Di Dang riding the elevator with over a million dollars in his backpack. He in Macau and the wealthy Chinese were looking to play poker. Obviously, he had dropped everything.
Play on the most sensible terrain of the Grand Lisboa, a ridiculous gleaming lotus-flower-shaped casino stack. (Seriously, google it.) A host had to accompany her and the security guards had to allow her access to the personal room. Di, a 27-year-old from the Virginia suburbs, walked in with a backpack full of poker plates and $ 100,000 in cash.
The whales were already playing, surrounded by, uh, “masseurs” with long hair and short dresses. Cigarette smoke filled the air. The servers were filled with trays of dragon fruit. And damn it, that view. Di liked to dress up when he played, especially in hot and humid Macau, where games can last 24 hours or more. But tonight, in this room full of gajllionaires, he stayed in a T-shirt and shorts.
Never mind.
“Part of you is nervous, but another part of you is like, oh man, I’m printing cash here for the long haul,” he says. “If I had my fair percentage of luck, then I think I could easily win, like $ 1 million, $ 2 million, $ 3 million overnight.”
That 2010. Twenty-five across the United States lived with their parents, bouncing between internships and parallel riots as the country limped out of recession. Di (pronounced “zee”) and his younger brother Hac also lived in their parents’ basement, only they played stupid cash gambling at online poker.
And they were legends. According to the High Stakes tracking database, Di and Hac rank fifth and seventh, respectively, among the biggest online winners of all time, with combined earnings of approximately $ 14 million. They filled the virtual stadiums and went through ESPN. During summers in Las Vegas, they took over a 3,000-square-foot penthouse at the Palms Place Hotel and Spa with a balcony with a Jacuzzi on the 58th floor. Poker addicts would bar them on the street and ask for photos.
So yeah, Di – screen “urindanger” – entered Grand Lisboa like a boss.
But he may be blind. Fix some details.
Until tonight, Di had entered the Macau games for up to $ 200,000. The buy-in for this Texas Hold ‘Em table was over half a million. “I was like, Oh shit, that’s great,” Di says. “This is where it hit me: I play the biggest game in the world.”
However, they were amateurs and thought that if he entertained them, they would invite him back: a treasure. While everyone played hard and waited for bigger hands, Di played aggressively and relaxedly, hotshot: “It’s political and look at the scene and look for them to like it.”
Almost 8 hours later, his backpack was empty. The biggest game of his life ruined, more than a million dollars.
Ten years later, Macau’s attics are extraordinarily distant. These days, Di serves self-made spring rolls at a place to eat called Roll Play and crayfish in one called Chasin’Tails, two of the six mid-priced suburban eaters he and Hac have opened. They count pennies, not bricks, care about visitor service rather than room service and tension in clogged bathrooms that in actual discharges.
And yet the memory of a life when he could lose a mil in an instant is not entirely nostalgia as the Dang brothers make their way in the restaurant business. The story of all those high highs and low lows might also explain why the duo is facing the pandemic and this moment of immense industry peril without sweating. But first you have to understand how they got here.
Poker is a game of skill that masquerades as a game of luck. You can play an opposite hand to the Dang brothers and win because yes, you are lucky. In the end, however, they perceive the strategy, mathematics, and psychology of the game better than you. With a lot of hands, they will kill you.
The brothers began playing online in the early 2000s, when they were reading mechanical engineering at the University of Virginia. The Wild West type of game back then, full of enthusiasts who thought they were Matt Damon in Rounders. But Di, who his friends call the Human Calculator, a former school mathematician who liked to take the SAT tests for fun. Hac, a year younger, in what Di says, especially if it might weigh him down. When they weren’t playing basketball or chess with each other, the Dangs got together in get-rich-quick schemes (selling Pokémon cards on eBay, reselling hot Christmas toys). In elementary school, in what could have been their first rampage, they scratched the trash can from the shoppers’ grocery store, mistakenly chasing the winners while their mother was shopping for groceries.
While others have treated online poker as an undeniable new edition of Grand Theft Auto, the brothers have studied books and videos on strategy and strategy. They would join each other as the stakes went up, their brotherly rivalry fueled their ascent. As No Limit Hold ‘Em became more lucrative, they left their jobs at Ruby Tuesday and Uno Pizzeria. When they earned $35,000 while hiding in their hotel room during spring break in the Bahamas, they also thought about ditching. Meanwhile, Hac’s GPA fell to 2.1. I controlled to cancel an optional successful/failure nutrition course.
“I’m so scared, unhappy and crazy at the same time,” says his father, Hoang Dang. He’s an oil engineer and reviews patents for the federal government. His wife, Binh, a Vietnamese writer, took over their five children. None has approved of turning cards into a life. “The game,” Hoang’s parents said, “is the guy of poverty.”
Hoang forbade the boys from playing poker at home. He took the Internet router with him when he went to work. Di and Hac were going to go to a PC café in Fairfax and pay a few bucks an hour to attach it.
In the end, the most productive thing Dad could do was insist that if they were looking for professionals, they would get at least one college degree. They did. And the following year, for his 50th birthday, the brothers surprised him with a BMW M5 adorned with a giant bow. Mommy’s got a Lexus. Di and Hac canceled their own student loans, as well as their three siblings’ tuition fees.
The Dang also exchanged the circle of relatives at home, where Dad once cared about the long downdoers that destroyed his water bills. Di and Hac bought their parents a 7,585-square-foot complex at Fairfax Station for $1.35 million in cash. The brothers continued to live there, with their brothers, in their thirties, “as an Asian Full House situation,” Hac says. By that time, Dad had arrived. His sons had succeeded, but not in the way he had imagined it.
“In the past, I was looking for them to be doctors or scientists,” Hoang says. “Not bad in the end.”
The Dang Bros., as they called them, bought games for up to $100,000. Hundreds of tuned audiences, with full online forums committed to feedback from their hands. “If you’re an online player, you know who the Dang Bros were,” says his friend and colleague Tom Hu. “They’re like the Brad Pitt in online poker.”
Di, a flashy dresser with a Johnny Bravo pompadour, would Google his name after big sessions: “I wanted to get as famous as possible.” He traveled from Shanghai to London for the kind of games where you had to know a guy who knows a guy. On high-roller trips to Macau, he’d stay with friends in penthouses with theater rooms, massive saunas, and Hermès shampoo. He’d order the $600 hairy crab just because it was the most expensive dish on the menu. “The crabmeat literally tasted like cardboard,” says Hu.
Some more sensible players lose a lot by engaging in “ego battles” with rivals. The Dang Bros thing about deciding on games where they knew they could go blank. They located whales, and one in particular: Guy Laliberté. Cirque du Soleil billionaire considered to be the Mothrough Dick of online poker.
“I told him my hat that his eating place will fail.”
In theory, Laliberté was anonymous. But insiders have held him accountable because of his recognizable taste and the magnitude of his losses. “Every time Guy logged in, the table filled up in less than five minutes,” says Hac, known online as Trex313. “One of us needed a seat.”
They have adapted their total life around their virtual rival. “We’d say, ‘Oh yeah, Guy just signed up and played an 8-hour session, so he’ll probably be back in 8 hours,’ says Hac. They hired a private attendant to bring them to KFC or to pick up their siblings from school.
Once, he and a friend were driving his father’s BMW to the gym when he won a text message that Laliberté had connected. He stopped and had his friend carry his friend so he could access his computer from the passenger seat. The only problem: your friend may not drive a gear stick. “It stalled about 12 times,” says Di. “I think I made $ 16,000 in ten minutes, so I thought, ‘Don’t worry, you paid for all those stands.”
As much as he played rock star poker online, Di was also determined to live it in a genuine life, which meant shaking up his inner math nerd. “Everybody considers me a smart e-book but very socially inept,” he says. He enrolled in artist education camps. And even when he was a 26-year-old millionaire, he was given a $ 7.25 an hour summer assignment at Tysons Abercrombie & Fitch to paint on his social skills and “practice talking to girls, practice contact.” visual. “Perhaps he would also use his air of mystery at the poker table and hang up more invitations to live games. Plus, he says,” I liked the clothes. “
The Dang Bros had a reputation for “tilt control” or emotional restraint. The good news is that they can go up or down six digits on any given day. When Hac lost a million, it “hurt,” he says. “But the next morning when I woke up the mentality was even bigger: I’m 23 years old and I lost a million dollars and didn’t kill myself, so I’m probably fine.” He wasn’t that attached to the high roller lifestyle. Even when he was making a million dollars a year, he was still driving a crappy 1997 Toyota Camry, until his mother secretly sold it while he was in Las Vegas once. “She was like, ‘Hey, that car makes you look poor.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, but I’m not, so it doesn’t matter.’
Di, on the other hand, found it more difficult to walk away, but knew how to motivate herself. The year it crashed and burned at Grand Lisboa, it had lost $ 2 million. He made the decision that if he could get back to balance, he would do so with an Audi R8, the same car that Tony Stark drove in Iron Man. Boom. The following Christmas, he and his friend Tuyet Nhi Le (now a restaurant wife and competitive bikini bodybuilder) parked their new R8 at Tysons for a Christmas shopping spree.
Hours later, they came out with at least part of a dozen bags of gifts and decorations. But none of this would do. “The total trunk is designed to be compatible with a set of golf clubs, because only the end of the purchase of this car,” says Di. He called his father, who had never succumbed to the allure of show cars. “He drove the truck to pick us up.”
Finally, it’s over. In 2011, the federal government shut down the 3 largest poker sites in the United States and accused them of fraud and cash laundering: Black Friday, as world poker has called it. The crackdown has banned online gambling in the United States.
Hac then sought to move to Canada to continue playing. Di, however, had an idea. He sought to open a restaurant. “I think it would be very simple money,” he says. “We would be the owners, so we would get, like, some status. You have many daughters if you are a restaurateur. “
“You have many daughters if you are a restaurateur.”
Visiting a circle of relatives in Louisiana, they had experienced the magic of a great seafood boil. I figured a place to eat Viet-Cajun crayfish would kill in Northern Virginia – it’s not that hard to prepare. Bring it to a boil, we’ve noticed our uncles do it. And we had my uncles to help us, if necessary, with recipes for okra or jambalaya. And it’s so easy, obviously. He would have opened 4 places to eat in six months, he thought, and then sold them at a huge profit. “It’s about money, retiring, having piña coladas, playing golf on an island somewhere.
You thought your brother is crazy. They were two of the most productive poker players in the world! If they moved abroad, even for a year or two, they may still rake in a few million more.
“For us, poker is safe. Like, we knew the numbers. We knew that if we played, we won. For us it will be another day at the office, ”says Hac. “But restaurants were anything we didn’t delight in. So it’s the best option for us.”
This time, their parents lobbied for poker—restaurants sounded like a bad bet. “He’s an absent-minded person,” Di’s dad says about his eldest son. “A lot of times, I or my wife take his clothes to the laundry. He left a lot of money everywhere—in his pockets or on the ground. Everywhere you can find money, and he doesn’t remember that he put it there. . . . I told him I bet my hat that his restaurant will fail.”
The brothers, who had been active combined for years, were arguing about it. “We have the touch of Midas,” Di said in spite of everything to Hac one day on the way to the gym. “Don’t worry about the restaurants, everything we touch will turn to gold.”
The Arlington site in Chasin’Tails, where server T-shirts indicated sucking your head, pinching details, delayed for seven months. They discovered the smartest call, Heads or Tails (HOT), but didn’t look for the logo before spending a lot on marketing materials. So Chasin ‘Tails was born from a public contest on Facebook.
When she nevertheless made her debut in April 2012, Di found herself unlocking the toilet, washing dishes and dealing with angry consumers who waited an hour for her garlic crayfish noodles. “The only explanation for why this position gets a star is because Yelp does not have a 0-star option,” read one of the first Yelp reviews. “If you need a mediocre Cajun faux kitchen, move on to Chasin Tails soon as it may not be open for a year.”
Hac moved to Vancouver to continue playing poker, but returned to help. He didn’t like the idea, but he wasn’t going to let the joint sink. One night, the dishwasher arrived early and Hac and his brother Au stayed until 2 a.m. to clean. A worker had thrown all the garbage away, anything that wouldn’t stop the owner off. So they went in the trash and started ordering bag after bag of stinky seafood in the right receptacle.
“I just had a moment where I like it, man, I made a million dollars a year gambling on poker every time I looked for it, and now I’m literally in a trash can. What happened?”
The Dang Bros spent $ 1 million to open Chasin ‘Tails. They played poker in parallel and now, to keep the place to eat afloat, they had to invest more of their winnings. Bleeding money, they hit the books, as they had done with the letters. They literally started reading on RestaurantOwner.com. They stood and stood out Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table, an industry bible.
Little by little, the two brothers gave up professional poker. The golden age is over: sharks circling sharks. They put everything into Di’s plan.
In 2015, the Dang opened the Chasin ’Tails moment. Then I got here Roll Play. (They almost called it Cilantroll, until a concentrate organization commented on how much other people hate cilantro.) Many others followed: Teas’n You bubble tea shop, Lei’d Hawaiian Poke, Happy Endings Eatery. The warmer names have given them some (but not positive) publicity. “People laugh when they see everyone gathered,” says Di.
Restaurants were a completely different animal psychologically. In poker, you can only win if the other player loses. And if it’s your whole life, this selfishness permeates your vision beyond the game. In restaurants, they could now really help others, workers, and customers. Over time, they became more obsessed with Yelp critics than any $ 50,000 jackpot. Win win win.
Hac, now 35, began to meditate. Di, who is 36, reads 20 books a quarter, basically about business and leadership, and is dedicated to biopiracy. Your home’s workplace is full of devices to optimize your fitness and mind: a device that produces (your words) “a special air that makes your DNA look more youthful for longer,” a neuro-gamma headset that “makes it more creative, “with an applicator going up your nose.
The brothers opened Happy Endings, their Rosslyn food hall, while doing one of their 72-hour quarterly fasts, which Hac says “removes all dead cells and leaves room for healthy cells to sleep, they bought wise Oura rings for them. $ 300 to monitor your REM cycles.
Last year, Di issued a 30-day challenge in which he forced himself to be rejected once a day, just to exercise himself against it. In 2020, it reached its peak to date, with the ambition to open two or 3 more food halls by the end of the year.
All of this would be an undeniable story of rags in rich-restaurants, the story of a pair of brothers who retired from the empty heights of the game to live honestly from the control of a fast and informal restaurant, on the one hand: a global cataclysm. which suddenly made his high flight very useful.
A pandemic has occurred. It’s Black Friday again.
On March 17, prior to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s shutdown order, the Dangs closed their restaurants and released all 208 employees. Ten days later, they reopened as Operation Delivering Happiness, a take-out business combining their restaurant menus (and some other trial war through fire, with the owners first as delivery drivers). Shortly after the reopening, Di fell ill with Covid-19. He was forced to quarantine him at home with a 100-degree fever, chills, and muscle aches. (He recovered; his case was mild.)
However, while the other restaurateurs naturally panic, the Dangs do not. They don’t panic. You know what it’s like to lose a million dollars in one day. Hac, more realistically, start listing all the possible variables that can have an effect on restaurants. “I don’t think all businesses are successful. I don’t even know if it is guaranteed that we will make it, ”he said.
Di almost swelled up from the tension and had to make quick changes on the fly, “like in poker.” It sounds crazy, you know, but I’d be glad you didn’t get help from the government. “I looked after us to fight this complicated war and turn my back on the wall,” he says. “It’s like a festival that starts at zero point.”
Di loves the “burn your ships” strategy, says Hac. “He puts himself in the conditions where he’s like, ‘If you don’t do this, you’ll die.’
They were golden, you know. “Some will survive,” says Di. “Best.”
This article appears in the August 2020 issue of Washingtonian.
Jessica Sidman covers the other people and trends of the D.C. food scene. Before joining the Washingtonian in July 2016, she was a Young & Hungry food editor and columnist at the Washington City Paper. She is originally from Colorado and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania.