Yosh Nakano has over thirty-nine years of experience in the poker industry as a player, high limit host, manager, promoter, and entrepreneur. His experience as the General Manager of the Hustler Casino enabled Yosh to serve as a liaison between casino management and players. As the High Limit Host at the Regency, Crystal Park, Hustler, and the Bicycle Hotel Casino, he has always been able to spread a white chip game (in reference to the color of the $100 chips used to play in the game).
Yosh also organized and promoted golf tournaments for poker players at exotic locations such as two at the Edgewood in Lake Tahoe, two at Pebble Beach, and one at the Ojai Valley Inn & Spa.
When the Hustler first opened its doors in 2000, Yosh formed and ran the “Corporation” that handled the banking duties for the casino.
While he was the High Limit Host at the Bicycle Club, he organized the sixty-four players for the $10,000 World Heads-up Championship. Yosh was invited to play in the inaugural NBC National Heads-up Tournament. In 2005 he organized and marketed his own online poker site called PokerBlue.
In 2006 he won the CBS Intercontinental Poker Championship consisting of the top twenty-one players from twenty-one different countries. That earned him a return invitation to the 2007 NBC Heads-up Championship Tournament. With pocket kings against the late Chad Brown’s king-deuce of clubs with the board showing 9 9 2 no clubs, Yosh’s tournament life was crushed when Vanessa Rousso screamed out correctly “deuce of hearts” for the river card, and there it was. One of the nicest and classiest guys in poker, Chad went on to finish 2nd in the event.
In 2009, Yosh had organized the Monte Carlo IPPA Championship which was a small field buying in for $250,000 that would pay $5,000,000.00 to the winner. His good friend Jerry Buss told him that at any other time when the economic climate was not at its worst; he would have found the underwriting. It was a mute point because in the following April, the Department of Justice shut down all the online sites operating in the U.S. Even if the underwriting had been found, the show would have to have been cancelled due to the pullout of all the major sponsors.
Max International announced that in the fall of 2010, they would be launching MaxOne whose primary ingredient was Riboceine. This was the technology developed by Herbert T. Nagasawa Ph.D. that Yosh had invested in to bring to the marketplace. Riboceine is a dietary supplement designed to increase one’s production of glutathione. Yosh researched the product and glutathione and starting taking the product as soon as it became available. Whenever he noticed a benefit, he would research it and found that science supported his improvements. The pain from neuropathy in his feet and the arthritis in his knees were gone after a few months of taking MaxOne. His allergies improved as did the seasonal congestion. It also seemed like his mental acuity and memory had improved but this was subjective. He formed IPPA-Max LLC to be a distributor for Max International. The product was a sure thing but the multi-level marketing model is not so easy. The difficulty is that even intelligent people are not open to the science of glutathione and Riboceine. Skepticism is their initial reaction. The benefits are not always easily discernible. Glutathione is very important to drinkers and the benefits from Riboceine can be more readily noticed the next morning by them. The ‘hangover’ industry is a billion dollars and Yosh decided to target that market with the RealHangoverRelief.com. In early 2015, the compliance department of Max expressed the opinion that it was not FDA compliant. Max products are in the category of a dietary supplement. Although no dietary supplement require FDA approval, they are not allowed to claim that they can treat, prevent, cure, or mitigate any disease. The FDA had categorized alcohol intoxication as a disease and hangovers a symptom thereof. Rebranded as AlcoholGSH.com, the site is now FDA compliant. GSH is the chemical symbol for glutathione and signifies the inseparable relationship it has with alcohol.
Marketing even the best product in an industry is very costly. An opportunity to produce a poker show developed into a Celebrity Charity Poker Tournament named the VIP Poker Gala. The future looks indeed promising for A Brand New World.