A member of the notorious new breed of young poker pros who are winning—and losing—millions

Matt Marafioti is a mouthy, high-rolling university dropout who plays 1,000 hands of online poker a night
By Jason McBride | Photography by Dave Gillespie

This past September’s Epic Poker League No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em Tournament had been underway for about an hour when Matt Marafioti strode into the ballroom at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. Epic is a relatively new poker league, co-founded by Jeffrey Pollack, a former NASCAR exec. His mandate is to professionalize the game and promote its most elite players. The tournament had attracted almost a hundred such players, including superstars like Phil Hellmuth, Erik Seidel (the current top money winner) and Tom “Durrrr” Dwan. The buy-in was $20,000, but more significantly, in order to qualify, each player had to have made a minimum of $1.25 million in live tournament play. Marafioti was late because, for the second time in a week, he had lost the key to his safety deposit box, and the box had to be drilled open so he could extract his bankroll. When he did finally arrive at the ballroom, the armpits of his tight heather-grey T-shirt dark with sweat, he sat at the wrong table.

All of these missteps seemed to distract Marafioti. After he moved, with a hint of embarrassment, to the correct spot on the other side of the room, his chips dwindled quickly. He was uncharacteristically quiet, almost sullen at the table, while other players around him joked and deconstructed past hands, read their Kindles after they’d folded, received hour-long back rubs from the black-clad masseuses who roamed the room. The relaxed, joshing atmosphere was not much different from your average $20 home game—there was plenty of palaver about women, single-malt scotch and football—but it was miles away from the ambience in the public casino that sprawled across the Palms’ first floor. There, ghoulish gamblers, wreathed in cigarette smoke, ordered early-morning drinks and carbo-loaded in the food court. The dress code seemed to mandate pajama bottoms, shower sandals and sunglasses worn on the back of the head. There was a disproportionate number of motorized wheelchairs. Upstairs in the ballroom, you couldn’t smoke. The young bucks there—the average age in the room was around 27—exuded a healthier, brainier vibe. Know-it-alls ringed every table. The typical BMI was significantly lower. The never-ending, eardrum-eroding jangle of the slots was absent, replaced by the unmistakable chirp of chips—players working their stacks like worry beads—and the sporadic pinging of iPhones. Downstairs, it felt like Dawn of the Dead, but one floor above, it was something closer to the set of The Social Network.

Marafioti is 23 years old. Toronto is his home base, but he spends a lot of his time playing tournaments in Vegas and Europe. He is one of the more notorious figures in this new generation of poker stars, young guns who honed their games not in barrooms but online. Players who have, for better or worse, completely revolutionized the pace and structure of the game and who have made extraordinary sums of money doing so. Marafioti is a provocative presence in both online and real-life games, renowned for his high-rolling lifestyle, brash play and mouthiness. In his four-year poker-playing career he’s made more than $5 million. While 37-year-old Daniel Negreanu, the most famous player ever to come out of Canada, has reportedly made at least five times as much, Marafioti, in his way, is more integral to the continued success of the poker industry. Poker’s history is rich with charismatic characters—the steely-eyed saloon gambler, the suave Monte Carlo millionaire—but Marafioti embodies a different archetype: the poker genius who first struck gold with a laptop. The Epic Poker League now ranks him the 19th best live player in the world.

Only three hours into the EPL tourney, however, an increasingly glum Marafioti wasn’t feeling like a prodigy. He was the short stack at his table, and after being dealt a pair of jacks, he moved all of his chips in before the flop (the first three community cards dealt to all players). He was called by another player with pocket jacks, and they split the pot. Marafioti took out his earbuds—he’d been listening to what he described as “electronic-techno-house”—and put on a pair of Bulgari prescription eyeglasses. He’s a stocky guy, about five-foot-seven, and has the physique of someone who spends 10 hours a day sitting at a table or in front of a computer: a premature, sedentary softness that he tries to keep in check through frequent gym sessions. That week he was sporting a chinstrap beard that gave him the appearance of an Amish club kid. During a break in the tournament, he told me he was “still having fun,” but the look on his face, something like dazed exasperation, suggested his idea of fun involved more pain than most people’s.

At these 15-minute breaks, which occurred every hour-and-a-half, Marafioti collected himself in his room at the Palms, taking hits off a large bong. The league had given him the room for the duration of the tournament, but he used it exclusively for this restorative, nerve-quieting purpose. He also rents an apartment in Las Vegas that he shares with two other young players, a furnished 5,500-square-foot suite in the Panorama, which is home to many professional poker players. His apartment is blandly decorated with prefab, vaguely Asian art, a study in beige and brown. Littered with expensive sneakers, stuffed animals, video game consoles and, in the kitchen alone, three additional bongs, it sort of resembles Tom Hanks’ apartment in Big. The rent is $8,500 a month, and Marafioti, who occupies the master bedroom, pays half of it.

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