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 given up 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 share of luck, then I think I could win $ 1 million, $ 2 million, $ 3 million overnight very easily.”
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 tracking site High Stakes Database, Di and Hac rank fifth and seventh, respectively, among the biggest all-time winners online, with combined profits of nearly $14 million. They filled virtual stadiums and turned up on ESPN. During summers in Vegas, they took over a penthouse at the Palms Place Hotel and Spa—3,000 square feet, with a 58th-floor balcony Jacuzzi. Poker junkies would stop them on the street and ask for photos.
So yeah, Di – screen “urindanger” – entered Grand Lisboa like a boss.
But it 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 he thought that if he entertained them they would invite him to return: a treasure. While everyone was playing hard and hoping for better hands, Di played a competitive, loose shot: “It’s politics and looking at the scene and looking to make them like me.”
Almost 8 hours later, his backpack was empty. The biggest game of his life ruined, more than a million dollars.
Ten years later, the attics of Macau are terribly distant. These days, Di serves up homemade spring rolls at an eating place called Roll Play and crawfish at one called Chasin ’Tails, two of the six mid-priced suburban eateries he and Hac have founded. They are counting pennies not bricks, they are concerned about visitor service rather than room service and the stress on clogged bathrooms than actual flushes.
And yet the reminiscence of a life where you can lose a millet in an instant isn’t entirely nostalgic as the Dang brothers paint their way into the place-to-eat business. The story of all the ups and downs could also be the reason the duo are facing the pandemic and this time immense business danger without breaking a sweat. But first you have to perceive 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, whom 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 teamed up in get-rich-quick schemes (selling Pokémon cards on eBay, popping hot Christmas toys). In elementary school, in what might have been their first rampage, they scratched the trash can from the shoppers’ grocery store, mistakenly chasing the winners while their mother bought groceries for the groceries.
While other people treated online poker as a remake of Grand Theft Auto, the brothers studied strategy and strategy books and videos. They would seek to bond with each other while raising the stakes, their sibling rivalry fueling their rise. As No Limit Hold ‘Em grew more lucrative, they left their jobs at Ruby Tuesday and Uno Pizzeria. When they made $ 35,000 while hiding in their hotel room during spring break in the Bahamas, they also thought about making technical trenches. Meanwhile, Hac’s GPA fell to 2.1. Di was able to cancel a pass / fail elective nutrition course.
“He was so scared, unhappy and angry at the same time,” says his father, Hoang Dang. He was a petroleum engineer and reviewed federal government patents. His wife, Binh, a Vietnamese writer, took care of their five children. Neither of them approved of turning the letters into a life. “The game,” said Hoang’s parents, “is the uncle of poverty.”
Hoang prohibited children from playing poker at home. He took the internet router with him when he went to work. Di and Hac would stop by a PC cafe in Fairfax, paying a few bucks an hour to connect there.
In the end, the most productive thing Dad could do was insist that if they looked for professionals, they would at least get a college degree. They did it. And the following year, for his 50th birthday, the brothers surprised him with a BMW M5 adorned with a giant bow. Mom has a Lexus. Di and Hac paid off their own student loans, as well as their 3 siblings’ tuition fees.
The Dangs also traded in the family circle at home, where Dad once worried that prolonged rains would destroy his water bills. Di and Hac bought a 7585-square-foot hotel at Fairfax Station from their parents 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 then Dad had arrived. His children had succeeded, but not in the way he had imagined.
“In the past, I looked for them to be doctors or scientists,” says Hoang. “Not bad in the end.”
The Dang Bros, as they were called, bought games for up to $ 100,000. Hundreds of viewers were tuned in, with entire online forums loyal to commenting on their hands. “If you’re an online gamer, you know who the Dang Bros were,” says his friend and colleague Tom Hu. “They are like the Brad Pitt of online poker.”
Di, an eye-catching cloth wardrobe featuring a Johnny Bravo cheerleader, Googled her call after big sessions: “I searched for the highlights possible.” He traveled from Shanghai to London for the kind of games where you had to meet one boy who knows another. During trips to Macau, he stayed with friends in penthouses with theaters, large saunas, and Hermes shampoo. He ordered the hairy crab for $ 600 just because it was the most expensive item on the menu. “The crab meat literally tasted like cardboard,” hu says.
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 that my hat, his place to eat will fail.
In theory, Laliberté was anonymous. But insiders have held him accountable because of his recognizable taste and the scale 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 non-public attendant to bring them KFC or 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 him 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 the seats.”
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 but socially inept e-book,” 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.
A few hours later, they arrived with at least a dozen gift bags and decorations. But none of this would be appropriate. “The total trunk is designed to have compatibility with a game of golf clubs, because only when you end up buying this car,” says Di. He called his father, who had never succumbed to the temptation of show cars. “He drove the van to pick us up.”
In the end, the odds ran out. In 2011, the federal government shut down the 3 largest poker sites in the US and charged them with fraud and cash laundering – Black Friday, as world poker has called it. The crackdown banned gambling in the United States.
Hac wanted to move to Canada to continue playing. Di, though, had another idea. He wanted to open a restaurant. “I thought it would be very easy money,” he says. “We’d be the owners, so we’d get, like, some status. You get a lot of girls if you’re a restaurant owner.”
“You have many women if you are a restaurateur.”
By visiting a circle of relatives in Louisiana, they had experienced the magic of a large shellfish boil. I realized that a place to eat Old-Cajun crayfish would kill in Northern Virginia: “Seafood isn’t that hard to prepare. Just let them boil; we’ve noticed that our uncles do it. And we had my uncles to help us, if necessary, with quingombó or jambalaya recipes. And it’s so easy, obviously. He would have opened four places to eat in six months, he thought, and then sold them for a big profit. “It’s all about money, retirement, drinking pia coladas, playing golf on some island.
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, his parents pushed for poker: places to eat sounded like a bad bet. “He’s a distracted person,” Di’s father said of his eldest son. “Often, my wife or I take her clothes to the laundry. He left a lot of cash, in his wallet or on the floor. Wherever you can find cash, you don’t forget to put it there. ArrayArrayArray I told you I bet my hat that your place to eat 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 crayfish and garlic noodles. “The only explanation for why this position gets a star is that Yelp does not offer a 0-star option,” says one of the first Yelp reviews. “If you need mediocre faux Cajun cuisine, move on to Chasin Tails soon, because it might 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 came early and Hac and his brother Au stayed until 2 a.m. to clean. A worker had thrown all the garbage in the trash, anything that would not stop pissing off the owner. So they went up in the trash and started sorting bag after bag of stinky seafood into the correct receptacle.
“I just had a moment when I like it, man, I make a million dollars a year betting on poker when I want to, and now I’m literally in a trash can. What happened?”
The Dang Bros had spent $1 million to open Chasin’ Tails. They were still playing poker on the side, and now, to keep the restaurant afloat, they had to sink in more of their winnings. Bleeding cash, they hit the books, the way they had with cards. They started, literally, by studying up at RestaurantOwner.com. They highlighted and underlined Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table, an industry bible.
Gradually, the two brothers left professional poker. The golden age was over: they were sharks surrounding sharks. They put everything into Di’s plan.
In 2015, the Dangs 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 have 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.
The restaurants were a completely different animal psychologically. In poker, you can only win if the other player loses. And if it’s your total 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 food hall in Rosslyn, while doing one of their 72-hour quarterly fasts, which Hac said “removes all dead cells and leaves room for healthy cells to eat. To reflect.” getting enough sleep, they bought them wise Oura rings for $ 300 to monitor their REM cycles.
Last year, Di presented a 30-day challenge in which he forced himself to be rejected once a day, only to be able to exercise to deal with him. He arrived in 2020 betting on his point to date, with the ambition to open two or 3 more food parlors until the end of the year.
It would all be an undeniable story from poverty to riches, the story of a pair of brothers who retired from the empty peaks of the game to make a fair living running a laid-back, fast-paced restaurant, with the exception of ‘a thing: a global cataclysm that has made its high flights very useful.
There’s been a pandemic. 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 restorers naturally panic, the Dang do not. They don’t panic. You know what it’s like to lose a million dollars in one day. Increasingly realistic, Hac begins to list all possible variables that can affect only restaurants. “I don’t think all corporations are successful. I don’t even know if it’s guaranteed we’re going to succeed,” he says.
Di almost turns out to be inflated due to tension and having to make quick changes on the fly, “like in poker.” It sounds crazy, you know, but I’d be happy not to get help from the government. “I searched after us to have to fight this complicated war and turn my back on the wall,” he says. “It’s like a festival that starts from scratch.”
Di loves the “burn your boats” strategy, hac says. “It puts itself in conditions where it’s like, “If you don’t do this, you’ll die.”
They were golden, you know. “Some will survive,” Di says. “The best.”
This article appears in the Washingtonian factor for August 2020.
Jessica Sidman covers other people’s DC culinary scene and trends. Prior to joining Washingtonian in July 2016, she was a food editor and columnist for Young and Hungry at the Washington City Paper. She is originally from Colorado and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania.