The Time I Played Poker with My Dad at the North Korea Border
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It's a sunny and humid September morning, and I'm playing poker in the most unusual of places. More than 6,000 miles from my home in Las Vegas, I'm sitting on a wooden bench in South Korea's Imjingak Park, located just outside the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that holds the distinction of being the world's most heavily fortified border. A few miles away is North Korea, one of the most secretive and isolated countries on the planet.
After making my first trip to Asia to cover the Triton ONE series on South Korea's Jeju Island, and getting to spend some downtime in the capital city Seoul, I couldn't resist a chance to visit the infamous DMZ. It is the closest most travelers will ever get to the almost completely restricted North Korea, which Human Rights Watch has called "one of the most repressive countries in the world" and which since celebrated its 80th anniversary by unveiling a new intercontinental ballistic missile.
And when my colleague Eliot Thomas suggested I get a game of poker going during my visit, I bought the first deck of cards I could find and headed north.
Poker Outside North Korea
I signed up for a guided tour of the DMZ with my dad, who is the one who got me into poker in the first place. We were led by an enthusiastic young guide who used the 40-minute bus ride from Seoul to talk us through North Korea's history, from the brutal Korean War of the 1950s (which is technically still underway) through the current reign of leader Kim Jong Un, defined by nuclear proliferation and rampant human rights abuses.
The tour began at Imjingak Park, which was built in the 1970s to symbolize hope for Korean reunification. While our tour group consisted mainly of European tourists, Imjingak Park was filled with Koreans who carried painful memories of the Korean War. One elderly woman paid her respects by getting her photo taken in front of a monument dedicated to Korean families who were separated from their loved ones.
The park is home to the Dokgae Bridge, a railway bridge overlooking the Imjin River that ran through North Korea before being destroyed during the war. This is where the poker game would take place.
My dad and I took our seats on a narrow wooden bench on the restored Dokgae Bridge for a poker game backdropped by green trees, shrubbery and lily pads in an area with a unique and thriving ecology due to the lack of human activity. There were also sobering reminders of "how horrible the Korean War was," as one plaque put it, including bullet holes that decorated concrete pillars of the bombed-out railway.
Figuring the slim bench would make flop games difficult, I took out the playing cards, Korea-themed, and began dealing 2-7 Triple Draw. Adding to the theme, we played with souvenir North Korean currency we got at the park gift shop, as well as poker chips from a Seoul casino.
With only a few minutes to spare before needing to get back on the tour bus, I quickly dealt a best-of-five-hands heads-up match. The first hand went my way as my dad couldn't outdraw a ten-seven I made after the second draw.
My dad won the second hand by patting down an eighty-five, while it was me who won the next hand with a pat eighty-five. My dad evened things out in the fourth hand as I drew an ace to lose to his ten-seven.
I shuffled and dealt out the final hand, drawing two as my dad drew one, then taking one more card as my dad stood pat. The same action took place on the final draw and I made a ninety-six to beat my dad's ten and win the match.
There's a poignant irony that this bonding experience with my dad took place on the grounds of a brutal 20th-century war that separated millions of Korean families. But this familial connection over a shared tradition like poker seemed fitting at a site that symbolizes hope for eventual Korean reunification.
After I posed for a winner's photo with my 5,060 North Korean Won, we headed back to our tour bus for an even closer look at the isolated regime.
A Glimpse Into North Korea
We left Imjingak Park and officially entered the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), where a South Korean guard inspected our passports and reviewed the passenger list before signaling for us to proceed north.
Our first stop in the DMZ was the Third Tunnel of Aggression, one of four incomplete tunnels allegedly dug by North Korean soldiers in an attempt to invade the south. We put on safety helmets and passed through a metal detector before descending a damp cave that led us to the closest spot you can get to North Korea without entering it.
The tour then took us to the Dora Observatory, a raised structure where we used telescopes to get a glimpse at the reclusive North Korea, including Songaksan Mountain, endless stretches of green hillside, and the Kijong-dong village lined with what is widely believed to be hollow buildings.
Poker is unlikely to play much of a role in daily life in North Korea, a country run as a totalitarian dictatorship that regularly violates human rights and prohibits any interaction with the outside world. However, a 2018 report alleged that North Korean hackers were cheating at online poker, with Axios reporting that the regime "relies on money from cyber crimes to compensate for sanctions."
South Korea, meanwhile, offers several places for tourists to play poker I was sure to check out one of these spots during my visit to Seoul as I went to Paradise Casino Walkerhill, where I found the equivalent of a $1/$2 game in South Korean Won (KRW) and was able to grind up a few hundred dollars in profit.
The game was both profitable and enjoyable, but it's the outdoor heads-up match at the world's most fortified border that I'll always remember.
