Poker News

Tom Sartori

Success at the World Series of Poker has helped Tom Sartori accomplish some big things in the world of music. He was a musician before he found poker and the World Series of Poker where he finished 26th in the $10,000 buy-in main event this past summer. And he’s still a musician. Nothing is going to change that. It’s his passion.

“But it gets confusing sometimes,” he says, flashing a broad grin. Talking to music people about his new cd and then switching in the same day to a discussion with pokeroriented reporters about his recent success at the tables.

How did he happen to find his way into the WSOP’s biggest game?

Like so many others during recent years, he did it by winning an online satellite, in his case at PokerRoom.com.

“I had been playing Texas hold ‘em for about six months when I won that satellite, the one that got me to Las Vegas.”

The 29-year-old Sartori had always played poker in family home games, so he was not a total stranger to the skills it requires.

“You know, nickel and dime stuff but the way we played at home everything was pretty much luck. I had never even heard of Texas hold ‘em, but I saw it on ESPN and the Travel Channel and started getting intrigued with it. What got me was seeing the Phil Iveys and the Gus Hansons always making the final tables.”

He wondered why it was always so many of the same guys in the big money. Were they consistently lucky or what, these same people who were always the same guys in the money?

“That’s what really intrigued me to research poker. I went out and got a bunch of books and started reading and quickly came to realize there was much more skill involved than I had imagined.”

But after winning $300,000 by finishing 26th among 5,613 in his first World Series of Poker, and then winning a PokerStars satellite that will take him to the Bahamas in January for another big money opportunity, is he ready to give up music for poker? He gave the question one of those you’ve-got-to-bekidding chuckles “Oh no, not even close. Music’s my passion in life and something I’ve been doing since I was 12 years old. It’s something I’ll be doing till the day I die.”

But in the mean time three hundred thousand will buy a lot of guitar strings. “Yeah,” stretching the word out as though it embodies the essence of recollections that are still being savored. “One of the things that’s possible now is that we’re actually looking into getting a bus for our spring tour.”

With a new cd that came out in December, Sartori had had only the tightest of budget as he worked through the involved process of putting everything together. So it is an understatement to say that his success at the WSOP gave production of the cd a big assist.

“Thank God for poker, because with the money I won I was able to get a world class producer. His name is Geza X and a Grammy Award-winning mixer, Charles Dye.” All because of the World Series?

“That’s right. You know, it costs a lot of money to get these guys and before everything that’s happened at the poker tables, I was on a very tight budget.” Sartori could not think of a better place to invest his poker winnings. “I’ve always been a bit of a gambling man and this is gonna be my big push, my roll of the dice.”

As Sartori’s official bio explains, “From the moment his father placed a 1961 Fender Stratocaster guitar in his hands when he was only 11, Tom was hooked. The multi-talented singer and songwriter went on to learn piano, trumpet and drums. During the last five years he has toured five countries performing roughly 200 shows that include four Super Bowls and work with artists such as Meatloaf, 98 Degrees, Chuck Berry and Cheap Trick. His acoustic guitardriven live performance landed him a first place tie with Ani DiFranco as ITTop Accoustic Performer of the Year at the Artvoice Music Awards . . .

“Tom’s magnetic charisma and energy have been packing college venues four and five nights a week for years. Tom and his band are currently on the road for a marathon three-month fall tour. Another tour is being mapped out to coincide with the national release of the album.”

Sartori wrote all the songs on the cd with the song entitled “One More Whiskey” scheduled to be the first single. It has already some nice attention and airtime in the Buffalo, N.Y., area, his home. A cd release party has been scheduled in nearby Niagra Falls.

For most of the years that Sartori has been writing songs and performing them he was something of a one-man team, “Just me sitting on a barstool with my guitar.”

That’s been changing over the last several years as he added a full band and started doing more touring, mostly in the Southeast. The so-called spring tour was initially scheduled to begin in early January, but was pushed back a couple of weeks when Sartori outplayed about a hundred others and won his first PokerStars tournament which gave him a seat in the World Poker Tour’s January event at the Atlantis in the Bahamas.

“I’m getting to like this online tournament stuff.” Another added benefit: his tv exposure because of ESPN’s coverage of the World Series produced a nice spike the number of hits on his web site www.TomSartori.com.

“We’ve been getting e-mails from all over the country, you know, like from people who have picked up my music online.”

This kind of exposure also has Satori and his strategists thinking of other possibilities - perhaps a marketing tie-in of some kind with the World Series or WPT. He certainly would not be the first poker player to find business success away from the table.

Sartori’s goals were not all that big when he hit Las Vegas this past summer and saw he would be competing against more than 5,600 wanna-be champs. “I was thinking that if I could get just half way through that would be great. Getting at least half way through that kind of field would feel like quite an accomplishment. I had been playing serious poker less than a year at that time.”

A funny thing occurred on the way to 26th place, a moment that Sartori enjoys discussing now.

The creators of a World Series documentary talked to all the usual cast of characters - a long list of big name stars during the weeks before the start of the World Series. They also got what seemed like a good idea: why not interview a couple of the no-names - Internet players who had parlayed online success into seats in the event.

They happened to talk with PokerRoom.com which gave them Sartori’s name. He was a nobody in the world of poker, but he could probably hold his own in an on-camera interview. “So they called me in Buffalo,” Sartori said, “and they decided to fly out and see one of my shows and we’d find some time for our conversation. That’s the way is went.”

Sartori did not give it much more thought until the aftermath of the championship event. He had collected his several hundred thousand and he runs into the woman he had dealt for the interview in Buffalo. “She told me that of all the big names they had interviewed for their film, I had gotten farther than any of them.”

One of those feel good moments is what it was. Did he treat himself to anything special as he wondered what to do with all that money?

Thinking about that, giving the question a big smile. “I dumped most of what I got into the cd, but, uh, well . . .” He considers how to say it just right, for maximum impact. “There was this one thing. I was passing the Armani store in the Bellagio and this suit caught my attention and I stood there looking at it saying to myself that I had never had a nice suit.” So he went in and bought himself a $3,500 suit, but that was about it so far as conspicuous spending went. Oh yeah, there were also some super sharp sunglasses that Sartori saw no good reason to try and resist.

Sartori comes from a close supportive family and his mom and dad flew out to Vegas to watch him play the big game. People who know where to look will recognize his father in the background on ESPN’s coverage.

Dad was a bit worried about his son for a while. “Back before the World Series, I was spending a lot of time playing online poker and dad comes to me one day and says he’s a little concerned about how much time I’m spending with the computer. He said he hoped I didn’t have a gambling problem and I explained that I was preparing for the World Series.” Necessary practice, is the way Sartori saw it. The family gets to Las Vegas and there’s, dad flashing the big smile at his son who’s sitting at the featured table on this particular day with big names such as last year’s champ GregRaymer.

“I got up during a break and walked over to dad and said can you believe I’m here doing this with these guys.”

They chat back and forth about nothing special, about how all that practice led to something good, until it occurs to Tom to tell his dad, “I guess they don’t call it a problem when you’re winning.”

Dad laughs goodnaturedly at that and mumbles, “I’m just so proud of you.”

And the two men stand there for a moment, enjoying the warmth of one of those Kodak moments.

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