[Nick Rivers]

Immigrants in America tend to be among the best and brightest from their country of origin. It takes a lot of smarts to not only survive in Vietnam, but to be successful enough to get to America. This kind of survival instinct and natural intelligence is a great bonus when it comes to poker.

I should note, too, that Vietnamese tend to naturally excel in other areas of gambling as well. I have routinely seen them finding advantages at blackjack, slots, and video poker, probably without ever having read a book on the games in question. They find machines with errant pays, or figure out how to make money at bankable slots, or find table games where errant procedures can be exploited for a player advantage. Most people are oblivious to these sorts of opportunities when they walk through a casino, but plenty of Vietnamese people figure out edges. This implies there is probably something fundamentally different about the Vietnamese outlook on gambling than the American outlook. In America, we grow up learning "the house always wins" and "gambling is bad." This is probably not the case in Vietnam, where "the house" is just another corporation and, as anyone can tell you, every corporation has its leaks. If you're inclined to be vigilant about these leaks all the time, you will find them where complacent first-worlders don't. The same goes for poker, where every player has a leak, and where the game itself is not bad or good, just a game. They are not plagued by the guilt and disapproval that comes with gambling, and they are not prone to self-defeating psychoses that can subconsciously disrupt the ability of the western gambler to make optimal decisions.

Of all the ethnicities I commonly see in the gambling world, I have to give the most props to the Vietnamese success stories. These are generally self-made people who have come up from a tough background and survived on their personal resources and wits. Some of the toughest live opposition I've encountered has been from Vietnamese players.