The Story of How a Quiet, Nice Guy Named Dusty Schmidt Battled His Swing, His Body and the World of Online Poker to Come Out a Winner. And How the USGA Just Might Bust His Latest Dream
by Darin Bunch
The nickname Leatherass conjures all sorts of images.
And none are very appetizing. Visions of crusty truck drivers and sun-stained bikers, or maybe that waitress in Mojave, Calif., the one with decades of desert stretched across her face and arms.
But what it doesn’t conjure is Dusty Schmidt — the fair-skinned, clean-cut online poker phenom with the quiet golf swing that matches his demeanor.
Technically, Schmidt’s nickname — or screen name, as it’s called in the Internet age — is Leatherass9, chosen based on a line from the movie "Rounders" describing a poker player who scratches out his living at the tables, “sitting on his leather ass.” And although these days Schmidt does all he can to keep his backside lean and mean (we caught him on the way to the gym during a recent interview), it turns out the notion of a guy sitting in a chair grinding out a living — a very good living — fits him quite well.
That’s because Dusty Schmidt is a professional online poker player. That’s right, he’s an online poker player. It’s doubtful you’ll ever see him play — unless you’re sneaking a peek on one of the world’s Internet gambling megasites like PokerStars or Full Tilt ... or you’re in his house for some reason as he plays multiple tables on multiple computer screens all at the same time.
No live games. No Vegas. No ESPN and the World Series of Poker for this guy. Just a lot of poker, hands and hands and hands of poker — more than 6 million hands in a little over four years. Maybe more poker hands than any person has ever played. And that repetition, combined with a solid strategy to reduce risk and an analytical mind that recognizes “edge,” as he calls it, has made him one of the most profitable online poker players in the game’s short but growing history, averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 per month over the past few years.
Not a bad job if you can get it.
Leatherass the Prodigy
But growing up, poker was never the plan. Golf was Schmidt’s future, and he set his sights on the PGA Tour from a young age with a work ethic to back up his talent. In fact, when you look at golf in his native Southern California, Schmidt’s game bore a resemblance to that of the kid who eventually took golf to its highest level — not only did Dusty beat Tiger Woods’ junior record of most tournaments won in a season (he took home 34 trophies, one more than Tiger’s 33, although Tiger pulled off his feat in fewer events), he also bested Tiger’s record low score by a stroke at the 13-14-year-old Callaway Junior Worlds.
He was an up-and-comer with the commitment and single-minded drive to give professional golf a run for its money. And he was well on his way, leading the Golden State Tour in 2004 when, without warning, his heart stopped working the way it is supposed to, sending him to the hospital and bringing his career to an abrupt end.
“It was pretty tough at first because I’d played golf 10 to 12 hours a day every day since I was a kid, and I’d done pretty well,” he says. “It was pretty much who I was and what I did, you know. I played golf. So when I wasn’t able to play as much, it was this moment of ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna do with my life.’”
But during recovery a friend turned him on to the fledgling world of online poker, and a new passion was born — a place where he could redirect his dedication. And make a few bucks, or more, much more, in the process.
“It was a pretty big transition, but the funny thing is that poker came along so quickly, not six months later,” he recalls. “And with the opportunity online that I saw to make so much money, that sort of re-consumed me.”
Leatherass Against the World
“I’m not really a gambler, but if I can find an edge, I’ll play for pretty much any amount of money,” Schmidt says after another smooth swing and iron to the green on a cold March morning at Pumpkin Ridge in Portland, Ore., where he’s now a member.
For a man who thinks in terms of edge and variance, gambling is little more than another line of work, a way to make a living — although Schmidt has made an art of turning online poker into a volume business instead of the traditional, flashy big-score gambling that’s glorified in movies and televised poker tournaments.
“In the beginning, I was just playing as much as I could because the poker sites had bonus programs — if you played a certain amount of time, you could earn cash bonuses, and I knew I could make enough from the bonuses to have a nice life, even if I didn’t make enough at the tables,” he says, referring to his days of smaller-stakes action, playing $2-$4 Limit Texas Hold ’Em.
But that’s a world away from the big-money No Limit games he plays today, where buy-ins range from $1,000 to $5,000 — multiplied by the 12 to 15 tables he’s on at any given time.
Still, even with more than $50,000 in play at any given time, Schmidt’s strategy is very risk-averse. “There are a couple of options to playing high-stakes poker online,” he says. “You can play big $100-$200 games, but then you open yourself up to million-dollar downswings. My idea was to basically reduce the amount of variance in the game by playing a lot of tables at a little bit lower stakes, but games where I’d have a much bigger edge.”
So he set out to average a $1 per hand, which might not seem like much until you realize he plays between 100,000 and 150,000 poker hands each month. Eventually, it starts adding up to real cash.
“I would say that for being a professional gambler, I don’t have much gamble in me. I don’t want to wipe out all my hard work on the chance of making a big score when I can make money steadily against amateur players.”
Speaking of poker in golfing terms, Dusty is happy to keep it safe, hit the layup and play for par. But to do that successfully, there’s a lot of preparation needed before he ever takes his first shot — or peeks at his first two cards, in this case.
“I do most of my work away from the poker tables,” he says, referring to his study of math, probabilities and analysis of the best times to log in and catch weaker players. “If there are a lot of players online, there’s a high likelihood that the games are going to be good. Plus, I know most of the regulars, we play against each other all the time, so if somebody is at the table who isn’t one of those guys, they’re probably a recreational player.”
And the pros feed on recreational players — those gamblers who pop in from time to time with a big buy-in but don’t have the patience to invest in long-term success.
“By playing so many hands every month, I’ve just seen every situation so many times that the decisions become really easy."
Leatherass v. USGA
The road to recovery has led Schmidt back to his first love, and these days he sees his job of poker as a means to an end — a way to play more golf once again now that he’s healthy and the USGA has reinstated his amateur status.
To that end, he spent much of the spring and early summer at the range and on the course, retooling his swing and recapturing the groove that brought him such success in his teens and early 20s. And when we caught up with him by phone for a followup interview in May, he was excited about the possibilities of playing competitive golf for the first time since his heart attack, especially eyeing the 100th Oregon Amateur at his favorite course, Bandon Dunes (“I love that place,” he said).
In the Oregon qualifier, he fired a 5-under 67, tying for medalist honors and setting himself up as a favorite to make a deep run in the event.
Meanwhile, the USGA was in touch with Schmidt regarding a YouTube video he had made and posted on the golf social networking site, www.10thgreen.com, which he owns with University of Oregon golf coach Casey Martin, a man who is no stranger to battling golf’s governing bodies after his successful bid to gain access to the PGA Tour by using a cart because of a degenerative disorder that severely affects his leg.
Schmidt’s sparring with the USGA was over something altogether different. You see, Dusty believes he’s the best golfing poker player in the world. And he was willing to put $1 million of his own money on the line to prove it, against anyone from Tiger to poker player Phil Ivey, in a series of golf matches and poker matches. And so he made a video issuing a Million Dollar Challenge, which brought an original warning from the USGA that should he participate in such an event, it would jeopardize his amateur status.
No problem, Schmidt said. “It was just something that was a fun idea, but my goal is to play golf, so I don’t need to do the Challenge. Plus, we hadn’t had any takers anyway.”
Issue settled, or so he thought. But on June 11, three days after the initial warning, the USGA again contacted Schmidt. And they had changed their minds, stating that by merely issuing the Challenge, he had violated the rules of his amateur status.
Goodbye Oregon Amateur.
Hello lawsuit — at which Schmidt has decided to represent himself.
“Since I have no profit to gain by being reinstated as an amateur, I can’t justify spending an exorbitant amount of money to fight the USGA and their high-priced attorneys,” he says. “While the USGA may insist I’m a non-amateur, their argument carries little weight considering all that I am doing to regain the ability to not play for money.”
He hopes to have the matter resolved quickly so he can still play in the U.S. Amateur and U.S. Mid-Amateur, among other tournaments later this summer, should the lawsuit go in his favor.
And he expects it will, comparing the USGA ruling to an “athletic death sentence” after the years of physical therapy he’s had to endure to return to competitive golf.
“This is a classic David v. Goliath,” he says. “The USGA arbitrarily and impulsively says a golfer can lose his amateur status with no progressive form of discipline, nor any reasonable appeals process or ability to present a version of events that allegedly took place. They have a guilty-until-proven-innocent system.
“In the end, the Challenge was just words. They’re punishing me as if it actually happened. In fact, I’m a hard-working, tax-paying American whose return to golf they’d celebrate if I had a profession they deemed more conventional.
“Deep down, I’m a golfer, and I want to play competitive golf. If I could play on the PGA Tour living in an apartment and just making ends meet, I’d do that over making $5 million playing poker. But right now I just want to play some amateur tournaments and have fun with the game again.”
Kid Leatherass and the 4-iron
This isn’t the first time Dusty Schmidt has battled the establishment.
As a young, hard-working pre-teen, he once went to war, golf-style, with nothing more than a 4-iron after the head professional at his country club changed the junior rules, effectively limiting the amount of time Dusty, then 12 years old, and other young players could be on the golf course.
“I told him, ‘I’m trying to be the best I can be, trying to practice and play as much as I can because I want to make the Tour, and you’re depriving me of that opportunity.’” Dusty recalls. “And my parents had already paid the membership, so it’s not like I could go join another club.”
So the pro put him to the test. “Let’s go see if you have a shot,” he said. And at the end of the round, the scorecard read Schmidt 69, Pro 74.
“It was a disaster for him,” Dusty says. “He went from hating me to really hating me and hammered the board for even tougher restrictions on junior play. And this went on for a long time. But I wasn’t afraid to speak my mind, even back then as a kid, so one day
I asked, “Why are you doing this? You know what, I could probably beat you with a 4-iron — I could beat you with one club.”
And the rest is legend, especially if you can find one of the members who lined the fairways that afternoon. “We played on a summer afternoon at like 4 o’clock — that was the only time I could play because of the new rules,” he says. “And there wasn’t a golf cart available for actual play because all the members had them to follow the two of us.”
But even back then, at age 14 or so, Dusty’s problem-solving skills were already working at a high level. He put together a game plan for the course, which just so happened to open with a few perfect 4-iron/4-iron holes.
“My whole goal was to grind and get up on him early and just deflate him,” he says. “So for the first three holes, I went 4-iron/4-iron to the middle of the green. And then I made one of the putts with the 4-iron, so I was 1-under early on. Meanwhile, he hit one into a bunker and left it in there to make double-bogey, so I was up by three early.”
So Dusty just kept applying the pressure, knocking 4-iron after 4-iron down the middle and to the green.
“I made a triple on one hole because I knocked it in a bunker, but I ended up shooting 74 — with one club. But I was banking on him shooting much worse than he was used to shooting, especially if I got him down early. He ended up shooting 77, so I got him by three strokes. He came into the office late the next day, and it was all over for him — within the next year, the members had voted him out.”
And, ultimately, the underdog was victorious. Although you’ve probably realized by now that with Dusty Schmidt’s mind, talent and level of preparation, he’s never really the underdog. Quite the opposite — he always has an edge. FG
Published in FG Magazine, July 2009
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