"Red Bull Robbie" Brings Big City Experience to Grand Falls
Back in the day, Robbie Thompson was a staple at the annual World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Not only that, he was a fixture on the poker circuit.
So how did the man, who hails from nearby Egan, South Dakota (Pop. 720) and still lives in the same house he did when he was just three years old, get to such a spot in the poker world?
In 1993, Thompson, who used to work manual labor, took a job as a blackjack dealer.
“After a couple years in the pit, I made my move to poker,” Thompson previously said in an interview with CardsChat. “I was leaving my shift one day and my manager asked if I would deal poker that night. She knew that I played, so without any training I sat in the box to a 7-Card Stud hi-lo game and the rest is history.”
Eventually, around 2002, Thompson became a traveling dealer and worked his first WSOP in 2004. Two more years of experience saw him dealing the WSOP final table, and from there it was off to gigs on the European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour. In 2008, he had his chance to become the final table announcer of the WSOP.
In 2017, things came full circle when Thompson got off the road and Renee Thomas, the poker room manager at Grand Falls, offered him a job. As it happened, she was the aforementioned manager who gave him his start 25 years earlier.
Thompson has been using his big-time experience here at the Grand Falls poker room ever since.