Third-place Vegas poker finish nets physicist $4 million
BY KRISTA ZALA
Binger, a theoretical particle physicist at SLAC, won $4 million in the World Series of Poker Championships in Las Vegas last week.
"Since middle school, I've always had plans to get rich," says Michael Binger, a theoretical particle physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Last week, his dream came true. On Aug. 11, Binger placed third at the World Series of Poker Championships in Las Vegas and walked away with $4,123,310.
"The championship included all the best players on earth, and a lot of the worst players," Binger says. "It's about knowing how to weave your way through people and survive."
The no-limit Texas hold 'em tournament drew nearly 9,000 entrants, each of whom paid a $10,000 "buy-in" that supplied the $87 million later apportioned to the top 10 percent of players. Stakes were raised every two hours.
At the 36th level, Binger's last, the minimum bet was $400,000. After another player folded, leading chip holder Jamie Gold drew a straight to beat Binger's pair of tens, landing the SLAC physicist third place.
A longtime card player, Binger recalls a yearlong surreptitious game of seven-card stud in his high school sophomore chemistry class. He moved from blackjack to poker in 2001, when a friend invited him to a poker table in a casino just south of San Francisco.
After winning $1,000 on a good day at Lucky Chances in Colma, he tried a table with higher stakes. "I stepped into that and got killed," he says. "I realized there was more to the game than I'd known." Binger studied books on poker with the goal of winning back the $10,000 he had lost, and did so within months.
"Blackjack is entirely solvable, but poker always involves adjusting to the precise environment," Binger says. That environment includes the vagaries of opponents' psychology—as well as luck.
"That's the difference between poker and golf," Binger says. "Nobody is ever going to beat Tiger Woods. In poker, luck does dominate in the short run, but usually the better players win in the long run."
Over the last five years, Binger has spliced forays into poker with earning a doctorate in theoretical particle physics from Stanford. Rewards in the two pursuits have coincided: He received his doctorate two months ago. But beyond skills in probability and statistics, Binger says, "there's very little direct overlap" between his training in physics and his poker feats.
Binger still plans to work on his research at SLAC while competing in the poker tournament circuit about once a month. Otherwise, he says, he will keep financial plans modest—unless he's bluffing.
Krista Zala is a science-writing intern at SLAC.
