The poker bluff that changed Tolga Kumova’s life

There’s something about migrant parents and the struggles they experienced when trying to make a living in Australia that stay with you forever. For Tolga Kumova, his Turkish parents were the embodiment of hard work.

From running a fish and chip shop to driving a taxi for a few decades, Tolga’s dad was “a proper wog,” he says. At 15, Tolga had three jobs – at a car wash, a fruit market and at Safeway supermarket – to help contribute to the bills; at 17 he did night shift at a sheet metal factory during the school holidays. By 18 he started his own business with a mate: a car wash service at Doncaster Shopping Centre, which he carried through university. “Basically the money that I was earning there, I was just helping dad take care of my family. I paid for both of my brothers to go to private schools out of the business.”

He completed a banking and finance degree at Monash University, which wasn’t what he initially wanted to do – computing. But a strange twist of fate brought him there. Unable to get into a chemistry elective at school, he did economics instead.

“There's one teacher, my economics teacher, and he was amazing. He made me feel like I was destined to be in finance, in markets, anything to do with supply and demand,” says Tolga. “Years later, after I'd made it, I went back and tried to give that guy a hundred grand just as a gift, but he’d passed away from cancer.”

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The bluff and the gold

After uni he sold his share of the car wash business to his partner so he could focus on his career. He spent years in a “shit-kicking” job doing data entry for a bank, as well as “selling toilet paper and shampoo and stuff” at a stall in the Queen Victoria Market, while applying for as many stockbroking roles as he could.

Eventually he scored a job as a dealer’s assistant. “I think I went through seven interviews to get this job as a dealer's assistant, paying 30 grand a year including super.”

One day he asked his boss why he hired him. “Under hobbies you had ‘poker’,” his boss explained. Poker skills indicated he knew when to hold and when to fold. It meant he understood numbers, strategy and could read people.

“And I said, ‘What if I bluffed you? What if I knew that those were all the things that you would think, the second you saw that?’ And he goes, ‘you're scary’,” Tolga recalls. “I did bluff him. I had no money to play poker. It was all about ‘what do I have to do to get where I want and what opportunity do I need to open the door?’ And that was how I got into stockbroking.”

At the time, his parents were in Turkey, his mother requiring warmer weather for an ailment, and his middle brother had moved out of home. He was pulling in $30K a year and his brother Burak was earning about $500 a week, giving him $350 for expenses. They were barely scraping by and quickly racking up credit card debt.

One strategic lunch changed his fortunes and he was promoted to broker. “I think it was 45 grand, my first [month’s] paycheque as a stockbroker. That was like 18 months of [my previous annual] income.”

A year or so later his parents sold their house and entrusted the money to Tolga to invest. He was doing well, even during the global financial crisis, until the organisation holding the money went belly-up. He’d lost their life savings in one day.

“Dad was so angry… I wish I just wasn't breathing,” Tolga describes. “But my mum said, ‘Don't listen to your father, you are so intelligent, you'll figure it out’. She goes, ‘The money lost today, it's irrelevant. The day's going to come when you're going to blow the money you lost today for fun. And you can do it the next day and the next day and the day after that’. I went to work and I made my bankroll.”

Eventually he started specialising in risky shares like junior mining companies. He ended up launching the IPO for Doray Minerals, which became the richest deposit of gold in Western Australia’s recent history. He then spent nine months researching sites in Africa from Mali and Mauritania to Ethiopia, Botswana and Mozambique.

For a million dollars, he bought 11 dud uranium licences. “One of them had the world's largest and highest grade graphite deposit,” he says. “Fast forward, I raised 500 million bucks. I become CEO of this thing.”

Since then he has stepped back from mining speculation day-to-day and works as an investor and consultant. “I'm looking for opportunities every day. I'll literally sit at my desk and I get things sent to me by all sorts of people, all different industries. And I finance and I invest, I try and help put their management team together.”

But even though his bedroom today “is the size of my entire house was when growing up,” he hasn’t forgotten the people who had so much faith in him when he had little. At his 40th birthday last year he flew his family to Mykonos to celebrate.

“My mum said, ‘I know why you're doing this right now. Once upon a time, dad told you you were an idiot and I told you you were going to spend money like this and not care. You were just making me right.’ 

Hear how Tolga Kumova went from assistant to broker in one strategic lunch, and how a trip to Perth became the best investment of his time in Episode 18 of The From Thousands to Millions podcast.

Listen via Apple https://apple.co/3aPdB6z / Spotify https://spoti.fi/2RemJcX or wherever you get your podcasts.