David Williams is an excellent poker player. He has been for the better part of a decade now. But this weekend he went back to a card game he played before he took up poker and found success, winning the Magic: The Gathering 2012 Grand Prix San Jose.
The 32-year old Williams was part of a team with Matt Sperling and Paul Rietzl, besting 570 other teams en route to the major title. The trio defeated the team of Maksym Gryn, Lucas Siow, and Jamie Naylor in the tournament finals.
Magic: The Gathering is a game on which many poker players cut their teeth before becoming old enough to play poker competitively. Like poker, Magic is a card game that contains both elements of skill and luck. While it is a game with pretty pictures of fantasy monsters that kids tend to enjoy, it is actually more complicated than poker.
We won’t go into the gory details, but here is the gist of the game. Two or more players (or teams) each have a deck of special Magic: The Gathering cards (decks usually contain a minimum of 40 or 60 cards, depending on the tournament format) and each starts with a twenty life points. Players begin the match by shuffling their decks and drawing seven cards. From there (with exceptions, but again, let’s keep it simple), the players take turns playing cards in an attempt to reduce their opponent’s life points to zero. Cards may represent spells that hurt or help a player, spells that summon creatures to do damage, or they may represent “lands,” which produce the “mana” needed to cast spells. Different cards have their strengths and weaknesses and players must be well versed in all of them in order to construct an effective deck.
There are two main types of tournaments, “constructed” and “limited.” In constructed tournaments, players bring their own deck to the match, built from cards they have personally collected. In limited tournaments, which are David Williams’ favorite, players open booster packs and use the cards contained within, thus having no knowledge of the cards ahead of time.
Williams was known as an excellent Magic player before venturing into the world of poker, but his Magic career was not without its problems. In 2001, he experienced phenomenal success, finishing in the top eight in eight different Grand Prix events. He also finished in the top eight at the World Championships in Toronto, but was disqualified when it was found that he had marked three key cards in his deck by bending them more than the others, allowing Williams to spot them easily and cut his deck so he would be certain to draw them. The judges didn’t just rely on the appearance of a few bent cards to make their decision, though. They saw that every time Williams cut his own deck before a match, one of those key cards ended up on top. And in determining that it wasn’t just a freak coincidence, the judges themselves were consistently able to bring one of those cards to the top when they cut the deck themselves.
As a result, David Williams was banned from tournament play for a year. He admitted to marking the cards, but he denied doing it on purpose.
In his poker career, Williams is best known for coming out of nowhere as Marcel Luske’s protégé and finishing runner-up to Greg Raymer in the 2004 World Series of Poker Main Event. He won a bracelet in 2006 in $1,500 Seven Card Stud and won the World Poker Tour World Championship in 2010. Williams has won over $8 million in his live poker tournament career.
