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Action Dan
Action is loud but results are louder
Dan Harrington was a schoolyard chess prodigy who went on to win state championships in Massachusetts and New Jersey. Players of his caliber have the ability to look 20 moves into the future. Dan Harrington looked into his chess future, saw there was no money in it and focused on poker. Harrington approached games as problems to be solved, like math equations on a chalk board. He used a kind of reverse engineering to unravel poker, backgammon and other games to see the working parts at their core. Then, after putting them back together, he would know how to beat them. Before there was the famous MIT blackjack team, Harrington was a member of the MIT roulette team. He and his teammates could game the system so that they had a 40% edge over the house. He considered becoming a pro backgammon player, but after a crooked organizer didn’t pay him for winning a championship, he decided he wanted to play a game where the money stayed on the table. Harrington went to Suffolk Law School in Boston and started seriously playing the game that would change his life. He once played poker with a couple Harvard nerds, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Unfortunately, this was before they became billionaires. Like minded people tend to gravitate to the same place. Like Hemmingway and Fitzgerald in Paris, Harrington and Howard Lederer had the Mayfair Club. For Mayfair alum, real improvement to their games didn’t happen on Mayfair’s felt, it happened at the late-night discussions after their chips were (or weren’t) cashed. Harrington, along with Lederer, Steve Zolotow and Erik Seidel dissected every play of every player of every hand. That thoughtful analysis gave Harrington the confidence to try his skill at the WSOP. In his first match he finished sixth and won more money than he ever did at chess or backgammon. Seven years later, Harrington returned to the WSOP and played all the way to the final table of the Main Event. Harrington tried to convince everyone to chop the pot. They declined. Ironically, Harrington would win the championship. He left Vegas that year with two gold bracelets and over a million dollars.
