Las Vegas’ Qui Nguyen used gambling instincts to win WSOP

Qui Nguyen may not have been the best player in the field of 6,737 players who entered the World Series of Poker’s Main Event in July.

The 39-year-old Las Vegan may not have even been the best technical poker player at the final table of nine that began play Sunday night to crown a champion.

Nguyen is, however, a gambler, and that instinct helped carry him to the $8 million prize and a spot in poker lore as the 2016 WSOP $10,000 buy-in No-limit Texas Hold ’em World Champion in the wee hours of Wednesday morning at the Rio’s Penn & Teller Theater.

The longest heads-up battle since the WSOP moved to the current format of the last nine players returning several months after the final table had been set for a made-for-TV spectacle. It finally ended at 3:21 a.m. as Nguyen’s suited K-10 held up against Gordon Vayo’s suited J-10.

“I’m so excited. I don’t know what to say,” said Nguyen, who looked every part the throwback to a an old-school Las Vegas gambler with his flashy jacket, jewelry and even a distinctive “Guardians of the Galaxy” Rocket Raccoon baseball cap. “I just tried to remind myself to never give up, to never give up. It was tiring, it was tough, but I wanted to stay aggressive and never give up and thankfully for me it worked out.”

Aggression was never a problem for Nguyen, who used a significant chip advantage throughout heads-up play to consistently press the action and not allow Vayo to see cheap flops. Vayo survived three all-in showdowns, including one when he needed to draw a long-shot runner-runner flush to stay alive.

Finally, on the 181st hand of one-on-one play, Nguyen’s cards held up and he became the first champion since Jerry Yang in 2007 to win after his 30th birthday.

While the recent trend has been for young online players who had seen countless poker hands both on their computer monitors and at live tables to emerge from this field as champions, Nguyen bucked the trend. He had cashed in just one prior WSOP event when he took 54th place in a $1,500 event in 2009 for a $9,029 prize. Nguyen had won $52,986 in live poker tournaments in his life.

Conversely, Vayo cashed eight times at the 2016 WSOP alone, climaxed by his $4.6 million Main Event runner-up’s prize. He earned a second-place check at a WSOP event in 2014 for $314,535 and just won a tournament in September where he cashed out $587,120.

Yet, it was Nguyen who controlled the table.

“I felt like this was the Qui show, to be honest with you,” Vayo said. “He really deserves it, man. I did a lot of preparation, a lot of calculation and (Independent Chip Model) work.

”What I couldn’t prepare for was the Qui factor. He’s tough to prepare for because he’s willing to do things very few people are and willing to and adopt a strategy almost nobody plays anymore. It was almost like a blast from the past. I’m so disconnected from people playing like that. It was tough for me to re-evaluate why he was doing what he was doing. I think he just has a phenomenal feel for the game.”

While those instincts may have been developed at a casino, it may not have been at the poker table. Nguyen says he just enjoys gambling and his most beloved game is baccarat. In fact, when he won a satellite tournament to qualify for the WSOP Main Event, he gave some thought to selling the entry.

Nguyen thought better of it because there was a good chance he may have just taken the money straight to the baccarat table anyway.

“I just decided it didn’t matter how far I got, I wanted to play poker,” Nguyen said. “I say no more baccarat for me. I’ll play poker for now.”

Nguyen, a native of Vietnam who has lived in Florida and Alaska before settling in Las Vegas, didn’t spend much time in preparation for this event thinking about what he might do with the money.

Shortly after winning, he still wasn’t ready to ponder the possibilities.

“I’m just thinking about going home to sleep and have my breakfast,” he said.

Nguyen is married with a 4-year-old son named Kyle, who wants a house with a pool. According to a representative for Nguyen, he has also committed to giving some portion of his winnings to the Wounded Warrior Project.

He’s also quite likely to become a star in the poker world, where he will look to continue confusing players so immersed in math and game theory they can sometimes forget they are gambling.

“I was recently watching something called Puzzles and Mysteries,” Vayo said. “A puzzle is something you can kind of put together the pieces and solve, while a mystery is something you’re confounded by. Qui was a mystery for sure. He was not a puzzle. He was not somebody you could piece together and say, ‘This is his range. He’s going to do this with ‘X’ and ‘Y’ hands. He just wasn’t like that. Every hand was a unique circumstance and he’s tough to play against.”

Now, he’s also got a whole lot of chips to play.

Contact Adam Hill at ahill@reviewjournal.com or 702-277-8028. Follow @adamhilllvrj on Twitter.