New breed of poker star on the Internet
By Bob Harkins, MSNBC.com
Posted July 16, 4 a.m. ET The future of poker isn’t hunkered down in a smoky card room in the back of roadside tavern. It’s not wearing a weathered face, chewing on a cigar and glaring lightning bolts from beneath a 10 gallon hat. The future of poker is fresh-faced and fast-paced. It’s intelligent and cocky and ultra-aggressive. And it’s likely sitting in front of a computer right now, trying to take all your money. Chris Moneymaker became the face of Internet poker when he won the main event in 2003. He had parlayed a $39 online tournament into a $2.5 million payoff in the World Series of Poker main event. But by today’s standards, Moneymaker is a dinosaur. Today’s online players spend hours a day on PCs in college dorm rooms or basement hideaways, grinding away on four, eight, or even more tables simultaneously on the same computer screen. To them, the World Series is an event where they can prove themselves and earn recognition. But as far as getting rich, they can earn more cash more quickly against inferior competition on the Web. | |
Hevad Khan (photo courtesy IMPDI) Take 21-year-old Brendan Keenan, for instance. A clean-cut kid from a middle class family in Stanton Island, N.Y., he’s not at the World Series to play, despite owning a bankroll he says exceeds $60,000. Rather, he’s in Las Vegas to watch his friend Hevad Khan (known as RaiNKhAN online) play in the $10,000 main event, and noted midway through the tournament a strong online presence.
“There are a lot of really good players in this room who no one has ever heard of,” Keenan said.
Keenan, 21, prefers online cash games to live tournament action. It’s a high-risk, high-reward environment in which you can build — or lose — a bankroll quickly, as opposed to slogging it out for hours in a casino.
He met Khan, a 22-year-old from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., while in college at SUNY-Albany. The two hit it off while playing poker for pennies in the dorms.
“Guys would play on the second floor until 5 or 6 in the morning,” Keenan says. “It was just guys having a good time.”
The two had similar interests, including backgrounds in competitive gaming — essentially playing video games on a professional level. They met another player, Joshua Gardner, online through competitive gaming, and he joined the group. Gardner, a 24-year-old from Seattle, also made the trek to Las Vegas to watch Khan play.
The group quickly discovered that online poker was far more lucrative than video games. Khan lent Keenan $250 and he quickly built it up into “a pretty good amount of money.”
Meanwhile, Khan quit school and moved to California to prepare for the World Series of Poker.
“I lived in a living room, on a couch, for two months,” Khan says. “I had a computer and I just sat and slaved in front of it every single day to prepare for Las Vegas, and this World Series.”
Khan would play multiple tables. So many, in fact, that an opponent accused him of cheating by using bots. He was kicked off of one poker site, but was allowed to return after Keenan sent in a video of Khan playing a whopping 26 tables at once. (You can view the video by searching "rainkhan poker" on YouTube).
He built up his bankroll enough to pay for his trip to Las Vegas.
“When I came out here, every tournament I’ve entered is from profit I’ve had grinding the live single table tournaments (online),” he says. “So I haven’t spent a dime out here. If you focus there’s a lot of money to be made because the average player just isn’t that good.”
And Khan has made what seems to be a seamless transition to live tournaments at the WSOP, entering the main event having already finished in the money in two preliminary events, for more than $20,000 in winnings.
Now, as one of the last nine players at the final table of the main event, which will be played Tuesday, he’s eyeing a potential $8.25 million grand prize.
“There are a lot of people who wait their whole lives to finally get some money to buy the materialistic things they desire … but they can never achieve it,” Khan says. “And we’ve kind of found a way to mold our adolescence of thriving through video game competition into poker. So it’s competitive, but we can still be kids and we can still live our lives, kind of be animals in a way. At the same time we can make so much money that we can become independent.”
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“If I work a 9-to-5 job as a college graduate, I’ll make $45,000 a year if I’m lucky,” he says. “There is more opportunity this way. You can travel all over the world. You’re your own boss, you can work whenever you want as long as you have a computer and the Internet in front of you.”
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