A lifetime of sacrifice and success has taken Jason Koon to the Poker Hall of Fame

Earlier this month, Jason Koon was inducted to the Poker Hall of Fame, in the first year he became eligible. In this interview, the Triton Ambassador and 12-time winner on the Triton Poker Super High Roller Series reflects on his ascension to poker's most respected ranks, as well as the journey that brought him to the very top of the game.

CONGRATULATIONS ON THE AMAZING NEWS ABOUT THE HALL OF FAME. CAN YOU DESCRIBE YOUR REACTION WHEN YOU HEARD YOU WERE IN?

I couldn't believe it. It was crazy. I was having lunch with my wife Bianca and I got the call from Ty Stewart [Executive Director for the World Series of Poker]. He told me I got in and I was shocked. I mean, I was pumped. For me to be the only person to get in I thought was not going to happen. So that was really crazy.

I try not to get too caught up in other people's accolades of me. I try not to overthink too much in these things. But this was a little different because it's your peers — and not only your peers. These are really legends of the game. You can say whatever you want about the characters of the game, but the people that are in the Hall of Fame are Ivey, Negreanu, Hellmuth, Antonius. And the list just goes on forever. Eric Seidel, who I admire as much as anyone in poker, and people who go all the way back, like Bobby Baldwin and Jack Binion.

These guys deciding that you belong with them. It's a community that I'm beyond honored to be a part of. I was really hoping just to be a part of the story. I'm a really big poker history fan. I love it. I read Blood Aces [by Doug J. Swanson] last year, which is the Benny Binion story, and how he moved from Texas to Vegas to start these casinos. Benny Binion is in the Hall of Fame. It's such a small group of people that it's an overwhelming thing to be a part of.

There's only 33 people alive that are in the Hall of Fame. There's only 60 some people ever that have been in the Hall of Fame. So it's just like a tiny little group of people. Wild Bill Hickock, the Dead Man's Hand, he's in the Poker Hall of Fame. So it's crazy. It's like you're part of the story now. Even if my story is a modern one. It just hit really different for those reason

Koon on his induction to the Hall of Fame: 'This was a little different'

TO GET TO THAT STAGE, THERE WAS A PUBLIC VOTE FIRST, RIGHT?

Yeah. I feel like I'm never going to be one of these true kind of mainstream guys. Because I think everybody that missed that original boom, it's going to be really hard to kind of transcend that just because the amount of TV time and buzz that there was just around poker back then. So I don't know if I'll ever be mainstream especially. I guess I'm a character in some ways. I'm a really intense guy and I try super hard at my job, but I'm not one of these people that's crazy entertaining to watch on TV, like a Sam Farha with a cigar in my mouth and saying all these awesome one off things or whatever. So for the mainstream to actually vote for me was a great honor. 

A bunch of people I haven't talked to in forever, from like my little hometown, they reached out for me and just said, "Hey, I voted for you." They oftentimes they would include a screenshot of the additional details that they added. And they had something really nice to say about me. So it was just a super heartwarming thing overall. People I haven't talked to in six or seven, 10 years, just saying, "Hey, we're really rooting for you with this thing." It was cool to see a bunch of people gather around me.

GOING BACK TO THE CALL FROM TY STEWART. CAN YOU DESCRIBE THAT.

Well, it was a hilarious interaction because we were at the Strip and my wife and I literally never eat out. And for some reason this day we were at Cipriani at the Wynn eating lunch, and I looked down on my phone and I see Ty Stewart. And, you know, that's not a guy that calls me very often. And I was like, "Whoa, I think I know what this is about, but I'm not sure." And Bianca, who's just been so excited for me, was like, "Oh, take it, take it." 

So I run off to take the call and he's like, "Jason, you know, you probably know what this is about. But I needed to call you because it's a really important conversation to have." And then this phone dropped, his call dropped and I was like, "Oh shit, man." 

And it took 45 minutes. Apparently, he was driving through the mountains somewhere, and he lost cell phone service for 45 minutes. And I was like, on edge, you know. I think I know what it is, but it could be something else. Who knows? I've had crazier phone calls. And then he finally called me back and he said, "Hey, you know we want to fly your family down. And you know, can you be here these dates? You're going in the Poker Hall of Fame.” I just couldn't believe it.

Koon still studies poker daily and continues to refine his skills

HOW DO YOU RANK THIS AMONG YOUR POKER ACCOLADES?

The Hall of Fame is like all those accolades put together. I think that it's just kind of confirmation that my life's work is respected by my peers. And I think that's something that's incredibly special. I still feel I'm pretty young. It's my first year of eligibility. And every single day I do poker work. I don't even have Tritons coming up and I've just been studying so hard the last few months. You think I'd be burnt out after all the Tritons and the World Series and this and that. But I just love poker so much. I just get up and I do poker work every day and I think that that's a sign there's a lot to come.

But, as of right now, I think that this honor and being selected to go into the Hall of Fame is it's an award of all of my accomplishments put together. It can't be put into the same class as winning 12 Tritons or the cash game runs that I went on, or the online stuff that I did back in the day. It's all of it put together, which is just overwhelming. Honestly, it's a great honor.

Koon says of poker, 'I've lost myself so deeply in this game'

HOW WOULD THE YOUNG JASON KOON HAVE REACTED TO THE THOUGHT THAT ONE DAY HE'D BE IN THE HALL OF FAME?

It's one of those things that even now I'm like, how did this happen? It doesn't feel like something that I have the ability to have done. A lot of the things that I've accomplished in my career, it just feels like I observed them happening. I think that the secret solution, the secret sauce to all this was just my persistence. I just wake up and I work and, and things that I can't understand or get to, I just grind it through until it makes perfect sense to me. And then I do it a hundred more times. And I think that if you would have told me this as a young teenager, I would have been stunned and honored and shocked. But in some ways I would have been like, I can see it. 

I have a couple examples of me being a dreamer as a young kid. My buddy passed away in February and I had to go back to his funeral. Back in our little hometown in West Virginia. And this dude, this big, burly kind of army man came up to me and he said, "Hey, Jason, you probably don't remember me, but you and I were really good friends in third grade when we were really small kids."

The little elementary school that I went to is in one of the most impoverished areas in West Virginia and West Virginia is the second poorest state in the United States. So where I'm from is just really impoverished. He pulled me aside and said, "Hey, I want you to know something. You know, I had to move whenever we were in third grade and you made this scrapbook for me." And he pulls out the scrapbook and it's got all these cars and boy things in it, boats and this and that, but mainly cars. And he said, "You had these little magazines and they were your favorite magazines and you were always talking about how you love these cars. And, you know, we'd never even seen a car like this. But when you found out I was leaving, you cut out all your favorite cars and you made a scrapbook for me. And he said, "You know, I want you to know how much that meant to me." 

But then he's like, "But I also want you to see this." And he turned to the last page in the scrapbook and it said: "We're going to have these one day."

I didn't remember it at all. But the second I saw the magic marker writing, I could tell it was my childhood handwriting. I was blown away that he had kept it. That's 30 years old. 

So I was like this like little poor kid in third grade in West Virginia. And for some reason, I just always felt like I was going to do something.

The essence of all this is kind of whatever story you tell yourself that you can do, you can do it. Obviously there are human limitations. I'm very gifted and I'm blessed. But if you really tell yourself that these are the things that are going to come of your life, you're so motivated to work hard for those things. I just grinded my way through with persistence. Obviously I've run so hot in my life, but I stand behind that the movie that you tell yourself you're living will in a lot of ways oftentimes become your reality.

What little spare time Koon has, he dedicates to his family

SO HOW DID YOU MAKE IT A REALITY?

I think anybody that knows me knows that I'm probably the most obsessive person whenever it comes to the little details of the game. I'm really obsessive and I'm obsessive about my execution of those details. I've lost myself. That's the thing. I've lost myself so deeply in this game. 

I just played all the hours and I went everywhere all over the world. You can ask Paul [Phua]. I was with those guys in the Philippines. I was with those guys in Macau. We were playing cash games in person. We were playing cash games on apps when we weren't playing in the tournaments. And it's just always been that way. 

Even before the high stakes stuff, I was grinding online. I was one of these kids that had a lot of success online. I won several major tournaments. I won the biggest prize pool tournament that Full Tilt had ever had at the time. It had 13,000 players and I chopped it heads up for the lion's share of the prize pool. 

From a very young age, I stood out, and I found ways to win. And I know I was talented because in college, whenever I started playing, within 30 days, every person I played with thought I was cheating. And so I've always been kind of an outlier. I remember when we started playing online poker, a couple of my close friends in college were very smart guys. But my graph just went up and their graph went down basically. And I realized like, oh man, maybe I'm on to something. 

There's something about the way that my brain works, that poker is just made for it. It's just perfect. And you combine that with raw obsession for two decades, deciding that this is my life and this is what I'm going to give every bit of my essence to. And then surrounding myself with the greatest minds that the game has ever seen. 

Obviously I've had great success, but I wouldn't say I'm a prodigy. But I went and I found all the prodigies. I surrounded myself with Stephen Chidwick. I surrounded myself with Nick Petrangelo, with Isaac Haxton, with Ben Tollerene, with Seth Davies, with Daniel Dvoress, with, you know, older friends of mine, Phil Ivey. Andrew Robl is my most important poker mentor, even though he's a year younger than me. These guys have been my peers. I'm with those guys and we're talking poker. We're inside of the game together. So you surround yourself with the greatest talent in the world. You have talent. You commit your life to something. It's not exactly like "Oh, wow, I can't believe I had success." I think I structured my life in a way where success was coming.

Koon, right, congratulates his great friend Ben Tollerene on a title-winning performance in Jeju

WHAT ARE THE SACRIFICES YOU HAVE HAD TO MAKE?

I've sacrificed everything. Everything. I don't have a normal life. I don't watch TV, I don't watch sports. I was an athlete, a several sport athlete, growing up. And I loved playing sports and I love watching sports. But I don't watch sports. I can't tell you who's doing what. If I have a free second of my life now, it's going to my kids and my wife. And prior to kids, it was just going to poker work. 

I sacrificed my time and my health for the grind. The main grind years for me were 2015 to 2021 or maybe 16 to 21 where it was just Macau, it was apps, it was online poker, it was live poker. It was every single day. I remember several Christmases grinding high stakes cash. 

At this point in my life, I was with my wife Bianca, and I told her I want to be the best poker player in the world. I think I can do it, but I need you to be all in with me. She had a great job in New York City, in Manhattan. And she quit and she came along to support me. And all of a sudden I had this responsibility on my back where you made a promise and you got to keep your word. And this is a woman who was out living her dream. And now here she is supporting yours and putting hers on the back burner. And, and I said, OK, I have to make this happen. This is a binary situation. This is a fail or succeed situation. And I have to succeed. And the only way for me to do that is to give this absolutely everything that I have. 

That was me falling asleep with laptops in my lap, studying solvers every night. That was me setting my alarm clock, waking up at three in the morning, playing online on apps because that was the right time for the best games. There were times I would sit in a soaking tub and be playing online poker because I just needed to rest my body for a second. You're talking playing 350 plus days a year for a decade straight. Those were the sacrifices.

It's a team sacrifice. And it's one where you made a promise. And, you know, I have to do everything that I can do to honor that. And believe me there were times when I really wasn't confident I could do it.

HOW HAVE YOU DEALT WITH THOSE TOUGH PERIODS?

The emotional side for me has always been tricky. I've always wanted it more than anything in the entire world. I've just wanted it so bad. And a lot of that is manifested in a negative way of me not being able to cope with those emotions. I've gotten better over time. But for me, it really has felt like an existential thing. And I think you can see me wearing that. It's less so now I'm older. I feel more fulfilled in my life. I've had the success and I have the kids and there's a lot of things that kind of prop me up now. But if you go back to the beginnings of the Tritons and me playing high stakes and 2015, my entire existence was kind of propped up on me needing to succeed at this thing. 

Obviously there are downswings in poker and tough times and I was playing in the toughest games imaginable. These guys kick your ass if you're not on your A game. And I would go through iterations of losing confidence and adrenal fatigue and fatigue in general. Some of these sessions we would play would be between 36 and 48 hours long. And for years, I was just always on the verge of having kind of a mental breakdown because I was just pushing myself so hard physically and mentally. And the stakes were so big. A lot of guys say that we're robots or whatever. But hey, when you've got real skin in the game and you're out there getting crushed, there's tons of times where you question if you made the right decision or not.

Fans don't always see it. We all have trolls on the internet, but a couple of times a year I'll get a tweet where it's like, "Well, if you didn't win this hand on that stream, your career would have gone a different way." And I'm like, "Buddy, I lost that hand a thousand times. You just didn't see it."

Poker players are expected to be robots. But the emotional strain is significant

WHERE DOES TRITON FIT INTO THE STORY?

I was out in Macau playing cash games whenever it wasn't the first Triton. I'd heard of Triton, because I had a couple of pieces of people that were playing the original Tritons in the Philippines. But the first one was a $200K and it was just too big for me to play. I had my cash game grind going on and I was in Macau whenever the Triton Macau happened and I went over and I played a couple of tournaments. I knew it was different. I'd already met and played with Paul and Richard from like the Philippines games and seeing them also at EPT High Rollers and stuff. But I knew Triton was different because it was just a much higher end experience immediately. I was like, what is going on? I felt like I was in a crazy movie and I liked the vibe. It just had a buzz to it.

Not only did it feel high stakes, but it also just felt special. And at that time, I obviously didn't know what poker or what Triton was going to become to me. 

The reason that Triton is different to me is because it's the poker brand where it just feels cool. It feels like you're in a movie, it feels like you're part of something big, and I've always loved that. I like that, like getting excited. You walk into this room and the sets are extravagant, but also the competition is incredible. If you want to be tested, go ahead, go to a Triton and you're going to get a taste. You're going to play the best players in the world. You're going to play the most fearless players in the world. There's nowhere like it. If you're going to make a poker movie and it's about poker tournaments, it has to be about Triton because you see these dudes walk in and you're just like, where on planet earth did this guy come from? He can play any stakes in the world. It doesn't matter.

I've just always loved that buzz. And I didn't realize that I was going to become a part of it. I knew I loved to be in it, but then I was just talking with Paul and Richard and even Ivan [Leow] and Darren, who's Paul's son, and Wai Kin, who's Richard's son. And Andy [Wong], who at the time wasn't even the CEO of the company. I talked to Paul and I said, "Hey, man, I want to be a part of this thing. This is amazing." And from that day forward, I started really trying to be involved every way I could.

I've always felt like this is an organism, like this is a thing that is growing and I love it and I want to be a part of it. And it's just amazing. And the people here, it's just different. The people are legitimately my friends. I'm rooting for them, the staff, my competitors, everybody. And we're kind of in this insane scene together, which is exciting and exhilarating, but it's also at times really frustrating and stressful. It's just like I've just bought into Triton. I know people see me as a Triton ambassador, but honestly I represent it because it's a brand that I wholeheartedly believe in. And I've been honored to get to see and experience some of the wildest poker moments because of it.

Koon has 12 Triton Poker titles among his numerous high-profile successes

SHOUT OUT TO ANYONE ELSE?

I want to shout out to my brother. He's six years older than me. And ever since we were little kids, he's always kind of looked at me like I was a superhero. I can't really explain why, but I kind of started believing it. I just remember we would go through some really nasty stuff as kids and he just would always kind of believe and tell me like, nah, man, you got this. You're gonna do it. You're different. And so shout out to Mike for really instilling in me that I could be something greater than I was.

I would love to give a shout out to Paul and Richard and Andy. I know I have so many times before, but like not just because we're talking about Triton. Honestly these guys have been super, super supportive.