#488 - My Rendezvous with Full Tilt’s Final Table Trio, Part II – The Vibe

Saturday, August 16 12:05 PM
Kelly Kim’s house in a gated community

Kelly Kim lives in a gorgeous house and I suspect he didn’t buy it in the month between making the final nine and this photo shoot. Kim is clearly doing something right. That’s what I think, as I write at a bar stool and lean against the marble kitchen countertop. The marble is cool on my resting forearms. Despite the blazing sun and the photo shoot outside – 12 feet away – the air-conditioned comfort is almost frosty cool.

That’s the best way to describe it all – Kelly, the house, the vibe, the photo shot: it’s all cool.

Because Kelly is the host, he is running around and there is not much chance to talk with him at first. But I get my first meeting with Craig Marquis and Scott Montgomery.

At first, I think this has to be awkward. These guys are all connected with Full Tilt, but it’s not like they know each other, beyond possibly playing at a table together for a day or two – as competitors – in the Main Event last month. And each stands in the way of the others claiming what they have to think will be the biggest payday of their lives.

Once we get to talking, though, I’m reminded of how poker instantly creates a bond among people, even if they are strangers, competitors, or otherwise antagonistic.

“Israelis, Arabs,” Todd Brunson once told me, “Everyone gets along in our game.”

Craig is tall, boyishly young, with very short hair and an open, easy manner. At the same time, he seems plugged into a voltage slightly higher than the rest of the world.

Scott Montgomery, also with short, dark hair, is more round. Not fat but solid, just three years older than Craig but clearly a contrast to the younger man’s long lines and right angles. Craig lives in Arlington. Scott lives in a town near Ottawa.

If Craig Marquis strikes me as a slender oval and Scott Montgomery is round, then Kelly Kim, darting from room to room, is square. The old man of the group – he is 31, Scott is 26, and Craig is 23 – he has a short, spiky haircut, a broad forehead and broad chin. Because I don’t get to talk to him much at first, I feel some distance between us, and with his solid, square shape and brusque exterior, I see in him the look of The Bad Guy’s Bodyguard in every action flick set in L.A. in the last eight years. (It turns out my initial impression is tremendously, almost ridiculously, wrong but I don’t know that yet as I settled in to meet Marquis and Montgomery.) For now, I’ve simply written up Kelly Kim as an intimidating presence in an awkward setting.

I start with Craig, who I now “know” from several e-mails. Just about all I know of him, however, is his friendship with Tom Dwan and David Benefield, who have struck it rich with online poker and in Vegas, and are living The Dream. So I ask the 23 year-old, who just scored $900,000, if there’s any chance he’ll succumb to the temptation to move here.

“Zero percent chance. I’m getting a new place near Arlington, but I like Texas. Like the food, like the music, like the people.”

Scott Montgomery chuckles. I’m about to ask him the same question but I don’t have to.

“One hundred percent chance,” he tells me. “Maybe more.”

I asked him if he has picked a place yet, and he introduces me to one of the unique uncertainties that govern the lives of these nine final table competitors. “I haven’t. I don’t know how much money I’ll have to spend.”

So he remains in Perth, from where he drove to Ottawa last night, missed his connection in Toronto due to the delay of his inbound flight, and just got to Vegas an hour ago.

He makes it clear, though, that it’s not about the money. I ask him if the $900,000 he has already received seems real.

“People always ask me what I’ve bought with it. I haven’t bought a thing. It was about $600,000 after taxes and it went into investments. After I finished fifth in L.A. (in a WPT final several months earlier), that was a big deal. But now it just gets put aside.”

Craig chimes in, joking, “And it goes to buy-ins to more tournaments. Because, as we know, the variance in high-buy-in MTTs isn’t very big, right?”

Scott, whose voice and accent make him sound low-key, even modest, more than makes up for that impression with the confidence radiating from the words he chooses. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve played three $10,000 buy-ins. Fifth in L.A.. sixteenth in the Heads-Up at the World Series. And the Main Event.

He doesn’t believe, obviously, that this is pre-ordained, that past performance predicts future results. But the message is clear to me, the Media Guy: “I know what I’m doing here.”

When we get to the subject of the four-month delay to the final table, Montgomery expresses the same view. As Marquis was telling me, “I love it. But that’s because I was sick back then,” Scott says, “I hate it.”

“For players like me and Craig, who play a lot, it’s just a chance for the guys who don’t play much to regroup, improve. I was ready to go the next day. All the delay does is give those other guys a better chance. The back-and-forth between Craig and Scott is very comfortable – until I mention it. It’s almost like I’ve broken the spell a little bit. They make awkward jokes about how they hate each other and they both assume the other has poisoned the food.

But then they’re on to another photo and laughing about how, if nothing else, they have in common this intense experience for four months.

“The media,” they both chuckle. Scott: “And they always ask, ‘What do you think of doing all these interviews?’ I think, ‘Do you REALLY want to know?’”

As they go off for more photos, I learn from a friend of Kelly’s that he splits his year between Whittier and Vegas. He shares this place with four roommates, at least three of whom, like him, are professional gamblers. The fourth introduced himself as “the social director.” Kim spends about five months a year here. That’s not the same as holding down this gorgeous place on his own, but still, a sweet and impressive deal for a gambler.

In fact, maybe it’s even more impressive than owning it outright. While I, a successful lawyer and author almost two decades his senior spent one World Series in a motel later known for housing a bio-terror ricin lab, and a another year at the Rio, trying to reheat Subway sandwiches on the sun-scorched window sill, this guy has good friends, good times, and all the comforts I have to abandon to come here. It’s all just waiting for him, whenever he wants it.

I don’t know Kelly Kim but I do know one thing: he’s got it figured out.