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#842 – 2009 WSOP Revisited #5 – Steve Wong Will Find the Money
After learning poker in Amsterdam from his cousin in 2004, Steve Wong has become an accomplished big-tournament poker player. In his breakthrough year of 2006, he made his first WSOP final table, finishing fourth in the $1,000 NLHE with re-buys, earning over $162,000. In October, at the Bellagio’s Festa al Lago, he won a $5,000 NLHE event, worth nearly $200,000. Just ten days later, after winning a satellite entry into the WPT Main Event, he made the Final Table and finished second, cashing for $542,700. Two months later, at the Bellagio Five-Diamond, he won the $2,500 NLHE, scoring another $215,255. In the three years after the whirlwind of the second half of ‘06, Steve has moved to Las Vegas and followed up those performances with strong finishes in WPT Championships, WSOP circuit Main Events, and in the World Series of Poker.
After writing about professional tournament poker players for awhile, a writer could be excused for confusing identities or assuming most of these guys are the same. All of them seem to have a serendipitous story of how they fell into poker. All of them are tearing up a tournament circuit someplace. But Uncle Tilty told me Steve Wong’s story was worth telling so we arranged to meet for an interview.
It was actually not our first meeting at the World Series. We played together at the end of Day 1 of the $2,500 SEOB-OEOB. I have two lingering impressions from the several hours we spent as adversaries: (1) I thought Steve was playing too aggressive so I tried to run him over, and he took almost all of my chips; and (2) When Steve was playing a hand into the break and the room emptied, our table was suddenly enveloped by a stench. Steve grimaced. “Oh god, who farted?” What impressed me is that Steve won the hand despite the adverse olfactory conditions. (Incidentally, I busted just short of the money in this event and Steve finished ninth.)
So I started the interview knowing just four things about Steve Wong: (1) He was a great poker player; (2) He could prevail over the foulness that sometimes physically intrudes on the poker environment; (3) He had an “interesting story” according to Uncle Tilty; and (4) He was half-Dutch and half-Korean. Uncle Tilty impressed upon me the importance of this last fact. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Steve Wong is Chinese. He is half Dutch and half Korean.”
Make that just three facts. When Steve got to the part of his entrepreneurial career – which, in Uncle Tilty’s defense, really IS an interesting story – where he started a business exporting cars to China as a 20 year-old, the tale Wong was spinning made no sense. To be frank, I thought it was a load of crap that he was making up. After telling me that the business depended entirely on “connections in China” and “it was like printing money,” I called him a liar. Come on, how does a 20 year-old kid in Amsterdam make easy money from “connections in China?”
“Because I am Chinese,” he said in a quiet voice that he would likely use only when communicating with a total moron. Thanks Uncle Tilty.
But I’m getting ahead of the story, and it is a good one. Steve Wong started his business career at 18, when he traveled over 4,000 miles to get his driver’s license. The Netherlands at the time had very stringent restrictions on issuing driver’s licenses, but they recognized licenses granted by their Antilles territories (Curacao, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, Saba, and Sint Maarten).
“I saw this market because I could bring all these Chinese people over there and make sure they passed the exam. I coached them in the Netherlands, brought them there, and made sure they got their drivers license. That was how I first made money, for two years starting when I was 18.”
When Steve was 20, he then started a business exporting cars from the Netherlands to China. Using family connections in China, he learned of the demand for the vehicles, was trusted to provide the right cars, and had reliable sources to sell the cars and remit the profits. This lasted approximately two years, after which China, reacting to the influx of foreign vehicles, clamped down on imported cars.
So what did Steve do next when he had to scale back auto exporting? He found more lucrative work … as a cab driver. Actually, he drove a cab on just a few occasions as a lark, but he learned that there was big money to be made in taxicab licenses in Amsterdam, and he figured out how to get some of it. The capitol of the Netherlands issued a very limited number of licenses to operate taxicabs. Steve obtained three of them (out of 635) and rented them out to drivers who used their own vehicles as taxicabs. After three years, however, because Amsterdam was considering a law to lift restrictions on the number of licenses, he sold that business.
After that Wong made money buying up the assets of bankrupt businesses like restraurants and hotels. He would organize and warehouse the assets (things like chairs, tables, bar stools, kitchen equipment, and televisions from hotels) and make his profits by selling the fixtures, usually exporting them from the Netherlands. Steve continued operating this business until 2004, when he discovered poker.
Steve’s cousin, Steve Liu was a professional poker player and a top performer in the Masters Classics of Poker, for a long time the biggest poker tournament in the Netherlands. Liu had won the Main Event and finished runner-up in PLO. While Liu was visiting Amsterdam and winning at poker, he told his cousin that he wasn’t happy about Steve playing in the pits. According to Wong, “He saw me playing all these table games and said, ‘That’s a bad way to do it. You’re going to go broke pretty soon if you continue doing this. You’ve gotta give that all up and I’ll teach you to play poker.’ And that’s how I started. He taught me everything he knew, I lived at his house for three months.”
That was in 2004. By 2006, he was winning major tournaments and making TV final tables. Obviously, the last three years hasn’t all been like that magical six months in ‘06 when he made over a million dollars without leaving the Las Vegas city limits. But I have no doubt that Steve Wong will be a factor in tournament poker as long as that’s the focus of his professional energies. In fact, if you notice Wong is absent from the money lists, I’d bet you it’s because he has found an even better gig doing something else.
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