Images courtesy of Tom McEvoy
The path of every world champion is different. Some come from a math background and use their academic prowess to power their poker career. Others translate skills from the sports field to the poker felt. Others use their business nous to make key decisions at the felt.
For Tom McEvoy, the 1983 Main Event winner, his natural gambling ability not only led to him winning the World Championship for $540,000, but has seen him cash in a professional ranking event every year since to the present day.
Before he returns to the Las Vegas action as part of this year’s 57th annual WSOP, we sat down with the man known as ‘Grand Rapids’ to look back at his greatest achievement other than the World Championship, describe the birth of the satellite Main Event winner, and find out which player Tom rates above them all, which might surprise you.
The First-Ever Satellite World Champion
Back in 1983, no one had ever won the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event without putting down $10,000 to do so. That all changed with Tom McEvoy’s victory, and we asked ‘Grand Rapids’ about how his qualification for the event came about.
Eric Drache was the tournament director of the World Series back then and had introduced the concept the previous year, Tom says. He suggested to the players in a cash game that they each put up $1,000, and the winner gets a seat in the Main Event.
They went for it, and it started to catch on. Other casinos then started hosting smaller buy-in satellites like the one Rod Peate won. He played a 100-player satellite that cost $110 to enter, and the winner got a seat in the big game.
Tom played in some of the same $100 qualifiers but didn’t make it through. Binion’s Horseshoe continued with single-table satellites, and after Tom won the Limit Hold’em WSOP event, he decided to play one to see if he could win a Main Event seat for a fraction of the entry fee.
It still cost $1,100 to enter, so I took on partners. By the time I won my satellite, I only had a third of myself in the Main Event. The satellite I won took about two hours to play. They had several single-table satellites that year. After I won the Main Event through a satellite, the concept exploded.
How to Win Heads-Up
The final battle for the crown was between Tom and Rod Peate, the other well-known satellite winner that year. Whoever took the title would have become the world’s first ‘satellite’ world champion. It was a long battle that Tom won hours after it began, having come back from a losing position many times.
Every tournament I ever won, I came back from a bad chip position at some point. Mental attitude is key to success. I had a student once who got heads up with another player in the Limit Hold’em event at the World Series. He then lost with pocket aces, and his opponent had over 80% of the chips.
Far from putting Tom’s student in the blender, it inspired him to battle back from adversity.
That lost hand won the tournament for him. After losing that hand, he showed no emotion, just shrugged it off, and bore down even harder. His opponent started to realize it wasn’t over after all, but too late.
The tide turned, and my student never gave up or showed any distress. The other guy crumbled, and mental toughness won out. My advice would be to never give up, no matter what happens.
The Greatest Achievement of All
Like many poker players, Tom is a passionate non-smoker. The World Series didn’t used to be a smoke-free environment, however, and it was down to Tom that the rules were changed, banning smoking from WSOP venues ever since.
A few years after the World Series went non-smoking, a player came up to me, asking if I knew what my proudest accomplishment was? Obviously, the Main Event win was first, but I immediately answered, getting the World Series to go non-smoking for the first time in 2002.
Tom, along with several other players, had been circulating petitions to get tournaments to go non-smoking for about two years. When Tom was hired to be the new poker room manager at Binion’s in the fall of 2001, he had become friends with Benny Binion Behan.
He was the grandson of the founder, Benny Binion, says Tom. He loved poker and wanted to get better as a player. I offered to give him free poker lessons if he could convince his parents, Nick and Becky Behan, to go non-smoking at the next World Series.
He agreed, and this is how it came about. There are two ironic things about this. Firstly, Benny was a smoker and still agreed to this. And second, I got fired one day before the [2002] World Series began.
The Man for All World Series Seasons
Tom is one of a number of former champions who keep coming back to the WSOP every year. In fact, he has cashed in a ranking tournament every year since 1983, a record that can hardly be touched by any other player. He still loves the WSOP to this day and doesn’t see an end to his incredible run.
I may be old, but I am not dead yet! laughs Tom. I still want to compete and try to win a fifth bracelet. I have played the Main Event 38 times, which may be a record. I will continue to compete as long as I have the physical and mental ability to do so.
Tom, who has played in at least one World Series of Poker event every year since 1980, won the Main Event the first year he competed in it. Most years since, he’s cashed in a WSOP event too, and all the former players he took on at the felt, one or two stand out.
T.J. Cloutier is the man I most admire and enjoyed playing with, says Tom of the Poker Hall of Famer and six-time WSOP bracelet winner. For about 20 years, he was the best tournament player alive, in my opinion.
Also, I have been friends and played with Phil Hellmuth for a very long time. Those two are by far my two most favorite players. T.J. and I wrote four strategy books together, and Phil did the foreword in two of my books.
The Growth of Modern Poker
The WSOP Main Event has changed immeasurably since Tom topped 108 entries to win the top prize of $540,000. The World Championship will be a huge TV production on ESPN this July and August, and the biggest all-summer show on the Vegas strip. The difference from 1983 is vast.
Nobody could have foreseen how big poker would become. A combination of several things made this possible. The internet, the hole cards camera, and The Moneymaker Effect contributed to this.
TV shows featuring the WSOP brought it into the mainstream, but it was the advent of hole-card ‘lipstick’ cameras that Tom believes moved the game forward.
Watching poker before the hole cards were revealed to the audience was like watching paint dry. Several top players fought against the hole card cameras, thinking that it would give away too much of their strategy.
This was very short-sighted thinking. The only way poker on TV would become interesting is if the audience saw what was going on through the play of the individual hands.
Before hole card cameras, poker hands were only broadcast at showdown, a move Tom says was simply ‘boring.’ But once players understood the context of each player’s actions and saw a bluff being played out live, for example, televised poker exploded.
People could also play at home online in their pajamas. After Moneymaker won the world championship, it inspired countless players to try and do the same.
While there are many positives about the modern game’s round-the-clock coverage, Tom strongly feels that the World Series of Poker could do a better job promoting their former world champions.
They no longer have a tournament that features their Main Event champions or their Hall of Famers, says Tom. They used to, but now we are largely ignored.
It would help to have a players’ committee to discuss rules changes and other improvements. Right now, casino executives who are not good players are making a lot of corporate decisions. They need input from professional players who are respected.
Backgammon and Poker
Now a passionate backgammon player, Tom sees a lot of similarities between the game and poker. This is backed up by recent cross-game winners such as the backgammon grandmaster Zdenek Zizka, who beat Shaun Deeb to a gold bracelet by beating him heads-up.
Poker and backgammon have a lot in common. Correct decisions in both games will determine your overall success. Both games have a luck factor you can’t control.
In poker, you get your money in with the best hand, and your opponent only has one or two cards to beat you, and they can hit the river card, and you get destroyed. In backgammon, one lucky or unlucky throw of the dice can change the outcome of the match.
While there is an element of fortune in both games, as Tom describes, the ability to press your skill edge will always win out in both disciplines.
All you can ever do in both games is play your best and make the right choices with the cards or the dice, admits Tom. The luck factor is what keeps losing players coming back to the game.
Sometimes they win even if they don’t play very well. Bad players in both games occasionally win against better players. In both games, however, the superior player will win out in the end given enough time.
Lessons in Life Through Poker
Poker provides many life lessons, and Tom is a proud Dad whose job is partly to pass those lessons on to those he has helped to raise and continues to support. As he tells us, the former world champion has learned plenty from poker that he would like to pass on.
I always thought that learning how to play poker was like learning how the real world works. I thought every person, no matter how young or old, could benefit from playing. Poker teaches you that you are responsible for your own decisions – good or bad.
As Tom says, life and poker might not always be fair, just like a two-outer can catch you on the river, life can catch you unawares.
In poker, you can play perfectly and still lose. In life, you can do nothing wrong and still have bad things happen through no fault of your own. Suck it up! Tom declares.
In poker, you learn math skills and lots of psychology. I think even small children would benefit, as well as aged grandmas and grandpas. Life is like a big poker game where both good and bad things can happen, sometimes when you least expect it.
When he put his money down in a WSOP satellite to the Main Event 43 years ago, Tom McEvoy could never have imagined that he would become the world champion. Now, almost half a decade later, he continues to be one of the game’s greatest ever ambassadors and more passionate advocates.
Here’s hoping Grand Rapids continues to go with the flow in Las Vegas for a long time yet.
