Profile | Meet the man who brought poker out of Hong Kong’s shadows

My younger sister and I were encouraged to read a lot and we spent a lot of our childhood in the library with mum. It was there that I found books filled with code. When I was 10 years old, in 1986, I discovered if I typed the code into our PC at home, I could play a game. I would make errors and correct them. Eventually I saw a pattern and understood logic in that way. I started changing the code to make my own games and that’s how I got interested in problem solving, which led to my eventual destiny.

Fighting spirit

My mother was a teacher and my father was a headmaster. In our little civil servant flat in Ho Man Tin, we had my grandfather’s calligraphy hanging on the wall. I’d read all of Sherlock Holmes in Chinese by the age of 10 as well as Oscar Wilde and all the greats. I read Murakami without realising Norwegian Wood was all about sex. My mum was very keen to talk to us about bigger themes in art and life.

Post Tiananmen Square, my father was worried and made plans for me to go to boarding school in the UK. Woodhouse Grove School was a middle-class boarding school near Leeds. There were a lot of military kids there and it was very utilitarian, especially the food. I was quite tall and became sporty. I played rugby and was good at cross-country and tennis. I became a little more rough and ready, I got into fights, which isn’t something a typical middle-class kid in Hong Kong experiences.

Win-win windfall

I did pretty well at A-levels and went to Durham University to study economics, philosophy and mathematics. I was out of my comfort zone. There were a lot of posh kids from the south, but the locals were suffering from unemployment and neglected by the government. On Friday nights, students were advised not to go into town. The amount of violence was insane. On Saturday mornings, when we went into town for breakfast, we’d see blood every­where. That was my experience of northern England.

Numbers game

In my final year, I met some guys who introduced me to the world of gambling in a mathematical way. We eliminated roulette and baccarat, because those games are math­emat­ically impossible to win. Internet gambling was starting to be a thing and the gambling platform Betfair had recently launched. In a primitive way, we started to build mathematical models to understand tennis and football. We won 10 to 15 times a graduate’s first-year salary – split between four of us.

Bean counting

I graduated in 1999 and my gambling friends got jobs as bankers and lawyers. I moved to Liverpool with the intention of doing a postgrad, but ended up carrying on with the gambling – the money was too good. After a while, I couldn’t win any more because other people had got better systems. I joined one of the Heinz brands as a trainee doing accountancy – yes, a bean counter for Heinz.

Marriage and mortgage

It was on a trip back to Hong Kong that I met Rachel. She was travelling through en route to Taiwan. Five days later, she moved to Liverpool with me and within six weeks we were married. Last month was our 25th anniversary. We got lucky with the housing boom. Banks were offering a 105 per cent mortgage – you didn’t even have to have a down payment – and our property went up 80 per cent in three years.

Going underground

In 2008, we moved to Hong Kong and I got a job at the Jockey Club. I finished work at about 2am. At that time, you could either go to Lockhart Road and do stupid things or find somewhere a little quieter and have a game of poker. That’s what I did. I played a lot of poker after work and started to understand the game. There were lots of underground games in Hong Kong at the time. I played in Central for two or three years and then that place got raided and shut down. No charges were pressed against me and my boss tried to keep it quiet, but I realised it was time to leave.

Wrong but so right

I had got into crypto money early, in the days when people paid for a pizza with a bitcoin, and had a little investment money accumulated. I invested in a few things, including a digital marketing firm. We were tipping football matches and shot videos of a young, pretty girl saying the opposite of our predicted win. She would wear the shirt of the team and it would lose. She was consistently wrong – and that was the gag. It was very sexist. It blew up in the summer of 2014, when the World Cup played. The girl would get it so wrong – she was a kind of anti-genie – she even made it onto the front page of Apple Daily. That made me wake up to the power of social media and marketing. I realised packaging gambling and making it fun is how I should be pursuing the world of poker.

Onto a winner

My good friend Sparrow (Cheung) invited me to form the Hong Kong Poker Players’ Association. We started in 2015 and ran games as pop-ups. They weren’t illegal because people weren’t playing for money. I wasn’t the house, I wasn’t taking a rake. A group of people were doing a similar thing in Taiwan, having pop-ups in a night market, and we connected. The High Court in Taiwan ruled that tournament poker is legal. We stopped having pop-ups and created a permanent space, knowing that people who got good could play for money in Taiwan. We created a relationship between Hong Kong and Taiwan. People don’t win anything here, but they qualify for something in Taiwan.

Switching sides

I was playing in competitions in Taiwan, Macau and the region and it was fun, but by 2018 I started to play less and became more of an organiser. In a poker competition you play for 12 hours a day and it’s quite boring. It’s a bit like the football match where the teams just pass the ball around and in 90 minutes you get just one goal. The excitement of scoring a goal is such a small proportion of the whole thing and it takes a lot of mental toughness. You are profiling all the players and what strategies they play. It is very taxing sitting at a table with other sweaty men sizing up each other. Then you wake up the next day and do it again.