Tony Ma

Birthplace
Vietnam

Hometown
South El Monte, CA

Total Winnings
$226,706

Hieu "Tony" Ma is not a man to back down from a challenge. Before he was even 20 years old, as a member of the Vietnamese Navy, he braved the seas of the war-torn 1970s. He escaped communist Vietnam and sought asylum in the United States in the mid-1980s. It would prove to be the start of a new life, a new locale, and a new profession. Once settled in the U.S., he found work as a welder and truck driver. His spent his off time playing the games of the day, Pai Gow poker and dominoes.

Those games, however, were not what would lift Ma to fame. Unhappy in the workaday world, Ma set out to make it as a professional poker player. With a modest bankroll, he went after the California card rooms and found near-immediate success. By 1996, he was starting to become very well-known. In the $5,000 World Series of Poker limit hold'em event, Ma refused to make a final table deal with the likes of John Bonetti, Johnny Chan, and T.J. Cloutier. He went on to win a quarter of a million bucks and his first WSOP bracelet.

Since then, Ma has won another WSOP limit hold'em bracelet (2000) and made the final table of the World Poker Tour's first season WPT Celebrity Invitational. While Ma has not yet managed to win a WPT main event, he has won millions of dollars playing poker of the course of his career. Making it in the poker world is not as easy as Ma makes it look. He knows it is a daily challenge. Still, he continues to meet it head-on every time he sits down at the felt.