SO IT TURNS OUT that the new World Series of Poker champion is an Asian dude.

When Jerry Yang, a 39-year-old California psychologist, won the $8.25 million pot in Las Vegas on July 18, he’d only been playing for two years. Quick and studious? Five foot, three inches tall? Father of six? What could he possibly be but Asian?

Yang, a Hmong immigrant from Laos, bested the last player standing, another Southeast Asian dude, Tuan Lam, a “boat person” from Vietnam who was penniless when he landed in Canada. But don’t feel too badly for him. As the runner-up, he made off with $4.84 million. Not too shabby for an FOB in the WSOP.

So, Asians took the top two spots in a field of 6,358 hardcore gamblers. Are you surprised? If you’d ever spent 4 a.m. counting down a dwindling stack of chips at a Vegas casino, you wouldn’t be. If you’d ever been hissed at by a 70-year-old Chinese grandmother for “taking all the good cards” at blackjack and bringing everyone else at the table bad luck, you’d wonder why it hasn’t happened more often. And if you were an Asian who’d ever been to Macau, you’d be taking a crack at the title yourself.

Despite the “super-minority” reputation that Asian-Americans have when it comes to going to Ivy League colleges, becoming doctors and generally staying on this side of crime statistics, Asians do traditionally have one major vice, and it’s gambling.

And to hear the UCLA Gambling Studies Program, it’s not a pretty picture. In 1999, it found that a whopping 70 percent of San Francisco Chinatown residents said gambling was their community’s No. 1 problem. What’s more, 21 percent of the people who responded to a follow-up study said they thought they were pathological gamblers, and 16 percent said they were problem gamblers—another Asian-American statistic well above the U.S. norm, but this time it’s one no one’s proud of. Those memories of shuffling mahjongg tiles on the floor with your Asian grandmother don’t seem quite so wholesome anymore, do they?

So why do those complimentary buses to Atlantic City, Las Vegas and Indian casinos always seem to make stops in Chinatowns, Koreatowns and other Asian neighborhoods across the country? Maybe it’s because gambling’s part of Asian—especially Chinese—culture. Maybe it’s because casinos treat Asian customers well despite their lack of English or their low-roller status. Maybe it’s genetic. Maybe—and this is the theory we like best—it has something to do with Pokemon cards. •