Tom Joy made the trip to Durant, Oklahoma for the $3,800 buy-in World Poker Tour (WPT) Choctaw Championship thanks to winning a PokerNews freeroll on ClubWPT, and he’s hoping a poker legend will bring him some good fortune.
The 39-year-old from Round Rock, Texas entered Saturday’s Day 1b session with his sights set on a potential six-figure payday. On the first break of the day, he spoke with PokerNews to give us some further details about who he is and how he got here.
From California to Texas
Joy, who doesn’t play many live tournaments, is mostly a cash game player who frequents The Lodge Card Club in Round Rock, a town in the Austin area. The Lodge is the largest poker room in Texas, and is co-owned by Doug Polk, Brad Owen, and Andrew Neeme. But he’s also been playing on ClubWPT under the “tj6073” moniker since 2017, and he enjoys the online poker platform.
“I like the low risk, high reward. The action at The Lodge can be crazy. Texas heads up is like four, five ways to a flop every hand. So, I like being able to just kind of sit back in the comfort of my own home and not have to worry about the live aspect of it. And then they have some really cool tournaments,” Joy said.
Joy resides in Texas now, but he moved out there two years ago from Los Angeles. Similar to many California residents fleeing the state these days, he debated between moving to Las Vegas or Austin before inevitably settling on the latter. Two years after arriving in the Lone Star State, he took a job working on traffic signals.
“Basically any equipment at an intersection, I install and maintain,” he said of his current job. “I just started it. When I got to Texas, my background was in electrical, so that helped me get my foot in the door.”
Idolizing a Poker Legend
The Day 1b entrant at the WPT Choctaw Championship is hoping for a little bit of luck from a poker legend. Joy’s dog is named after a late great poker player just about everyone reading this article would recognize.
“His name is Doyle,” Joy said of his dog, who is named after the late Doyle Brunson. “I idolized Doyle Brunson, read his autobiography, and he’s probably my favorite poker player.”
Joy said he brought his dog with him to Southern Oklahoma, about a four-hour drive from Austin, in hopes of getting some good luck from Doyle in the tournament.
As part of his ClubWPT freeroll tournament win through PokerNews, Joy received a $1,200 travel stipend on top of his free buy-in into the WPT Choctaw Championship, which he used to rent a ranch house “about five minutes” from Choctaw Casino & Resort.
At the time of publishing, entering Level 3, Joy was sitting on 65,000 chips, up a bit from the 50,000-chip starting stack. Day 1b is the final opening session, and registration is set to close at the start of Level 9. Payouts will become available shortly after, which we will share in our full recap following the conclusion of the day.
*Images courtesy of the World Poker Tour.