With 14 bracelets and nearly $50 million in tournament earnings between the four of them, there’s no denying that Shaun Deeb, Josh Arieh, Daniel Weinman and Matt Glantz are poker crushers. But with resumes that include a $1 million bounty pull, a body fat prop bet victory worth nearly the same amount and a win in the biggest World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event in history, it’s clear the group of close friends also have luck on their sides.
The four American poker players have branded themselves as “Team Lucky” — a name that Deeb may have come up with, though they aren’t certain — as a way of consciously embracing and owning their good fortunes while fighting back against the jaded cynicism all to common in the poker world.
But Team Lucky is about more than once-in-a-lifetime bounty binks and turned two-outers leading to $12 million scores. As PokerNews learned during brunch with its four members, is more about friendship, camaraderie, and shared values than a good run of cards.
Team Lucky Origins
Team Lucky, which we’ve created a special badge for in our live reporting chip counts, wasn’t formed in a ring game or MTT, but in an online gaming lobby.
“Back in 2017, we all started playing Fortnite together,” Arieh, a six-time bracelet winner and the 2021 WSOP Player of the Year, explained on the patio of Mon Ami Gabi outside Paris Las Vegas on May 28.
“We all started playing Fortnite and then found out each other were playing. And then we started playing. And we would play every day. And then Covid hits, and now we’re playing every day. And the Fortnite group grows. And so our Fortnite chat turns into a chat of like 15-20 poker players. But we always wanted to play together, and we had the most fun because we’d really just be really mean to each other. It was a lot of fun. We gambled big.”
“We were all friends in poker,” said Deeb, who is also a six-time bracelet winner and former WSOP POY. “I became super close with Dan, I was friends with Matt for a long time. Josh and me really didn’t interact much, but I knew he was close friends with Dan. And then with Fortnite, we were talking to (each other) for eight hours a day and they’re hearing my wife and kids yell at me in the background.
The four-piece got along so well that they “ended up creating our own second chat with just the four of us, and we would always play together,” according to Arieh. Their group chat was initially named “Original Morning Crew,” but they thought better than to associate themselves with the acronym “OMC,” a shorthand for “Old Man Coffee” in poker lingo.
“And then all of our success started coming together,” Arieh remembered. “They would make fun of me, saying like you’re so lucky, you’re so lucky. Then Matt pulls the fuckin’ million-dollar bounty, and then Matt’s the lucky one. And then Dan wins the Main and he’s the lucky one. And Shaun, we don’t know where his luck is yet.”
“I found a million dollars by losing a hundred pounds,” Deeb replied on queue. “I don’t think many people can say that.”
High-Stakes Fortnite Bets
Before long, their interests in Fortnite and gambling collided. They started betting on duo battles, with Deeb and Weinman, who wore black and gold “Team Lucky” hats during lunch, having an edge over Glantz and Arieh.
“They were so much better,” said Arieh. “And then Matt improved a lot to where he was almost as good as them. But I never improved.
“So just like poker!” quipped Deeb.
They were so much better, in fact, that Deeb decided to offer his friends 7-1 odds that they wouldn’t win a match. But Arieh and Glantz somehow pulled ahead in that match and secured a big payday.
“I guarantee you, at that point, I was the leading money winner in Fortnite history,” Arieh said. “It was before there were any tournaments or anything. I won more money than any living human at Fortnite.”
Like all good things, the Fortnite betting came to an end. “We did a lot of dumb side bets over the years, and now Matt has enforced a rule that you can’t intra-team bet anymore,” said Deeb.
“These two can’t bet into each other, because that creates a lot of problems,” Glantz said gesturing to Arieh and Deeb.”We had a lot of bad feelings for a while. But it’s cleared up.”
Still, bets find ways of being made around Team Lucky. Arieh said he would take “unlimited action” this summer on bets between Glantz, the only member of Team Lucky who has yet to win a WSOP bracelet, and any bracelet winner.
“Well, unlimited up to what I can afford,” said Arieh.
“Which is not that unlimited,” said Deeb.
“We Bring Out the Best in Each Other”
It isn’t the prop betting, on Fortnite or anything else, that sustains Team Lucky, but rather a shared ethos and lifestyle between friends.
“Nobody in this group really does drugs, nobody drinks or goes to strip clubs,” said Glantz.
“All of our goals are really similar,” Arieh said. “We don’t party, we’re family people … It was great for me because I was going through a divorce, and instead of going to the strip clubs and going to the bars and getting drunk, I’m hanging out with these guys every day. And it’s like, I couldn’t think of three better role models and people that I want to be like.”
Arieh, who re-married earlier this year, added, “I’ve changed a lot for the better in the last five years.”
“We bring out the best in each other,” said Deeb. “We aren’t pool hall degens anymore — sorry Josh.”
In addition to bringing out the best in each other, Team Lucky has also changed its members worldviews.
“Josh likes to brag that before I met him, I always got into arguments that there is no such thing as luck,” said Deeb. “My kids are trained, if they say something about luck they say there’s no such thing as luck, there’s only variance. And now, watching Josh keep having the success he has and reading his hand history, there has to be luck. It’s the only way he could be where he is.”
“So now he knows that there really is luck,” said Arieh. “So I changed Shaun from thinking there’s no such thing to believing in luck now. I’m very proud of that.”
PR & Media Manager
PR & Media Manager for PokerNews, Podcast host & 2013 WSOP Bracelet Winner.
