Executive David Magerman says he had hoped to repair frayed relationship with Mercers

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By Gregory Zuckerman for The Wall Street Journal
April 28, 2017

As David Magerman counted down to April 20, a confrontation with Rebekah Mercer wasn’t on his mind.

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The Renaissance Technologies Corp. executive was anticipating the annual hedge-fund poker tournament that evening at New York’s St. Regis hotel benefiting Math for America, which supports math and science teachers. The event serves as an annual showdown among investors who rely on computer models and are known as quants, professional poker players and others.

He knew James Simons, Math for America’s founder and chairman of Renaissance, the Long Island hedge fund where Mr. Magerman worked, would be there, as would other Renaissance executives, including Robert Mercer, the firm’s co-chief executive officer.

It would be the first time Mr. Magerman would see many people in the industry since his decision in late February to criticize the role Mr. Mercer and his daughter Rebekah played helping Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Subsequent to speaking with The Wall Street Journal about his views, the 48-year-old executive was suspended from Renaissance without pay in the fallout from the high-profile disagreement.

Mr. Magerman remains suspended, but he chose to attend the poker event. Mr. Magerman and others at the event recently described what transpired to The Wall Street Journal.

For weeks, Mr. Magerman vacillated between desiring an exit agreement with Renaissance and hoping to remain. Recently, he and the firm had decided they could work together again, he said. Mr. Magerman viewed the poker evening as an opportunity to repair the frayed relationship.

“I was anxious,” he said. “But I wanted to reintroduce myself and be part of the culture again, to show I was making an effort.”

Driving three hours from his home outside Philadelphia, Mr. Magerman reached the St. Regis and pledged $5,000 to enter the tournament. Just after 7 p.m., he began playing No Limit Hold ‘Em at a table with about seven others, including Mr. Simons and Dan Harrington, a member of the Poker Hall of Fame.

Most of the approximately 200 players in the carpeted, second-floor ballroom wore suits or sports jackets, contrasting with Mr. Magerman’s jeans and open-collar dress shirt. He stopped by Mr. Mercer’s table, complimenting him on his suit, a friendly exchange that buoyed Mr. Magerman.

When Mr. Simons ducked into a side room to smoke, Mr. Magerman followed. He apologized to Mr. Simons for the negative attention thrust on the publicity-shy firm after his criticism of the Mercers. “I’m sorry how things played out,” he said he told Mr. Simons. “I respect you and want you to know that.”

Mr. Mercer, Mr. Simons and Renaissance declined to comment for this article.

Back at his table, Mr. Magerman lost some early hands but remained in good spirits, pledging an additional $15,000 for buy-ins to continue playing.

A few tables away, Mr. Mercer was playing against investors and others, including sports-finance executive Chris English. Mr. Mercer won several early hands, Mr. English later said. But soon Mr. English detected Mr. Mercer’s tell, or a clue that might give Mr. English a crucial advantage.

“When he has a great hand, he whistles patriotic songs,” Mr. English said of Mr. Mercer, referring to tunes like “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “When he’s not sure, he hums them.”

Seizing on his discovery, Mr. English won a pot over Mr. Mercer.

Mr. Magerman hit his own losing streak. Around 10:30 p.m., after he consumed several glasses of 12-year-old scotch, Mr. Magerman left the tournament. He decided to watch others play, including Ms. Mercer, a former Renaissance employee. The two hadn’t spoken in years, but Mr. Magerman said he hoped for a friendly interaction.

When Ms. Mercer saw Mr. Magerman hovering nearby, he said she became agitated.

“You’re pond scum,” Ms. Mercer told him, repeatedly, according to Mr. Magerman and two people at the table. “You’ve been pond scum for 25 years; I’ve always known it.”

Shaken, Mr. Magerman walked around the table to be next to Ms. Mercer. She told Mr. Magerman that his criticism of the Mercers’ support for Mr. Trump had put her family in danger, he said.

“How could you do this to my father? He was so good to you,” she said, according to two people at the table.

Mr. Magerman told her he felt bad, adding that her family had played a supportive role when he joined Renaissance more than two decades ago.

“I loved your family,” Mr. Magerman told Ms. Mercer, he said.

Ms. Mercer told him to leave.

“Karma is a bitch,” she told Mr. Magerman, he and another person at the event said.

A spokeswoman for Ms. Mercer declined to comment on this article.

A security member approached, telling Mr. Magerman to back away from the table. He refused, dodged the security and approached Mr. Simons, asking for help. Mr. Simons said he thought it best if Mr. Magerman left, according to Mr. Magerman and another person at the event.

Security forced him outside to the curb, Mr. Magerman said.

“I’m not denying I was a little impacted by the alcohol,” Mr. Magerman told The Wall Street Journal several days after the event. “But that doesn’t change what she said to me, or what I said to her. I didn’t start the fight, and I didn’t resort to the petty name calling like she did.”

Upstairs, players buzzed about the confrontation. Play continued and Mr. Mercer, rebounding from his earlier setback, was on a tear. Other quants—including Mr. Simons, Peter Muller of PDT Partners, and Mr. Mercer’s co-CEO, Peter Brown —exited the tournament but Mr. Mercer kept going, Mr. English said. In the evening’s last big pot around 1 a.m., he knocked out Mr. English.

“He might have been humming to reverse his tell,” Mr. English said, trying to explain his loss. “It was so loud I couldn’t tell.”

Mr. Mercer smiled and accepted congratulations from rivals, an attendee said.

Around the same time, Mr. Magerman was on his way back to Philadelphia. On Friday, his lawyers discussed final terms of a potential departure with Renaissance representatives though his fate was still uncertain.

“It wasn’t one of my finest moments, it wasn’t my intent to create a scene,” he said. “She pushed my buttons and I gave her a reaction.”

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Brandon Adams, who teaches behavioral finance at Harvard University’s Department of Economics, says some of the best candidates for Wall Street trading jobs are the professional card players at FullTiltPoker.com and similar Web sites.
“They’ve essentially been the survivors in the system, a very difficult system where 95 percent of people lose money,” the 30-year-old Adams, who plays at the site, said in a telephone interview. “Anyone smart enough and disciplined enough to survive that system is probably going to do very well in the trading world.”
An increasing number of hedge funds and brokerages are scrutinizing professional poker to find talent and analytical tools, according to financial recruiters including Options Group, a New York-based executive-search company. Susquehanna International Group LLP, the Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania-based options and equity trading company, uses poker to teach strategic thinking.
“Someone who has made a successful living as a poker player for a few years would more likely be a good trader than someone who hasn’t,” said Aaron Brown, a 53-year-old former poker pro who is now a risk manager at AQR Capital Management LLC in Greenwich, Connecticut, which oversees $23 billion. “They know to push when they have the edge and they know how not to bust, and that’s a tough combination to find.”
Skill Sets
Skills that define successful traders -- rational approach toward risk, speedy decision-making under pressure, discipline and a well-trained memory -- are the same ones that separate elite poker players from ones known as “dead money,” financial recruiters say.

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After the World Series of Poker started in Las Vegas four months ago, Options Group recruiter Simon Satanovsky said he received a hedge-fund request for online poker players with no financial experience. He wouldn’t identify the client.
“Before, we were asking about GPA or the Math/Physics Olympiad,” Satanovsky, a former Russian national bridge champion, said in a telephone interview. “Now, we’re asking questions about poker successes.”
Satanovsky said Wall Street firms and recruiters have been paying increasing attention to poker players as job candidates since 2003, when amateur Chris Moneymaker beat hundreds of professionals to win the World Series of Poker’s No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em main event.
The Right Game
Adams, who has taught at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, each spring since 2003, said disciplined poker players can be spotted on sites such as Full Tilt and PokerStars.com waiting for particular games, not tempted by those outside their area of expertise or financial comfort level.
Their self-control and confidence would be useful in trading where large profits are possible, the probability of going broke high and the competition formidable, he said. Adams cited as an example a trader who notices a slight imperfection in the way options are being priced, then works to come up with the proper bet per trade.
“In poker, people are used to not sitting back and waiting for the fat pitch,” Adams said. “They’re used to skirting the edge of ruin and they learn the tools of how to do that.”
Susquehanna has been using poker to teach its new traders since it was founded in 1987, said Pat McCauley, who heads the privately held firm’s trader-development program.
College Friends
The company’s founders played the game as college friends at the State University of New York-Binghamton. Susquehanna has held in-house poker tournaments to recruit traders and monitor decision-making skills.
The trainees learn to use information they see in the marketplace to infer what motivates others, helping them make better prices. It’s the same way poker pro Phil Ivey, considered among the game’s greats, makes bets based on what he sees among his opponents, McCauley said.

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“What professional poker players are really good at is taking this information that’s relatively subjective, quantifying it and making it objective, and that’s what trading is about,” McCauley said.
The ability to write complex poker algorithms, which either run poker Web sites or try to beat them, will get hedge funds interested, said Todd Fahey, a recruiter who specializes in quantitative finance at New York-based Exemplar Partners.
“There have been a few guys that I’ve placed in the industry that come from the poker software side of the house,” Fahey said in a telephone interview. “Two Sigma, D.E. Shaw and any of your larger computationally-based hedge funds are going to want to see people like this.”
Two Sigma Investments LLC and D.E. Shaw Group, both based in New York, declined to comment.
Begleiter’s Try

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The worlds of poker and finance often intersect. Steven Begleiter, who headed corporate strategy at Bear Stearns Cos. before its 2008 collapse, earned $1.6 million earlier this month with a sixth-place finish in the main event. Greenlight Capital LLC founder David Einhorn was 18th in 2006. The annual “Wall Street Poker Night,” benefiting Math for America, was started by billionaire James Simons, the founder of hedge-fund firm Renaissance Technologies Corp. This April, the $5,000 buy-in tournament drew 100 entrants -- 90 percent from hedge funds or other Wall Street jobs -- raising $1.3 million.
Even though poker players make good traders, they aren’t necessarily good with their own investments, said Adams, adding that he is almost “famously unsuccessful” as an investor.
“Poker players are lazy and they’re gossipers,” he said. “If you look at the way they trade, they tend to latch onto other people’s ideas.”

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Texas Hold ‘Em
One person who has chosen poker over finance is Joe Cada, who this month outlasted Begleiter and Ivey at the main event final table. Cada, who plays the game professionally, was first among 6,494 entrants and took home the $8.55 million top prize, giving half to financial backers Cliff Josephy and Eric Haber, poker pros with Wall Street backgrounds. The Texas Hold ‘Em contest had a $10,000 entry fee.
“As a little kid, I used to watch the stock markets day in and day out,” Cada, 22, said in an interview. “My parents always thought I was going to get into banking or become a stockbroker because I was really good with math and logic, and I was obsessed with money.”

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Cada said he plans to remain a poker pro. AQR’s Brown, the author of “The Poker Face of Wall Street” and a life-long player, long ago gave up the game professionally after a couple years of trying.

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“I eventually decided finance was easier,” he said.