Poker pro David Williams (pictured) won a card tournament over the weekend, but you won’t find it listed in the Hendon Mob database. Why? It wasn’t a poker tournament. On Sunday, Williams teamed up with Matt Sperling and Paul Rietzl to take the Grand Prix San Jose 2012 title in Magic: The Gathering.In a Magic game, two or more players battle it out using decks of cards trying to reduce each other’s life points to zero. As opposed to poker in which every player at the table shares the same deck of cards, each player in Magic has his own unique deck.
Decks in a tournament are typically either “Constructed,” meaning created by each player from his own collection, or “Limited,” meaning that players make the decks right then and there by opening booster packs and using whichever cards are contained within. There are various rules as to the number of cards in a deck as well as a deck’s composition, but we won’t get into that here.
Magic cards can be purchased at most retailers that sell trading cards, such as Target, or specialty game stores and comic book stores.
Players take turns playing cards from their deck in an attempt to hurt their opponent or help themselves. Cards can be things like spells that have some sort of effect on a player or creatures that can attack an opponent. While there are other ways to end a match, generally the goal is to get the opponent’s life points down to zero.
Williams, Sperling, and Rietzel (pictured) triumphed over 570 other teams, defeating Maksym Gryn, Lucas Siow, and Jamie Naylor in the finals.Williams was known as a top Magic: The Gathering player well before making his name in the poker world. He finished in the top eight in eight different Grand Prix tournaments in 2001 and placed in the top eight in the 2001 World Championships in Toronto.
Even with his Magic success, Williams has a big negative mark on his record. In that same World Championships in which he made the top eight, he was disqualified for marking three of his cards. It was found that those cards were bent more than others in his deck, making it easier for him to see where they were after the deck was shuffled.
Tournament judges determined that whenever Williams cut his own deck before the beginning of a match, one of those marked cards ended up on top. In testing to see if it may have just been a lucky coincidence, judges cut Williams’ deck themselves several times and were easily able to ensure that one of the marked cards came out on top. Williams eventually admitted that the cards were marked, but he claimed it was not done intentionally.
David Williams was suspended from sanctioned Magic: The Gathering tournaments for one year.It was during that suspension that he began to concentrate more on poker. He made his name known in a big way with his first live tournament cash, finishing second in the 2004 World Series of Poker Main Event. He followed that up with another runner-up finish, this one in the 2004 World Poker Tour Borgata Poker Open Main Event.
In 2006, Williams captured his first WSOP bracelet in the $1,500 Seven Card Stud event and came close to another, placing second in a $5,000 No Limit Deuce to Seven Draw tournament. He had several other excellent tournament performances after that, but the topper was in 2010, when he won the $25,000 WPT World Championship for over $1.5 million.
