PRINTGoing all-in
How James Mackey went from college student to millionaire dropout
Sait Serkan Gurbuz
March 20, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
To the other 60-odd residents of Hudson Hall’s fourth floor, James Mackey was something of an enigma. An MU biology major in 2004, he went to his classes on a daily basis; his goal was to become a doctor. He led a reserved lifestyle in a subpar dorm with no air conditioning. But aside from the occasional encounter in the hall or sighting in the dining room, the diminutive, strawberry-haired freshman was relatively unknown to the remainder of the Honors Learning Community. Two years later, Mackey would be a millionaire.
FINDING HIS PASSION
Cash Games A non-tournament game where players can buy in as much as they want and can drop out at any point.
Flop/Turn/River The flop consists of the first three cards shown that are shared by the players. The turn is the fourth shared card shown, and the river follows it as the final community card.
Ten-Deuce Also known as the “Doyle Brunson,” the ten and two is a famous combination. This weak hand was used by Doyle Brunson to win back-to-back WSOP titles.
Chip Lead The state in which a player has the most chips at the table. This allows a player to be more aggressive with his or her bets.
Kicker An unpaired card that determines the better of two near-equivalent hands. The hand with the higher unpaired card wins. For example, Ace-King would beat Ace-Queen if the Aces were paired.
Living in a new environment and on his own, James “mig” Mackey was like any freshman trying to find his niche. He found it in online poker, and his sudden fortune grew from there. It began as a brief flirtation, as groups around the nation began meeting for impromptu cash games. The fourth floor of Hudson was like any other dorm floor at any other university. It’s commonplace for poker to flourish at universities, and Hudson housed a veritable hotbed of students who had a tendency to waste money on frivolous things.
But what began as an innocuous waste of time soon became a more serious affair. Cash games became a nightly occurrence among students on the floor, and Mackey deposited $50 into online poker games, which he used to sneak in between and after classes. Poker, however, can be a fickle mistress, and Mackey lost his initial $50 investment — and his second, for that matter. His third investment, on the other hand — this time for $75 — would be his last.
It was during the summer of 2006 that Mackey decided to drop out of school. Playing around 40 hours a week, he had won more than $150,000 dollars in two and a half months and then more than $600,000 over 12 months. Even as a doctor, Mackey would be hard-pressed to make that kind of money; it was the logical choice considering his status as pocketfives.com’s No. 1 online poker player in Missouri. “My parents have always been OK as long as whatever I’m doing makes me happy and I’m making enough money to take care of myself,” Mackey says. “I decided I’d rather just play poker.” With school out of the picture, he was able to devote significant time to playing and improving his skill.
As his friends returned to Columbia for their next semester of school — re-entering the daily grind of homework, papers and tests — Mackey returned to enter a world of online gambling, of playing nine online poker tournaments at once, of waking up at 5 p.m. after a particularly grueling night of holding, folding and going all-in. It continued like that for a while, and the money continued to roll in until, like most prodigies, Mackey decided he wanted more.
With an open schedule, Mackey traveled to Las Vegas in April 2007 to compete in live poker events. Backed by two investors, he entered nearly 12 tournaments. His entry fees (which ranged from $5,000 to $25,000) were covered completely by his backers, which required Mackey to pay back half of his winnings. His investors’ faith in him was justified when Mackey placed third in a preliminary World Poker Tour event and won $75,000 for a few days work.
The backers staked Mackey again for the summer of 2007 to continue receiving a return on their investment. Mackey rented a house in Las Vegas with a group of other poker players, including Hevad “Rain” Khan, who earned just shy of $1 million with his sixth place finish in the 2007 World Series of Poker Main Event. While in Vegas, Mackey played in nearly 20 events and spent his free time making side bets with his roommates on everything from pool to other players’ bets. The group even bet on a game they called credit card roulette, in which the server shuffles the group’s credit cards and lays them on the table one by one. The last card to be laid down pays for everyone’s meals, which could range from $150 for a standard meal to $1,000 for a bar tab.
“(Rain Khan and I) would bet on whether it would be him to get hit by credit card roulette,” says Mackey of a lopsided bet they once made when Khan gave Mackey 3.1 to 1 odds instead of simply 3 to 1. “He’d give the extra 0.1 to give me a slight edge so that I’d bet with him, just so he could gamble. He never won that bet.”
Despite the losses he incurred through credit card roulette, he still managed to come out of Vegas a winner. Mackey only cashed in on two events in his few months there, but one of those events was an incredible run that earned him more money in two days than most see in a decade.
THE GROWTH OF MONEYMAKERS
The WSOP hasn’t always been as ubiquitous as its current prevalence would imply. The series is the world’s largest set of poker tournaments. It comprises more than 50 events, each awarding a cash prize and one of the famous gold bracelets. The WSOP culminates in the Main Event, in which that year’s champion is crowned. The tournament’s current incarnation, however, began with little fanfare in 1971 when Johnny Moss became the last man standing in a field of six entrants to win a $30,000 prize. That amounts to a little more than $150,000 today — far from the $12 million dollars and nearly 9,000 entrants of the largest ever Main Event in 2006.
Poker’s exponential increase in popularity can be largely attributed to what has become known as the Moneymaker effect. Named for the 2003 WSOP Main Event winner, Chris Moneymaker (his actual birth name), the effect was a result of the former online player’s out-of-nowhere win as a poker amateur. Once people realized that an amateur could win the tournament (and even gain entry into the event for free by winning a satellite online tournament as Moneymaker did), the money seemed much more attainable. That, coupled with ESPN’s intense coverage of the tournaments, led armchair gamblers nationwide to triple the event’s playing attendance from 839 in 2003 to 2,576 in 2004.
BECOMING A PRODIGY
Day one of Event 22 in the WSOP gathers 640 players, including such well-known poker players as top cash game player Phil “The Unabomber” Laak, six-time bracelet winner T.J. Cloutier and 2005 WSOP player of the year Allen Cunningham, to compete for a total prize pool of more than $3 million. Early on, Mackey winds up at the same table as Dario Minieri, a prolific online player from Rome (he was the first player on PokerStars.com to garner enough frequent player points to redeem the site’s highest prize — a Porsche Cayman S worth at least $60,000).
“He bluffs a lot and is very aggressive,” Mackey says of Minieri. “He’s risky, but anybody that’s good is risky. Risky’s not really the right word, because risky makes it sound bad. He’s good at being super-aggressive.”
After surviving Minieri’s onslaught and other formidable players such as big-time cash player and at-the-time chip leader Dustin Dirksen, it comes down to nine players on day two. The final table is quick and painless and lasts only two and a half hours and 48 hands. Mackey executes his game plan with near-surgical precision. Of the eight other competitors at the table, Mackey busts four of them — seasoned hold ’em players with more than $10 million of live tournament winnings among them — before entering into heads up play with Stuart Fox, who somewhat infamously limps through the final table and plays only a single hand before facing Mackey one-on-one.
The final hand is quick and fortuitous, as Mackey shoves all-in with Ten-Deuce. Although it’s by no means a dominant hand, a nearly insurmountable six-to-one chip lead makes Mackey’s win just short of inevitable. It is perhaps appropriate that he defeats Fox’s King-Four with Ten-Deuce, as it is called the “Doyle Brunson,” because it’s the hand with which the 10-time WSOP bracelet winner earned his back-to-back titles.
Mackey nets a pot of $730,740 for two days of work and wins his first WSOP gold bracelet — the coveted emblem of excellence in tournament poker, redesigned in 2007 with 18-carat gold and embellished with diamonds and other precious stones. Great poker players spend years — careers, even — without winning a bracelet, but at 21 years and 4 months, Mackey has become the third-youngest poker player to do so in the U.S.
MAKING THE GAME HIS OWN
If there is one question Mackey is tired of hearing, it’s “How did you feel after winning?”
“I hate that question,” says Mackey, shaking his head. “That’s the question I hate more than anything. I felt good. There’s no other answer.”
So perhaps the question is a bit contrived, but Mackey is proud of his performance. At 22, he’s already made more than $1 million, and is just getting started. Since his Event 22 win, Mackey has continued to make his mark in poker. He and online partner “apestyles” won the August PLB on pocketfives.com, in which top online poker players formed 20 teams of two. The goal is to see who could win the most online tournaments based on a proprietary point system.
Mackey also won an event in the World Championship of Online Poker, in which he cruised to a win of $580,212.50 — one of the largest paydays in online poker history. Most online players choose to “chop” at final tables, a decision that divides the money among the remaining players based on their chip count and skill — though a small amount of money is left in the pot to play for. Mackey has become notorious for his consistent refusal to chop — a sort of all-or-nothing risk Mackey likes to gamble on. Mackey explains the reasons why he never chops: “One, so I can play for more money. And two, just because I have an edge on other players. I am better. They were terrible at the final table.”
THE MAN BEHIND THE CARDS
It’s difficult for Mackey to explain his talent for poker. He comments that only the top 10 percent of poker players are successful enough to make it their profession. Of his own skill, he says: “It’s kind of a combination (of statistical odds and gut feeling), but it depends. They don’t really work against each other. It’s not like there’s two sides and you have to choose one. They work together.” Although the inner workings of his strategy might be hard to decipher, the results are striking; all the money Mackey has earned is pure profit, the fruit of his initial $175 investment.
Despite his success, Mackey still maintains a college lifestyle — albeit a very rich one. He still lives in Columbia, however, in a new custom-built two-story house with two roommates who are the second- and fourth-ranked online poker players in Missouri. He still plays video games but on one of his three massive plasma screen TVs. He still takes time to relax — sometimes in his $12,000 hot tub with built-in speakers and a mini-waterfall.
Even though he is currently the 28th-ranked online poker player in the world, Mackey is still conservative with his money. He believes that other poker players, because they have little experience with large amounts of money, have a tendency to be irresponsible with their newfound fortunes. “They just spend it recklessly, especially when poker players get together,” Mackey says. “In Vegas, they would bet 5K on a game of beer pong.”
Mackey, on the other hand, sees his house as an investment; at the very least, he’ll be able to recoup his money when he eventually moves. He files his income taxes quarterly, due to the large amount of income he receives, and his three plasma TVs were all obtained for free with his online frequent player points. The only thing that could be seen as excessive is his fully-loaded 2008 black Corvette — a step up from the rickety minivan he used to drive. Also, he purchased a $15,000 Breitling watch — a symbol in the poker world of having truly made it. Mackey has been playing even more live tournaments since his big win in Vegas. With month-long poker trips to the Bahama Islands, Las Vegas and Los Angeles becoming more regular, it’s likely he’ll earn another million before this year’s up. Not bad for a guy who still has a good chance of being carded for a beer. V
