Di Dang got in the elevator with over a million dollars in his backpack. He in Macau and the wealthy Chinese were looking to play poker. Obviously, I’d given it all up.
The game on the most sensible terrain of the Grand Lisbon, a ridiculous and gleaming casino pile in the form of lotus flower.(Seriously, google). A host had to escort him and the security guards had to allow him access to the personal room.Di, a 27-year-old from suburban Virginia, came in with a backpack full of poker plates and $100,000 in cash.
The whales were already playing, surrounded by, um, long-haired “masseurs” and short dresses.Cigarette smoke filled the air. The waiters swirled with trays of dragon fruit.And shit, that view. Di liked to dress well when he played, especially in hot and humid Macau, where matches can last 24 hours or more.But tonight, in this room full of gajllionaires, he stood in a T-shirt and shorts.
I don’t fucking care
“A part of you is nervous, but a part of you is like, oh, man, I print money here in the long run,” she says. “If I had my fair percentage of luck, then I think I could win very easily, like $1 million, $2 million, $3 million in one night.”
That’s in 2010. Twenty-five across the United States lived with their parents, going from internships and parallel hustle and bustle as the country lied out of a recession. Di (pronounced “zee”) and his younger brother, Hac, also lived in their parents’ basement, only they did stupid cash gambling in 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 name “urindanger”—walked into the Grand Lisboa like a boss.
But he may be blind. Fix some details.
Until tonight, Di had gone to the Macau games for up to $200,000. The buy-in for this Texas Hold ‘Em table exceeded half a million. I was like, oh, it’s big, says Di. “That’s when I realized, “I’m betting a lot on the biggest game ever seen in the world.”
They were amateurs, though, and he figured if he entertained them, they’d invite him back—a treasure trove. So while everyone else was playing tight and waiting for better hands, Di played aggressive and loose, the hotshot: “It was politics and looking at the scene and trying to make them like me.”
Nearly eight hours in, his backpack was empty. The biggest game of his life blown, more than a million dollars gone.
Ten years on, the penthouses of Macau are awfully distant. These days, Di serves build-your-own spring rolls at a restaurant called Roll Play and crawfish at one called Chasin’ Tails, two of the six midpriced suburban eateries he and Hac started. They count pennies, not bricks, worry about customer service instead of room service, and stress over clogged toilets rather than royal flushes.
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 masquerading as a game of luck. You could play a hand against the Dang brothers and win because, yeah, there’s some luck involved. Ultimately, though, they understand the game’s strategy, math, and psychology better than you do. Over hundreds of hands, they’re going to kill you.
The brothers started playing online in the early 2000s, when they were both studying mechanical engineering at the University of Virginia. The game was a sort of Wild West at the time, full of amateurs thinking they were Matt Damon in Rounders. But Di, whom friends call the Human Calculator, was a former middle-school mathlete who liked to take SAT tests for fun. Hac, a year younger, was into whatever Di was into—especially if he could crush him at it. When they weren’t playing each other in basketball or chess, the Dangs partnered in get-rich-quick schemes (hawking Pokémon cards on eBay, reselling hot Christmas toys). In elementary school, in what might have been their very first hustle, they’d scrounge the trash bin at Shoppers Food Warehouse, hunting mistakenly discarded scratch-off winners while their mom bought groceries.
While other people treated online poker like just another spin through Grand Theft Auto, the brothers studied books and videos for technique and strategy. They’d try to one-up each other as they climbed the stakes, their sibling rivalry fueling their rise. As No Limit Hold ’Em became more lucrative, they ditched their jobs at Ruby Tuesdays and Uno Pizzeria. When they scored $35,000 while holed up in their hotel room during spring break in the Bahamas, they considered ditching engineering, too. Meanwhile, Hac’s GPA sank to 2.1. Di managed to flunk a pass/fail nutrition elective.
“I was so scared and sad and mad at the same time,” their father, Hoang Dang, says. He was a petroleum engineer reviewing patents for the federal government. His wife, Binh, a Vietnamese writer, looked after their five kids. Neither approved of turning cards into a living. “Gambling,” Hoang’s parents always said, “is the uncle of poverty.”
Hoang banned the boys from playing poker at home. He took the internet router with him when he went to work. Di and Hac would head to a PC cafe in Fairfax, paying a few bucks an hour to log on there instead.
Ultimately, the best Dad could do was insist that if they were going to go pro, they would at least graduate from college. They did. And the following year, for his 50th birthday, the brothers surprised him with a BMW M5 adorned with a giant bow. Mom got a Lexus. Di and Hac paid off their own student loans, and their three siblings’ college tuitions, too.
The Dangs also traded up the family home, where Dad had once worried about long showers wrecking their water bills. Di and Hac bought their parents a 7,585-square-foot compound in Fairfax Station for $1.35 million in cash. The brothers continued to live there, along with their siblings, into their thirties, “like an Asian Full House situation,” Hac says. By then, Dad had come around. His sons had made it, just not in the way he’d imagined.
“In the past, I wanted them to be a doctor or a scientist,” Hoang says. “It’s probably not bad in the end.”
The Dang Bros, as they were known, were buying into games for as much as $100,000. Hundreds of spectators would tune in, with entire online forums devoted to commenting on their hands. “If you’re an online player, you know who the Dang Bros were,” their friend and fellow player Tom Hu says. “They’re like the Brad Pitt of 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 top-tier players lose big by getting into “ego battles” with rivals. The Dang Bros’ thing was picking games in which they knew they could clean up. They stalked whales, and one in particular: Guy Laliberté. The Cirque du Soleil billionaire was considered the Moby Dick of online poker.
“I told him I bet my hat that his restaurant will fail.”
In theory, Laliberté was anonymous. But insiders attributed multiple accounts to him because of his recognizable style and the size of his losses. “Whenever Guy logged in, the table would fill up in less than five minutes,” says Hac, known online as Trex313. “One of us needed to get a seat.”
They adapted their entire lives around their virtual rival. “We’d be like, ‘Oh, yeah, Guy just logged off and he played an eight-hour session, so he’ll probably be back in eight hours,” Hac says. They hired a personal assistant to bring them KFC or pick their siblings up from school.
Di remembers one time he and a friend were driving his dad’s BMW to the gym when he got a text that Laliberté had logged on. He pulled over and made his friend drive so he could get on his laptop from the passenger seat. The only problem: His friend couldn’t drive a stick shift. “He stalled about 12 times,” Di says. “I think I remember winning $16,000 during those ten minutes, so I was like, ‘Don’t worry, man, you paid for all those stalls.’ ”
As much as he played poker rock star online, Di was determined to live it in real life, too—which meant shaking his inner math nerd. “Everyone calls me book smart but very socially inept,” he says. He enrolled in pickup-artist boot camps. And even as a 26-year-old millionaire, he got a summer job for $7.25 an hour at the Tysons Abercrombie & Fitch to work on his social skills and “practice talking to girls, practice eye contact.” Maybe he’d improve his charisma at the poker table, too, and snag more invites to live games. Plus, he says, “I liked the clothing.”
The Dang Bros had a rep for “tilt control,” or emotional restraint. Good thing, when they could be up or down six figures on any given day. When Hac lost a million, “it definitely hurt,” he says. “But the next morning when I woke up, the mentality more so was: I’m 23 and I lost a million dollars and I didn’t kill myself, so I’m probably doing okay.” He wasn’t as attached to the high-roller lifestyle. Even when he was making a million dollars a year, he still drove a shitty 1997 Toyota Camry—until his mom secretly sold it when he was in Vegas one time. “She was like, ‘Yo, this car makes you look poor.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, but I’m not, so it doesn’t matter.’ ”
Di, on the other hand, had a harder time detaching but knew how to motivate himself. The year he crashed and burned at the Grand Lisboa, he was down $2 million. He decided if he could get back to even, he’d treat himself to an Audi R8—the same car Tony Stark drove in Iron Man. Boom. The following Christmas, he and his girlfriend, Tuyet Nhi Le (now a restaurant partner and competitive bikini bodybuilder), were parking his new R8 at Tysons for a holiday shopping spree.
A few hours later, they walked out with at least half a dozen bags of gifts and decorations. But none of it would fit. “The whole trunk is designed to fit one set of golf clubs, because only rich people end up buying that car,” Di says. He called his dad, who had never succumbed to the allure of showoff cars. “He drove the minivan out to get us.”
Eventually, the luck ran out. In 2011, the federal government shut down the three largest US poker sites and indicted them on fraud and money-laundering charges—Black Friday, as the poker world dubbed it. The crackdown effectively outlawed online cash games in the 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 get a lot of girls if you’re a restaurant owner.”
Visiting family in Louisiana, they’d experienced the magic of a big seafood boil. Di figured a Viet-Cajun crawfish restaurant would kill in Northern Virginia: “Seafood’s not that hard to make. Just put it in the boil—we’d seen our uncles do it. And we had my uncles to help us, if we needed, with some gumbo or jambalaya recipes. And so it’s so easy, obviously.” He’d open four restaurants in six months, he figured, then sell them at a big profit. “It was all about the money, retiring, sipping piña coladas, playing golf on an island somewhere.”
Hac thought his brother was insane. They were two of the top poker players in the world! If they moved abroad, even for a year or two, they could still bank a couple more mil.
“For us, poker is safe. We knew the numbers. We knew if we played, we’d win. For us, another day at the office,” Hac says. “But restaurants were anything we didn’t revel in. So that’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 location of Chasin’ Tails, where the servers’ tees read suck dat head, pinch dat tail, was delayed seven months. They came up with the cleverest name—Heads or Tails (HOT)—but failed to look up the trademark before spending big on marketing materials. So Chasin’ Tails was born out of a public Facebook contest.
When it finally debuted in April 2012, Di found himself unclogging toilets, washing dishes, and dealing with angry customers who waited an hour for their crawfish and garlic noodles. “The only reason that this place gets one star is because Yelp does not offer a zero star option,” reads one early Yelp review. “If you want subpar imitation Cajun cuisine go to Chasin Tails soon, because it won’t be open in 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 up. 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 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 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 profits. Bleeding money, they beat the books, as they had done with the cards. They literally started reading in RestaurantOwner.com. Set the Table by Danny Meyer, an industry bible, was highlighted and highlighted.
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 Dang opened the Moment Chasin ‘Tails. Then I came here Roll Play. (They almost called it Cilantroll, until an organization of concentrates indicated how much other people hate coriander.) Many others followed: Teas’n You, Lei’d Hawaiian Poke, Happy Endings Eatery. Warmer names gave them exposure (but not positive). “People laugh when they see them all gathered, ” said Di.
The restaurants were psychologically a completely different animal. 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 Rosslyn dining room, while performing one of their 72-hour quarterly fasts, which Hac says “removes all dead cells and leaves room for healthy cells to replicate.” Fearing that their managers would not sleep enough, they bought oura rings of $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. It has reached its point to date in 2020, with the ambition to open two or 3 more canteens until the end of the year.
All this would be an undeniable tale of rags in rich-restaurants, the story of a couple of brothers who withdrew 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. that suddenly made his high flight very useful.
There’s been a pandemic. It’s Black Friday again.
On March 17, before Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s closing order, the Dang closed their restaurants and freed the 208 employees. Ten days later, they reopened as Operation Delivering, a takeaway business that combines the menus of their restaurants (and some other fire test battle, in which homeowners first act as delivery men). Shortly after reopening, Di became ill with Covid-19. He was forced to quarantine him at home with 100-degree fever, chills and muscle aches. (He recovered; his case was benign.)
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 fight this difficult war and put our backs against 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 of 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.