If you were to sit down at a tournament poker table with Lee Watkinson, you most likely would come away with the impression of him as a quiet and measured opponent who let his play do the talking as he relieved you of your chips. You might remember his piercing stare, which shouts focus and concentration, but otherwise gives nothing away. If you sat down at a poker table with Watkinson, or watched him from the rail, you would know that he is a great player — but you would see only a small portion of what defines him as a person. It is true that Watkinson is the consummate poker professional, a true grinder who has been making a living from the game since 1990, but what you probably don’t know is that he has used his career poker winnings to launch multiple businesses and support a worldwide nonprofit charity. Watkinson is a professional poker player, but he is also an American Renaissance man.

A True Grinder

Watkinson arrived on the tournament poker scene in 2004, when he made two final tables at the World Series of Poker, and then made back-to-back final tables on the World Poker Tour (second at the 2004 Mirage Poker Showdown and second at the 2004 Legends of Poker). He won his first WSOP gold bracelet in the 2006 $10,000 pot-limit Omaha event, and he has consistently performed well on the biggest stage of them all, the WSOP main event. He finished in 45th place in a field of 5,619 in 2005, and he improved upon that finish in 2007, when he made the final table before busting out in eighth place against Jerry Yang in a field of 6,358. Watkinson has an impressive poker resume by any measure, but what is just as impressive is the journey that took him to the top.

In 1990, Watkinson was working as a jack-of-all-trades (security guard, valet, and so on) in Reno, Nevada, and after (or, admittedly, sometimes during) his shifts, he sat in on poker games. He enjoyed the game and did reasonably well, so when summer came around, he decided to head to Lake Tahoe with a $600 bankroll and see how long he could stretch out his vacation before enrolling in grad school at Eastern Washington University in the fall. He was on a tight budget. “I didn’t want to spend a third of my bankroll per night on a hotel,” he said. So, he slept in the surrounding woods at night in a sleeping bag. He said that his standard routine consisted of nightly poker sessions in $4-$8 and $10-$20 limit hold’em games that would end at 5 o’clock in the morning, at which time he would head into the woods and sleep for a few hours before spending the afternoon swimming in the lake. He would then head back to the casinos for another session in the evening; call it the poker version of Into the Wild. He did sprinkle in a night at a hotel here and there, and his bankroll held up for the entire summer, before he traveled north to start grad school. “In a way, I’m still working off of that original $600,” said Watkinson.

He registered for a full schedule of classes that fall, but there was one hitch. He found a poker room nearby that featured a dealer’s choice $3-$5-$5-$10 mixed game, and he was hooked even more. “I actually never went to one class,” he admitted. In late 1990, he moved on to Las Vegas, and built his bankroll by playing $10-$20 limit hold’em at the Mirage, while staying at a Budget Suites nearby. A desire to learn how to surf took Watkinson to San Diego in 1991, and he continued to support himself by playing $20-$40 limit hold’em at Sycuan Casino. The next couple of years found Watkinson in the midst of a poker odyssey that saw him split time between Las Vegas, San Diego, and various spots in the greater Los Angeles area playing poker. He primarily played limit hold’em, at times as high as $40-$80 and $80-$160. He admits that the game had become somewhat of a job for him by that point, and he then found the game of pot-limit Omaha in Oceanside, California, in 2001.

The game was half $10-$15 pot-limit Omaha and half $10-$25 no-limit hold’em. “I really started to enjoy poker again,” said Watkinson. He also met the late Billy Duarte, who became his poker mentor. “He helped out a lot of the players; he was a really good guy.” Watkinson reflected on his time in Oceanside, and credited it for his Omaha success many years later: “I would lose just a little bit in Omaha and win a lot in hold’em, and I did really well. I’m sure I’ve gotten a lot better at Omaha.”

In 2003, a lot of the players who played in the Oceanside game went broke, so Watkinson and Duarte traveled to L.A. to play in cash games at Commerce Casino. It was also around that time that a cash game in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Colma dried up, and that drove a number of other professional players down to L.A. from Northern California. “I used to play here [Commerce] every day. It was back before 2004, mostly $10-$20 and sometimes $20-$40; Antonio Esfandiari, Phil Laak, Gabe Thaler, and Bobby Hoff were all in the game. Now I come down here and I see them in the $100-$200 game [laughing]. I think it was 2004 when Antonio won this tournament [the WPT L.A. Poker Classic], and Phil won the celebrity [invitational] right afterward, and then I cashed at back-to-back final tables and made two final tables at the World Series. And then I didn’t play cash games anymore [laughing]. I think that after that year, the focus was on tournaments for the majority of the players,” said Watkinson.

The face of poker had changed forever when the Moneymaker effect flooded tournament fields with dead money, and Watkinson adapted. He switched to tournament poker and became one of the most consistent performers on the tournament trail. While other players won accolades with their antics at the table, Watkinson won his respect with a silent focus that has helped him accumulate $3,817,076 in career tournament winnings to date. When asked what poker accomplishment he is most proud of during his journey that has spanned two decades, Watkinson said, “I would say the main event last year, up until the final table. I wasn’t very proud of my final-table performance [see the sidebar]. Close behind is my pot-limit Omaha bracelet. Being able to hold it together throughout a whole main event was great. I think I played the best that I could, up to the final table.”

Opposites Attract

Sitting down to dinner with Watkinson and his fiancé, Timmi De Rosa, I was able to see the phrase “opposites attract” in action, and the two take the cliché even further - as these opposites enhance one another. They met when Lee donated $10,000 to the Cortland Brandenburg Foundation (a chimpanzee rescue charity), so that he and one of his friends who had a band could work with Grammy-award-winning producer David Kershenbaum, and Timmi, who works as a talent developer and songwriter, in a three-day seminar. Timmi was a driving force in the foundation at the time (and still is), and as a sign of appreciation, she invited Lee to visit the chimpanzees. Lee made an immediate connection with the chimps, and with Timmi, as well. The two are now engaged and have purchased a mansion in the Las Vegas area to start their lives together.

They are still involved with the chimp foundation, which rescues captive chimpanzees. “Money isn’t spent in a place where a chimp wouldn’t spend it,” said Timmi. Chimpanzees are often used in Hollywood and bought as pets when they are young, but around the time they are 5 or 6 years old, these animals become stronger than human beings, and they understand that power. Their intelligence and strength make them quite dangerous and unmanageable at this age. “They go from being treated like a kid to solitary confinement overnight,” said Lee. The chimps are usually given the out-of-sight, out-of-mind treatment, as they are sold for biomedical research and held in small cages that they can barely stand up in for the remainder of their lives (captive chimpanzees have an average life span of 60 years). Both Lee and Timmi have taken up the fight to raise awareness of the horrible treatment that awaits these animals after they have outgrown their usefulness to society, and they one day hope to build a sanctuary for chimpanzees. They have adopted two chimps of their own, for which they pay for comfortable and proper living quarters in Las Vegas. They are also working with Matt Savage to host a charity poker tournament at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, which will combine support from poker professionals and rock stars for the charity.

In addition to the chimpanzees, they are involved in a number of other endeavors, including a record company and a jewelry line. Lee says that he owes a lot of his success in these ventures to Timmi: “Yeah, she does everything for me. She’s brilliant, she’s the most creative person I’ve ever met, she’s the best salesperson, she thinks outside the box, and she can come up with ideas that nobody else can come up with.” Some of those ideas include the photo shoots that produced the photos you see on the surrounding pages, which Lee admits were not too fun at the time. “She had me doing photo shoots with lions, and kept asking me, ‘Can you get closer?’ She had some naked women and snakes, which was kind of interesting; that photo shoot was for the jewelry. We did three different sessions of photo shoots, and I hated it, but when the pictures came back, they were really fantastic.” As much praise as Lee has for Timmi, she is quick to point out that all of their business ventures have been fully funded by Lee’s poker winnings.

The Music Man and Hard Core Elegance

Lee’s love for music led him to partner with Kershenbaum and Timmi to start Rebel Yell Entertainment Inc. Kershenbaum has worked with the best in the industry, including Tracy Chapman, Duran Duran, and Janet Jackson, so he has an eye for musical talent. The record label has signed a distribution deal with E.M.I. music, and they are currently working with their first band, Pico vs. Island Trees, which just finished recording their debut album. “I just love music, and when I heard this particular band, I was really drawn to their music. We met them, they were seniors in college in North Carolina, and they dropped out to come do this album and sign with our label,” said Lee.

“David found them in North Carolina and gave me the opportunity to be involved, so I pretty much backed them, and right now we are done with their first album and trying to find out the best way to release it. I was in the studio during the making of the album, but I was there mostly to enjoy it. We had a Grammy-award-winning engineer, Greg Collins, who just won a Grammy with U2, and David was producing, and Mark Endert mixed; he’s one of the hottest mixers right now. We have a great team,” said Lee.

The glamorous world of rock and roll does not end with music for Lee and Timmi; they also own a company that designs jewelry — as Lee puts it, “rock and roll, silver … jewelry.” The name of the brand says it all - Hard Core Elegance. “When we started out, we wanted to do a clothing line, and then we started doing the jewelry and found that the jewelry was a really open niche,” said Lee. A few of their clients include Justin Timberlake, Rob Thomas, and Tommy Lee, and the list is growing. When Matchbox Twenty came to Vegas in March, the two had a custom-made piece for Thomas with them while they enjoyed the concert, and delivered it directly to his manager during the show.

“I really think the jewelry company is going to be a huge, huge company; we are putting really great detail and artwork into our jewelry. Some of it, we’re doing in silver, but a lot of it, we’re doing in other alloys that won’t be as expensive as silver, but will still look just as good,” said Lee.

Balance

Although Lee has numerous interests outside the game of poker, he has never forgotten what took him from the forests of Lake Tahoe in 1990 to the empire he is building today. In addition to his business interests, Lee is one of the most well-sponsored players in poker. He is a Full Tilt Pro, and is also sponsored by the high-end clothing line A and G clothing, which you can see him wearing at every poker event he plays. After his hot start in 2008 (see the sidebar), Lee shows no signs of slowing down on the tournament trail, and he continues to use his skills at the poker table, in the business world, and in the recording studio to find balance in his busy life. “Bankroll management and patience, but on the other hand, I’m willing to gamble when it’s time to gamble,” said Lee when he was asked about what lessons have helped him the most in his variety of interests. He also recognized the importance of spreading out the money he’s made playing poker into those other interests. “I think it’s good to have other things to do with your money besides gamble and buy cars, and that’s why it kind of softened the blow of losing the main event, knowing that Jerry Yang wasn’t going to blow the money; he’s going to put the money toward helping children. If a degenerate poker player won, and you knew that he was going to blow all the money, there wouldn’t be any bright side,” said Lee.

So, the next time you see Lee Watkinson at a poker table, whether it be out on the tournament trail or on television, know that you are looking at a player with a balanced attack at the poker table. Know that you are looking at a businessman and a philanthropist, with a balanced attack in the business world, as well. Behind that piercing stare in his focused eyes, there is a lot to think about.