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Originally Posted by 9hilikeabos
Good find!
If Sitton was the big winner who stayed, and Collins is the big winner who left, Tim Watts might just be the dreamer who stayed in the South a minute too long. He is a man of vice, but you’ll never see him with a drink in his hand, a cigarette in his lips, or his nose down in a pile of coke. His weakness, aside from poker, is coffee, almost to a ridiculous extreme. There are countless YouTube videos of him loading up on caffeine before a night at the poker table. He’s dreamed of opening a coffee house, but more than that, he dreams of making it as a poker player.
Once convinced he was going to Vegas to be a casino dealer, he found a poker game in Greenville and a talent for pitching cards. Before long, he was making a good living. Players considered him Greenville’s best poker dealer.
“It felt like freedom,” he said. “I was still kind of trapped to a job, but not really. It was fun. It was adventurous. It felt like I was living off the grid and sort of on the edge of society. All of us thought it was going to last forever.”
He made enough money playing and dealing that he went out to Vegas to live for a bit. Eventually, he came back to Greenville where he found he could still stay in the game. That decision landed him on Pine Knoll Drive the night Greenville’s poker scene became front-page news. The $100 ticket he got was routine. The emotions afterward were not.
“It was eerie, surreal, and an eye-opening experience,” he said. “I really just didn’t think that going to an underground poker game was worth it anymore.”
So, he did the only thing he could think to do. He’s back in Vegas. He hates the dust. He hates the traffic. He misses his mom. He lives in an apartment he hates, but he’s playing the game he loves in a place where he is less likely to get shot while doing it. It’s the only thing he can imagine himself doing. Nevertheless, he wonders what might have been if he went a different direction.
“Maybe I would’ve had the time to settle down, meet the right girl, and get married,” he said. “Or maybe not. Who knows?”