An inbound cab tacks on to the rank outside Crown Casino and the passenger flips the driver a hundred dollar bill.
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‘‘Sorry,’’ the fare apologises, ‘‘I don’t have anything smaller.’’
The cabbie climbs out and shuffles up to the next taxi looking for change while the passenger, all of 19, waits patiently in the air-conditioned cool of the idling cab.
The young man has had a big collect in the past couple of days and has managed to break his winner’s cheque into nothing smaller than hundreds.
The forecourt of Crown is busy. Melbourne, fairly buzzing in a mid-January heat and Australian Open fervour, is the place to be at this time of the year. On any morning you might see tennis players and their entourages grabbing a bite to eat here before catching a flight home.
Martin Drewe, the guy who just arrived in the cab for breakfast, is a player – not that you’d know it. But tennis ain’t his racket. Instead, his court is a table inside Crown, venue for Australia’s richest poker tournament, the Aussie Millions.
It seems inconceivable that this unassuming dude, turning 20 later this month, might be having a better paying week than some of the tennis stars. Unlike them, he doesn’t live in an Orlando or Palm Springs gated community but at home with his parents in Merewether, NSW. Yet, he has some kind of talent.
Right now he’s in hot form. A few days ago he beat a field of almost 1000 in the first event of the Aussie Millions championship series for a first-prize collect of $200,020. Today, the stakes are even higher.
The big guys are in town. Joe Hachem, the Australian who pocketed about $9million from winning the World Series of Poker in 2005 and the first World Poker Tour title the following year, was spotted with Shane Warne at the tennis.
Phil Ivey is here too. The 34-year-old American is not merely the world’s most famous gambler but reputedly the best poker player in all forms, whether online, tournament or cash games. Ivey is here for the cash prizes on offer but that might be slim pickings compared to what he can collect from the side action that attends most major tournaments. With Gus Hansen, Howard Lederer, Patrik Antonius and defending Aussie Millions champ Tyron Krost, there is bound to be plenty of both.
As the wait staff sweep the breakfast dishes away, Drewe is on the move, just minutes from taking his place at the poker table. Today, the buy-in price for each player is $10,600. Up for grabs is a massive cash pool topped by a $2million first prize. Does he look nervous? Not a bit.
Who is Martin Drewe? From a town that has given the world a Miss Universe, a movie star or two, a few handy musicians, golfers, surfers and footballers, here’s a new addition to the talent bank. A poker champ.
A year ago nobody outside the Newcastle poker-playing community had heard of him. That was not surprising given that the teenager was new to the game. But he was a fast learner.
In 2010 he was a total unknown among the hundreds of entries for the ANZPT Melbourne series at Crown. At his first major tournament he won the $500 buy-in heads-up event, made it to the final table of the $1000 six-handed event and finished 23rd in the no-limit holdem to collect a total of $18,300 from a good week’s work.
This summer finds him back in Melbourne for a $200,020 payday, his biggest by a long shot.
The day-one field for the Aussie Millions included top guns Eric Assadourian, Emad Tahtouh, Hachem, Jonathan Karamalikis, Matthew Pearson, ‘‘Toothpick Tony’’, James Broom, Dave Lee, Mitch Carle, Ben Delaney and Dean Nyberg.
Among the casualties on the first day were international stars like World Series of Poker main event final tablist James Akenhead, Annette Obrestad, Maria Ho, Tony Dunst, Richard Ashby and Michael Greco.
With the day two field down to 143, John Corr was first to bust. Isaac Lau stepped away with $11,520 followed by Jonathon Palmer. Scott Montgomery, $22,220 better off, went next then Gabriel Xiourouppa, Antoine Bechara, Vito Dalessandri, Nik Lackovic and Justin Cohen. That left Martin Drewe and Darren Kramer to go heads up. The new kid survived the marathon to walk away with a gold ring and two hundred grand.
‘‘How do they pay you that sort of money,’’ Weekender asks. ‘‘Cheque? BPAY? Bank draft?’’
‘‘No,’’ he laughs. ‘‘In poker chips. You take it to the window and they’ll write you a cheque.’’
By the time a pre-pubescent Martin Drewe left The Junction Public School for the selective Merewether High his teachers had already guessed that the kid with a tendency towards a bit of creative classroom disruption was pretty bright. At The Junction, the school that had set a bunch of its junior band members on the way to becoming Silverchair, difference was a virtue. So, what awaited young Martin? A career in research, engineering, computer science or academe perhaps? Not quite. He enrolled in IT at Newcastle Uni, found he didn’t like it and dropped out. Eighteen months or so ago he started playing poker online and with friends. He hasn’t stopped.
The long-held poker cliche depicts a smoke-filled room where grown men go to drink, break wind and lose cash. Forget it.
The current poker revolution sweeping pubs, clubs and the online community is entirely different. Its adherents are more Bill Gates than Amarillo Slim, more Mark Zuckerberg than Bat Masterson – young players with high IQs, nerves of steel and minds as quick as super-computers. The geeks, God bless ‘em, have gone gambling. Fries with their burgers? No, not for non-smoking, vegetarian Martin Drewe. But, when it comes to poker, it’s chips with everything.
For a while Martin dealt pizzas for Domino’s. Now, his day and night job is poker. This is serious.
To get that good you don’t have a day job; chances are you don’t have a hobby, a partner, or anything that the rest of us might call a normal life. What you do have is poker. The internet never sleeps. Out there in cyber space is the biggest card school in the universe.
Drewe: ‘‘Online you get to play really good opponents.’’
And you get to play often, all day and night. Eventually, you can be playing multiple games at once. In the pre-digital age it would take a talented player years of seeking out savvy poker schools and endless hours at the table to build up a bank of experience and work out if you have the mental agility, guile and emotional stability it takes to perform under the sort of pressure and ego-challenging ploys you’d find only at a high-stakes card table. Today, cyber poker has allowed sharp-minded greenhorns to put a real hook in that learning curve.
As a kid, Martin Drewe had always enjoyed games. Eventually, he got around to playing poker. It stuck. Making money out of it seemed like a bonus at the time.
‘‘I started playing online with mates and around about the same time turned up at Adamstown RSL for their free Friday night games with a first prize of fifty bucks. It was more fun than anything.’’
(The card craze is booming in the Hunter with an expanding network of clubs and pubs hosting poker nights catering to beginners through to experienced players. In June, Club Macquarie at Argenton will be the venue for the 2011 Newcastle Poker Championships.)
Martin still hangs out with mates he met through pub poker in a home game they’ve called Rybe’s Room in honour of the host, a dude who bears the nickname Rybe. None of the others are on the pro circuit, but Drewe reckons they go all right.
The attraction for the Merewether teenager with a head for maths lay in the sheer numerical complexity and the mental gymnastics of calculating risk.
‘‘It’s an entirely different game, a lot of the good players are quite young. Besides concentrating on your own cards, you have to be thinking about what everyone else is doing and what you can do to counter it.’’
Stamina and nerves of steel help: ‘‘You have to stay relaxed and you have to think clearly.’’
At this stage we should be doing our civic duty and issuing the standard advice on the perils of gambling. After all, the lure of easy money sure has its pitfalls. But for all of you thinking that this 19-year-old has stumbled on a get-rich-quick scheme, Drewe has sage advice:
‘‘It’s like anything, you’ve got to work very hard. There are no short cuts, no secrets that the best players don’t already know. You’ve got to get experienced; there is no other way. Do all that and the results will come.’’
All this is explained in an even, matter-of-fact, down-tempo way. Martin Drewe is no excitable kid. Check his pulse. High blood pressure and professional poker aren’t a good mix. A bullet-proof temperament and an icy brain; that’s what you need.
Weekender gets that bit and now we’re hoping that our conversation doesn’t stray into anything too detailed about the lore of poker. We’d just tried an online poker quiz and scored so low that the quiz page responded: ‘‘Oh, dear! Are you sure you’ve even heard of poker before? Ask your mum for Poker for Dummies for your birthday. We suggest you stick to the rails.’’ We would if we knew where to find them.
Thankfully, good-natured Martin Drewe doesn’t bamboozle us with poker science. As for money, that we understand. What was he thinking when he got within sniffing distance of that $200,000 pot of gold?
‘‘I was trying not to think of the money ... just trying to focus on playing the best I could.’’
He took the eight winner’s chips – each worth $25,000 – swapped them for a cheque and went to bed. It had been a long night.
‘‘We had played from noon to seven the next morning,’’ Drewe relates. ‘‘I was exhausted.’’
And now, he’s back in the frame for another shot at an even bigger pot of gold, the Aussie Millions main event. For his $10,600 buy-in the teenager is in the hunt with a batch of the world’s best for that $2million first prize.
‘‘Biggest event in Australia,’’ he texts Weekender. ‘‘Starts in 3 minutes. Wish me luck!’’ The cards pay no heed to reputation. Deep into day two the field is down to a hundred or so. The cut-off point for collecting the minimum prizemoney of $15,000 is 72. Nobody wants to go out the wrong side of that number. For Martin Drewe it is a near-run thing. He is the 76th player to bust which means no return on his buy-in stake.
There will be other days. Once Melbourne winds up he’s off to the ANZPT Adelaide series. His mates from Rybe’s Room are expecting him back home on about February 10, hopefully with enough left in the kick to buy a round or two on game night.
What’s the plan from here? Simply, to win enough cash to stake himself for the next big tournament. For now, that means staying close to home. At 19, he’s still too young for Las Vegas where the legal gambling age is 21.
We remind him that $200,000 is a whole lot of stake money. What about a car?
‘‘Yeah, maybe,’’ he says. ‘‘I’m driving my dad’s at the moment. I think I’ll start looking into some investment options.’’
On that score, Weekender is as bereft of advice as we are of poker knowledge. What we wanted to tell this 19-year-old was that ‘‘the secret to surviving is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep, ‘cause every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser, and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep’’.
But somebody beat us to that one.