Playing card games, and specifically Texas Hold’em, is one of my earliest memories in life. I must’ve been around 6 years old when, in a family game, I surprised everyone with my one and only Royal Flush. Of course I had no idea how rare it was, but I still remember the reaction of every adult in the room. Even to this day, some twenty years later, that hand is still talked about because it has never happened since. From the beginning, this game was more than a game. It was how I connected with my family. I was the only kid in the family (my brothers are twenty years my senior), so poker became the one activity where everyone I wanted to talk to, impress, or just hang out with was at the same table. Without exaggeration, it was my lifeline. I was born twenty years after my youngest brother and twenty years after my youngest cousins, surrounded by people one or two generations older than me. Poker was my gate. I never went pro, mostly because I didn’t even know you could become a professional poker player. But the patience, planning, and cunning I learned at that table I carried into everything else I did. Believe it or not, I never played poker with anyone outside my family until I was 19. That’s when I discovered online poker cash games and tournaments. I hated them. So I never played again. I especially hated the whole online poker experience. Every site felt off, the language, the user experience, the way money moved, the total lack of transparency, and sometimes the obvious cheating by unregulated players or even the sites themselves. It all felt like a scam. The magic I remembered from my childhood and teenage years, playing for fun around the dinner table, was nowhere to be found. More than twenty years after that first Royal Flush, I finally found a way to share that same love of the game with the world. Twenty+ years after my first poker game, I built White Sands Poker.

White Sands Poker

Texas Hold'em, redesigned

Texas Hold'em, redesigned