Greetings Ultimate Bettors!
Monday, August 17, 2009 - Bryan Devonshire
My name is Bryan Devonshire, aka “Devo”, simply for the reason that Coach could say, “Damnit Devo!” and, “Devonshire!” in the same number of syllables. He was a fan of fitting colorful metaphors into sentences, and a four syllable last name just wouldn’t cut it. Since then it’s stuck.
Many of y’all probably haven’t heard of me simply because my exposure to the main stream has been minimal. I’ve played on one TV table, the 2008 Reno WPT in which I finished 2nd, drawing out my heads up battle vs. Lee Markholt for two glorious hands in which I folded my button in the first and then got it in on the turn stone dead in the 2nd. At least I bet/shoved the turn eh? LOL.
I’ve been blogging for a long time. I started a personal blog in 2004 to connect with the students I was working with at Gateway Presbyterian Church in Colorado Springs, CO. That was the last “real” job that I ever had, working part time and supplementing my income by spending enough time on Party Poker that I was able to collect some of the free money being given away. I moved from Colorado Springs to Minnesota to get married, that lasted 8 months, and at the tail end of that I went to Las Vegas for the 2006 WSOP.
My start in poker came years before though sometime around the period in my life when girls became interesting. My dad ran a home game for as long as I can remember, standard kitchen table nickel-dime-quarter games with friends and family. Baseball, Dr. Pepper, Criss-Cross, and Eight and Twenty-Eight were family favorites. My grandfather retired in Carson City, NV, and my dad loved the gamble, so I was around casinos usually about four times a year. Circus Circus was my Disneyland.
Shortly after turning 18 I wandered into San Manuel Indian Casino and Bingo Hall, played 1-5 no ante Stud, won $65 and thought I was the best. Made a trip to Pechanga back when they were in the tent (this is 1999), played 1-5 Stud8, won with a strategy of playing any two of three good cards = good starting hand, and then played Caribbean Stud where I said, “It’s weird that they pay more for a flush than a straight, since a straight beats a flush.”
I then started college at the University of Southern California as an Architecture major. I also discovered Planet Poker, bonus whoring, and Fake Surf. I hit many online casinos for the deposit bonus, bet the pass and don’t pass, meet required bets, then withdrawal. I walked into the Commerce for the first time in 2000 as a 19 year old, and spend a lot of time climbing the latter to 15-30 limit hold’em where I usually lost it all. I started keeping records somewhere in 2001, and after turning 21 and finally getting carded, I won 2 tourneys and made one final table in the same weekend. I won the Hustler morning $30 rebuy, where I thought the rebuy period was a game seeing who could spend the least, loaded my surfboard onto my 1995 Honda Civic, and drove up the coast. I played in a tourney on Saturday at Chumash Casino in Santa Barbara, a $1k guarantee, and at that final table they gave the 10 of us $100 in red chips. One $5 blind I think. You could quit the tourney and cash in your chips any time you had the smallest stack. I think I cashed out for like $95. Then came home and won the Hustler tourney again on Sunday. T’was fun.
I dropped out of college December 2002, not for poker, but to pursue a career in the wilderness industry. In the summer of 1999, 2000, and 2002 I worked at a camp called Forest Home in So Cal and loved it. I also worked with Bel Air Presbyterian Church which had a whitewater rafting program that I was trained in, the company that trained me I ended up working for (Whitewater Voyages), and that led me to Peak 3 Outfitters, now out of business, that offered me a full time position as an “Adventure Guide” with the intention of me starting a whitewater program and them teaching me everything else. I was trained in Wilderness First Aid, how to guide Climbing, Mountain Biking, Caving, High and Low Ropes, all season Mountaineering, and Lumberjacking. Unfortunately that summer I spent more time cutting down trees, chopping wood, and getting addicted to Skoal than I did guiding and ended up leaving the company at the end of my first season.
Jobless I started playing online, and by the time I won my first $10 online donkament in November 2003 I had pretty much given up looking for a job. Then I went broke in January because it turns out that $1k wasn’t enough of a bankroll to 4 table 3-6 limit hold’em, got a job as an armed security guard in Colorado Springs which turned out to save my life, because my guiding buddies climbed a peak that March that I couldn’t go on because of said job. On the descent they triggered an avalanche which killed my friend Kyle who was in the lead, right where I would have been had I been there also. I rustled enough money to get a roll going by April 2004, started the job at Gateway in May (they paid $900/month), and made ends meet through poker along the way.
In the spring of 2005 I worked as a prop(ositional) player at Buffalo Bill’s in Cripple Creek, CO where I was paid $10/hr plus benefits to play 2-5 spread limit hold’em on my own money 40hrs a week. Over four months I beat the game for $17/hr in addition to wage, quit to guide the Kern river in Cali in 2005 before moving to Minnesota, and after that self-induced train wreck I found myself at the 2006 WSOP to play tourneys.
I had been playing 15-30 LHE regularly in Minnesota and built myself a decent little roll which skyrocketed in event #1, the $500 employees event. I used my valid Colorado gaming license to enter and two days later took 2nd in my 1st WSOP event ever for $66k. I then promptly lost $40k back over the course of the summer, flew back to MN to sign papers, pack, and leave, and wanted to live with my brother Jared. He wanted to get out of So Cal, I wanted to get back west, we wanted to be in warm near water, were thinking Laughlin, and ended up in Henderson as close to Lake Mead as we could get. I crushed limit hold’em games around town fall of 2006, took 2nd in best all around at the Canterbury Fall Classic, and then won a $300 tourney over Jon Turner by sucking out on his aces at Commerce in November. I was playing 100-200 LHE at this point and winning, but decided that I was going to play every event in the December Bellagio tourneys and lost most of my strong roll again.
Then in April 2007 while playing 15-30 LHE at the Wynn, I spied a juicy 100-200 mix game that I told my buddy about, he put me in the game within 15 mins of his arrival, and the biggest fish in the game eventually ended up giving me a shot at playing satellites into the WPT $25k. In the 1st, a $3k sit-n-go, I busted within ten minutes. I’m sure he was like, “WTF?!?” But, on the 2nd, I got heads up with Kevin Song with a 3-2 chip lead, then negotiated a deal where my backer gave Kevin some dollars and we took the seat. I eventually finished a gross 64th place for $46k after a sick orbit of poker. We stayed together through the WSOP, I took another 2nd in event 9, $1500 Omaha 8, losing to Alex Kravchenko in very disappointing fashion. I deserved that one. By the time the main rolled around he had lost all the money I had won for him by playing big PLO, and since a crazy chick threatened to kill me I skipped the 2007 main and took it on the lam.
I dilapidated the roll again by November 2007 by playing too many big online tourneys, signed with my current backers, had a 50k and a 20k online score in Feb 2008, the 2nd in Reno for 271k, then 12th in the $25k for 131k, and then took a motorcycle trip to Vancouver, BC for the launch of WPT Canada. I won the first event on my own wasted on Sleaman’s Honey Brown, a $500 tourney for 53k Canadian, which was good news because when I brought it back to the Bellagio then they gave me more American money than I gave them Canadian.
Since then I don’t have much to brag about poker wise, as if I really had much to brag about in the first place, but good news/bad news for me I’ve always kind of put poker 2nd to life. I have loved poker for the freedom that it’s given me to go and experience the world at the pace that I would prefer to, and it’s allowed me to make more money than any other menial job that I could have pulled off in the last dozen years. I really didn’t accept poker as a long term thing until last year, as the fluctuation and stress is significantly underrated to those who don’t do this full time. The ability to generate passive income through poker with the various things I have been involved in has been a blessing, and I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to travel, the opportunity to play on the world’s stage, and the community of friends I’ve met along the way.
I’ll be firing a unique blog here every week, I hope you enjoy it. You can reach me at maverickusc@gmail.com or playing on Ultimate Bet as BRYAN_DEVO.
Peace and good luck,
Devo
Tags: Bryan Devonshire, omaha, Poker Poker Poker, poker tournaments, Presbyterian Church, ub, WPT
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