All In (24 page)

“So beautiful,” one of my brothers said.

“I can't wait to see it up close.” I grinned.

After we'd landed, our escorts led us through the terminal to a waiting shuttle bus.

Wide-eyed, I looked at all the people in the airport. They were all so tall, the ladies so beautiful. I couldn't get over the first blonde woman I saw. I'd never imagined anyone could have that hair color.

The shuttle took us to a hotel where we stayed while our paperwork was processed. Our hosts led us into a banquet room, where a buffet awaited us.

Xay and I walked toward a large pot filled with noodles
covered in some sort of red stuff with lumps of meat sticking up. “Xay, look at that. They covered the noodles in blood. That's disgusting.”

“It doesn't smell like blood,” he said. “Look, the Americans are already eating it. We should give it a try.”

“I will if you will.” With that, I took my first bite of spaghetti and meatballs. “Hmmmm, this isn't bad at all.”

The staff also served us salad and fruit. I recognized the bananas and oranges but didn't know what to make of the orange-sized fruit with the smooth, red skin. I took a bite and liked it. Later, someone told me it was an apple.

The one fruit that really caught my eye was small and round and came in bunches. Some were red, some black, some green. I pulled off a red one and ate it. It tasted like candy— the best I'd ever had. I grabbed another and stared at it a moment. “What kind of fruit is this, and why is it so sweet? Do they soak these in sugar?”

“No,” I was told through an interpreter, “they're naturally sweet. They're called grapes.”

I ate grapes until I felt sick, and then I kept on eating them. Pure joy swept over me.
This is the America I dreamed about.
I also ate more Jell-O. Lots and lots of Jell-O. For dessert, I had my first ever chocolate chip cookie. I'm still a big fan.

After our meal, my father went to take care of our paperwork while our escort took Xay, Kham Dy, and me to our hotel room. We stayed in one room; our parents and two other brothers stayed in another.

Before we left the banquet room, I overheard the escort
tell my father, “You'll stay here tonight. Tomorrow you'll fly to your destination to meet your brother.”

My father seemed anxious to get back on an airplane and fly to Nashville right then.

Me? I didn't mind having to spend the night in San Francisco. Not if they planned to keep feeding us like this.

When the escort opened the door to our hotel room, I thought we were at a palace. “Wow, can you believe this place?”

“No,” Xay said.

Without a word, Kham Dy jumped into the middle of the king-sized bed and went right to sleep.

“Look, a television,” Xay said. Neither of us had seen one up close before. “I wonder how you get it to work.”

“Let's find out.” I started turning knobs.

“You're going to break it.

You should just leave it alone.”

“No, I won't. Besides, I once saw a policeman watching Jackie Chan on a television in the security shed at Ban Vinai. Don't you want to watch Jackie Chan?”

“Sure, I guess.”

After I turned one or two knobs, the screen lit up and sound came out.

The two of us sat back on the bed and stared in wonder. Unfortunately, it wasn't Jackie Chan.

“What is this?” I said.

“I don't know. It looks like some kind of game, but it's the craziest one I've ever seen.”

On the television, oversized men in heavy pads and helmets lined up, then ran into one another.

“Why don't they go around?” I said.

We watched, but neither of us could figure out the point of the game.

After a few minutes, I said, “I'm going to see what else is on.”

“No, Xao, don't mess with it. Just leave it here or turn it off.”

The Tom Sawyer in me ignored my brother, and I turned knobs until something happened. Somehow, I managed to change the channel.

Instead of athletes, a puppet came on the screen. Apparently he was about to go to bed, just like Xay and me. The puppet walked to the window, shivered, and shut the window.

“Close,” he said, then climbed back into bed.

Another puppet came into the room, also dressed for bed, and walked to the window and raised it. “Open.”

Then the first puppet shut the window and said, “Close.” The second puppet raised the window again and said, “Open.”

The puppets, who called one another Ernie and Bert, gave us our first English lesson.
Sesame Street
sure beat football.

To this day, my brother and I still joke about Bert and Ernie and “open” and “close.”

After my brother and I went to bed, I sympathized with Bert. This was my first time sleeping on an actual mattress. The bed was amazing, but neither my brother nor I could figure out how we were supposed to sleep under the sheets. The hotel maid had tucked them in so tightly that we couldn't squeeze between the covers. Instead, we slept on top and shivered all night.

The next morning a shuttle bus arrived to take us back to the airport.

“Next stop: Nashville,” my father said.

“And Grandmother?” I replied.

“Yes, and your grandmother.” He smiled.

I was so excited that I could hardly contain myself. I did manage to eat breakfast, another meal of firsts, in which I discovered Corn Flakes, bacon, and sausage. I had yet to try a food in America I didn't like.

The plane from San Francisco to Nashville was much smaller than the 747 we'd taken from Bangkok. After everyone had boarded, one of the flight attendants introduced herself. She knew we were moving from the other side of the world to Nashville and was assigned to take special care of us.

I looked up at her in amazement. Tall, blonde, blue-eyed, she looked like an angel. And her nose. I could not stop staring at her nose. All the people I'd known had short or very flat noses, but this woman's was long and shaped just right.

Once the plane was in the air, this flight attendant brought my brothers and me some chocolate milk along with some coloring books and crayons.

I opened the book and laughed. “Xay, remember these guys?” Then I spoke my first English words: “Open, close.”

Xay laughed. “Ernie and Bert must be big stars in America. They're everywhere.”

Halfway through the flight, I was tired of coloring, so I drew the mountains of Laos with a river flowing down. During
my time in school in Ban Vinai, this had been my favorite picture to draw. When I was finished, I gave the page to the flight attendant with the beautiful nose and tried to explain that this was my village where I'd grown up.

Unfortunately, she didn't speak Hmong, Lao, or Thai, and my English was limited to “open” and “close.” She smiled and took the picture as if she understood.

From the sky, Nashville looked different from San Francisco. It was October, which meant many of the trees we could see from the air had multicolored leaves: reds, yellows, and oranges.
What amazing trees
.

Once we were finally on the ground, I couldn't wait to get off the plane. An escort led us up the long, narrow hallway and through a door.

Standing there were two of my uncles. I dashed out to hug them and held on for a long time. After they'd left the camp, I'd wondered if I would ever see them again.

“It is so good to see you, my brother,” my uncle said to my father.

Both were obviously fighting back tears.

My uncle then led us out of the airport and to a brown Datsun station wagon, the first actual car I would ever ride in.

“Who's car is this?” my father asked.

“Mine. I bought it myself.”

Wow,
I thought. My
family has always been so poor. Here in America, everyone truly is rich.
I was so proud of my uncle. He had lived in America such a short time and already had made
something of himself.

The nine of us crammed into the little Datsun for the drive to my uncle's apartment, our new home. I pressed my face against the window the entire drive. So many cars sped past that I couldn't count them all. And the buildings? Oh, what magnificent buildings! Even the large signs advertising food and everything else fascinated me.
This has to be paradise.

My uncle exited Interstate 40 and made his way into an apartment complex next to the highway. As we pulled in and slowed to a stop, I beheld the most wonderful sight in the entire world: my grandmother.

I leapt out, ran across the lot, and fell into her arms. As she held me tightly, I sobbed. Soon I felt another set of arms around me as my father embraced his mother. Before I knew it, our entire family had joined in a giant group hug there in the parking lot at 55 Carroll Street.

This must be what heaven's like
. It was the moment I'd dreamed of. I never wanted it to end.

On July 6, 2007, the World Series of Poker had started with 6,358 players. At high noon on Tuesday, July 17, we were down to nine, including me. This was the final table. Whoever went out first would walk away with over $525,000, but no one wants that. Making the final table is the ultimate dream of every poker player, but once you make it, getting there is no longer enough. You want to win.

It's not just the money. The World Series of Poker is like baseball's World Series and football's Super Bowl and all of boxing's championship belts put together. The winner truly is a
world
champion. People from around the globe flock to Vegas to play in this one event. The nine players at this final table alone represented six different countries.

For these reasons, simply sitting at the final table is more pressure than most people can take. Everyone starts off playing even tighter than they have the rest of the tournament.
No one ever goes crazy and goes all in on the first hand. The pressure is too great to do anything so foolish.

Then again, poker is always about pressure, especially to survive. The stakes are not life and death, but they can feel that way with millions in chips in front of you.

No real poker player wants to depend on the luck of the draw to win a hand. You end up losing as often as you win when everything comes down to luck. The key to the game is knowing when to apply pressure to your opponents and to continue until they fold.

You always win when your opponent folds to you, but you never know what may happen when a hand goes to the flop or the turn or all the way to the river card.

During the first round of the final table, the big blinds were 240,000 and the small blinds were set at 120,000 with the antes, or minimum bets, at 30,000. This meant for the first two and a half hours of play, the pot began at 630,000 before anyone did anything.

All of us had begun the tournament with 20,000 in chips. I started play this day in eighth place with 8.45 million.

With my stack size and lack of experience, I looked like the easiest player not only to push around but to shove right out of the tournament. Vegas oddsmakers and most Internet poker sites agreed. They placed the odds of my winning at ten to one, very poor indeed when you consider there were only nine of us left.

I drew the fourth position at the table. Lee Watkinson,
the most successful professional player left in the tournament, sat to my immediate left in seat five. This was his fifth final table at a World Series of Poker event, which is a remarkable achievement. With just under 10 million in chips, however, he was in sixth place and nearly as vulnerable as me. Even so, I regarded him as a dangerous player, perhaps the most dangerous at the final table.

Next to Lee, with over 21 million in chips, was the odds-on favorite to take home the main event championship bracelet: Tuan Lam. Oddsmakers put him at three to one to win.

On Tuan's left, in seventh position with 22 million, was chip leader Philip Hilm of Denmark, a hard-to-read player with a lot of experience. Like Lee Watkinson, he was dangerous, even more so given his huge chip stack.

John Kalmar from England sat in eighth position. His 20 million in chips put him in third place. John was a good player and a very likable guy.

Twenty-two-year-old Hevad Khan, the youngest player at the final table, was in ninth position. The fact that he'd made it this far was surprising since almost all of his poker experience had come from playing online. Just over 800,000 chips separated Hevad, in seventh place, and me. Given the size of the pots at the final table, that difference was nothing.

Raymond Rahme of South Africa, the oldest player still standing, at sixty-two, had the button for the first hand in the first position. This meant he was the last person to have to act in the hand. He started play in fourth place with over 16 million in chips.

The short stack belonged to Alex Kravchenko of Russia, who had 6.57 million in chips. He and I had gone up against one another many times over the past few days, with mixed results.

The last player at the table was another one I was well familiar with. Lee Childs sat to my immediate right. With just over 13 million in chips, he was in fifth place. Lee and I had played many memorable hands during the past few days. I think both of us would have preferred to be seated apart, but the luck of the draw put us side by side. Thankfully, I had the better position. On most hands, I played after him, which gave me a real advantage.

The dealer wished us all good luck before shuffling, and off we went.

I took a deep breath and glanced at my hand.
Just like any other table,
I told myself.
This is just like any other table. Play your game, and play to win.

After my little pep talk, I looked around the table. Every-one seemed more than a little nervous, which only made sense. All of us were close enough to the title to think we could win it, yet we knew how quickly our chip stacks could shrink to nothing.

No one planned on doing anything crazy. Being the first eliminated would be bad enough; busting out on one of the first few hands would be humiliating.