Family man, geek and World champion
Robert Varkonyi might be an unfamiliar name to most poker players. Everybody knows Chris Moneymaker, the young lad that went from spending $39 on a satellite to winning the World Series of Poker. Why then, has so few heard of Varkonyi, who won the same tournament only one year earlier?
This question has been on my mind for quite some time, so when I met Varkonyi during the 2006 WSOP I found it to be the perfect starting point for an interview. This was the first and only major win by this very likeable man, and is likely to be the last, as he plays very few tournaments. This year he has gotten more involved by playing a few events both in the World Series of Poker and in the Professional Poker Tour, a new feature by the people behind WPT. The results in this year’s WSOP weren’t all that, but still he seemed quite happy when we met him. The tournaments had only just started and he had played quite a few Sit&Gos, with good results. There would be no great successes later in the tournament either, though the sympathetic Hungarian-American did well on day 1 of the Main Event.
World champion
The first question I wanted to ask Varkonyi was how he felt about winning the Main Event one year early – one year before the NHL-strike, when poker suddenly got more tv-exposure than ever before?
– I didn’t win a year early, I was supposed to win in 2002.
We are sitting with Robert Varkonyi in Starbucks at the Rio in Las Vegas, and it is clear that this is a man of senserity.
– I received a two million dollar cash prize and a lot more attention than I could have imagined, so I definitely don’t feel like I’ve missed out on anything. I understand why you ask this, though. Chris Moneymaker has become a poker icon, and compared to him, a lot of people don’t know who I am. This is due to several things out of my control. For instance, it took ESPN nine months to edit and broadcast from the final that I won, and the following year they sped the process up a lot. So I only got three months as a champion, whereas Chris still is a supercelebrity and gets recognized by everybody.
Winning a WSOP title is huge, and winning the Main Event is the dream of any poker player. How did it come to happen that a completely unknown American came from nowhere and became World champion?
- Looking back it seems that this was meant to be. Everything was going my way and my family’s way back then. I played satellites every year for the Main Event from 1995 to 2001 without qualifying once. I worked on Wall Street for a while, but at the end of the nineties I got bored and took a couple of years off. That’s when I met Olga, whom I fell in love with right away. She was in the country without a permanent work visa, and had to go back to Russia. I went after her in 2000 to win her heart, which worked out nicely. She came back with me, and we got married in 2001. By then I had decided to go back to Wall Street, and had already gotten a job. This job literally blew up on 911, and suddenly I had nowhere to go. When things started to settle after this mindless tragedy I again started looking for work. During this period I worked two days for free for this company so that they could see what I was good for. when the two days were up I was supposed to go to Las Vegas to, once again, try and qualify for the Main Event. I told my future employees about this, and the last thing they said to me before I left was “Don’t win too much money, now!”
In hindsight this comment is one for the history books. Life was sweet for Robert at the time, and not only regarding poker:
- During the course of three weeks I won the Main Event in the World Series of Poker, we got our dream house, and my wife Olga got a Green Card. A lot of amazing things happened all at once, which is why I say that it seemed like it was meant to be. I flew in to Las Vegas on a Friday, played a satellite during the weekend, and the Main Event started on Monday. A few days later I was the champion, and had to call the people who wanted to hire me to let them know that I probably wouldn’t need the job anyway.
Hero or fool?
Robert Varkonyi has long been perceived as a one hit wonder, and is by many called the worst poker player ever to win “the Big One”, the Main Event. In Main Event 2003 he was placed at the TV-table with Doyle Brunson on day 1. ESPN claims that the seating was drawn, something Varkonyi doubts. Doyle was beat quite early in the game, and when asked what he thought of the reigning champion, he made a few derogatory remarks. We had to confront Varkonyi with this, and wanted to know how he felt about other top players perceiving him like this.
- It really doesn’t matter that much to me, he says. – I know what I am all about, and I’ve never thought of myself as the greatest poker player in the world. I am definitely in the top 50%, probably in the top 10%, and maybe even in the top 5%. I can’t help what others may think of me. Doyle Brunson making comments like the ones he made on ESPN is something I can do nothing about. Doyle is not the smartest of men, and has time and again made remarks that prove he doesn’t have a good command of the English language. Poker players know that he can’t possibly mean what he says. His problem is that he doesn’t know how to express his sentiments more accurately. I think ESPN is much to blame for how the whole thing was portrayed, and they also did a couple of other things that distorted reality quite a bit. Whenever I meet someone who has seen the coverage from 2003, they all say that I was really lucky to get pairs of Aces during the first two hands of this tournament. This of course did not happen, but it looked like it did on ESPN. The first pair of Aces came after two or three hours, and the second came an hour after that. When the network edits to make it look like they were two consecutive hands, then it’s no wonder people seem to think I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth.
This was actually our impression too, after watching the game on TV, so it seems that some sort of clarification was in order.
Is he often recognized by regular people, like the most recent World Champions are, and if so, how do people react to him?
- A lot of people actually consider me a kind of hero after winning the WSOP as an amateur, he says and smiles. – To people on the outside it looks as if I was this nobody who just came from nowhere and went all the way to the top. In a way this is true, but people don’t know about my previous personal achievements, who are as, or more, important to me personally. I understand that you, as a journalist, would want me to express discontentment towards the poker environment for them not recognizing me as a World Champion. I won’t do that, because all that means nothing to me. I feel no pressure what so ever about achieving big results in poker. Of course it’s really cool to have been the World Champion of poker, but the only thing I feel pressure for is being a world champion parent to our two daughters. This is something we work on a lot, trying to give our children the best upbringing possible. We don’t want to pressure them in any way, we teach them different things like sports and games, and will of course also teach them poker when the time is right.
Theory and practice
Robert Varkonyi is no doubt a man of great intelligence and eloquence, and things other than poker seem to be of great importance to him in his personal life. Nonetheless, he is a poker player by profession, and we would like to know what he thinks makes a great poker player.
- More of a combination of several things than one thing in particular. To be a top player you need to really know the game, you need to be hard on yourself and be tough, and also you need luck. A lot of the time you create your own luck by choosing the right moments.
You don’t have to be an intellectual to be a good poker player. Actually, that can sometimes stand in your way. I usually say you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to play poker. I’ve been one myself, and it really didn’t matter much, he says, laughing. – If you have a mathematical approach to the game, it can really prevent you from seeing the right and valuable situations you need to handle to stay in a tournament. You will often need to look behind the numbers and notice other things that can have impact on a game. Your opposing players and the setting for the game are just as important as the numbers themselves. It’s all about how you play your hand, how the other players play their hands, what your table image is, what your opponents’ table images are, and also how the other players perceive you. All of this, combined with the right mathematical calculations, should boil down to a decision. And that’s all there is to it, Varkonyi says with a smile.
Family life
Robert Varkonyi’s family emigrated from Hungary in 1956. There was a revolution in the country, and his parents had to escape while being fired at by the Soviets. Ironically, he would marry a Russian girl. Olga Varkonyi is actually known in some circles as a better poker player than her husband, and Robert himself isn’t modest in his description of her:
- Olga is no doubt a much better player than me. She’s at home with our newborn at the moment, but is threatening to come to Main Event in a few weeks. We have a lot of experience in playing with a baby around, and we’ve done well in the past. In 2003 we drove to Foxwoods with our baby daughter. Olga played a satellite and won a seat in a $10,000 tournament. This was her first tournament of this caliber she had ever played, and she would feed the baby during breaks. The week after, we went to Atlantic City, and again she won a satellite. In the Main Event there she ended up as number 20. She had bad luck, and lost with KK, but these things happen.
Olga Varkonyi’s possibly biggest claim to fame is her effort in the Main Event 2005. She came deep into the money, and again some bad luck ket her from doing even better. Robert tells us what happened:
- Olga played really well and it seemed she would go far when she faced two hands in a row that would kick her out of the tournament.
Both Robert and Olga Varkonyi are sponsored by Interpoker, and are enjoying not having to pay the buy-ins in major tournaments. They pay for the side events themselves, and that is pretty much all the poker the Varkonyis play.
- Poker in New York is not that important to me, Robert says. – I don’t go to the poker clubs there, but I do visit the New Jersey casinos from time to time, and I also play homegames. There we play all different kinds of poker and have fun together. I also play quite a bit online at Interpoker.com, which I enjoy. Online poker is more comfortable than live poker, but other than that I really don’t think there’s much difference between the two. Of course more information is available in a live game, but it really doesn’t matter much at the end of the day. In my opinion there is a much greater difference between cash games and tournaments, than between online poker and live poker, says Robert Vakonyi.
