complications as people become parents.

Daughter Victoria is close to four now and there was another addition to the family within the last few months.

But Varkonyi likes to celebrate the fact that, as he puts it, "I am a lucky man." His parents were hiding in Hungary from the Nazis during World War II and other family members died in concentration camps.

He was "very, very lucky" to be able to attend MIT. That would not have happened without a lot of financial aid.

"Time went by," he continues, "and I was fortunate enough to have a successful career on Wall Street . . . "I had started life with nothing and graduated from college with a lot of debt. I had been working very hard all my life, working since high school.

But he managed to work his way toward better things and in his last year at Goldman Sachs in 2000 following the accidental death of a friend, he decided the time had come to take time off, maybe six months or a year. He wasn't certain how he would use the time but more than anything the goal was to simply not work for a while. Give himself enough time to experience whatever life had to offer. That's what he was thinking.

What also happened about this time was that he decided to learn Russian, which is how he happened to meet Olga. She was to be his teacher and that it how it worked for a while.

"First we were friends and then," he grins, "we became romantic."

A year later more or less, in the late summer of 2001 he decided the time had come to call off the "fantasy life" he had been living and go back to work on the stock exchange.

But on the morning of Sept. 11, he and Olga were in their apartment in Brooklyn a couple of miles from the World Trade Center site when they heard what Varkonyi describes as a "terrible boom." They looked at each other guessing that there must have been an accident nearby involving a couple of big trucks.

Something like that. Olga turned on the television to see shots of smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center towers, but it was hard to accept the reality. All that smoke, maybe it had something to do with a movie.

The job he was headed for had just been "varporized." Time goes by and it is the spring of 2002 and Varkonyi and Olga are planning their trip to Las Vegas. He had taught his bride the basics of hold 'em, they are in the process of buying a house, Olga is about two months pregnant but they did not want to tell anyone until she passed three months. Varkonyi had had a conversation about a job offer and left for Las Vegas with a friend warning him to be careful about losing too much money out there.

"And they say you're supposed to go into these tournaments with a clear head and a clear mind," he chuckles.

Even now he gets a kick out of remembering how he called back to that prospective employer about 10 days later telling them how he didn't think the time was right for him to go back to work.

The two of them have been playing mostly World Poker Tour events the last year or so and with this year's World Series now complete Varkonyi speculates that they will probably participate in perhaps a coupler WPT tournaments, some of the WSOP circuit events and, well . . . he'll just have to see what's possible.

"We like to be at home now with the kids and Olga's not traveling now because of the baby, but we're definitely going to the Caribbean Poker Classic the end of November and beginning of December. We'll be playing in the main event." Other than that, Varkonyi will be content to sit back and see what happens as he considers the next right move.

It's a strategy that's worked nicely so far.