Get to Know Winfred Yu
Winfred Yu is one of the players in today's field that may not be known to the poker masses, but that's not to suggest he isn't experienced in the game. On the contrary, Yu has been around for quite awhile and often plays the high-stakes cash games in Macau. Asia PokerNews caught up with Yu a few years ago to get his thoughts on poker. Here is a short blurb from that interview:
Hi Winfred. First off, let’s talk a bit about you. How did you get into poker?
I was born in Hong Kong before immigrating to Canada with my family when I was 14. I then went to university there, taking up math and statistics. So basically, I got something that was related to poker, so that’s how I first started playing.
So what was the scene like back then when you first started off?
At first, they didn’t even have any commercial casinos in Toronto back then because of laws and regulations. I first started off playing poker when they introduced the game to charity casinos about fourteen years ago. I had some friends who played a lot in casinos so I ended up learning the game there. I met players like Daniel Negreanu and Evelyn Ng because we played in the same rooms together.
After I graduated, I started working at a marketing company, where I got to work with some of the charity casinos.
So how did you eventually end up in Macau?
Poker’s been around for a long time in North America, although it just recently exploded in popularity thanks to things like big cash prizes, online poker, and the showing of live hole cards, percentages, and things like that on TV.
Because of the spread of poker’s popularity into places such as Sweden and Russia, I thought that China is definitely one place where the game can grow. I wanted to bring the game to the market and show that the Chinese can definitely be good at poker.
Chinese people like to gamble and at the same time they are very interested in a lot of challenging and skill games. Also, a lot of them are very good at math, so that helps as well.