Joe Poker
JOE POKER
Courtesy of Bluff Magazine
STANDFIRST: Each month our man of the poker people
trawls the card room floors, looking for real life stories from
everyday players
Nathan Nowack didn’t grow up playing poker in his family
‘rec’ room - he grew up playing table tennis. But strangely
enough, one would eventually lead to the other.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Nathan was adopted as a child and grew
up in Bartlesville, OK, doing average American kid stuff –
playing soccer, tennis, golf, and knocking the ping-pong ball around
with his dad.
When Nathan was 15, renowned coach Barney Reed moved to town to
open a table tennis academy. Nathan became a full-time student of
Reed’s, and was soon rising through the ranks of local and
national competitions, eventually placing second in the national
championship tourney at the age of nineteen.
In 1994, however, the Table Tennis National Championships were
hosted in Las Vegas. Nowack played and did well, but lost in the
quarterfinals of his age bracket. Not his best performance, but
reason enough to celebrate.
One evening after ending his tournament run, his friend’s
mother (and trip chaperone) smuggled Nathan into a Vegas poker room.
Though it was ten years and a thousand hands ago, he remembers it
like yesterday.
“I’m in there with all these huge guys, smoking cigars,
wearing sunglasses and I’m like, I don’t even know what
a ‘turn’ or a ‘flop’ is.” His vocabulary
may have been lacking, but Nowack had found a real attraction to
a new game.
After graduating from college, Nowack moved west, to Los Angeles
to work in DVD production and graphics. He started a regular game
with new-found friends in his new hometown, and supplemented those
rounds with convenient cross-desert trips to Vegas to try his hand
at the blackjack tables. Then, about a year ago, he caught the Hold
‘em bug.
Two circumstances steered Nowack towards the poker tables in Vegas.
First was the “poker explosion” going on in the media
in 2003; the second, and just as convincing a force, was the fact
that Nathan Nowack was not a particularly successful blackjack player.
“I was just fed up with blackjack, and I was going to Vegas
every couple of months, so I figured I should give poker –
in Vegas – a shot.”
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So a few months back, Nathan started playing live tournaments,
here and there, just for the experience. Then, on October 16, he
entered just his 4th tourney, the Bluff/Chipleaders.com Launch Celebration
Poker Tournament at the Hollywood Park Casino. Nowack and about
65 other players ponied up the $10 entry fee and went to work on
the tables.
Still a relatively green tournament player, Nowack was nonetheless
familiar with the “TV-poker” styling of some of his
opponents. “There’s always some guys wearing shades
and hats and loud suits, with headphones or i-Pods hanging out of
their ears. That’s not me – I’m just sitting there
in a t-shirt, no hat, no glasses.”
In fact, Nowack’s most impressive attire for this particular
tourney was just plain old confidence. On the night before the Hollywood
Park tournament, Nowack had placed second in a field of 400 in a
PartyPoker.com satellite, which had made him feel like he was a
real force to be reckoned with.
And his confidence did pay off: “By the time I got to the
final table I was feeling very confident… I was tied for the
chip lead, and between the two of us, we had almost a 10-1 chip
advantage. Five guys at the last table were sitting there doing
chip tricks, trying to look tough, and I was just looking down at
their short stacks, smiling to myself.”
Nowack also seemed to be getting just the right cards at just the
right time. In one late hand, Nowack limped in with an unsuited
A-3. Three cards later two of the remaining five players pushed
all-in after a 3-10-3 flop.
“I checked again, and then two guys went all-in. I was thinking:
‘OK, I’ve got the set and the high card, and I have
these guys covered up.’ Sure enough one guy flipped K-3, and
we ran through the fourth and fifth cards with nothing much coming
up. I had just bounced two people and taken a chunk out of the second
highest stack. One guy actually called me a bully…I was just
laughing inside.”
At the end of the day, Nowack sat alone at the final table. In
his first tournament win, he had managed to turn a $10 entry fee
into nearly $1400. Not a bad day’s work for a ping-pong player
from Oklahoma!
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