How Did Bernard Huang Buy a Foreclosed Dickey's Barbecue Pit?

Friends asked Bernard Huang, then at the University of Texas in Austin, to take over a foreclosed Dickey's Barbecue Pit. The price was low because the restaurant was in foreclosure. On a spreadsheet, matching the previous owner's revenue would have made them money, since that owner was carrying financing costs they thought they could skip. Huang had a little over $120,000 from online poker, and the paper case looked solid, so they bought it. He tells it as a decision made from the numbers, before anyone had run the store. The restaurant became his first business and, later, his first failure.