Stadium High grad overcame years of addiction to become poker millionaire
When Tony Miles pushed back from the table at the World Series of Poker’s main event on July 15 he was $5 million richer.
The former Tacoman bested more than 7,800 other poker players in Las Vegas to take second place at the championship event.
For Miles, just getting to Las Vegas might have been a bigger accomplishment than winning millions. Two years ago he was at rock bottom, detoxing at his mother’s Florida home from addictions to alcohol and opiates.
He remembers clearly, he said in a phone interview last week, what he now calls, “The lowest point in my life.”
“I was so cold that I was under four blankets,” he recalled. “I was just shivering so bad that my mom was holding a hair dryer under the blankets, moving it up and down, pouring hot air on my body.”
The Stadium High School grad’s descent into the chaos of addiction — as well as the skills he used to reach big-time poker success — all began in Tacoma.
WHERE IT ALL STARTED
Miles moved to Tacoma with his mother and stepfather in 1999, just as he started the ninth grade at Stadium.
“I moved from Texas,” said Miles, now 32 and a resident of Ormond Beach, Florida. “I was different. I had a strong Southern drawl. I dressed differently. I got teased.”
Robert Walker, a classmate of Miles, recalled the first time he and another boy saw the new guy in the school’s courtyard.
“He was by himself, because he had just showed up at the school, and we were both, ‘Who is this kid?’,” Walker said.
He and his friend made fun of Miles’ cowboy boots.
“Even though we were talking trash to him he shot it right back at us,” Walker said. “‘Who are you to say what I can wear?’ We were like, ‘Yeah, you got a point.’”
They were impressed with Miles’ character.
“He would never fold, that was not his style,” said Walker, who now lives in Los Angeles and works in the entertainment industry.
Walker nicknamed Miles, Tex, and the boys became tight friends.
Miles wanted to play basketball at Stadium, but wasn’t good at it.
“The learning curve was just too steep,” he said. “My eye-hand coordination for dribbling wasn’t good enough.”
Still, he diligently played the game every day at The Center at Norpoint.
“I would always get picked last,” he said. “But I kept practicing and I kept working, and that really built the work ethic inside of me that I’ve applied and was a critical component of my success.”
Trying to fit in, Miles started drinking alcohol with other kids.
“The one thing that always caused me so much trouble was that I was so uncomfortable with myself and I was so insecure,” he said. “I was always trying to escape.”
He soon had a drinking problem. That, Miles said, led to “chaos.”
He got in to a fight in his senior year. A kid videotaped it and brought the camera to school where it was confiscated.
“They expelled me and they didn’t allow me to go to prom; they didn’t allow me to walk with my class,” Miles said. “It was heartbreak; it was all these emotions. It was really terrible.”
After high school he moved to Arkansas. It was the ages-old story: He followed a girl.
His drinking put an end to the relationship but he stayed in Arkansas long enough to complete two years of college.
His father was living in Florida and Miles enrolled at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.
“I started doing really well, but I was also drinking a lot,” he said. “A girl who I fell in love with left me because of the drinking,”
In 2008, he went to his first rehabilitation center.
“It’s just a terrible, terrible disease,” Miles said of alcohol abuse. “It runs your life. If you’re an alcoholic and you can’t control your drinking, it’s chaos. It’s madness. And it brings chaos to everyone around you.”
He went back to college but relapsed.
“I kept falling over and over and over,” he said. “My parents would keep sending me to rehab and I’d come home and I’d start doing better and I’d think, ‘I can have a drink, I can control it this time.’ It was just the disease lying to me.”
He had a single class to finish to get his degree but even that was too much.
“It took me a year and a half to finish this one class because I was in the depths of despair with this addiction,” he said. “It absolutely consumed my life.”
His family and friends supported him.
“They told me, ‘We love you. We believe in you. We know one day you’re going to overcome this battle and one day do great things.”
RUNNING BAD
Miles began playing poker while a student at Stadium.
The grandmother of one of his friends taught them how to play.
“She’s like 90, and we used to play in his garage,” he recalled of those good times.
“It was a two to three times a week thing,” Walker said. “That’s the way we all connected. We played basketball. Rode bikes around the neighborhood.”
But there were bad times, too.
During one game, Miles got into a fight with Walker.
“We almost got into blows,” Walker recalled. “I was like, man, this is just a game. He obviously looked at it like (it was) life.”
“I was so competitive,” Miles said. “I wanted to win. We were best friends having a fight over a game.”
He easily lists off the names of friends from those days who he still keeps in contact with, like Walker.
Others are gone forever.
“If I had stayed in Tacoma, I probably wouldn’t be alive,” Miles said. “It was a toxic environment.”
“Pills started to come into the mix,” Walker explained. “It did have a large grasp on people in Tacoma. The same reason he left (Tacoma) is the same reason I left.”
Many of the kids they ran with were on something, Walker said.
“We were relatively good kids with access to things we probably should not have had access to,” Walker said.
In 2003, just as Miles was finishing up at Stadium, online poker exploded in popularity.
“A bunch of kids from our generation who played video games growing up started playing poker on the internet,” he explained.
Players like Miles now moved from garages to online poker rooms, where they could play multiple tables simultaneously and quickly. It accelerated the learning curve.
“It made us very good and very fast,” he said.
“I thought poker was about luck,” he said. “As soon as I found out it was a skill-based game and you could have an edge, I was fascinated and consumed by it.”
He also made money at it.
But on April 15, 2011, a day known as Black Friday in the poker world, the U.S. Department of Justice essentially demolished the online poker world.
“That was ripped away from us,” Miles said. “We lost our ability to make our living.”
He adapted.
“All these poker players started going to the casinos and learning to play live instead of sitting at home in our pajamas clicking buttons on a computer,” he said.
The evolution from childhood games to online gambling back to live playing is what made Miles — and probably the other young men who played the final rounds with him last weekend — the poker players they are today, he said.
“I have this training from when I was on this computer that gives me the theoretical, the strategic, all the technical skills,” he said. “But then I was forced to go to casinos and sit there with people and learn about body language, betting sizes …I had to watch people play.”
It made him wiser and gave him perspective, he said.
“You don’t need to understand poker to understand its components,” he said. “Its components can be applied to other situations: Being able to set aside the distractions, to dedicate everything in your power to focus on one thing and concentrate on that task and accomplish it.”
COMING BACK
Miles traces his opiate addiction to high school. It happened quickly, as it does for many, with prescribed pain killers.
Over the years, like his alcohol addiction, it got worse.
“I had some shoulder surgeries from injuries playing basketball and I just started buying opiates on the street,” Miles said.
His drug of choice: Oxycontin.
His poker associates knew he was addicted and didn’t want him near them.
“I wasn’t physically able to control myself,” he said.
In 2016, he tried one more time to go off alcohol and drugs using a 12-step program, leading to the fraught scene in his mother’s home.
This time it stuck.
“I gained mental clarity long enough through abstinence from the drugs that I was able to get perspective,” he said. “As the fog cleared from my brain I realized that I had wasted so much time.”
He also found his spiritual side.
“I started having a relationship with God,” he said. “That was the tipping point that allowed me to move away from the drugs and alcohol and start focusing on the things that I consider important in my life today.”
Miles made up for lost time.
“Once I got sober, I knew I wanted to go back to poker,” he said. “That was my passion. I was hungry to learn.”
But he had another hurdle to jump.
Poker is always changing, with new strategies and skills.
“The game had passed me by,” he said.
A poker friend helped Miles catch up.
“We got to work. I started studying 15, 20 hours a week,” he said. “And it wasn’t just poker I had to learn. I had to learn to be independent and live without drugs. I had to learn to pay rent, bills. These are responsibilities that had fallen by the wayside and I was having to learn them at 30 years old.”
In 2017, he played in the World Series’ main event but busted on day two. He went to Australia for three months to live with an ex-girlfriend.
By that time he was making money again with poker.
A WIN OR A LOSS?
This year’s World Series tournament drew Miles and more than 7,800 players who put down $10,000 or earned a seat through satellite competitions with lower buy-ins.
He called the eight-day tournament “mental, physical and psychological warfare,” and compares it to a marathon.
“It was absolutely the most intense challenge of endurance I have encountered in my entire life,” Miles said. “You can’t sleep at night. You’re absolutely at the brink of mental fatigue and then you’re trying to use your brain to power through those conditions and accomplish the task at hand.”
Miles kept winning and reached the final day of play. Eventually he faced just one opponent: 33-year-old John Cynn of Indianapolis.
Then everything changed.
“The strategy changes significantly, the math is different,” Miles said. “You have to make calculated adjustments.”
In the end, the two played 199 hands of Texas Hold ‘em. They faced off for more than 10 hours.
Then, on the game’s final hand, Miles thought he saw Cynn holding a 10 of hearts.
Miles decided to bluff.
He went all in with a queen of clubs and an eight of hearts.
The five “community” cards, three of which would make up the best hands of both players, were the king of hearts, king of diamonds, five of hearts, eight of diamonds and four of spades.
Cynn was holding the king and jack of clubs, a stronger hand than Miles’ and enough to win the tournament and $8.8 million.
Fatigued and semi-delirious after hours of play, Miles had only imagined seeing the weaker card in Cynn’s hand.
“If I didn’t think I had seen the 10 of hearts, I would never have made that bluff,” he said later.
Still, he left the table with $5 million.
That didn’t keep him from being overwhelmed with feelings of sadness and failure. He considered jumping over a rail to flee as the crowd cheered Cynn’s win.
“I wanted to escape,” Miles said. “I wanted to run away from my problems like I had done so many times in the past.”
Then he had a moment of clarity.
“I was able to regain my composure,” Miles said. “No,” he told himself. “I’m not running away from my problems. I’m going to face this like a man and I’m going to be a good sport about it.”
“I walked back over and I did the interview and I was gracious in defeat.”
Days later, Miles had gained more perspective on his second place finish.
“It’s confirmation that I’m doing the right thing,” he said. “That sobriety has to be part of my life.”
Poker has taught him a lot about life and Miles wants to share his perspectives on efficiency, strategic advantages and streamlined decision-making.
“It can be applied to business, sports — a number of things,” he said. “If you train your mind to think in that way, you have a strategic advantage when you are tackling any type of challenge.”
Miles will continue playing poker and is looking to use his winnings for charities, travel — the things his previous life as an addict prevented.
His ultimate goal: To be invited to speak about his winning strategies before the Seattle Seahawks.
During several days of the tournament, Miles wore Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson’s No. 3 jersey. Wilson’s Christian faith and willingness to help people off the field makes him a role model, Miles said.
As for his multimillion-dollar payout, he’s hiring professionals to manage the money.
“I’m still not good with money,” he said. “I need to protect myself from myself. I need to have safeguards in place. I need my family watching what I’m doing with my money. And I need to be surrounded by people who love and care about me.”
He’s heard the stories about lottery winners, sports stars and others who have seen their fortunes evaporate seemingly overnight through reckless spending.
“This is a ton of money and it could be gone at the drop of a hat,” he said. “I’m not going to buy nice, fancy cars. I’m going to take this money and help other people.”
Miles’ friends and family are sharing the euphoria of his success.
“For anybody to make it through any form of adversity and reach that peak ... it’s just sweet,” Walker said. “Especially, someone you grew up with and know their story. It’s beautiful.”
Craig Sailor: 253-597-8541, @crsailor
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