BY STORMS REBACK

HIDDEN AMONGST THE LONG LIST of complicated questions you need to ask yourself before deciding if you have what it takes to be a professional poker player lies a fairly simple one: Are you capable of folding pocket kings before the flop? After mucking trash all day long and finally picking up a hand as pretty as that one, some players simply can’t do it. They tell themselves that there’s only hand they really need to fear and if their opponent has it, then, oh well, it simply wasn’t meant to be.

Now contrast that sort of submissiveness with the extreme self-discipline Tony Hachem displayed in the latter stages of the A$2,000 main event of the Australia New Zealand Poker Tour (ANZPT) event held in Darwin, Australia in late October when he mucked pocket kings before the flop not once but twice. Beyond the fear of seeing pocket aces, what drove him to make such bold laydowns?

As it turned out, he was playing to win much more than a poker tournament that day. He was trying to win the ANZPT’s Player of the Year award for the second year in a row, an incredible accomplishment and one that might make people forget, if only for a second or two, that he was Joe Hachem’s little brother and prove to them that he was a damn fine poker player himself.

Imagine what it must be like to be Stephen Baldwin. The Hollywood actor has done just about everything there is to do in the world of television and movies, but his older brother just happens to be Alec Baldwin, an Emmy Award winner and Academy Award nominee. Stephen wowed us with his performance as Michael McManus in The Usual Suspects, but his list of career-defining roles pretty much ends there.

Meanwhile, his big bro has forever etched his look and mannerisms into our collective consciousness playing unforgettable characters like Jack Ryan in The Hunt For Red October, Adam Maitland in Beetlejuice, and, most recently, Jack Donaghy in NBC’s 30 Rock.

Now you have some idea of what it must be like to be Tony Hachem. But to say that he and his brother Joe are constantly mired in some sort of sibling rivalry, well, that’s just not true. The two are incredibly close, although their age difference—Tony is 5½ years younger than Joe—has worked to make Tony the more deferential of the two.

“For the people who don’t know our relationship, Joe’s been like a father figure to me,” Tony admitted during a conversation with ALL IN. “I’ve always idolized him.”

To say that during their childhood and beyond Tony chased after Joe like a puppy follows its master would be a bit of an overstatement, but at the same time Tony rarely said no whenever Joe invited him to play cards in his garage. The brothers and their friends frequently played Seven-Card Stud, Five-Card Draw, and a popular Australian poker game called Manila. They started playing Texas Hold ’Em in 1999, often playing $50 sit & gos, but they didn’t get too serious about the game until 2003 after Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker’s Main Event. When the ripples of the poker boom hit Australia’s shores, the Crown Casino in Melbourne, which the Hachem brothers still call home, started spreading games of Limit Hold ’Em and on Tuesday nights it hosted a $135 buy-in tournament that attracted increasingly large fields.
Forced to quit his job as a chiropractor because of a blood disorder in his hands, Joe started playing poker full-time, while Tony treated the game more like a hobby. He mostly worked as a tax accountant and ran a café for three years, only dabbling in poker during his free time, but Joe’s victory in the WSOP’s Main Event in 2005 changed all that. After earning $7.5-million for the win, Joe generously gave his little brother a portion of his winnings, what Tony calls “a really nice present,” but Tony refutes the notion that Joe bankrolled him at the start of his poker career.

“He assisted me after he won the World Series, but would I call it bankrolling? No, he probably wanted me to use the money for something else. I was still pretty green on the poker scene. Through Joe’s win I learned very quickly what the World Series and Texas Hold ’Em was all about and saw the sort of money players could possibly win. I thought it would be a good opportunity to take my game a couple steps further.”

After having cheered Joe on from the rail in 2005, Tony decided to play in several WSOP events in 2006 and he ended up finishing 52nd out of 740 entrants in the $2,500 Short-Handed No-Limit Hold ’Em event. He has played in at least one World Series event every year since, but he has enjoyed most of his success Down Under. In May 2008, he finished second in the New Zealand Poker Championships, an impressive showing that caught the eye of an executive at PokerStars who offered Tony a coveted sponsorship deal. But like many of his accomplishments in the poker world, the arrangement was slightly tarnished by the hint of nepotism surrounding it.

“She saw that another online site, 888, was coming here and marketing and so was Full Tilt and so was Party Poker and she really didn’t care if I played poker or if I was good,” Tony explained. “I mean, she knew I was good, but the more important thing for her was that she didn’t want another site to badge me up and utilize the name Hachem.”

Hoping to live up to the expectations that come from being a member of Team PokerStars Pro, Tony stopped playing cash games and started focusing all his energy toward winning a major poker tournament. That year, he cashed in several events on PokerStars’ Asia Pacific Poker Tour, but it wasn’t until the following year that all his hard work finally began to pay off. By making the final two tables in four of the five events on the schedule during the ANZPT’s first season, he earned its Player of the Year award.

While it’s not the World Poker Tour or the European Poker Tour, the ANZPT should not be summarily dismissed as some backwater poker tour. In the wake of Joe Hachem’s WSOP victory in 2005, players from Down Under have improved at an incredibly swift rate.

“Australian players are very well balanced overall,” Tony said. “We have some of the best online kids in the world and now they’re playing live tournaments, which has brought up the level of play to a higher level. Then we have the old players who used to play in the World Series in the ’80s and ’90s. They’re still around. It’s a pretty good mix. I play with a lot of Scandinavian and Asian players, and they don’t calculate as much as Aussies do.”

Winning the ANZPT’s Player of the Year award in 2009 rewarded Tony for his consistency on the tour and validated all the hard work he’d put in toward improving his game, and yet the accomplishment was still frequently disparaged by those who felt he’d somehow taken a shortcut along the way.

“I’ve had people come up to me congratulating me and then behind my back they say, ‘If it weren’t for Joe, he wouldn’t have had that opportunity.’ I’ve gotten that in the States as well. I’d say 85 percent of all poker players are inclined to be that way because every poker player thinks he’s the best.”

As hard as he tried to dismiss such comments as petty jealousy, he couldn’t help hearing a small sliver of truth in them. While he knew he deserved to win the Player of the Year award, he also felt like his poker resume still contained a major flaw.

“My winning Player of the Year meant I’d been consistent. That’s what it’s based around. It was an achievement, but I hadn’t validated myself because I hadn’t won a tournament. I’d made a number of final tables, but I still hadn’t won.”

That changed in March of this year when he captured his first major title by winning the ANZPT’s main event in Perth, Australia. He earned $121,523 for the victory, but, more importantly, it confirmed his belief in himself, that he was a champion poker player, not just the brother of one.

“It was validation that I could win a tournament at that level. I played against the best Aussie, New Zealand, and Asian players that were in the country at the time. I was pretty emotional after the win. So was Joe. He was back in Melbourne, railing me online with my sister-in-law and my fiancée. He knew how hard I had worked.”

The win in Perth, combined with his previous seventh-place finish in the tour’s first stop in Adelaide, thrust Tony into the early lead for Player of the Year of the ANZPT’s second season, but in July he was overtaken by John Maklouf and Andrew Scarf. Coming into the final event of the season in Darwin, he still had a chance to win his second Player of the Year award in a row, but he needed to cash and hope that Maklouf and Scarf didn’t. When his two main rivals got knocked out within minutes of each other on Day Two of the event, that left the door open for Hachem to pass them in the standings. All he had to do was make the money. But to do that he had to make one of the most painful decisions in all of poker, tossing cowboys into the muck before the flop.

“I laid down kings twice. I still can’t believe I folded kings pre-flop, but in poker you ask questions, you try to gather information, and you make the best decisions, and that’s what I did. I was right the first time. The guy had aces. The second one I was wrong, but I had a lot more to play for. I had to come 12th, and when we got down to 14 players a player raised, I re-raised with kings, and he moved all in for 160,000, and I just didn’t want to risk it. I was playing for too much. I was two players away from winning back-to-back Player of the Year awards and I thought to myself, I don’t need to get involved here, I just have to make the money. If I folded, I’d still have 120,000 behind me, so I folded my kings face up, and the room just erupted. When I did that, I knew my game had come of age.”

Now that Tony Hachem has conquered Australasia, he’s looking to take his game to the next level by playing more big buy-in events abroad.

“I foresee myself playing overseas a lot more. I’ll be playing the Australia New Zealand and Asian Poker Tours. I’ll do the World Series. I’ll be doing the WSOP and EPT in London and maybe the NAPT in the Bahamas. Those are the events I want to be doing. I know the competition will be a little bit different, but I’ve played with some of the best players in the world before I became this experienced and had success.”
Helping him in this quest is a three-pronged support network that covers all of his basic needs. His fiancée Jessica, whom he plans to marry in the early part of 2011, provides him emotional support and stability. “I have to give her credit for my success. She made my luck. And she’s really supportive.”

He’s also become good friends with Shane Warne, the former cricket star from Australia who now plays in the WSOP Main Event every year. “Shane has been a good friend since 2006. He’s taught me a lot, not necessarily in poker, but how to handle yourself. Shane used to talk to Joe about how to handle success, and in some ways I sponged off it. When I started having some success, he said to me, ‘Tone, let me give you the best advice: Stay humble, and keep your close friends close.’”

But in the end he derives the most help and encouragement from his brother Joe. “I’m very proud of what he’s done. Him winning the World Series, I got just as excited and emotional as if I’d won it. Anybody that says to me, ‘Your brother’s an icon, but what have you done?’ Please, mate. I don’t contend with Joe. When he wins, it’s like I’ve won, and vice versa.”