Poker News

Poker Player Profile: Lee Watkinson

He was on the road again, poker pro Lee Watkinson and his friends.

There he was on an afternoon in mid-September, sitting around his London hotel waiting for a plane out of there, still deciding on his next stop in search of poker table action.

“Maybe it would be the Borgata in Atlantic City,” he was telling a U.S. acquaintance via telephone. He had just finished the time he had for thefirst World Series of Poker Europe in London and declared himself “satisfied” with the experience even though he failed to get as deep as he would have liked into the main event. Hey, there’s always next year.

“It was the same structure as what they have in Las Vegas and a lot of the same people. Not quite the excitement of Las Vegas at this point, but they did a good job of running it …”

His voiced trailed off as though his thoughts had turned elsewhere for a moment. Maybe it was the attention required by the Full Tilt Internet tournament he was playing as he continued the phone conversation. Watkinson has been busy since the Vegas version of this year’s World Series, when he made it all the way to the final table, finishing eighth in the main event and pocketing $585,699 in prize money to take his official prize money total past the $3 million mark.

He looks at it as one of those good news, bad news things. It was nice to make the final table. The bad news was that having made the final table, first place would have been a nice way to wrap everything up. Watkinson was the best known face at a final table filled by a lot of “nonames” and because of that a lot of people figured Watkinson was the guy to beat for the first place money. Butthe main event results of recent years have not been kind to poker personalities with a high profile.

Thinking about it now, he adds, “When I got knocked out, I think I was more depressed than in any tournament I’ve ever played in.”

Why was that?

“Very frustrating,” he continued, to get so close to the biggest prize in poker, playing his way through more than 6,300 players and then to fall short.

“I don’t know that I’ll ever get that close again but I was very happy with the way I played up until the final table.”

Whatever second thoughts he had about certain hands … well, they seemed minor although the difference between first and eighth place was measured in millions of dollars.

The 40-year-old Watkinson has been playing poker for years and began to get serious about it during the period when he was going to school and working as a valet parker in Reno. His focus these days is on much more than poker. With his fianc? Timmi, he has a small record company, a label that for the moment is focusing on a band from North Carolina. There are also separate lines of jewelry and clothing. He is also active in an effort to rescue chimpanzees, which don’t always get the best of treatment when they are retired from acts or to old to work.

About the jewelry, Watkinson notes that rocker Tommy Lee was impressed by examples of the jewelry he has seen, even grabbing one of the pieces. “He’s been wearing it around.”

Watkinson thinks of it as “jewelry for jeans,” nice looking stuff-bracelets, necklaces and so forth- fashioned from alloys that make it affordable to people other than millionaires rockers. It’s still not widely available and has quickly sold out in the few Vegasarea boutiques where it has been placed.

As for being called an “animal activist,” Watkinson isn’t sure that is entirely comfortable with the label, because maybe it suggests that he is doing more than he is.

“All we’re trying to do is create awareness about the way chimps are often treated after people are done with them.”

And so the Cortland Brandenburg Foundation was created to put a spotlight on the plight of these “discarded” chimps who, Watkinson argues, deserve better treatment than they are often getting. “We don’t expect to keep people from having them, but we want to make sure they are treated humanely.”

Watkinson continues to represent the Full Tilt team, spending enough time on line to give players the feeling that they are up close and personal with the pros. He began playing poker about the time he was earning a bachelor’s degree in economics. His initial thinking was not to necessarily become a professional but merely see where it went.

And it went nicely, as he would later tell himself. Over the years he has posted nearly two-dozen tournament cashes with back to back final table finishes during the third season of World Poker Tour and a World Series of Poker bracelet in the $10,000 pot limit Omaha event in 2006.

He was the Card Player Magazine’s Player of the Year in 2004.

Any poker books or DVDs in the works?

Wakinson gives that a moment of thought and says, yeah, probably. Maybe something about Omaha, but he hasn’t started it yet. After all, there’s only so much time in the day and staying busy has not been difficult for him to do, what with the myriad business endeavors, the interests of the Foundationand the time needed to get from poker event to another and squeeze in some on-line playing time.

Watkinson says he enjoyed a certain level of success almost from the beginning. Taking an initial bankroll of about $600, he built it into about $10,000 over a year or so, also building a level of confidence that told him poker was the place to be.

Thinking about it now, remembering that moment when he realized he had made $10,000 playing poker, Watkinson figured life wasn’t going to get any better.

But it did … It has. Full Tilt’s Howard Lederer says of Watkinson, “With his patience and tremendous skill, “I expect Lee to have many more high finishes over the years.”

And if Watkinson also manages to hit home runs in the jewelry, clothing and save-the-chimps business, he will have a very satisfied mind.

But in the meantime he is on the road again.

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