Nearly going wire-to-wire to win $12 million, Gold introduced TV audiences to a kind of poker no one had ever seen before.
Now, almost a decade later, Gold looks back on the week that changed his life forever.
“Sometimes it's just your time and that happened to be my time,” Gold told PokerListings.com. “It was 8,773 players back then in the Main Event. There was almost $90 million in the prize pool.
“I wanted to win the World Series of Poker. Doing it on my first shot out saved me a lot of time and energy.”
Gold smashed his way through day after day, holding on to the chip lead all the way to the final table and the eventual championship. He gave the ESPN cameras more entertainment than they knew what to do with.
He talked some of the best players in the world into laying down the best hand or paying him off when had the nuts.
In short, he crushed it.
"I believed I was actually going to win it which is crazy, thinking back now that I actually thought I was going to win the Main Event,” said Gold.
“But things all went my way. I got lucky and it happened.”
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