Meet “Yukon” Brad Booth
By 10/18/2006
Ken R. Auliffe
It started as an interview, and ended up as a lifetime summation of one of the most successful Canadian poker players making a living playing cards in Vegas for the last several years. I’d like you to meet “Yukon” Brad Booth, who is quickly gaining recognition in the poker world, not only in his home native land, but playing against the top names in the game from his home at the Bellagio in Vegas. He was described last summer as ‘the best unknown poker player in the world’ by none other than 9 time WSOP bracelet winner, Phil Hellmuth.
I had a great opportunity to hang with Brad while he was in Vancouver during his hiatus and it was a pleasure to meet such a genuine, humble, grounded and amiable human being, who has just begun to enjoy life. And with more stories to tell than a newsstand tabloid, I just sat back and listened.
This is only the beginning installment of Brad’s amazing journey. In fact it may take several issues to properly chronicle the man who considers Doyle Brunson a mentor, plays regularly in huge games at the Bellagio and remains firmly rooted as a patriotic Canadian. This is the story of “Yukon” Brad Booth…
Hi Ken and thanks for the opportunity to recount my path in the poker world to Canadian Poker Player readers. My poker career started for me as a really young kid. I remember sitting on my Mom’s lap while she and her 7 sisters played Rummy. They used to play for dollars and I would always ask if I could play and they said “No, you’re too small”, but I would sit on my aunt’s lap and tell her which cards to pick up and discard and that’s how they taught me, and kind of how gambling started in my life.
At about age 7, my father used to take me to my grandfather’s barber shop who taught me how to play no limit 5 card draw. When he would get a customer though, I always heard something like “Alright Bradley, go play in the corner” and grandfather would give me the deck of cards and chips and off I would go into the corner and practice shuffling cards and chips, and playing poker by myself.
I was so interested in this game that I would take a deck of cards and a bag full of pennies to hockey practice, and I would teach the rest of the kids in the dressing room how to play no limit 5 card draw poker. Most of our parents would give us $5 for the concessions or whatever and we would gamble it away. This was when I was 10 or 12 years-old.
Then I guess when I was 13 and going into Grade 8, some of the older kids in school were having home games where they would play Kings-and-little-ones, Stook, 5 card draw and 7 card stud and those types of games. No Texas hold’em back then, but they played Omaha and such, so I learned there and really got into gambling at that stage.
When I was 15 and in high school I got a part-time job at Little Caesar’s, but after I started going to these poker games and hitchhiking out of town to play, I ended up quitting school and working full-time. Mom and Dad didn’t know I had quit school, so in the morning I’d get up as if I was going to school, and with them thinking I had school books in my bag (which was really my Little Caesar’s work clothes!) they’d go off to their jobs and I would go off to work myself. Around 3 or 4 o’clock I would leave work, and go back home with my work clothes back in my bag.
In the evening, I would say I was going off to do homework at a friend’s house, and of course what I’d do instead is head out to the highway, stick my thumb out, and hitchhike out to Vancouver to play in some of the underground clubs. I would cash in my whole $340 paycheck and take the whole thing to the table. I’d put $328 on the table and leave myself $12 for a snack and enough money to get home because I didn’t want to hitchhike all the way home since I had to work at 9 am the next day.
What would invariably happen is I would be almost felted because my chips would just keep dwindling away and I’d have $18 or $20 left. I’d think “If I can pull out this $12 from my pocket and get 3 or 4-way action, I’ll be right back in the money!” Then I’d plan to rat-hole like $5 off the table and stuff it into my pocket and make sure I had enough for a bus ride home. I was always scared about getting caught at the table though so I generally just left my money on the table and, of course, I hit the felt, completely busted, without a penny in my pocket. It would be 4 am, I started work at 9 am and I have to hitchhike all the way back home - sometimes I’d be hitchhiking between 5 and 8 hours! Also, I’d have to sneak in the house before Mom and Dad realize I’d been out all night.
I learned hard lessons there and I guess the reason I never told Mom and Dad wasn’t that I was fearful of telling them that I didn’t like school, but it was that my Mom and Dad had told me, “Brad, when you’re sixteen years old and if you’re still in school, we’ll reward you with a Sprint.” I believe it was like an ’87 Sprint that cost $800. Since I had quit school when I was 15½ or so, I had to pretend I was still going to school so I could get this car, quit hitchhiking, and finally drive myself to the games.
At that point I was looking this opportunity as a poker hand with a car in the pot and I really wanted to win this pot. On my birthday I finally won the ‘pot’ (the Sprint), and two days later I let Mom and Dad know that I had quit school, was moving out, and was going to play poker and pool and gamble for a living. They didn’t really know what the hell to think at the time. I was also playing junior hockey at the same time so they were really confused and kind of just wished me the best.
At 16 I was living in Abbottsford, BC with two RCMP officers who took really good care of me. They were my hockey billet so to speak, and they made sure I went to work and hockey and tried to do some alternative schooling on the side, in a home-school kind of way. I got a job at Save-On Foods, was making more money than ever before, I looked a little bit older, and I had a car! I started going into the States and sneaking into Lummi Island and Nooksack Casino. I was making money there and made enough to buy myself a motorbike. I was able to go in and out of these places all the time, while my bankroll went up and down.
At that point, the funny thing was, I was a winning player but I had some ‘interesting’ habits so to speak. I was buying tonnes of clothes and spending lots trying to be a cool kid. Also through that time I was playing blackjack, sic-bo, roulette and I didn’t come to terms with separating the two and recognizing one where you can make a living and the other is just gambling. I learned the hard way like a lot of people do and quit playing the house games, deciding to just play poker full-time.
When I was about 19½ my Mom passed away and I found out that I was adopted, which made me a sad kid. Not mad or anything, just sad. A family friend that I had known my entire life and grew up with playing hockey, who had moved up to the Yukon Territory with his family, called and gave me their condolences. The day after my Mom’s funeral I left Mission, BC and never said goodbye to one high school friend, one teacher, one family member, my Dad, my sister…. nobody. I just packed up and drove to the Yukon Territory to live in a small town called Haines Junction, with a bustling population of 651 people.
I was just trying to find myself as a person and had a couple of small jobs, like waiting tables and setting up the itineraries for a lot of Europeans and people traveling into Alaska in a place called Access Kluane which offered river rafting, heli-hiking, and glacier flights. All the while I was trying to come to terms with the fact that the people who I thought for my whole life were my biological parents, weren’t. I don’t want to diminish what they did for me, but it just took some getting used to the idea.
Right away I found out about a poker game in Whitehorse which was a 2-hour drive away. I’d go every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, sleep in my car or in a tent, depending on whether it was winter or summer. I played with these guys that were all older than me by at least 20 years and we played maximum $25 bets, no check-raise, no Texas Hold’em but a lot of Stud, 5 card draw, and a lot of Omaha.
For the first couple of years I built up my bankroll like clockwork. I never made less than $300 and never won more than $2,000 three days a week. Finally I built my bankroll up to a pretty healthy level and I’d fly down to Calgary for a week at a time, come back for 2 weeks, go back for 2 weeks, come back up for a month, go back down for a month, et cetera. Eventually I was in Calgary for 4 months straight and had done really well playing pot limit Omaha there. I returned to the Yukon, because during that time I had a girlfriend that I was flying down every couple of weeks and our relationship needed a bit more attention than that.
After a while in the Yukon, I decided that I wanted to go down south and pursue my poker career a little bit more. I think I was 22 or so and went and lived in Vernon, BC for 9 months where I met a really great snooker player named Brady Gollan who I played pool and poker together with and he really honed my skills. Maybe not honed my skills, but gave me a lot of ‘self-courage’ if that’s the right word, to develop my poker skills and try to go somewhere with poker.
After those 9 months I moved back up to the Yukon and decided to move into the big city of Whitehorse, which is the capital of the Territory. I was playing in a game at a hotel but that got shut down and we ended up playing in a place that was literally a shack, no bigger than 10 by 10 feet with a poker table. It was smoke-filled and had little plug-in heaters and it was just awful. The place was never clean, everyone but me smoked four packs of cigarettes a night and it was just absolutely sickening. Fed up, I went over to the place one evening and cut a hole in the roof.
We were playing cards that night and the guys asked, “What the hell is this hole in the roof?” I told them I did it, as I couldn’t stand the smoke anymore. They said “Then don’t play here!” To placate them so I could keep playing, I promised I would shovel off the snow from the roof to keep the hole open.
We would play, and of course its -40 degrees out, and they would say, “OK Brad, time to go shovel off the snow.” And I’m thinking, “Jesus Christ, every half an hour I have to do this, go outside, freeze my ass off, climb up the ladder, and shovel off the snow” this is so sick! Finally, (I don’t know why I didn’t do this in the first place) I built a little teepee on the roof, so the snow wouldn’t drip onto the centre of the table amongst the chips and cards. But these old guys were still yelling at me because I’m a non-smoker. Cantankerous bastards!
Finally I said, “That’s it guys, I can’t play here anymore,” and decided to open up my own underground cardroom in Whitehorse. I had one table and was playing $1/2 no limit Hold’em, introduced the check-raise to the Yukon, unfortunately lost a lot of the old crew with the changes but I also got a younger crew of poker players together.
The game got busier so I got a friend of mine, James Lopushinsky, to build a proper poker table. It was also time to get a dealer too because we had been just passing the deck, dealing ourselves, and it was slowing the game down. I got James to deal as well (just for tips), I recognized that James had great skill at poker, someone who had great personae about him and generally just a great human being. So I decided to teach him everything I knew about poker, inside and out – the emotional side, the probability side, everything!
About 4 years ago I went down to Vegas for the first time. I was supposed to go down for 3 days but ended up staying two weeks. I did well there and got a little taste of Vegas. I went back up to the Yukon and my girlfriend, bought myself a home, a cabin, a boat and some other things. Two years later I decided to head back down to Las Vegas. I was ready to move on with my life and decided to return to the single life and just go play poker.
In 2005 I played in my first World Series Event and did very well. I placed 12th in the $5,000 short-handed event. My initial plan was to go down there for the whole summer but I’d done so well in the cash games and some of the tournaments, that I decided to stay and live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio for, well... a whole long time!
This last March I came up to Calgary for the 2006 Canadian Open Poker Championships with my protégé, James, who had traveled down to Vegas a week before this tournament. He ended up winning the Heads-Up Championship and even knocked me out along the way. That was self-rewarding in itself and made me feel, well first of all it made me feel old, but at the same time made me feel very proud that I had helped develop somebody into a good poker player.
In next month’s installment, Brad talks about his poker-playing style, his experiences at a WPT final table, his appearances on the TV show High Stakes Poker, the 2006 WSOP, and what his first vacation in a decade feels like.