Interview: Will Fry

We can tell from the Estuary twang and Spurs shirt that you’re not from Notts…
I came here to study Contemporary Art, back in 1998. I’m actually from Essex but it’s not my favourite place in the world so I tell people I’m from South-East London. I did live performance work and made short films. I was always into acting, but I wasn’t the most studious person in the world, so I ended up not getting the best degree and not doing the right course to progress the acting...

…and you got into poker.
My family was always playing cards when I was growing up. When I went to uni I was introduced to a character called Benz who used to run games at his house. He had a proper table, which was brilliant. I went home after uni for a bit, looking for acting work. I got a job in London and each night, when I got in, I’d get on the online poker. Some nights I used to only come down for dinner and my Mum would come in the room at one or two in the morning, saying: “Go to bed. You’ve got work in the morning.” I’d be like “yeah, yeah” but I was making thirty, forty quid a night.

How did you make the jump to becoming a professional?
I’d moved back to Notts and gave myself three months to do it. I knew my parents wouldn’t be happy about it, so I thought if I could create a chart and show them that I’d started with fifty dollars and turned it into thousands, then I’d carry on doing it. So, I’d get up at five pm, have breakfast, potter around, start playing about seven, and play through till about four, five in the morning, which was a great time to play ‘cos you’ve got all the Americans online. They’re not allowed to play anymore due to tax laws, so times have changed.

And you went from that to tournaments?
Yeah. Loads of small-scale tournaments. I’d start off with fifty dollars, but it got to a point then when I started putting down two-hundred, then four-hundred, then a thousand dollars on each table. That was my peak. That was the most, pretty much, I’ve ever put down. I was working to pay the mortgage on my first house.

And then you entered the EPT...
That's right. Poker sites offer you loyalty points – incentives for playing on their sites. The more you play, the more points you get. I’d accumulated so many points – £5,000 worth – and one night I was a bit worse for wear when I’d come in from a nightclub. I had this crazy voice in my head, almost, that was saying “I’ve never been to Budapest. I’m always hearing it’s beautiful”. So I paid in. I wasn’t expecting to get anywhere.

Any special preparation?
No, I just had a laugh with it. Each day I’d go down to the casino, play poker, and come out with more chips than I started with. It was all a bit crazy. And no nerves, not in the early stages; I’d been a poker pro for two or three years, so I was doing my job. Even when I got down to the final table – the final eight players – I just thought: “This is my job, this is.”

 

What was the minimum you could have won had you crashed and burnt on that final table?
I think it was about €30,000...

...so it was already a very good week’s work by that stage.
I’m already flying, but I was about middle-ranked with the number of chips I took into the final. So my tactic was: stay out of everyone’s way, keep folding, only play very strong hands, and hopefully everyone will keep knocking each other out – like they did – and I’ll climb the ladder. ‘Cos the money really starts going up there: seventh would be fifty or sixty thousand; sixth would be, say, ninety thousand. So, I was planning on folding my way to fifth. As soon as I got fifth, I was happy with that, then I could really start opening up, changing the style I was playing.

But even though you won it, you said you cut an earlier deal that meant you didn’t take the full prize money of €595,000.
Yeah, when there were three of us left, we all wanted to cut a deal. We were three relatively young chaps – I was 27, the oldest guy was about 30 and the other one was about 24 – and that amount of money at that stage of your life…even though I had the most chips, with second place just behind and third place maybe half of us, any one of the three of us could have won it. So, if the first place gets €600,000 and second place gets €350,000 and third wins €200,000, there’s such a big drop that you do a deal, like insurance. We figured out how many chips we each had and split the money.

So it wasn’t a completely even three-way split?
Me and the guy in second both got more than second-place money, and the other guy is getting more than third prize. Being able to guarantee myself over €350,000 was obviously life-changing. Poker can change so quickly, so even though I was chip leader at that point I could have easily come third, and then I’m only winning €200,000.

So, winning that amount of money – is it a ‘this has changed my life forever’ moment?
No. I never take money as being completely, totally life-changing. Even a large, large, large amount of money, like £5 million… I mean, you don’t want that to change things that much, you know. If you’re happy with where you’re living, your friends, your family, you don’t want them affected. I was just over the moon at the fact that it was my first ever big tournament, playing against these professionals, and I’d won it.

We need to ask how much of a spend-up you had afterwards.
I rang some mates back at home and said: “Fill the fridge with champagne. We’re having a party”. People were going nuts. That was an awesome party. After that, I bought a big TV, a new computer, a big sound system. I paid off my mortgage, and invested some money in shares. I come from a family of accountants, so I was never going to be one to just spunk it away.

But you also lobbed a chunk of it over to an orphanage in Nepal.
Yeah, I went out for about a month and just did some teaching out there. The plan was to give some money to charity after my win, but with a big charity you don’t know where it’s going. So I donated some money to the school I was teaching at, and then went to help out in an orphanage. They had thirty-one kids and an old rusty bike between them, so I got them four new bikes, a new bike for the guys who worked there, some medication, food, a new DVD player, and I left them enough money to put up another building so they could get to admit some of the kids on their waiting list.

So how did the win change your status as a poker player?
You can’t just win one of those tournaments and become a celeb, for starters. You used to be able to, back in the day, but it’s less glamorous now. Back in the day, if you won an EPT you’d get a sponsorship deal, like that. You were an instant face. Nowadays you really need two or three strong results to be considered for sponsorship, which gets you into tournaments for free and that. It has changed things in Notts, though; when I went back to Dusk Till Dawn, my favourite casino, people that didn’t even like me there would go: “Hey Will, how ya doing?” And the managers there, Rob Yong and Simon Trumper, were great –  they were like: “We’re really proud of you. You’ve done Nottingham proud”.

So what now? Still playing as much as you used to?
Not really. Before Budapest I was playing 26 hours a day and 9 days a week, but I got a bit bored of the game and was just playing it to make money. So, I just started to try and do some other things with my life. I became very good at bumming around. I’m a very skilled bummer now. So, I took six months off, watched some football, and rekindled my passion for it. But online’s very difficult now; the standard’s got a lot better and it’s more difficult to make money. So I stopped playing online and I just play at Dusk Till Dawn now.

So, how much is luck and how much is skill?
The two go together; part of the skill is making the most of your luck when you get it. And when you’re down on your luck, make sure you minimize the damage. Also, it’s about how you react to bad luck: when you’re down on your luck, can you still concentrate and make the correct decisions? That’s the thing with poker. If you’re a keen tennis player, you’re never going to be able to take Federer on. But I’ve played against some of the best poker players in the world. You can make a bad decision and it can turn out good as well – it’s one of those games where there are a lot of variables. It’s not like chess where, if he’s better than you, he’s going to beat you every time.
 
Do you have a good poker face?
It’s not massively about a poker face as much as people think. There are ‘tells’ that people use, but that’s, like, one tenth of the skill in the game. There lots of other skills, like maths, memory, patience, analysing past situations, picking up patterns and physical ‘tells’, keeping your emotions in control. When all’s said and done, you’re playing against yourself.   

So the moral of the story is: ‘always act on your impulses when you come back from a club battered’?
Hell yeah.