‘DEGENERATE’
Depaulo tells story of turnpike exits, lost Wi-fi, poker fame in grocery lot
dubbed the Big 500, earning $159,563.11.
His bracelet story starts with America’s online poker laws. Only people physically in Nevada and New Jersey can play on WSOP. com, the host site for the U.S. leg of the WSOP Online.
That means Depaulo has to drive from Manhattan into New Jersey every day he wants to play in the series. Some days he gets a hotel, some he gets an Airbnb, some he stays with his girlfriend’s family.
Three times so far, he has chosen to play in his car, thinking that if he is eliminated from the tournament early, he can drive home and sleep in his own bed.
That was the plan July 12.
“I just drove into Jersey,” he said. “I thought I knew a place, but I didn’t have any place picked. I tried to pull over on the side of the road overlooking Manhattan. (The site’s geolocator) said I was too close to New York. It kept
thinking I wasn’t in Jersey.
“So literally all I did was get off at the next exit and go deeper into New Jersey and then search ‘parking lot’ in my phone.”
He ended up in the parking lot of a strip mall with a Whole Foods, and the mall’s Wi-fi connection worked for him.
“It was really random,” he said. “It was just a nondangerous place in New Jersey that happened to have Wi-fi that bailed me out.”
Depaulo said he soon realized the Wi-fi had a wrinkle: It would kick him off the network once an hour, apparently wanting to make sure that he still wanted to be connected. He would rapidly switch to the WSOP mobile app to play a hand or two while restoring the Wi-fi connection to his laptop.
The stakes of each disconnection became higher as he went deeper into the tournament, he said. He faced a crisis when the tournament was down to three players and he couldn’t immediately get back on the Wi-fi after a disconnection. He said he played on the mobile app for 12 hands, but a glitch prevented him from raising more than the minimum amount — quite a limitation in No-limit Hold’em.
“It’s the biggest spot of my life, and I thought I was going to have a mental breakdown,” he said. “And then the Wi-fi reconnected.”
A short while later, with the sun rising and people filing into work on a Monday morning, Depaulo was a
World Series of Poker champion.
He posted a Youtube video of the immediate aftermath, as he jumped out of his car and yelled, “I’m a legend!” He then noticed a shopper walking into a store staring at him and yelled, “Sorry!”
Depaulo said he wasn’t thinking about what a win might mean for his online following during the tournament, but that soon changed.
“I win and then Google my name, and it’s like, ‘Ryan Depaulo wins bracelet in parking lot.’ ” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s pretty on brand.’ ”
His “Degenerate Gambler” channel documents his poker adventures, but he also has videos in which he plays slots and video poker