Meet the Future of Poker

Brittany DeWald is in another snit. "I'm cold!" Nothing. Her boyfriend, David Williams, is sitting on the sofa playing online poker on his laptop for $1,600 a pot. His friend Minh Huynh is sitting at a table behind him playing online poker on another computer in Williams's loft apartment, which is highceilinged, cold, dark and cavernous, with barren gray concrete walls and exposed pipes and air ducts. There is nothing on the walls--no prints, photographs or mirrors. The only furniture in the room is a black sofa, a matching love seat, a coffee table with a small photograph of a Chihuahua, a computer table with Williams's collection of Playboy magazines stacked chronologically under it and a 60-inch flat-screen television showing the finals of the 2004 World Series of Poker on ESPN.

It is nine P.M. in Dallas, and the only light in the room comes from the TV and the eerie cyber-blue computer glow reflecting on the faces of Williams and Huynh. Williams is 24 and lean, with a wispy goatee, a head of tight black curls and creamy, coffee-colored skin. He looks vaguely black, vaguely Middle Eastern. Huynh is 32 and from Vietnam. Very heavy, with a jowly face and thick-lensed eyeglasses, Huynh is a loquacious, funny, acerbic fat man. Williams is laconic, spare with his words and emotions. He looks like NBA star Tim Duncan, were Duncan to dress like a slacker-hipster in baggy T-shirts, jeans and sneakers. Like Duncan, Williams has the eyes-lowered, self-deprecating slouch of a supremely confident man. Williams and Huynh have been playing poker for more than four hours now.

"I'm cold," DeWald says.

"Yes!" says Williams. "A $735 pot."

Huynh glances at the WSOP on TV. "That Eskimo Clark is an old-timer. Traveled around to underground clubs, got raided by the cops or hijacked and couldn't go to the cops. Poker is mainstream now." He goes back to his computer. "Jesus Christ!"

"Fuck!" says Williams. "A set of threes." He glances at the TV. "Scotty Nguyen can drink Michelob all night long."

"I'm cold," DeWald says.

"Then put some clothes on," Huynh responds.

DeWald pouts. "This is a fucking man pit. There's too much estrogen in here."

"You mean testosterone," says Williams.

"Whatever. It's a boring lifestyle." DeWald, 20, flops down on the love seat beside me. A beautiful, curvaceous redhead with white skin and hazel eyes, she's wearing a low-cut, short camisole that exposes her plump breasts and a navel ring. Her tiny miniskirt barely covers her ass. She flips through one of Williams's Playboys. Williams reads the magazine from cover to cover each month, but he passes over the nude photographs because he doesn't think the models exist.

"Where are these girls?" he asks. "They don't go to the grocery store. They should be human, but I never see them."

"I plan to have a body like Pamela Anderson's," says DeWald.

"Great," says Williams. "Let the world know how shallow David Williams's girlfriend is."

"My mother had a boob job."

"She had six kids. It was time." Then, after another winning pot, he says, "I'm up $2,793 now."

I ask DeWald if she plays poker. "I'm learning," she says. "The object is to win all the money. I play only very, very low limit."

"That's because you're so bad," says Williams.

"Asshole!" Then to me, "I don't have the attention span for poker. Everyone in my family has ADD. I hate to lose. One game, I put all of my money in the pot and lost, and I cried."

"There's no crying in poker," says Huynh.

"I was pissed. I'm a woman, and I'm emotional. One game, this guy took all his girlfriend's money and didn't give it back."

"Daniel Negreanu once bluffed his girlfriend out of a pot," says Huynh.

"It's common courtesy not to browbeat your girlfriend," says DeWald.

"It's common courtesy to the table not to soft-play your girlfriend," says Huynh.

Williams and Huynh glance at the WSOP on TV while their fingers move across their computer keys. They seem not to have to look at the computer screens, as if they're playing by osmosis.

ESPN is broadcasting 22 weeks of the 2004 WSOP (the previous year the network aired just seven episodes), which took place at Binion's Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. More than 2,500 players--1,700 more than in 2003--put down a $10,000 entry fee for the chance to win the $5 million first prize, the $3.5 million second prize or the diminishing amounts for other top finishers. Most important to professional poker players, they also competed for the diamond-encrusted gold bracelet that proclaims the recipient the best poker player in the world.

Texas Hold 'Em, heavily featured at the WSOP, is one of the simplest yet most challenging of all poker games, which is why the WSOP title is the most prestigious. Players must have an uncanny instinct in reading their opponents' two down cards, a mathematical bent in figuring out the percentage of drawing a card they need, an innate ability to read an opponent's "tells"--his mannerisms when looking at his cards or preparing to bet--and the guts of a burglar in knowing when to try to bluff an opponent out of his superior hand by raising large amounts of money until he folds. That is why the game has made TV stars out of a disparate group of men, and a few women, who have little in common except their poker skills. Those players fall easily into two groups: old-time poker players who cut their teeth on illicit cash games (in which they bet their own money) and the newer breed of players, younger and more intelligent, who cut their teeth on online video games, then graduated to card games like Magic: The Gathering (a sort of Pokémon game for pre-adults) and finally to online poker before venturing into live cash games and then the WSOP.

"Williams and guys like Negreanu are the new breed," Huynh tells me. "Many of them started with Magic and then went to online poker. Williams is so smart. You can't beat him. When he was 16 I saw him push his last $2,000 into a pot. You can't teach that."

Williams was 15 when he met Huynh at a Magic tournament. Williams describes Magic as an analytical card game with features of chess, bridge and poker. The artwork has a fantasy element--goblins and knights--but he says the game is nothing like Dungeons & Dragons. It's played mostly by teenagers and people in their early 20s. "Most of them are not very social," Williams says. "All they do is bitch about Magic."

Huynh says the David Williams he met "was smart and mature, and he wanted to learn from me." By the age of 16 Williams was already one of the best Magic players in the world. He traveled to the Netherlands, Aruba, Singapore and Paris for money tournaments and won as much as $45,000 in a year. During his Magic days Williams made an assortment of friends around the world who remain his friends today: Huynh; Neil Reeves, now 26, from Arkansas; and Noah Boeken, now 23, from the Netherlands.

Williams's Magic friends "are so dorky," says DeWald. "They're nothing like David. They're kind of nerdy."

"Yeah," says Williams, "and they're all earning deep six Figures playing poker."

By the time Williams turned 17, Magic was less of a challenge for him. His Magic friends on the Internet told him about the new big thing online. "I was intrigued by poker," says Williams. "Huynh helped me out and then got me into some illicit games. I didn't play any games that would hurt me."

"Williams went in with $500 and didn't stop until he'd won $5,000," says Huynh. "He figured the game out and in three months was better than I was."

Williams read every book he could find on poker, every issue of Card Player magazine from cover to cover and within a few years began to make a living at the game, which he'd play online and in illicit cash games in underground Dallas clubs. When Reeves moved there a year ago, Williams taught him the game, and the three men would go to clubs to play poker for up to 30 hours straight.

"David has no fear," says Reeves, who describes himself as a fat, ugly white guy. "He looks at chips as chips, not money. He introduced me to underground poker games. They're like a spiderweb, and now I'm making more money than at anything else I could do, maybe $82,000 to $86,000 this year."

Williams's attraction to Reeves, and to all his Magic and poker friends, says Reeves, "is that we're all extremely smart and don't want to work nine to five. It's the most intelligent collection of scumbags I've ever met. It's an alternative lifestyle."

By the time Williams, who describes himself as smart and lazy, turned 21, he was playing poker for a living and making between $50,000 and $100,000 a year at it. He finally decided it was time to play in the biggest game of his life, the World Series of Poker. The day before he went to Vegas he won an online tournament, which paid his $10,000 WSOP entry fee. "I had no expectations," he says. "I thought of it as a learning experience."

"There's a big difference between a cash player and a tournament player," says Huynh. "There's less pressure in a tournament, because you can lose only your qualifying fee. In cash games, I used to lose two months' salary in just one game. Vietnamese gamble out of all proportion to our salaries. We'll bet a third of our week's salary on a pot. Man, poker brings out the worst in people. After a bad loss, a miserable bastard will be an even more miserable bastard."

"I played nothing but cash games before the WSOP," Williams says. "In those, if you lose, you go into your pocket for more money. In a tournament, if you lose, you're out, so players are more cautious."

"Live poker games are more artful," says Huynh. "A lot of bluffs and skill. They're more fun than online games."

"But I can make five times more online," Williams insists.

"Yeah," says Huynh, "but online games aren't art, just math. I have notes on almost a thousand online players. I see a weak player in a game, and I jump in. I play four online games at a time, 250 hands an hour. You can play only 35 live hands an hour. I play online eight hours a day. It's like going to work. I make more than $100,000 a year."

Reeves says he prefers live games because he can play the player, not the cards: "I look for tells. David is the best face-to-face player."

Williams says he got into a zone at the WSOP. "I was gaining talents like I was possessed," he says. "I could read a guy's body language. If he looked at his cards and tensed his shoulders, he had a good hand. It meant he was thinking. If he relaxed and looked around, he had nothing."

DeWald speaks up: "Poker is such a huge part of our life and relationship. David's on his laptop 18 hours a day. I get jealous. 'Don't you wanna sleep or eat?' I ask him. I try to sleep, but guys are hollering over a pot at three A.M. I wake up at nine, and guys are sleeping all over or still playing."

"She says I'm the lamest," says Williams. "I don't drink, do drugs, jog, work out, go to clubs, dance, nothing. I send her out to the grocery store. I play poker."

"We're opposites," says DeWald. "David chills and cools. I'm energetic. I love roller coasters."

"Why do something that makes you sick?" Williams asks.

"I wanna skydive next." I notice that DeWald has a pierced tongue with a silver barbell in it. I ask her about it. "It's just something to play with when I'm bored," she says.

"I told her it's time to take it out," says Williams. "You're an adult now. When adults have those things there's something wrong with them."

DeWald screams at him. "There's nothing wrong with me! Look at you--it took you six months to buy a sofa. We had nothing but a TV. You said you'd buy a car with your WSOP money, but you won't get one by Christmas."

Williams shrugs. "I don't like to spend money."

At 10 P.M. Williams starts making telephone calls, looking for an illicit cash game. When he finds one, Huynh, Williams and I get up to leave.

"I thought you were taking me out to dinner," DeWald says.

"Tomorrow night," he says. She storms out of the living room and goes upstairs to their bedroom.

Williams, Huynh and I drive north out of Dallas to a Steak n Shake for dinner, then on to the poker game. (continued on page 184)Poker(continued from page 152) Williams tells us about his WSOP experiences. He says he entered the WSOP because he's a perfectionist with a strong desire to be the best at anything he does. At the age of six he had to beat his mother at video games. In grammar school he had to have perfect grades. When he once got a 95, he confronted his teacher about his five missing points. "I always wanted to beat the game," he says, "find the secret no one else knew."

Because he was a WSOP unknown, Williams felt little pressure. At first he played cautiously, but on his second day he was up only $2,000. Disgusted with himself, he started playing faster and looser. In one game he pushed in all his chips when he had two jacks, not knowing that his opponent had two aces. He got his third jack on the flop and won, he says, "because you have to be lucky to win. And lucky to dodge the other guy's luck. You have to be focused and emotionless. You can't let a bad beat affect your mind. That's always been my nature. Brittany says I never cry or get angry. I don't, because I accept reality. Getting mad doesn't change it, so why expend the energy? Maybe that's bad for personal relationships, but it's good for poker. That's how I reconcile my perfectionism with fate. I call it the law of probability. Nothing's guaranteed. To be a great player you have to accept that."

Williams moved steadily through the field for a week until he finally found himself, on the day before the finals, in 10th position. That night's game would stop only when nine players were left for the final table the next day. Williams desperately wanted to be at that final table. If he made it, he would be the youngest player ever and the first black player (his mother is African American, his father from Iran) at a final table; most poker players are white, Asian or Middle Eastern men. But Williams had the lowest stack of chips of any of the 10 players at his table, which put him at a distinct disadvantage. So he played cautiously, dropping out of hand after hand to protect his short stack.

"I'm sitting there like a pussy," he says. "Scared, hoping I can make the final table. But even if I made it, with no chips I'd be the first one out. I wasn't playing tough. Finally I said to myself, 'Be a man. If it's meant to be, it's meant to be.' " So when he drew an ace and a queen (his opponent had two 10s), Williams put all his chips into the pot. When the subsequent three cards, called the flop, didn't improve his hand, he began to pack his things. His new friend Marcel Luske, now 51 and one of the best poker players in Europe, put his arm around Williams and said, "Relax. The next card will be an ace."

"I don't believe in voodoo," says Williams, "but the next card was an ace, and I moved to the final table with enough chips to protect myself. It was amazing how Marcel in his heart wanted me to win. He loves to teach, and I love to learn. It was a real moment for me."

Williams describes the WSOP finals as the best poker played by the most boring players. "There was no chatter," he says. "It was too tense for that. That's the appeal of poker. It's like reality TV. You can drop in on it at any moment and find drama--highs and lows that are captured in a moment."

At the final table one player after another went bust until only Williams and a Connecticut lawyer named Greg "Fossilman" Raymer remained. They played a few hands, one or the other dropping out quickly to conserve his chips. Then Williams decided again to play it fast and loose. He pushed in $300,000 in chips while holding only an ace and a four. His opponent had a pair of eights. "I didn't think he had a pair," says Williams, "because he didn't look at it too long. A pair of eights, you got to stop and think."

The flop was two-four-five, so now Williams had two fours to Raymer's pair of eights. Raymer immediately raised $1.6 million. Williams called instantly. "I'm a quick thinker," he says. "I went with my gut. People say I should have slowed down."

The turn came up a two, which gave Raymer two pairs, his pocket eights and the community-card twos. Williams also had two pairs, fours and twos. Before the river Raymer bet $2.5 million, and Williams called him. The river came up another two, which gave both men a full house, but Raymer's was higher because of his eights. Raymer pushed in all his chips, and Williams, certain Raymer didn't have a pair of down cards, pushed in all of his. When they turned over their cards, Raymer was the new champion. Williams, who was $3.5 million richer, had still finished second, which tormented him. "Nothing hurts like busting out of your first big one," he says. "I think about that final hand every day. So close to being the champion. Winning was so much more important to me than the money. If first paid $3.5 million and second $5 million, I still would have liked to win. I don't know if I'll ever get it out of my head."

Williams was so disheartened by his second-place finish that he ordered takeout food and ate it in his room. But the next day his new fame hit him. A lot of young actors, including Tobey Maguire and Ben Affleck, are poker aficionados. Williams met Maguire, who began to call him Number Two. (Williams solidified this nickname four months after the WSOP when he finished second in a World Poker Tour event in Atlantic City, winning $600,000.)

"I said, 'Who are you?' " Williams says. "He said, 'Tobey Maguire.' I said, 'What do you do?' He said, 'I'm an actor.' I said, 'Really. What movies have you been in?' He said, 'Spider-Man.' I said, 'Oh.' "

Weeks later Maguire beat him in a cash game. "I could see sadness in his eyes that he beat me," says Williams.

Veteran players began to offer Williams a seat in their million-dollar cash games, but he'd decline. He had already gone to dinner with enough veteran players who told him about players' "leaks"--a poker player's vice that leaks money. It could be drugs, booze, women or other forms of gambling. Phil Ivey, the young black player who favors NBA jerseys, is "the greatest player in the game," says Williams. But he has a leak. He likes to gamble. He once lost $250,000 in a poker game he actually won. Between hands he made proposition bets of thousands on the color of the next card. "Guys pointed out players who won millions in poker and are now broke because they had a leak," Williams continues. "Most leaks are gambling. Poker players are challenge seekers. It's not enough to beat someone in poker. They have to beat the unbeatable next. Craps. Roulette. Anything."

One poker player bet $500,000 that he could drink 23 beers in 23 hours. Another bet $10,000 that Howard Lederer, a confirmed vegetarian, couldn't eat a hamburger. He did, and the bettor was annoyed that Lederer didn't throw up. Another player bet an opponent $30,000 that he couldn't live in Des Moines for 30 days. Another bet his opponent $10,000 that he couldn't float in the ocean for 20 hours.

Once he returned to Dallas, Williams made only one purchase, a $25,000 Rolex wristwatch. He gave his mother $50,000 and paid off her bills. He also promised he'd pay off her $125,000 mortgage. Shirley Williams, 49, has been a Delta flight attendant for 26 years. "My mother's a great woman," says Williams, "but she never saved for retirement. Now I can do it for her if I don't blow it. If she doesn't want to work, I'll support her. If she ever needs anything, she can have it. But Mom's not good with money. She lives paycheck to paycheck. I didn't think it was good to give her $500,000 and turn her loose. I got her a $1,000 line of credit for online poker, and it's already gone."

When Williams was back home in Dallas, he went to see a financial advisor. He sat in a conference room around an oval mahogany table and discussed his finances, how to minimize taxes and how to invest his millions with a man named Kent, who was dressed in a suit and tie. Williams wore his usual slacker's outfit--oversize T-shirt, ripped baggy jeans, sneakers. He told Kent, "I want to do the right thing with my money, something productive like owning a company so I won't ever have to work nine to five for anyone. I'd like to invest so that by the age of 30 I have $10 million, but I know my goals conflict with my conservative nature. There's a trade-off between risk and reward. I don't like to gamble." Then he produced all the meticulously kept records--his expenses, poker losses, etc.--he has maintained over the years, ever since he decided to live off his poker earnings.

"Living off poker is not dependable," Williams points out. "It's the only job where you can come home with less money than you started with. You can't make $10,000 one night, spend it on a $6,000 TV and the next month be struggling for cash."

At the end of his financial meeting, Williams learned he could pay off his mother's mortgage without paying an extra gift tax. He also learned that if he declared himself a professional gambler to the IRS he could deduct his losses and expenses. "So it's settled," Kent said. "You're a professional gambler." He laughed and added, "Now all your family will be coming out of the woodwork."

"I have only my mother," Williams said. "I never knew my father."

We pull off the highway north of Dallas at 11 P.M. and drive east past a flat, barren stretch of land until we come to a strip mall and a Steak n Shake. We order hamburgers and shakes from a thin, pale waiter.

While we're eating our burgers, Williams says, "After the WSOP I was invited to play in a tournament in L.A. I was the first player out. Just as I got up, one of the guys from the WSOP came by and asked if I was just starting. I told him no, I'd already been eliminated before most of the players had even registered." Williams shakes his head. "After the WSOP, guys told me you lose your confidence. You're afraid to play again because you don't want to be embarrassed. They told me to expect a dry spell."

His cell phone rings, and he answers it. He listens for a moment, then says into the phone, "If you're gonna pay that kind of money to have your car detailed, make sure you look the car over before you pay the guy and he leaves." He listens again, then adds, "I love you, Mom" and hangs up.

"Her car is always filthy," he says to me. "Like anything I do, I'm cautious. I take my time, look into it." He smiles, something he rarely does, and says, "My mother and I have more of a brother-sister relationship."

After we finish dinner, Williams makes an attempt to pay the bill. I tell him the magazine will pay for it. Even before he won $3.5 million at the WSOP, Williams often paid the bill for his friends, much to DeWald's dismay. "Why do you always have to pay?" she'd ask. "It's in my nature," he'd respond. But after the WSOP, Williams found that his friends, including Reeves, were insulted when he tried to pay their dinner bill.

"I'm a man," Reeves told him. "I can pay my own check. Just because you won some money, you're not paying for my meals for the rest of my life. I'm your friend."

Williams shrugs. "I picked my friends right. On their character. We make sure we help each other out."

Williams surrounds himself with men who are older than he is, yet he seems older than his years. He has a gravitas and a sadness about him. Williams likes the company of men and only tolerates the company of women. That's part of his attraction to poker.

"It's a guy thing," says Huynh. "I love my wife and two kids, but I've left them to play poker with the guys for 72 hours straight." When Huynh plays poker, he's no longer just a fat guy. He's a player. He has personality and a kind of power. When Williams plays poker, he's no longer "the lamest" or "lazy." He's sharp, focused, a man to be respected and reckoned with. Poker defines these men. It brings out their repressed personalities, which they keep hidden during those few hours a day when they are not playing poker.

We drive east at midnight past desolate countryside. We go down a side street and come to an industrial strip mall that should be deserted, but more than 20 cars are in the parking lot.

Williams goes up to one of the mall doors and knocks. Someone opens the door, Williams tells him who he is, the door opens, and we step inside. The front room looks like a shabby office space for an auto body shop or a tile company, except on the wall is a little sign that reads, We are a Poker Dealer's School. Sometimes We play Poker after Class. On another wall is a copy of a check made out to the Dallas Police Department.

The owner of the club greets Williams and Huynh and tells them a game awaits in the back room. Williams and Huynh go down a corridor while I ask the club owner about the check on the wall. He smiles and says, "Every little bit helps." I ask him if the neighbors get suspicious with so many cars in his lot at midnight. "They haven't so far," he says.

Williams and Huynh stand around a poker table crowded with about 10 men, all of whom are in their 20s or 30s. They all look like Williams--slackers with baseball caps on backward, baggy T-shirts, jeans--except they are all white. They look up at him and smile. "Come on, David!" They make room for Williams and Huynh at the table, and someone says, "So tell me, David, how many new friends you got? Broke friends, I mean." Everyone laughs while Williams and Huynh buy chips.

It's obvious that the players genuinely like Williams because, as he puts it, "I'm one of their own in their eyes. They're proud of me. I give them hope. If I can do it, they can do it. And here I am, playing right alongside them."

Williams, no longer lame, comes alive while playing Texas Hold 'Em in a dingy strip mall club with his friends, laughing, joking, cursing a bad hand. I stand behind Williams and watch a few hands before he moves a chair close to him and invites me to sit. Every time he gets his down cards, he curls them back at the edges, cupping his hands around them so that only he can see them. Then he slides them toward me and curls them back so I can see them. Despite his curious remove, Williams is unfailingly polite and helpful to me, as he is to everyone. "He's reliable," says Huynh, "and he always returns his calls." When Williams makes an appointment to meet me and he's five minutes late, he apologizes profusely. When he has his financial meeting, he makes a point of having me sit in, even though he's discussing his most intimate finances. As long as I'm in Dallas to see him, he says, "I'm available to you whenever you want me."

Williams looks at his down cards, two eights, and pushes a big stack of chips into the pot. His opponent has two jacks but is scared off by Williams's assertive play. He folds his better hand. Williams hugs his chips toward him. He stacks them lovingly, fingers them, almost caressing them like small loved ones. It's as if he has a romance with his chips, the way most players do, needing the tactile sensation of them for reassurance. The more chips they have, the more they can feel between their fingers, the more confident they become.

Williams has the beginnings of a straight, five-six-seven-eight. He pushes in $300 in chips. Only the man beside him, a 25-year-old wearing a red baseball cap, is still in the hand. He has a pair of queens. He stares at Williams, trying to read him and determine if he's bluffing. Williams goes cold, blank, devoid of expression. He lets his opponent stare at him for long moments, until finally his opponent folds, his hand--the winning hand had he stayed in the game. Williams pulls in his beloved chips.

We drive back to Dallas at six in the morning. Williams has won $600 and is as exhilarated as if he'd just won the WSOP. It's not the money but the six hours with friends that makes him animated. Huynh was a big loser, but he doesn't care. He'll just go online tonight and win it all back. The money is almost irrelevant to Huynh and Williams. It's just a means to keep score. The action is what motivates them. They're using their brains, skill and, most of all, character in a game that proves their manhood--if to no one but themselves.

I ask Williams about the player with two queens whom he bluffed out of a pot. "I could tell by his body language that he didn't like it when I bet his queens," he says. "I could see his fear. He's a weak player."

The following morning I meet Shirley Williams and her daughter, Tina, David's half sister, for breakfast at Denny's. Shirley arrives heavily made-up and wearing a pair of short shorts and high heels that show off her fine brown legs. She is one of those women pushing 50 who still think of themselves as younger; in Shirley's case, she does look much younger than her age. She's still very pretty, with skin much darker than her son's. Although Williams says he has a brother-sister relationship with his mother, it's more complex than that. Williams is protective of his mother, much like an older brother. He's always complaining about her "acting like a kid" and being "too emotional" and not as responsible as she should be with her money. Williams has no concept of women except as people who need to be protected from themselves. When he saw his mother at the WSOP talking too long to a man, he went over to her and demanded, "Who was that?"

At breakfast I ask Shirley if David is like his father. "I don't know," she says. "I only knew him for a few months. David always resented that he had no father. He thought his father left him. I explained to him that his father didn't know I was pregnant. When he was a child he always said, 'I wish I had a daddy.' One day I said, 'Okay, I'll put you up for adoption,' and he cried, 'No, no, Mommy, I want to be with you.' That was mean of me, I know."

When Williams was a child and his mother would leave to fly with Delta for two or three days at a time, he would stay with his grandparents. When his mother returned, she would be home for four days at a time, which Williams thought was "cool." They'd play Scrabble and video games, bickering over them like two kids. "I always loved games," says Shirley. "I played Atari when David was in my stomach." Shirley got her love of games from her father, a dominoes player. "Nobody could ever beat him," says Williams.

"David was forced to grow up early," says his mother. "When he was 12 he got bored with his grandparents when I'd be gone, so he stayed at home alone. The first time, I cried." Williams would wake up by himself, get dressed, make his breakfast and then catch the school bus. When he'd come home he'd do his homework. "I never had a party or got into trouble," he says. "I couldn't let my mother down. She put her trust in me. I would only have made it harder on her." When his mother was home, she hosted card games at the house. Williams would fix the drinks and serve the food. It was at about this time that Shirley asked her son if he wanted her to try to find his father: "He said no."

In school Williams was so much smarter than his peers that he finished his work early, got bored and began to cause trouble. Shirley says she had him tested and found out how smart he was. "So I enrolled him in a magnet school for gifted children," she says.

The school was in a bad neighborhood, says Shirley, "yet David got along with both types of kids."

"Socially, I hung with the cool kids, a few deadbeats, but I had a dark side," says Williams. "I was a closet nerd. I'd go home and watch the Science Channel, but I could never tell my friends about the properties of chemicals. I adapted, like a chameleon. It was a mixed neighborhood, but my friends didn't think of me as black. I was just David. I didn't fit into any stereotypes. Some kids said, 'You don't act black.' I hated that term, the gold-chain stereotypes. I told them they were ignorant. You can't act a race."

Williams got his first job at the age of 14 to help out his mother. When he was 15 he doctored his birth certificate so he could work at Wendy's. Then he began playing Magic for cash prizes, entering tournaments around the world and becoming part of the nerdlike subculture Magic attracts. (One year, he was disqualified from a tournament for cheating, which he adamantly denies doing. Williams was accused of having a marked or bent card in his hand. He was automatically disqualified despite his claim that the marked card was a meaningless one, akin to a deuce in a poker hand of three kings.) When, at the age of 17, he turned his attention to poker, Shirley never worried about him in those games because, she says, "He was always respectful. Always, 'Yes, ma'am' and 'I love you, Ma.' And he was always so calm."

Williams finished his last two years of high school at the University of North Texas. When he graduated he was considered a college junior and had a 1,550 SAT score. He chose Princeton because an article in U.S. News & World Report claimed it was the number one school in the country. But Williams hated Princeton--the cold weather, his more privileged classmates and the fact that he had to work in the cafeteria serving them. He was so depressed and lonely that he was admitted to the infirmary before Shirley finally told him to come home. He returned to Dallas and eventually entered Southern Methodist University, where he has a year to go to get his economics degree. Williams has a 4.0 grade point average at SMU, but his overall college GPA is 3.9 because of his marks at Princeton. "That point nine really gets me," he says. "No matter what I do I'll never be able to get it back. I'm obsessive about my grades. I guess I'm stuck in the anal stage."

I ask Shirley about the money her son gave her. "I knew David would help me out financially if he won the WSOP," she says. "But that's my son's money. I want to keep working. He's only 24. Maybe I don't know how much money that is. It's got to last him a lifetime."

After breakfast Shirley and Tina take out their makeup cases. Then mother and daughter stare into their mirrors and apply fresh makeup before they drive to Williams's apartment for the afternoon. Before they leave I ask Tina, who is pretty like her mother, if she and David are close. "Not too close," she says. "He's not home very much. But my girlfriends think he's cute." David has said of Tina, "She was born when I was eight. I struggled for attention because I'd been the only kid. I'm not always there for her now, but I ask about her grades."

•

It is late afternoon in Williams's apartment. He's curled up on the love seat, sleeping in his clothes. His mother is watching a soap opera on TV. Williams stirs, wakes and sits up. He looks at his mother and says, "Quality entertainment, huh?"

"David, why don't you give me more money for my online account?" she says.

"Because you'll burn it up." He puts his computer on his lap and turns it on, and within minutes he's playing poker.

After Shirley and Tina leave, I ask him where DeWald is. "She's mad at me. She went to her mother's." Then, his eyes still fixed on his computer screen, his fingers playing over the keys, he adds, "Maybe I was meant to live alone." Williams is a curious case. Despite his obvious affection and concern for his mother, and even for DeWald, he talks about them without emotion. His words are affectionate, but nothing in his demeanor corresponds to them. The only time he reveals emotion is when he talks about his beloved Chihuahua, which died recently. "I was holding him and dropped him onto the floor," Williams says hesitantly. "He hit his head and died. I didn't get another dog because it would be unfair to him. It's like if your wife dies. It's hard to remarry."

Williams met DeWald when she was 17. "She was goofy and hyper," he says, "but I never thought about it. We're opposites. She's emotional, illogical and whiny. I'm her out for everything, like I'm her father."

A few days ago DeWald came home late after a night out and damaged her cell phone. She called Williams, who was in Vegas, and told him her cell phone didn't work and that she wanted a new one. He told her he couldn't do anything about it until the following Monday. "But what if I get a flat tire and someone tries to kill me?" she said. "People got flat tires before cell phones and weren't killed," Williams responded.

When Williams went to the WSOP, he didn't want DeWald to go with him, because he felt he couldn't give her the attention she would need. But she showed up and stood behind him, saying, "Come on, baby, give me a smile." Williams told her to be quiet; this was his moment. "I was on the verge of winning $3.5 million," he says. She stormed off, crying, and Williams had to go look for her. "I'm trying to get her some counseling," he says. Reeves, for one, doesn't think she needs it. "She's basically a child," he says. "David doesn't respect her. He's always complaining about her. I told him to get rid of her or shut up."

"David's pretty honorable," says Huynh. "He'll never break up with Brittany unless it becomes intolerable. Something's holding him back. He never had a father figure, you know. Maybe he doesn't know women."

Williams's fingers are playing his computer keys as if he were a concert pianist. I ask him if he ever played sports. "I wasn't raised to play sports," he says without looking up. "Maybe I wouldn't have been a nerd and would have been into basketball if I'd had a male influence." Still, Williams has never had any desire to find his father. "I wouldn't acknowledge him if he showed up," he says.

He pauses a moment after winning a pot and adds, "Things are what they are. I don't have any insecurities. I accept things. I don't mean this as a knock on my mother or grandparents, but there's no person I look up to. I am who I am."

Just then DeWald comes through the door. She moves silently through the apartment without acknowledgement from Williams. With a rare, faint smile he says, "I can't wait for the WSOP next year. It's so fun. Like poker summer camp." His fingers play over the keys. "A set of jacks," he mutters to himself. Then, without looking up from his laptop, he says, "Baby, wanna go out to dinner tonight?"

DeWald looks at him. "What about my cell phone?"

"We're all extremely smart and don't want to work nine to five. It's the most intelligent collection of scumbags I've ever met. It's an alternative lifestyle."

Photographed at the Borgata hotel Casino & SPA