The eyes have it

Behind his glasses, Greg Raymer won the 2004 World Series of Poker. This summer, the Raleigh resident is back

RALEIGH -- From the back deck of his house, Greg Raymer has a view of not only one of the toughest holes at the TPC at Wakefield but an idyllic lake ringed by cattails.

He could have picked anywhere to live, and he picked this. Then again, he has a history of being in the right place at the right time.

In 2004, as the poker boom was approaching new heights, the corporate lawyer- turned-poker player hit the jackpot, winning the $5 million first prize in the main event at the World Series of Poker and the hours upon hours of ESPN airtime that went with it.

His lizard-eye glasses -- a souvenir from a Walt Disney World gift shop -- caught the camera's eye, and the fossils he used to protect his cards on the table gave him a made-for-TV nickname: Fossilman.

His well-timed win gave him a new career and new home. Free to choose a new place of residence, Raymer and his wife passed on poker destinations like Las Vegas or Los Angeles and decided to raise their 10-year-old daughter here instead.

"We said, let's just forget poker and find the place to live we would enjoy the most," Raymer said. "We settled on Raleigh."

Here, he relaxes, plays poker online and hits the golf course -- he's a 16 handicap -- on the rare occasions he's not making a big-money corporate appearance or jetting off to a high-profile poker tournament.

Raymer hit the big time right as poker was hitting the big time. He went from anonymous lawyer to the cover of Cigar Afficionado in no time at all.

"I probably won the main event in the No. 1 year in terms of getting publicity," Raymer said. "I think we had more attention, more coverage. It was either 2004 or 2005. In a sense, Joe [Hachem] is better off for winning in 2005 because it was 50 percent more money. But I might have gotten more attention out of it than he did."

The World Series had gotten a bump in interest after the 1998 Matt Damon/Ed Norton movie "Rounders," which featured a video clip from Johnny Chan's main-event win in 1988.

Over the next five years, casino gambling spread across the United States like a rash, and Internet sites replaced smoky card rooms as the place for novices and professionals alike to find a game. Poker, particularly the no-limit Texas hold 'em played in the World Series main event, had never been hotter.

ESPN jumped on the craze with saturation programming of the World Series, and the rags-to-riches story of preposterously named Chris Moneymaker only accelerated the boom.

A Tennessee accountant who started playing online for fun, Moneymaker won his seat at the 2003 main event in an online tournament, then flew to Las Vegas and won the whole thing.

His unlikely success convinced thousands of would-be pros that certain success awaited them in Las Vegas, all for a $10,000 buy-in. Raymer was there to collect.

A patent lawyer for Pfizer, he turned a $1,000 bankroll and part-time hobby into a second career at the Foxwoods Casino, only six miles from his home in Connecticut. He went to the World Series for the first time in 2001 and took his first run at the main-event title in 2002.

"I had considered myself a part-time professional for half a dozen years before that," Raymer said. "I had known for several years that I could have quit my job and just played poker and I almost certainly would have succeeded and made a living. It was highly unlikely that I would fail and go broke. It was also highly unlikely that I could make more money."

At least until 2004, when Raymer outlasted 2,574 other players before going heads-up against David Williams for the title. He still remembers looking frantically across the table on the final hand, trying to figure out how he had been beat -- only to realize his pair of 8s was worth $5 million.