button in Safari"It Was a Dream Come True"; Toran Tate Rides Quads to a Big Stack
Win or lose, big stack or short stack, Toran Tate will usually be found with a big smile on his face and laughing at the poker table.
The affable Illinois native has only been playing poker for a few years, but it’s quickly become a love of his. “I love it. I love the people. I mean, I have to think about it as just a regular home game sometimes. Just to kind of get over some things. But, yeah, for the most part, it’s awesome,” he said.
“I just pretty much started doing some series tournaments like, probably, two years ago. It’s slowly progressing, but I enjoy how it is.”
Tate heads into the second break with around 140,000, thanks in large part to a big hand against Christina Davenport. He turned quad queens and doubled up against Davenport’s kings full. “I just checked, of course, just to see if anybody was gonna stab at it. The lady did, and I called, so I was thinking, like, okay, maybe we both have a queen,” he said.
“It was really crazy when the third queen came out. I just let her do all the betting pretty much. It was a dream come true.”
Tate has worked for the Marriott hotel chain for the past 25 years and is just a few hours of flight time away from earning his pilot’s license. He couldn’t make it through yesterday’s Day 1b, falling a few spots short of the money, but he’s well on his way to a big stack today.
“It’s been going pretty good. Better than yesterday,” Tate said, accompanied, as usual, by a big laugh.