FULL TILT POKER BLOG

#664 – “Good One Chau” – The Remarkable Chau Giang

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Chau Giang hosted the Limit Hold ‘Em FTOPS event the other night and I would have used the occasion to write about him if I hadn’t left town with Jo Anne for Miraval the day before. But it turns out after a day of mindfulness and reflection and healthy eating and rope-walking … that there’s nothing to do at night. So I played the FTOPS event on Friday evening and found myself on Chau’s right.

What better reason is there to write about Chau Giang? That’s not even a rhetorical question. We played a hand together, and it reminded me of a great joke that Andy Beal and his poker-friend/colleague/employee/controller Craig Singer share.

One of the most enjoyable research tasks during SUICIDE KING was chronicling the development of the world’s best poker players. Several of these stories were already well-known, and some I had the pleasure of developing or further explaining.

*Doyle Brunson – NBA hopes dashed by a bum leg and no job opportunities for Doyle with his Masters in Education, he became a business equipment salesmen until he joined a back-room poker game and won more than a month’s commissions in one day. This started him on the jagged path of the Texas road games of the 1950s.

*Chip Reese – Working as a telemarketer before starting law school, he took a weekend trip to Vegas and won enough to stay. With friend Danny Robeson, they built a bankroll murdering mid-level stud games until Chip had to guts to put their whole bankroll on the line in a wild $400-$800 Hi-Low game.

*Barry Greenstein – Spent a decade cleaning up on No-Limit games in the midwest while slowly working on his Ph.D. in Mathematics. After taking a “pay cut” to work for a Silicon Valley start-up (that later became Symantec), he left math, hi-tech, and the software business for the Bay Area cardrooms and never looked back.

*Jennifer Harman – She split her time between school and the casino until she realized he had to admit poker was her job or quit. She spent years gradually cleaning up, building her bankroll, then moving up in stakes and getting broke – at least eight times by her estimate.

*Todd Brunson – Without his father’s knowledge or approval, he started making money playing poker in college, spent a summer in secret focused solely on poker, then shocked his parents by telling them he was giving up school for the game.

*Howard Lederer – Ran away from home at eighteen (from a family where college and post-graduate education were assumed) to become a professional chess player. Spent years as a broke, struggling low-stakes poker poker in the underground poker clubs of Manhattan.

*Ted Forrest – Like Howard, he left a life where academic achievement was the norm. Just short of graduation and right after his father’s death (his parents were both college professors), Forrest moved to the Grand Canyon. After periodic trips in Vegas in which he killed low-stakes games, he moved there with his girlfriend, working his way up from the bottom. (In a parallel to Chip Reese, Ted was “made” by the high-stakes fraternity as a result of a crazy $400-$800 game.)

But even amid these remarkable stories, Chau Giang’s stands apart. Chau was born and raised in Vietnam. He left there for Florida, then worked in a Chinese restaurant in Colorado. He then moved to Las Vegas in the early Eighties, where he started grinding his way up in limit hold ‘em games.

Even after Giang graduated to high-stakes games at the Mirage and then the Bellagio, his story remained bizarre. Before plugging a leak in the baccarat pit, he lost a million dollars. Some players privately whispered – seriously – that Chau must have somehow been the beneficiary of voodoo or black magic. He was also part of the group that would play for days on end, oblivious to clocks, bodily needs, or personal appearance.

I heard one story that he was engaged in a marathon session so intense that, though he left to play a World Series event at the Horseshoe, he didn’t have time to get his car out of the parking lot on the way back to the game at the Bellagio. Already haggard from several days without sleep, he asked a dealer if she would go to Binion’s and pick it up. She declined, though I’m not sure if it was because she couldn’t get away to do the errand or she didn’t want to risk damaging his new Mercedes – or maybe she didn’t want to be cruising the bad streets of downtown Vegas in the middle of the night.

She finished her shift, went home, and returned to work the next evening. Chau was still there – same clothes, same haunted look. “Could you please go to the Horseshoe and pick up my car?” He seemed so desperate that, this time, she made arrangements and got the car.

Unfortunately, I got Chau’s story only second hand while working on SUICIDE KING. I approached him after speaking with most of his contemporaries but, based on what was going on in the game that day or the language barrier, he never got back to me. Subsequently, he’s been very friendly and always has a nice word for me.

Two or three years ago, I was at the Bellagio and all the talk was about a huge game going on in Bobby’s Room. Chau was supposedly the big winner – hundreds of thousands, maybe in the millions – but I had some other business and, in any event, no one was giving me enough details to use as a story. I finished my work, went home to Scottsdale, and several days later returned to the Bellagio for a WPT event.

I noticed Chau Giang smoking a cigarette near the bar adjacant to the poker room and the sports book. “Chau’s back playing?” I asked a Vegas friend.

“Back? Chau never left. That game’s still going on and he’s still here and, I heard, still winning.”

I walked over to Chau to say hello. He’s slender and not very tall, but on this occasion he looked as if a strong breeze could break him in half. His skin looked gray and his eyes were so red they almost appeared to be bleeding. I congratulated him on what I heard were some excellent results then CAREFULLY tried to inquire how long he’d been playing.

I couldn’t get a number of hours or days out of him, but he said something I couldn’t make out and concluded by declaring, “I could sleep for days but I’ll sleep when the game is over. As long as they want to keep playing, I’ll stay awake and play.” Then he took a drag on his cigarette that was so deep that he briefly had me convinced that the only source of oxygen in the Bellagio was inside that cylinder of tobacco.

Andy Beal and Craig Singer had lots of stories about Beal’s games with Giang, some of which I didn’t hear until after finishing the book. I didn’t really learn about all the time Andy and Craig spent together playing poker until I played some poker with them myself, and one Chau story was part of their banter.

Beal and the pros played their heads-up matches fast, but the matter of showing down hands was very sensitive. Neither side wanted to show unless they were required, but at the same time they were playing quickly and sometimes calling out their hands before or instead of showing.

I can tell you from playing on several occasions with Andy Beal is that he is very, very, VERY unlikely to show his cards unless the rules require him to. So if he’s called, he has to show and does – but if he skips a beat and his opponent shows first and has the winning hand, he mucks. Whenever his opponent shows first, he will muck his loser. In fact, if he’s not sure, he’ll hold up the game to study his cards and the board – despite his otherwise doing everything possible to rush the game along – for as long as it takes him to figure out whether he has won. He won’t turn over his hand and let the cards speak, even if it takes him awhile or ends up looking like he’s slowrolled an opponent.

He just doesn’t want to give away even one iota of information, regardless of how it looks.

So he was playing with Chau one time at their usual breakneck pace. This was also one of those games where Andy was raising all the time – and Chau was doing the same. On one hand, Beal had A-2 and he and Giang went through several preflop raises. Andy missed the flop and Chau check-raised him, but Beal re-raised. Even though Andy’s hand never improved, he stayed with it.

At the end – after some more raises – Giang asked, “What do you have?”

“Ace-high.”

“Ace what?”

“Ace-deuce,” Andy replied, dejected that he was essentially correct that Chau didn’t have a hand but that he was going to be outkicked in this now-giant pot.

“Ace-deuce is good,” Chau said, throwing his hand in the muck.

Thereafter, Beal and Singer would chide each other, after an outrageous bluff or some kind of gamesmenship with, “Good one, Chau.”

So now I’ve got one.

Chau, hosting the event, was sitting to my immediate left. During the second level, it was checked to me on the button. I had Ah-8h and raised. Chau reraised from the small blind and I called.

It was a dream flop: A-8-6, rainbow (one heart). Chau bets out and we go for the maximum of four bets. The turn is the queen of hearts, now also giving me a flush draw. Chau check-raised me so I just called, figuring he had to have a set.

The river brought the third heart, making me the nut-flush. Chau bet so, of course, I raised. After going for seven bets pre-flop and flop and three bets on the turn and river … Chau folded.

Good one Chau.

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