American PokerPlayer issue 1 by People Like You

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03/14 CONTENTS

THis month…

Game on!

THE PLAYERS editor David Tuchman contact@pokerplayeramerica.com

Welcome to American PokerPlayer, a brand new mag that celebrates the world’s greatest game. Each issue we’ll bring you the best news, interviews and strategy from the greatest writers and players in the business. We’ll also be here after every bad beat you suffer to remind you why you play the game. I had my own personal wake-up call recently… It was 3.15am when Ish came barreling in through the basement door. He was supposed to be back hours ago, but he’d been at a 25-year high-school reunion. Nonetheless, Ish was back, drunk, and ready to gamble. ‘Give me a hundred. I’m all in.’ This, before he received his cards. Playing with Quachy, Panda, Ryan, and the others reassured me that poker is doing just fine. 16 guys came to play and while they all wanted to win, the money was secondary. The food, the competition and most of all, the laughter, is what brings them together. It was the same impetus for my dad’s home game 30 years ago. We drive down to casinos, sit with strangers, put on our headphones and on occasion, forget why we play poker. The fun and excitement it brings us. It’s the reason I play and it’s the reason that when I woke up to an offer to be the editor of American PokerPlayer, I couldn’t agree fast enough! Yes, this mag aims to make you a better player. But most of all, we’re here to remind you – win or lose – just how much fun it all is! I hope you enjoy the ride… T.S. Eliot

editor

Even Tuck can forget to smile at the poker table

BRIAN RAST

David tuchman

editorial director Dave Woods dave.woods@plyp.co.uk editorial consultant Ross Jarvis art director Marc Southey Production editor Scott Skinner Online editor Nick Pryce THE hustlers Brian Rast, CardRunners.com, Conlan Ma, David Docherty, Howard Swains, Jason Koon, Julian Rogers, Marco Valerio, Matt Moore, Simon Hemsworth Advertising

Tim Farthing +44 20 3176 6982 +44 7939 106213

jason koon

matt moore

With over 40 live cashes and almost $2.5m in tournament winnings, Jason Koon knows about big scores. He also knows that it’s not the results but the process that’s important. He says, ‘If you didn’t think you sucked six months ago, you’re not working hard enough.’ He’s here to help you reach the top.

Matt Moore made the move to Vegas and chronicled every step along the way. He ‘writes for the grinders, for the passionate, and for anybody who’s ever had a dream.’ He says of Vegas, ‘While I may leave broke, I’ll know I gave it a shot. As T.S. Eliot said, “Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.”’

tim.farthing@plyp.co.uk people like you Publishing

With two WSOP bracelets, nearly $6m in live cashes and a reputation for killing the biggest cash games in the world, Brian Rast hasn’t joined us for the money! His passion for the game is apparent every second you speak to him. He’s also a very contented family guy and talks about the importance of balance in his first column for us.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE Before playing at a gaming site you must ensure you meet all the age and regulatory requirements before placing a wager.

Publisher Tim Farthing editorial director Dave Woods

AMERICAN POKERPLAYER is published bi-monthly by People Like You Publishing (Gibraltar) Ltd, 3.3 Waterport Place, 2 Europort Avenue, Gibraltar. Entire contents © People Like You Publishing (Gibraltar) Ltd.

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contents

It’s amazing what $18m will do for your confidence!

6 poker news Phil Ivey is back to winning ways at the Aussie Millions

Strategy 36 five MTT moves Add these to your tournament arsenal

9 a kid with a dream Matt Moore asks the pros to stop tapping the glass

40 the joy of sets Make the most of poker’s most wanted threesome

10 Livin’ it up A resurgent Liv Boeree on her return to form in 2014

42 pokerplayer quiz Do you have what it takes to prosper in the early stages of MTTs?

11 poker is boom! The state of poker and the return of the online game

44 the perfect start The ultimate way to play suited connectors

12 best of the web The top videos, blogs and forum posts this month

48 the life of a poker player Haseeb Qureshi on what it takes to be a pro

16 raising the bar America’s biggest and best bar poker league

52 pokersnowie Introducing the world’s most powerful coaching tool

17 snapchat We talk to Kristy Arnett

56 jason koon Focus on the process

18 Antonio Esfandiari The Magician on doing a historic double at this year’s Big One for One Drop

24 rank and File Alexandre Dreyfus and the Global Poker Index

28 the swings of life Greg Merson on his greatest ups and downs 30 poker legends Barry Greenstein looks back at High Stakes Poker

58 cardrunners Experiment if you want to be one of the best 62 Brian rast How you can balance a family life and poker career

Barry Greenstein relives some classic High Stakes Poker moments

Twitter: Follow us @PokerPlayerUS Web: www.PokerPlayerAmerica.com for updates from the poker world Facebook: Like us at facebook.com/ pokerplayeramerica

Subscribe to

57 Your call Top pro Karl Mahrenholz with a tricky real-life hand

How to be a poker player explained

63 gpi rankings The world’s top players

ONLINE Check out our awesome website!

see page 34 for more details March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 5

SHUFFLE NEWS

VIEWS

Ivey’s A$4m win is the biggest single score of his career

GOSSIP

Ivey tops the league

pokerasiapacific.com

Phil Ivey, Yevgeniy Timoshenko and Mike McDonald are among the high rolling winners at the Aussie Millions At almost any poker festival it’s the main event that gets the most people talking. One exception to that rule was this year’s Aussie Millions, once again taking place at the Crown Casino in sunny Melbourne. Instead two high roller events completely stole the spotlight – and started a debate. The first was the A$100,000 Challenge, which drew a huge field of 76 entries, including 37 re-entries. That was up from just 22 entries in 2013, showing the poker economy Down Under is doing just fine. While A$100k is a substantial investment for most people, it didn’t deter Isaac Haxton from firing six – yes, six – bullets at the A$100k Challenge. Despite all that effort, he could still only muster a 39th place finish. Predictably, the final table was big on star power with Daniel Negreanu (sixth, A$500k), Patrik Antonius (fifth, A$700k) and Erik Seidel (third,

Phil Ivey saw off Isaac Haxton heads-up

A$1.07 million) all making deep runs. Heads-up was between Yevgeniy Timoshenko and Mike McDonald, who was coming off a second place finish at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. McDonald played the bridesmaid here too, his T♥-7♥ no good against Timoshenko’s K♦-Q♠ in the final hand. The A$2m score was Timoshenko’s best since winning the WPT Championship in 2009.

Enter Phil Ivey Last issue we reported on a quote from Jordan Belfort-wannabe Dan Bilzerian, who said Tom Dwan and Phil Ivey were ‘broke’. After both made the final table of the LK Boutique $250,000 Challenge it proved that rumors of their demise were highly premature. Dwan exited in sixth place but Ivey was in dominant form as Quoss, Negreanu and McDonald fell leaving Ivey and Isaac Haxton, who fired two bullets in this (on top of his six in the A$100k event for a total outlay of A$1.16m!), heads-up. Haxton started with the chip lead but Ivey ground him down in typical style, before taking over when a triple barrel bluff by Haxton went awry, Ivey shoving over him on the river and forcing the fold. In the final hand, Ivey limped the button with A-6 and induced a shove from Haxton’s 8-7. Ivey called and an Ace on the flop finished the job.

Isaac Haxton started with the chip lead but Ivey ground him down in typical style

LK Boutique $250,000 Challenge Entries: 46 (including re-entries) Buy-in: A$250,000 Prizepool: A$11,270,000

FINAL TABLE 1. Phil Ivey 2. Isaac Haxton 3. Mike McDonald 4. Daniel Negreanu 5. Fabian Quoss 6. Tom Dwan

A$4,000,000 A$2,820,000 A$1,900,000 A$1,250,000 A$800,000 A$500,000

Haxton’s A$2.82m prize meant he got out of his Australian hole, while the A$4m Ivey won is the biggest single score in his illustrious career.

A bad example? While the A$250k event captured the imagination of poker fans, it wasn’t popular with everybody. Dan Shak took issue with the way players were still buying in early on Day 2, when a stack equated to just 12.5 big blinds. Shak accused players who did this, such as Daniel Negreanu, of ‘glorifying’ gambling and setting a bad example not only to young players but also in the eyes of the American public, provoking a spirited debate on Twitter. With the $1m Big One for One Drop returning this summer, the debate looks set to run and run. And the A$10k main event? Canadian pro Ami Barer beat out 668 players to the A$1.6m first prize. Compared to the action going on elsewhere though, the main event was merely a side order at this PP year’s Aussie Millions.

www.pokerplayerAMERICA.coM

The NUTS

The $10m main man

2014 WSOP main event champion guaranteed to win at least $10m!

The WSOP has finally released the schedule for this summer’s poker spectacular, and the headline news is that the Main Event champion will be guaranteed to win at least $10m, the largest first prize since Jamie Gold shipped $12m in 2006. It’s an ambitious move by the WSOP that should pay off with more mainstream coverage than ever before. As expected, the $1m buy-in Big One for One Drop also makes a welcome return. You can check out the full schedule at www.wsop.com/ tournaments and we’ll have a big WSOP preview next issue.

Eugene’s Crown slips Eugene Katchalov just falls short at EPT Deauville Team PokerStars Pro Eugene Katchalov came close to becoming only the sixth player to achieve poker’s Triple Crown of EPT, WPT and WSOP titles when he finished runner-up to Greece’s Sotirios Koutoupas at EPT Deauville. Katchalov was consoled by a €379,500 prize while Koutoupas won €614k. Three Brits – Oliver Price, Eli Heath and Harry Law – also made the eight-handed final table. Dominik Panka continued his incredible year, winning the High Roller to add to the $1.4m he won at the PCA main event in January.

full treats! Full Tilt players get refunds When the Full Tilt scandal erupted after Black Friday, it looked like players across the USA would lose their online bankrolls. Until PokerStars stepped in, that is. It’s taken a while for the refund process to kick in, but players started receiving their money back at the end of February. It’s fantastic news for everyone involved and the poker world owes a big round of applause to PokerStars for making it all happen.

The winner of the 2014 WSOP Main Event will be taking home $10m

Losing the plot

Gus Hansen keeps losing online in 2014 If Gus Hansen thought that 2014 was going to bring a turnaround in his fortunes so far he will be sorely disappointed. Two months into the year and Gus is, predictably, the biggest loser in online cash games, down $1.375 million at the time of writing. Familiar names headline the biggest winners, as Ben ‘Bttech86’ Tollerene and Viktor ‘Isildur1’ Blom lead the way, with $1.5m and $1.3m in profits, respectively. It’s still early days and fortunes can quickly turn around but, given that Hansen has consistently been one of online poker’s biggest losers, it looks set to be another long year for the Dane.

Hansen’s fortunes continue to spiral downwards in 2014

poker partners nevada and delaware team up at the table It’s the news we all hoped for and it’s come sooner than we expected. Nevada and Delaware have signed the Multi-State Internet Gaming Agreement, which paves the way for the two states to join together for online poker. Revenues in both states, but especially Delaware, have been low so teaming up is seen as essential for growth. And while it might not have a huge impact instantly, multi-state partnerships can only help the spread of online poker across the USA. And that is a very good thing.

Neil Stoddart

March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 7

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SHUFFLE Column

A kid with a dream Our new columnist and Vegas pro Matt Moore explains why sometimes it’s better if poker players could just keep their mouths shut

ith the 2014 WSOP FAST without hearing about his strategic flaws. approaching, I’d like to Have we reached the point where players take a look back at last who don’t mimic Lord Galfond’s ranges are year’s final table and subject to tar and feathering? Or was the how it resonated with my life. Back in overly confident Reiss just an easy target November on a slow Tuesday in Vegas for those not blessed as a variance outlier? I made a wager on that night’s action. In a day and age where the strength of I wasn’t familiar with the games of the opinion is directly correlated to the players, instead choosing my horse based followers on your twitter account, pros like on preliminary interviews. Seiver, Selbst, and Julius are the face of the Amongst the sea of rehearsed responses poker community, whether they like it or my attention was tickled by the curly not. And for better or worse, their haired kid from Michigan. A Christian emotional responses can have a rippling degenerate, his attitude balanced a unique effect on the poker community. Do blend of chaos and focus. ‘I’ll be most we really want an environment nervous because I want to win so badly,’ where players fear a he said. ‘Other people aren’t going to make backlash over their me nervous, it’s just living up to my own gambling decisions? expectations.’ And then he said it. ‘I do Chip Reese would’ve think I’m the best player at the table.’ rolled over in his grave I’ve been bluffed enough times on a if he checked his downswing and hero called enough on twitter feed on an uptick to understand the value November 4. of confidence in poker. If they were Haters gonna’ hate, but passing out Kool-Aid, I was taking Reiss looks happy enough my cup from the guy with the prettiest promises.

The people’s game Seiver continued his football analogy by comparing his critique to those of an NFL game, still failing to grasp the point. Joe Shmoe and Jack Black can’t watch a game on Sunday and try out for the Cowboys on Monday. The poker player field is endless and our biggest recruitment stage of the year is ESPN’s main event coverage. That is our time. I’m not worried about Reiss’ feelings. The kid looked tough, and no knocks at his ego are going to erase the $8.3m in his bank account. I’m worried about the guys who play for fun and for the love of competition. The guys who pay Scott Seiver’s bills. In a post Black Friday world, we as professionals have a unique opportunity to mold the shape of poker’s future. We can either pave the path to a competitive experience, or wager wars through ego until there’s nothing left in the water but sharks. Maybe we were spoiled by Greg Merson, the true people’s champ. Maybe now we expect our World Series Main Event champions to make fourbetting look smooth and crying even smoother. The truth is we may never have a winner like that again. This is poker after all – the best player doesn’t always win. And while most of us will never become ‘ambassador for a year’, we’re all given an opportunity, every time we sit down at a table or type out a tweet, to affect the game we love. Let’s tank before PP we hit send.

Do we really want an environment where players fear a backlash over their decisions?

Put a sock in it Scott Two days later, to my bookie’s dismay, 23-year-old Ryan Reiss was crowned the 2013 Main Event Champion. He rode that young swagger and an unmatched run of cards all the way to the top of the poker world. But not everybody was impressed. The confident Reiss was publicly punished by tournament professionals for folding too many buttons and not peeling enough raises from the big blind. Professional player Scott Seiver, one of Reiss’ biggest detractors, compared his heads-up match with Farber to a ‘Jags and Bucs Super Bowl’. Superstar Vanessa Selbst took it a step further by comparing the match to a ‘peewee championship’ while Ryan Julius tweeted it was the worst poker ‘he’d ever seen’. By the end of the week you couldn’t mention the champion’s name

l Matt Moore has been paying his rent, on time, since 2010. Last summer he bluffed off his first chance at a bracelet, heads-up in Event 30 at the 2013 World Series of Poker. Follow his quest at www. AnotherKidAnotherDream.com. March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 9

SHUFFLE Liv Boeree

Livin’ it up

A renewed Liv Bo eree has started 2014 in fine style

After a disappointing 2013, Liv Boeree bounced back with a runner-up finish at the UKIPT Edinburgh. We caught up with the PokerStars Pro to find out how she did it

During January’s PCA you did an interview where you talked about how bad poker was for you in 2013 (www. tinyurl.com/livworst). Exactly how bad did it get and why? I had a bunch of personal stuff going on in 2013 that affected me more than I gave it credit for. I couldn’t control what was happening but I could control how I reacted to it, so I have to take

responsibility for that part. It was a combination of that and the fact I just ran like sh♠t! I had a very negative mindset, to the point I was almost dreading playing. I started to focus on only the negative comments about me. Whether they are justified or not, those comments are always going to be out there. It got to the point where I had moments of feeling utterly worthless. Do you think that’s magnified because of who you are? Yeah I do, and women in poker get a very disproportionate amount of criticism. That’s a shame, but it is what it is and it’s something you’ve got to take on the chin because there are benefits that come from being a woman in poker too. How did you manage to break out of this negative mindset? It took some fantastic conversations with some really close friends to snap me out of it. They were like: “stop being ridiculous, take a look at yourself”. After some reflection I realised that I actually am good! I thought f♣ck the haters, looked

I couldn’t control what was happening but I could control how I reacted to it

UKIPT Edinburgh yers attracted 427 pla 10 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

UKIPT EDINBURGH

Buy-in: £1,000+£100 Entries: 427

FINAL TABLE 1. Dean Hutchison £93,900 2. Liv Boeree £59,180 3. Jason Beazley £42,430 4. Eldon Orr £33,700 5. Tomasz Raniszewski £26,430 6. Jacobus Visser £20,170 7. Michael Kane £15,570 8. Ciaran Heaney £11,060 at some hand histories and stats and realized variance just hadn’t been on my side in 2013. How important is it having friends who are excellent at poker like Fabian Quoss, Igor Kurganov and so on? It’s amazing, they are the best and much better [players] than me. They are close friends and such a great group of people so being able to discuss hands and listen to the way they talk about poker is fantastic. If I can take just a small part of the way they approach a hand and incorporate it into my game then it’s going to increase my game play so much. What has your terrible 2013 taught you? I have realised that I was putting way too much expectation on myself and I was my harshest critic. I live a fantastic lifestyle but I rarely took time to be at peace with taking some time off. I’d always feel guilty if I wasn’t playing. So it was a lose/lose situation and now it’s like a win/win! If I take time off I’m doing good stuff for myself and if I’m playing I know that I’m playing PP f♠cking great!

Dean Hutchison saw Boeree to take the off title

Rene Velli

American PokerPlayer: Congratulations on the result at UKIPT Edinburgh. Were you happy or disappointed you didn’t win it outright? Liv Boeree: Thank you! I’m happy but it’s disappointing to come second. At the same time it’s a nice score and a good start to the year. Annoyingly I got him [eventual winner Dean Hutchison] down to 20 big blinds and he re-jammed A-4 against my Kings and made a wheel. I just couldn’t win a hand after that. It’s been a great start to the year, I’ve played two tournaments in 2014 and gone deep in both [Liv finished 50th in the PCA main event] so I’m just so excited to play.

The big issue

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Poker is With new poker rooms opening and the online reboot, Marco Valerio argues that poker has never looked stronger At this year’s Aussie Millions the 2005 WSOP Main Event champ Joe Hachem gave an interview and said ‘poker is dying’. Without getting into the specifics (summary: the ‘young geniuses’ are too serious so now nobody’s having fun), Hachem’s remarks sent the poker community into a frenzy. I only play poker recreationally. I’m the last person to credibly weigh in on things like how difficult the games are today. Many people tell me that the games have gotten tougher. I believe them. Hell, I sucked too when I first started playing a few years ago and I’ve certainly improved. But I still like to play poker because it’s fun. I also spend a lot of time analyzing the gaming industry and reporting on important trends and developments. And I have good reason to believe the game isn’t just alive and well, but getting stronger. Here are five reasons why…

A comprehensive study of worldwide poker participation carried out by the Global Poker Index (see page 26) last year indicated that tournament poker participation has consistently grown in the years since the Moneymaker boom. Similarly, the WSOP continues to post record-setting participation figures year-to-year.

The most recent gaming revenue reports out of New Jersey, which recently introduced real-money online gaming, show that, out of all the New Jersey sites that currently offer it, online poker makes up over 40% of total revenue.

The state of California is getting closer and closer to legalizing online poker, and that will be big – see right.

Poker boomed when Chris Moneymaker won the WSOP

Casinos understand that having a large, healthy poker room is important. Baltimorebased casino Maryland Live! added a large poker room to its property last year and has announced a tournament series with a $1m total guarantee set to take place in March.

Casino expansion is on the rise both in the US and abroad. New York and Massachusetts are in the process of issuing licenses for almost a dozen Vegas-style casinos between the two of them. Think of all the new poker space…

er Joe Hachem thinks pok has used its one-time

To conclude by returning to Joe Hachem’s doomsday prophecy, I don’t believe it can be proven that x number of uninteresting people, young or otherwise, are taking a negative toll on the game. If anything, the surge of youthful interest in poker that followed the Moneymaker boom brought the game to unprecedented heights. Who’s to say it wasn’t ‘dying’ before then?

Marco’s minutes our industry expert with the latest on the fight to get online poker back in the USA l We have a new political force on our side. The Coalition for Consumer and Online Protection (C4COP) was recently formed as a counterweight to Sheldon Adelson’s Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling (CSIG). l At the heart of the political debate is whether or not individual US states should have the right to legislate online gaming. Adelson and CSIG are lobbying for a federal ban on online gaming, which would take away states’ authority. C4COP is pledging to fight that. l California is expected to give online gaming legislation another go this year. While the numerous gaming powers in that state (tribal casinos, card rooms and racetracks) continue to differ on specific legislation, the outlook for an eventual passage has never seemed more positive. Saying this, most see it happening in 2014 as a long shot, given that it is an election year and the issue is still a generally divisive one. Fingers crossed… l Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the leading online poker site, PartyPoker has awarded a $1m prize to the winner of its inaugural Next Poker Millionaire promotion. Players took part in a series of online tournaments that led to a live final table. Myroslaw Woroch, a local 40-year-old took it down. l WSOP.com has begun running online satellites into the 2014 World Series of Poker, via both its Nevada and New Jersey sites. WSOP.com is the only online poker room where people can officially satellite into the World Series of Poker.

March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 11

SHUFFLE the month online

Best of the web All the latest poker highlights from the online world

BEST OF BLOG S

Online legends Reliving the greatest players in online history

Chad ‘lilholdem954’ Batista Who? Eminem wannabe Chad Batista was an online MTT superstar in the years before Black Friday, winning over $2 million in tourneys to spend on gold chains and oversized white tracksuits. Where are they now? Batista is grinding the live mid-stakes tournament circuit in America with his best result a $166k score in an LA event this past January.

Vanessa Selbst Alex ‘dinner’s on me’ Millar loves the high life

Alex ‘Kanu7’ Millar After winning $2.6 million online in 2013, UK pro Alex ‘Kanu7’ Millar is firmly established as one of the world’s best players. Tangling every day with Isildur, Haxton and Sauce1234 sounds glamorous but, as Millar explains, it can also be quite surreal at times: ‘My favorite poker moment of 2013 came when my girlfriend asked me if I wanted to eat dinner with her one evening or if I was going to keep playing poker. I was two-tabling Viktor Blom heads-up at 400/800. We both had about $120k at each table, and we were in the middle of playing a big pot on both tables. “Hang on” I said. I went all-in on one table and then all-in on the other. Viktor called one, thought for a while and called the other. Both pots shipped my way. “Nice. I just won a quarter of a million dollars,” I said. “And he quit, so, yeah, dinner sounds great!”’

Giant swings However, It’s not always plain sailing when you’re playing such high stakes. Millar was already down $600k in January 2013 when a certain poker legend turned up to play 12 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

early in the morning. ‘I was about to go to bed at 11am when Phil Ivey sat with me at 300/600. Phil is obviously a fantastic player….but at specifically HU no-limit hold’em he would be a significant underdog against me…unfortunately things didn’t go my way and I ended up losing $300k in a couple of hours.’ After becoming just another victim of the Ivey train, Millar found redemption in an unlikely target: Isildur. The two played plenty of ‘pretty swingy’ sessions but Millar ‘couldn’t seem to lose. I ended up winning $3.2m from Blom at 400/800 for the year. I undoubtedly got extremely lucky against him, but…I was certainly taking it pretty happily!’ After such a stressful start to the year and great comeback Millar has decided to invest in some low-variance stock options in 2014…just joking! Instead he’s been back grinding and has already dropped $600k to old nemesis Viktor Blom. Millar is nothing if not persistent though and ‘feels quite positive about the year ahead.’ That’s good to hear because at American PokerPlayer we’d be on suicide watch… www.tinyurl.com/Kanublog

A new year brings some interesting resolutions for the most successful female tournament player of all time Vanessa Selbst. Of course, there’s the usual boring poker one, ‘I’d really like to win an EPT Main Event’ (really Vanessa? So would we!) and more abstract goals such as aiming to live a more balanced life and helping out with non-profit work. Yet the resolution that really caught our eye was this: ‘I’ve been told I often look angry or perturbed. I’m usually not, but sometimes I’m off in my own world, so I don’t notice people saying hello to me. I really want to make a conscious effort to smile more so that my outside matches my inside.’ So if you see Vanessa around try giving her a smile to help her out on this audacious 2014 mission. www.tinyurl.com/Selbstsmile

Vanessa flashes that winning smile

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check it out!

Top videos on the web this month Thing I wish I’d done before just now: the cost calculation for how much I’d lose by not squeezing out the final 1% from the toothpaste tube” Matt ‘@hoss_tbf’ hawrilenko Hope whoever stole my crutch enjoys it. Didn’t know theives hung out at Albertsons. Fortunately, I’ve got plenty for back up. #timesaretough” doyle ‘@TexDolly’ brunson Completely missed the debate, so is there a God or not? Are we all in agreement now?” erik ‘@erik_seidel’ seidel Ya so at the time of this bogus macau story 36hrs ago I was losing on my macau trip, and definitely hadnt won 25 million in a session.” Tom ‘@TomDwan’ Dwan Guy at this casino, in the bathroom stall, doing what you do there, cheering himself on loudly. Priceless!” gavin ‘@nhgg’ griffin Tom Dwan definitely didn’t win $25m in Macau

What’s everybody’s high score on flappy wings. Tell me tell me.” jeff ‘@JeffMadsenobv’ madsen

Tweetin’ Out! The craziest pics and videos tweeted by the poker world

Daniel

Let’s be sharkin’ A sneak peek at new PokerStars TV show The Shark Cage is now online. It’s hard to tell how good it will be but the inclusion of 1990s throwbacks Tilly, Laak and Nguyen doesn’t bode well… tinyurl.com/TVcage Sink your teeth int o another poker TV show

Karma for Jesus Tom Dwan lives out the fantasy of thousands of poker players: coolering the sh♠t out of Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson in a high-stakes cash game. www.tinyurl.com/ DwanJesus

Phil

‘@RealKidPoker’

‘@PhilIvey’

Totally busted here, but have to admit this was kinda funny. www.tinyurl.com/ busted-dan

#TBT Same poker face, but what’s the price to grow my hair like that again for one year? www. tinyurl.com/ no-comb-jerome

Negreanu

Ivey

Jason

‘@JasonMercier’

Mercier

May 2005, Toronto! 1st trip outside the US. Just a 18 year old with a dream! Lol that hair tinyurl.com/ merci-hair

Bertrand

‘@elkypoker’

Grospellier Very proud of my beautiful girl @nojennyno who recently got her own spread in Turkish edition of @fhmdotcom! #sexy www. tinyurl.com/ yes-jenny-yes

Jesus suffers the pain we’ve all felt

You worked him It’s good to revisit the classics and this 2008 clip of a US Congressman’s son playing online poker is the absolute stone cold nuts. ‘I worked that guy! I worked you!’ www.tinyurl.com/nuts-son

Neil stoddart

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @PokerPlayerUS Go to www.pokerplayeramerica.com for all the latest poker news

Nice work if you can get it

March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 13

SHUFFLE NEWS

Crime and punishment The $2m guaranteed Borgata Winter Poker Open didn’t quite play out as planned, and it left 27 players out of pocket and many more unhappy… The poker world was dealt a black eye in January when the Borgata Winter Poker Open $2 Million Guarantee was suspended, and Were the right actions taken and could this happen elsewhere? later canceled, after staff discovered WSOP tournament director Jack Effel has his say… counterfeit chips in play. At the time, Jack Effel: The whole incident is 27 players remained in the tournament. our rules and enforcement techniques. unfortunate for all of us who love, play Payouts had already been made to We feel all these things are the best in and work in poker. What is important to everyone who cashed before the the business. We ban people from the understand though is that the local tournament was suspended but the WSOP every year for various offenses. gaming authority and law enforcement rest of the payouts are in limbo. We are on private property at the Rio officials got involved as soon as the Christian Lusardi, 42, of Fayetteville, and we have the right to refuse service offense was discovered. North Carolina, was to anyone. And we do. Simply, no one From this point it’s not arrested and charged with person, no matter who they are or what the tournament director’s rigging a publicly exhibited they have done in poker, is above the decision as to what contest, criminal attempt, game or the integrity of the game. happens. So, if we had and theft by deception. He We have surveillance of every table 27 players left at the was essentially caught and practically every square foot of WSOP and we were made because he flushed $2.7 space in our convention center, and we aware of counterfeit million worth of counterfeit know we would successfully catch any chips being introduced, poker chips down the toilet perpetrator(s). It would just be a we would order the in a room at Harrah’s matter of time. So I guess you could tournament stopped Resort and Casino in say that anyone who tries will get while we investigated the Atlantic City. The caught. Essentially, if someone matter thoroughly. discovery in clogged sewer introduced counterfeit chips at a Christian Lusardi was caught In Borgata’s case, and pipes prompted Harrah’s WSOP event and got caught, they flushing chips down the toilet as is typical with law to notify Borgata officials, would face criminal prosecution to the enforcement matters, investigations who made the call to suspend the fullest extent of the law, but they would take precedence at that point, and the tournament. And thus, the quest to also be permanently banned for life process runs its course. convince the general public that poker from WSOP events and our properties. players are smart takes another hit. The integrity of our events is of Meanwhile, The Press of Atlantic City utmost importance to us and we Why the WSOP is different reported that a class-action lawsuit has know it is to our customers. What I can tell you is that there been filed on behalf of the 4,000 are several major differences in people who entered the tournament. It l The 2014 WSOP begins at the WSOP tournaments, from what cites that the Borgata Hotel Casino & Rio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas took place at the Borgata. That Spa failed in its duty of supervision. on May 27. See the full schedule said, I don’t think you can ever at: wsop.com/tournaments prevent criminals from committing crimes or attempting to commit crimes. Instead we focus on our procedures, our operational execution and of course

Voice of reason

He flushed $2.7 million worth of counterfeit poker chips down the toilet at Harrah’s

Don’t try and mess with the WSOP – you will be caught 14 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

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USA’s best

card rooms

Pointers from a poker wife

Northern California

Fancy taking your game out on the road? We take a look at the best (and worst!) places to play live poker in the Bay Area

You can play poker and have a successful relationship – if you listen to erin GO bragh-less…

Lucky Chances

Graton

www.luckychances.com The floormen are professional, but we can’t say the same for the dealers – unless you’re looking for a misdeal. Games at the $1/$2/$2 level are ridiculously soft but giving you all $1 white chips to play with is LOL. $3/$5 NLHE is typically nitty and short-stacked (the average stack is between $200-$300). If you can, play $5/$10, the stacks are deeper and the fish give action. If you’re on a diet this is a great place to go – you won’t want to eat the food.

www.gratonresortcasino.com This is a new casino that’s opened north of San Francisco. As such, they aren’t quite ready for primetime yet – the dealers and floormen are inexperienced and make mistakes – but they’ll get there. On the upside it’s a nice room with great food and big games. The casino is great for those who want to play PLO. Once in a while they get a big game of NLHE going, up to $50/$100.

Several years ago, after more than a few margaritas, I awoke to find myself hungover and in a relationship with a prominent cash game player. I now know a few more things about poker than I did back then. So, for those of you who have married (or are dating) someone like myself, I’m here to help you tackle some of the challenges of juggling poker and a relationship with an actual human being.

Oaks Card Club

Rules of the game

Bay 101 www.bay101.com This is a great place to play if you like action and/or games other than no-limit hold’em. Bay has higher stakes limit games that are fairly soft, and it’s also great for low-tomid stakes NLHE ($1/$2 up to $2/$3/$5 Deep Stack). You’ll find almost no pros but plenty of wealthy Silicon Valley types. The floormen and dealers are great and there’s a bonus: they also serve food you can eat.

www.oakscardclub.com You would think with so much experience (it’s one of the oldest card clubs in the Bay Area) between the casino, floormen and the players that you would get better service and food. Unfortunately not.

Artichoke Joes www.artichokejoes.com Not good. Let’s just say this casino’s name (and the image created in your mind) doesn’t do this place justice. It’s worse.

Card room of the month

Casino M8trix is a superb place to play your poker

casino M8trix www.casinom8trix.com This is probably the best casino in the area right now. If you’re going to play here often (or want to get a seat quickly), tip the floormen and they will treat you like a king. The lists can be extremely long (especially at weekends) as they only have 14 tables. A $10/$25 no-limit game runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Fridays are best as all the Silicon Valley executives go to distribute some of their wealth. The food is good but you’ll need a thick wallet, or some run-good.

We get it! If the game is really good, we won’t expect you home at a reasonable hour. Logically, this makes sense. Emotionally, however, this can be a bit of a challenge. So, make sure that the game is worth it, and in terms that we can understand. ‘I had a good night last night!’, means nothing to us. ‘I won a new coffee table for the living room and a weekend in wine country’, makes everyone a winner!

Do not try to sneak into bed in the hour before we’re scheduled to wake up. Sleep on the couch. Sleep in your car. Get a massage before you leave the casino if you have to. We will only accept your night-owl status until it robs us of our sleep. Once that happens, we will hate you.

If you say, ‘I won’t be home too late tonight’, make sure you either aren’t home too late, or don’t come Use your poker winnings wisely home until normal people wake up. Bring home a venti latte and a scone, and all will be forgiven. A sausage, egg and cheese McGriddle works too, but don’t forget the hash brown!

March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 15

Play poker with a smile on your fac e

SHUFFLE tavern poker

Raising the bar If you want to play live in a fun, social environment, sign up for a game with World Tavern Poker What started out as a small poker game at a bar in Chapel Hill, North Carolina is now a national phenomenon. Since 2005, World Tavern Poker has grown from its humble origins into a huge organization with over 400 venues and 175,000 registered players. Though the poker is free, the competition can be formidable and there’s over $100,000 up for grabs in prizes each year, including 40 World Series of Poker packages. ‘When we started this business in 2005, people said “Poker is a fad – you’ll be out of business in 2 years,”’ says World Tavern Poker’s owner, Mike Matsinger. ‘But last year, we filled over a million tournament seats around the country. That’s more than either Las Vegas or Atlantic City.’ While bar poker is stronger than ever and expanding to all corners of the country, it still faces a stigma: it’s free! Such criticism seems misplaced though. With World Tavern Poker popular in states all over the country, it provides live poker for players that don’t have access to a casino or card room. Plus, if you’re new to the game you can learn to

play in a safe and comfortable environment – and enjoy the social aspect. Greg Bender is a Marketing Executive who lives 45 minutes from Atlantic City, but prefers the games at the World Tavern Poker: ‘It’s hard to tell the wife, “Sorry honey, I’ll be at The Borgata all night”. It’s a lot easier to say, “Hey honey, I’m going around the corner to play some cards with my friends. Be back in a few hours.”’ So why has World Tavern Poker become the biggest poker league in America? ‘It’s more than just having a great poker game’, says Matsinger, who asserts that WTP’s prizes, technology and willingness to go the extra mile for their players are all part of their winning formula. ‘Beyond our prizes and technology, our franchises have really helped our league to grow,’ says Matsinger. ‘We now have ten franchises, spanning from New York to New Mexico – each of them helping bars turn some of their slowest nights into some of their busiest, week after week.’ So, business is booming, but don’t expect World Tavern Poker to rest on its laurels. Each year the league holds two major events, the World Tavern Poker OPEN, one in Las Vegas and one in Atlantic City, bringing together over 1,000 players to compete in tournaments and cash games. In their most recent Las Vegas event in November 2013, more than $175,000 was paid in prizes. Matsinger is looking to even bigger and better things in the future: ‘In June, we will be hosting our largest championship freeroll ever, where the winner will be taking home a $10,000 WSOP Main Event seat. It’s an exciting time to be a part of PP World Tavern Poker.’

There’s over $100,000 up for grabs each year, including 40 World Series packages

e The games are fre real but the prizes are

Get involved! It couldn’t be easier to play with World Tavern Poker. Just visit www.WorldTavernPoker.com, where you can create a profile and search for a local game with your Zip or on the interactive map. You can also find the latest leaderboards and a full schedule, along with information on everything from the prizes to the official WTP rules.

www.pokerplayeramerica.com

Snap chat

It’s fair to say Kid Poker lost the dance off

Kristy Arnett The poker world’s fastest interview 140 characters max per answer

Neil stoddart, JOE GIRON

American PokerPlayer: How’s it going? We last saw you at the PCA. Kristy Arnett: It’s going well! PCA was so much fun. It was my 6th time there! I’m like the college kid who won’t graduate and keeps coming to the parties.

Protein smuggler Jason Koon is in great shape

The poker world seems to be taking fitness more seriously. As an expert, which poker player is in the best shape? Jason Koon. He does backflips off everything, and I’d say at any given time he has protein in a pocket somewhere on him.

Ha! Are you happy being on your side of the fence rather than playing? I love my job, however, I do always have an itch to play.

You’re hugely into yoga – if you could convert one poker player to yoga who would it be? I sure wouldn’t mind seeing Liv Boeree in a downward dog, so I’ll pick her!

You’re hugely into fitness and health now. How do you hang around the poker world & not just scream at chubby players all the time?! I would never! When it comes to health/ fitness, people have to want it for themselves. All I can do is lead by example and help when asked.

So you’ve interviewed everyone. Who are your top 3 faves to interview? 1) Daniel Negreanu 2) Jason Mercier 3) Maria Ho – They always say yes, are so outgoing, and everyone wants to watch!

dancing poker players

Dave ‘Devilfish’ Ulliott Having the Devilfish grind up against you on a cruise ship while Gold Digger blares out sounds like a terrifying prospect – but the middleaged blonde in this 2007 video is enjoying it. A little bit too much… WATCH IT! www.tinyurl.com/DFishdance

Bill Chen Forget the two WSOP bracelets, $1.6 million in tourney winnings and strategy books – Bill Chen’s most memorable moment came at the 2007 EPT when he was pictured pole dancing topless. Cue one million giggling threads on TwoPlusTwo. WATCH IT! www.tinyurl.com/perfect-chen

‘Oh God here comes Kristy with another interview request’

And which 3 players are the most difficult? No sitting on the fence… 1) Phil Ivey – He doesn’t do them. 2) Phil Laak – He’s so smart, his brain moves faster than his words. 3) Tom Dwan – It’s hard for me because I get nervous. I get critiqued by a million poker forum people every time.

What’s the most embarrassing tactic you’ve used to get Ivey to talk? Five years ago I left the club at Bellagio pretty drunk and ran into him in the poker room. I asked him for an interview haha. We’re sure he was amused…. He smiled and said, “Sure.” It didn’t happen. Then I went to Spearmint Rhino to meet friends. Oh man, funny night. Kristy really loves yoga and we really love this photo

To p 5

Chris Ferguson Watch ‘Jesus’ swirl fellow vintage poker star Clonie Gowen around the floor to hit songs from Grease. Bizarre. WATCH IT! www.tinyurl.com/Fergiedancing

Liv Boeree Finally! A player that looks good dancing. Watch the lovely Ms Boeree shake her moneymaker in a dance-off with Daniel Negreanu from a 2009 PokerStars party. WATCH IT! www.tinyurl.com/Livdances

Daniel Negreanu While Liv looks mighty fine, the same cannot be said for her dance partner. Watching Kid Poker reminds us more of Alfonso Ribeiro doing the ‘Carlton Dance’ than whatever the hell it was that D-Neg was going for. WATCH IT! www.tinyurl.com/carltondance2014

March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 17

Antonio Esfandiari

The re-election of poker’s President In 2012 Antonio Esfandiari won poker’s biggest prize at the Big One for One Drop. As the second $1 million tournament approaches, Howard Swains speaks to Esfandiari about how that $18m win changed his life

ntonio Esfandiari pads across a convention centER corridor and comes to rest in an ostentatious, oversized chair, the kind of ridiculous furniture that is scattered across the Atlantis Resort on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, home of the annual PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. He hoists his legs up on to a waist-high table, revealing a pair of white, towelling, hotelroom slippers. He then rocks back to settle the rest of his frame into the kind of comfort he has secured for his feet. All of a sudden, Esfandiari checks himself. ‘Are you okay if I put my feet there?’ he asks, genuinely fearful of having transgressed. In a vignette lasting all of ten seconds, Esfandiari exhibits the kind of devil-may-care

18 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

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When I win this tournament how is anyone ever going to compete with that?

March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 19

Antonio Esfandiari

confidence that made him one of the poker boom’s first clown princes, and then the new-found self-awareness that has, he goes on to explain, transformed him into a mature, content adult—and one of the best poker players in the world. Esfandiari is 35-years-old and is, on paper at least, the highest money earner of all time in tournament poker. Although he readily admits the obvious – that the seven-figure buy-in to the 2012 Big One for One Drop was not all his own investment – he did the crushing of the event all by himself. It means that Esfandiari will be forever listed as the winner of poker’s first million dollar tourney and it was in his name alone that the $18.3 million winner’s check was made out.

Neil stoddart

Party over Such a spectacular success would be the defining moment in any player’s career, but it goes double for someone whose previous major scores had tended to be overshadowed by time spent goofing around on television poker sets, or drowned in champagne in Las Vegas nightclubs. Esfandiari has enjoyed his recent vindication. He worked for it. ‘Pre One Drop, if you said, “Name the five most notable poker players,” it would not be me,’ Esfandiari says now, his slipper-clad feet given permission to remain. ‘It’s not that I was even mentioned. I’d been lurking around for a long time and I won a couple of tournaments early on in my career, and I got a lot of air time because I’m kind of talkative. But for a long time, people kind of wrote me off, and rightfully so, because all I did was party and hang out and I didn’t care about poker at all. I never focused and I just kind of lost my confidence a little bit. ‘When you don’t put yourself in the right mind-frame and physical condition to play poker and give yourself a chance to win, you’re not going to win. I was out partying every night and that’s not going to be a success story waiting to happen. So I got motivated about two years ago to start playing good again and to really focus. And as soon as I did that, I had some incredible results. I didn’t like being written off.’ Chief among those results, of course, was the jamboree in Vegas in the summer of 2012 for which he will always be remembered. Esfandiari was the last man standing from a field of 48 top pros and extravagant businessmen who flicked a collective middle finger to the post-Black Friday blues by stumping up a million bucks each to play cards. The tournament had the biggest buy-in of all time and the biggest first prize, but although it played out in an atmosphere of carefree, philanthropic friendliness (it

20 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

The Magician now has the kudos to go with his star status

It’s like a presidential election. It’s just you versus the other person, for super glory

close to something so glorious and come in second, it’s going to hurt for the rest of your life. I don’t know if I would have truly ever gotten over it. I’m so glad I won that tournament because had I not, I would have been truly heartbroken.’ ‘It’s like a presidential election,’ he adds. ‘It’s just you versus the other person, for super glory. You’re either the guy that almost did it, or did it. That’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. In presidential elections, the winner is the man. And the guy that almost won, was almost president, nobody cares.’

A bold prediction made more than $6m for the One Drop charity,) Esfandiari was focused on the win. Watching the television broadcast back, it is never more obvious than when Esfandiari and Guy Laliberté, the billionaire founder of the Cirque du Soleil empire and the tournament’s organiser, got all their chips in on a coin-flip during the final table, Laliberté’s Queens against Esfandiari’s Ace-King. The players may have donned clown’s noses and embraced with genuine goodwill, but Esfandiari’s, ‘I need it more than you, Guy,’ has a distinctly beseeching tone. He now admits that had he lost heads-up to the British player Sam Trickett, the course of his life would have changed dramatically. ‘I’ve thought about that a lot,’ Esfandiari says. ‘I love Trickett, but I think that if you get so

This summer, Esfandiari will have the chance to stand for a second term as poker’s president when the One Drop returns to the World Series schedule. (He came fourth in the scaled down renewal in 2013, won by Tony Gregg, which required ‘only’ $111,111 to play.) Esfandiari will, of course, be in a field he predicts will have swelled to about 56 players and be hyped even more intensely than before. However only he has the chance for a unique double. ‘This will be the true back-to-back,’ he says. ‘When I win this tournament, how is anyone ever going to compete with that? I don’t mean to sound egotistical, but that would be my legacy. For sure. Nothing will ever come close to that, and I’m the only person that can do it. I’m about as motivated as it gets.’

Best buddies Antonio Esfandiari and Phil Laak have been very publicly joined at the hip ever since Esfandiari was persuaded to show Laak some magic tricks at the 2000 World Series. here are some other pokerplaying besties…

Barry Greenstein and Phil Ivey

ElkY and Eugene Katchalov

Theo Jorgensen and Gus Hansen

When the Vegas big game was floundering in the late 1990s, Barry Greenstein invited a young kid named Phil Ivey to play, essentially just to keep the game going. Ivey and Greenstein have remained close ever since, even as the apprentice has outshone the master.

Bertrand ‘ElkY’ Grospellier and Eugene Katchalov’s bromance flourished while they were holed up on an island in the Med playing the WCOOP. It progressed through a series of fitness challenges, culminating in the duo cycling to EPT Sanremo—and with both sporting midriffs like kitchen drainers.

Denmark’s finest have been friends for years and have followed one another across the world, from the tournaments of Vegas to the cash games of Macau. But in 2009 a challenge made on the squash court ended with the pair in the boxing ring, with Jorgensen edging a scrappy affair.

Esfandiari’s insistence that he ‘will’ win the tournament is not uttered accidentally. In his ESPN interview ahead of the One Drop final table, Esfandiari responded to Kara Scott’s question of what he would do if he won the event with, ‘First of all I have to correct you, there’s no “if”, there’s “when”.’ It’s a line I heard amid our attempts to schedule a meeting during the whirlwind that is the PCA. Esfandiari could guarantee his availability for American PokerPlayer only in principal, with this habit of winning poker tournaments usually getting in the way. ‘As soon as I win this tournament I am all yours,’ he wrote in an email at the end of the first day of the $100,000 Super High Roller event. ‘IF they HAPPEN to bust me...(not happening) then I’m all yours.’ He ended up finishing fourth in the Super High Roller, his first event of 2014, playing long into the night for two days before losing a flip to Vanessa Selbst and banking close to $600,000. He then immediately started the $10,000 main event, lasting again until Day 3 and ensuring he kicked off the new year with a two-for-two cashing average. We finally got together after the $25,000 ‘regular’ High Roller event didn’t pan out as expected, freeing Esfandiari for a day, to watch the San Francisco 49ers in the NFL play-offs and record another round of interviews for the PCA shows to be aired sometime this year. ‘I haven’t been outside, by the pool

Esfandiari remains an engaging and entertaining presence at the tables

March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 21

Antonio Esfandiari The Magician has his sights set on a historic double this summer in Vegas

TV Magician here are some of Esfandiari’s greatest televised moments

Esfandiari outbluffs Einhorn

Esfandiari played solid poker and won flips on his way to winning the first Big One for One Drop and $18.3 million, but The Magician also knew how to pounce on the weaknesses of the amateurs in the field. WATCH IT: www.tinyurl.com/magic-bluff or in the ocean one time, which is super tilting,’ he says of his trip. ‘I want to go check out the ocean.’

Leading the pack

Chip secrets with Antonio Esfandiari

Okay, maybe not his finest moment, but certainly one of the funniest. The young Esfandiari gives a startlingly earnest tutorial into how to riffle chips, cut cards and, er, look kind of awkward in front of a camera. WATCH IT: www.tinyurl.com/magic-riffle

Politics gives me wood

One of Esfandiari’s greatest calls: to a sex hotline, where he turns the tables on the operator and quizzes her on politics, geography and current affairs. Warning: also features Howard Lederer. WATCH IT: www.tinyurl.com/magic-hotline 22 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

Positive thinking, and ‘checking out the ocean’, is a significant part of Esfandiari’s recent reinvention. Although he does not reference any organization by name during our conversation, Esfandiari is well known as one of a number of high-profile poker professionals to enrol in a so-called leadership university in Las Vegas that offers intensive, and sometimes controversial, personal development programs. (Daniel Negreanu is another vocal advocate.) Esfandiari said he resisted signing up at first, but now describes an ‘incredibly rewarding and refreshing’ experience that helped him address some personal issues that had lain unresolved since his childhood. He says he learned to confront emotions, he learned to cry and he learned to accept ‘I am who I am.’ It moved him into a more responsible phase of his life. ‘I think we can all grow no matter who you are,’ he says. ‘It hit me like a massive force. All of a sudden I got to deal with so many different things I didn’t even know were an issue for me.’ Esfandiari’s young life cultivated both sides of his character: the showman and the focused individual with a point to prove. Born in Iran in 1978, his family relocated to San Jose, California when he was 9-yearsold. However his mother returned to Tehran

soon after, apparently abandoning her two sons, and leaving Esfandiari with some deep scars that took more than 15 years to heal. ‘I thought that my mom had left me,’ he says. ‘I was a kid, it hurt me and I cried a lot….I had all these insecurities that I’d built up. I hated being alone. I was very insecure. Even though I was a very confident person, deep, deep down there were certain things that I was very insecure about.’ Esfandiari and his mother, who now lives in Paris, have since been reunited and are very close. Originally, it was magic that offered the young Esfandiari the opportunity not only to become the center of attention, but also to display his card skills. Poker followed when he was 19, and he soon found himself perfectly positioned to make the most of the boom of the mid-2000s, when the producers of television poker shows

Even though I was confident, deep down there were things I was insecure about

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were seeking young, good-looking folk with a natural table-manner to become the superstars of the new era of the game. It helped, of course, if they could play a bit and Esfandiari ticked all the boxes. He won the WPT LA Poker Classic in February 2004, a matter of months after Chris Moneymaker won the World Series, and then his first bracelet back in Vegas that summer. Esfandiari was a regular booking on all of the most prominent shows on both sides of the Atlantic, and he rolled along with the momentum. He wrote magazine columns describing a hedonistic lifestyle, jetted across the world in search of a party and was romantically linked to numerous women.

The Ultimate choice His obvious marketability also ensured a steady stream of sponsorship opportunities and he has previously worn the patches of Paradise Poker, UltimateBet, WPT, Victory Poker and Doyle’s Room. However, his newfound financial freedom has recently afforded him the luxury of picking and choosing endorsement deals based on factors other than the bottom line. In April last year Esfandiari signed a deal with the Nevada-based Ultimate Poker to be its first global ambassador. ‘I could have gone with different sites to make probably more money on a regular basis, but I’m not about that,’ he says. ‘I told them I want to be part of the process and I want to watch the company grow. And some day when the company is worth a ton of money, then I’ll really cash out. I’m going for the long-term play.’ Esfandiari says that his friendship with Tom Breitling, the 44-year-old

trust them, obviously, to do whatever they need to do.’

I’m just hanging out, enjoying my life, traveling, you know. Wine tasting…

founder of the site, was decisive. ‘I look up to him in an entrepreneurial sense. He’s a very, very sharp guy. When he says, “Look, I’m starting up a poker site with the Fertitta brothers, who also own UFC,” it’s kind of hard to say no.’ Esfandiari is a UFC fan, likening its showpiece bouts to heads-up duels in poker, with everything on the line. ’It’s mano-a-mano and I just love that,’ he says. However, his deal with Ultimate is mutually beneficial, allowing him to play when he is at home (Ultimate is one of the first sites to launch post-Black Friday in the United States) and to fulfil his own modest entrepreneurial ideals. ’They bring me up to speed with a lot of things and if there’s a big marketing decision – a ‘should we do this, or should we do that?’ - they run it by me,’ he says. ‘They take my opinion into account. But I don’t know the first thing about running a company. I’m a one-man operation. These guys are great at what they do and I

The money men After the Big One for One Drop Esfandiari comfortably sits atop the all-time money list… but which players are in pursuit?

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Antonio Esfandiari Phil Ivey Daniel Negreanu Erik Seidel sam trickett Phil hellmuth John Juanda Michael Mizrachi Jamie Gold Jonathan Duhamel

$26.2m $21.2m $21.2m $20.3m $19.8m $17.9m $15.4m $14.5m $12.2m $12.1m

Living the dream Despite the success poker has brought Esfandiari, and the impression he can often emit of being one of the game’s secret scholarly nerds (perhaps it is the glasses), his work-life balance these days is still deliberately skewed towards ‘life’. ‘If you knew how much poker I played or studied or spent time on in the last ten years, you would be absolutely shocked,’ he says. ‘I almost never play poker. I go to these big tournaments, but all the downtime in the middle I don’t even play poker. I’m just hanging out, enjoying my life, traveling, you know. Wine tasting…’ He says he plays perhaps one or two hours a day at the low-stakes tables on Ultimate Poker when he is home in Las Vegas, but is only an infrequent visitor to the Aria card room, whose name he also wears on his chest. ‘I really don’t play live that much,’ he says. ‘The Aria game is a game with more businessmen than pros, and I respect that. I’m not the kind of guy who’s just going to show up and sit down if I’m not invited… Anybody can play in those games and a lot of pros go and put their name on the list and jump in. But sometimes they want to play just the business guys and when that’s the case I think it’s rude for the professional to go in when they’re not really wanted.’ Esfandiari’s current tournament diet consists almost entirely of the high buy-in events, the High Rollers and Super High Rollers that have created a kind of poker premier league for the elite. It took Esfandiari ten and a half years to accumulate his $4.9m lifetime cashes before the One Drop but only 18 months since then to record another $3m, the clear result of playing much bigger. But the sharpness and motivation remain both on and off the tables and he reels off a never-ending list of titles that still elude him, summarised with: ‘I just want to win more stuff.’ Yet for all the magazine covers, appearances on Howard Stern, multi-million dollar pay-days and potential re-election as poker’s unofficial president, there also now exists a more profound, more grounded version of Antonio Esfandiari. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to be a superstar,’ he says. ‘But would I want Daniel’s role, as far as being an ambassador, the face of poker, someone that’s so involved with the way things are, tournament rules and all this other stuff? No. I would not want that. I just want to get in, do my thing, play poker and go live my life. I play poker to live my life, I don’t live my life PP to play poker.’ March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 23

DEAL Global poker index

RANK AND FILE

Alexandre Dreyfus has bold plans for the Global Poker Index in 2014 as he bids to take his tournament ranking system mainstream. Julian Rogers finds out more

ebates as to the world’s best tournament player have been cropping up as long as Doyle Brunson has been donning ten-gallon cowboy hats. Indeed, most poker aficionados have probably mulled over a mental game of poker Top Trumps at one time or another. Yet the vast fields at major live tournaments, combined with that omnipresent femme fatale, Lady Luck, means that determining the Great White of card sharks isn’t a precise science. However, the Global Poker Index (GPI) has fast become a widely accepted barometer to gauge the current zenith of tournament poker, much akin to the rankings associated with sports like golf or tennis. Owned by internet entrepreneur Alexandre Dreyfus’s Zokay Entertainment, the goal has been to create the definitive ranking authority and plug the leaderboard to ardent poker fans and mainstream audiences alike. ‘Poker has been suffering and struggling in the past few years but if we want to have growth back then we need to expose poker,’ says Dreyfus. ‘The best way to do that is to promote it as a sport, to promote the best poker players and have a ranking. Right now, they [non-poker players] might know Daniel Negreanu or Phil Ivey but we need to make 20 or 30 players known.’

Numbers game From Zokay’s mission control on the sunny island of Malta, a handful of busy number crunchers assimilate live results from 24 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

tournaments taking place all over the world. To qualify for a ranking, any event a player enters needs to attract 21 or more players and to have taken place during the past 36 months. It previously had to have a buy-in of at least $1k, but recent changes means that any result recorded in the Hendon Mob database is eligible for GPI points. A formula based on a player’s finishing position relative to field size, the size of the buy-in and time elapsed since the score is then used to aggregate points for a ranking. The GPI previously ranked 40,000 players worldwide, but by lowering the buy-in requirements this was expanded to a whopping 160,000. As we went to press, German wunderkind Ole Schemion topped the list with 3,883 points and live career earnings of $4.3 million. He also won the GPI’s Player of the Year (POY) race for 2013. But, of course, the GPI is in a constant state of flux and the hotly contested leaderboard can alter pretty quickly, especially with tournaments taking place all over the globe during most of the year. For Dreyfus, though, it’s as much about ranking the game’s glitterati, or the ‘GPI 300’, as it is the casual players. ‘There is the 300 at the top of the tree, and then there is you and me – random players, recreational players who want to know where they stand globally and locally. They can then tell their mothers they are in the top 10,000 in the world, which is pretty cool.’ Dreyfus leans across to his desktop PC and promptly punches his

Dreyfus wants to take poker to another level

Poker has been If we suffering. ve want to ha k we growth bac ose need to exp poker

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gs Our rankin idered will be cons A and like the PG ext ATP. The n o step is to g mainstream

March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 25

DEAL global poker index

name into the GPI website, only to discover he’s slipped out of the GPI because his last cash falls outside the three-year window (a €1,180 score in Marrakech in November, 2010). ‘Sh♠t, I’ve lost my GPI ranking,’ he shrugs insouciantly. Then again, the 36-year-old isn’t a regular face on the tournament circuit. ‘I love poker but I’m not an expert or a poker specialist and I’m not at all a good player. For me, poker is a commodity.’ Although he’s the owner of the GPI, it was in fact the brainchild of Federated Sports + Gaming, owners of the ill-fated Epic Poker League, before the business went belly up two years ago. Dreyfus, the ex-CEO of ChiliGaming.com, sifted through the remains of the bankruptcy and eventually acquired the fledgling GPI after Pinnacle Entertainment snagged it in an auction. And the charismatic Frenchman, who launched his first web business in 1995, says he has shoved his chips all-in with the patent-pending GPI. ‘I’ve put 100% of my cash and resources into this project, so I’m pretty much committed.’

Mob handed Last summer, after 12 months of negotiations, Dreyfus also got his mitts on the aforementioned Hendon Mob website – the world’s largest live tournament results database. It was a logical purchase considering the GPI is so reliant upon results, and because the TheHendonMob.com stores tournament cashes on 286,000 players.

‘When you spend a lot of energy and money to develop GPI and you rely on data that you don’t own, it will always be an issue. So we decided to avoid being dependent on a third party and own the source of the information.’ He describes the acquisition as a good deal for both himself and the website’s owners (Ross and Barny Boatman, Joe Beevers and Ram Vaswani). ‘It made sense for everybody. I am younger than them and I probably have more energy, so selling it to us was a great opportunity to have their baby grow more than they ever expected.’ Indeed, Beevers reveals that it was the right time for the quartet to sell up and concentrate again on playing cards. ‘We were four poker players who became businessmen and we wanted to get back to poker. The deal made good sense for Alex and it was good for the Hendon Mob website – it’s in safe hands and I couldn’t think of anybody better to take it forward.’ Dreyfus has given the site a lick of paint and integrated the GPI ranking. The Hendon Mob and GPI websites attract around four million unique visitors a year and are data goldmines for stats fiends and journalists. However, the Hendon Mob’s strong visitor

g The rankin t of the mos successful ys a players pla in major role g legitimisin poker

Rank and fails

Read all about it

The GPI is the most successful attempt to rank the world’s leading players – but there have been some less successful efforts

A bad business model sunk the Epic Poker League says Dreyfus

Epic Poker League

Launched by Federated Sports + Gaming, the EPL was restricted to the world’s elite players. However, it only staged three tournaments before FS+G filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Sections of the poker community had questioned the wisdom of the EPL, which included $2.6m in added money and freerolls. ‘They had the wrong business model,’ says Dreyfus. 26 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

numbers, active forum and a sponsorship deal with Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars doesn’t mean it’s a cash cow, Dreyfus admits. ‘It is not a business that is very profitable; in fact, I would say it’s not profitable at all.’ Hard on the heels of this acquisition, Dreyfus forged a relationship with online poker community site PocketFives to share online and live results. Founded in 2005, PocketFives.com has also become a respected resource for tracking members’ results on the cyber-felt and creating its own rankings. By combining both live and online results, poker followers are provided with a holistic view of a player’s prowess, and shortcomings. ‘We want to aggregate more information to become the most accurate and biggest poker database,’ Dreyfus explains. ‘When you go to Chris Moorman or Sam Grafton you can see their online and live results on the same page so it provides a good profile of the player. It makes sense for the players and the audience.’ For PocketFives co-founder Adam Small, live and online rankings help validate player achievements. ‘I think the rankings and other forms of recognition of the most successful players play a major role in legitimising poker competition – both online and live.’

Huck Seed won the last WSOP Tournament of Champions in 2010

WSOP Tournament of Champions

This invitational tourney saw nine of the game’s best compete in 2004 to determine the world’s top player. Annie Duke defeated Phil Hellmuth heads-up to land the inaugural event. The tournament was mothballed in 2007 but made a return in 2010, this time with a public vote to select the participants. Huck Seed was victorious but the tourney sunk without trace.

The GPI leaderboard is published alongside NFL and NBA standings in the weekly edition of USA Today Sports, and one of Dreyfus’ main objectives is to persuade other mainstream media outlets and sports publications to run the ranking. This, he hopes, will further enhance the game and the profiles of the elite players, helping put poker on an equal footing with pro sports in the eyes of the public. Dreyfus says: ‘Are our rankings going to be considered like the PGA [golf] and ATP [tennis]? One hundred percent yes. It’s already the case in the poker community and the next step is to go mainstream.’ He also hopes to enlist retired sports stars to promote the GPI on and off the felt and demonstrate to non-poker players that the game can be classed a true ‘mind sport’. Television, too, will continue to play a key role in marketing poker as a skill game. Although Dreyfus acknowledges that poker will ‘never be as popular as sports that have been broadcast on TV for 30 or 40 years’, he’s a firm believer that coverage should be more ‘player-orientated’ instead of ‘cards-

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Kid Poker rules the decade With it being roughly ten years since Tennessee accountant Chris Moneymaker helped spark the poker boom, the GPI decided to use its point scoring system to crown a Player of the Decade. The ageing factor was omitted and a maximum of 12 results per year were used to reach the overall score. The star-studded ‘final table’ of nine included legends of the game but it was Daniel Negreanu, third on the all-time money list with $21.2 million in winnings, who scooped the coveted award. The Canadian tells Pokerplayer: ‘It’s pretty cool to be honored for the body of work and consistent results I’ve put together over the last ten years, especially with all the changes the game has seen.’

1. Daniel Negreanu (canada) 2. Erik Seidel (USA) 3. Michael MizrachI (USA) 4. Barry Greenstein (USA) 5. John Juanda (USA) 6. Bertrand ‘ElkY’ Grospellier (FRANCE) 7. Shannon Shorr (USA) 8. JC Tran (USA) 9. Phil Ivey (USA) orientated’. By that he means promoting poker’s protagonists. ‘We should have a little bit more statistics on the players, such as ‘he is number eight on the GPI ranking or he was on the final table of this tournament with this player’. We should show the audience this player is not just sitting here by luck or [being] able to spend $10k, but because they are a good player and we can give you reasons why.’ One pro that he would put in this category is Negreanu. In fact, Kid Poker was recently bestowed the accolade of GPI’s ‘Player of the Decade’. Despite some in the poker fraternity questioning why the award was suddenly decided in 2013, Negreanu describes the GPI as ‘awesome’. However, he doesn’t think the

7,377 6,953 6,553 6,457 6,261 5,778 5,578 5,569 5,422

GPI is quite perfect, highlighting how he thinks the scoring system to be somewhat opaque. ‘It would be good for the players if there was some transparency into what tournaments are worth in terms of points.’

Tough decisions Dreyfus is always open to suggestions when it comes to making tweaks to the pointscoring criteria and formula. And the GPI’s

boss also isn’t afraid to make difficult decisions, such as axing players from the GPI. Jean-Paul Pasqualini and Cedric Rossi will soon be removed after a video emerged last year that allegedly showed the pair signaling their hole cards to each other on the final table of the Partouche Poker Tour Main Event in 2009. They finished first and second, although no suspicions were raised at the time. After the video surfaced, Dreyfus sent his views and the footage to the GPI’s top 50 players and a few tournament directors. ‘I would say 99.8% of those who replied said they supported me. We cannot have players who were caught on camera cheating represented in the ranking. It makes no sense.’ It was a ‘bold and scary move’, according to Dreyfus, but illustrates how he doesn’t want anyone or anything besmirching the legitimacy of his ranking system. He’s passionate about this project, as well as the other poker-related businesses in his swelling portfolio, including Fantasy Poker Manager (similar to Fantasy Football). As well as the hugely successful EPT now using the GPI to decide its Player of the Year, there seems to be overwhelming support in the poker community for what he’s building. The kudos of being ranked number one tournament player in the world creates a buzz and a target for the game’s elite to chase. Plus, circuit grinders and amateurs are able to see where they stand in the tournament food chain. There’s something for everyone. When Dreyfus first acquired the GPI he considered staging a tournament solely for the ranking’s top 100 players, which would determine the best tournament player. But he soon conceded that this concept was intrinsically flawed, so canned the idea. ‘It would just be the best poker player who won a tournament full of the best players. The reality is that only a ranking based on several criteria gives the best picture of who are the best poker players in the world right now.’ For the time being that’s Schemion. However, his lead could soon evaporate with the chock-a-block schedule of tournaments on the horizon and Negreanu and a group of Schemion’s compatriots chasing him down. One thing’s for sure, it’s not going to be dull watching this struggle for supremacy unfold.

Only a sed ranking ba on several es criteria giv e tur the best pic e h of who is t best in the world

l Turn to p63 for the latest Global Poker PP Index rankings

March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 27

NE W

DEAL GREG MERSON

Greg Merso n The swings of life 2012 Main Event champion Greg Merson talks us through the best and worst moments of his poker career and life In 2012, when he was 24-years-old, Greg Merson became the World Series of Poker Main Event champion and the WSOP Player of the Year. He won $8,531,853 for the Main Event, but had already won $1.1 million for taking down the $10,000 NLHE six-handed title, becoming the first player since Chris Ferguson in 2000 to win the Main Event and another bracelet in the same year. It was a triumphant comeback for Merson who spent much of 2011 battling a serious drug addiction. American PokerPlayer spoke with Merson to hear the shocking details…

The lowest point of my life was detoxing from Roxycontin in a Vegas hotel room on December 10, 2011. I’m a recovering drug addict. That was a little over 25 months ago, and was the lowest point of my life. [WSOP bracelet winner] Tony Gregg was with me at the hotel. I don’t really remember it that much but I don’t think I left the room for three days. I was sleeping, I’d have cold sweats and bad diarrhoea and all the side effects of detoxing from an opiate. It was really bad. I flew home on the fourth day and I still wasn’t feeling too great. And then I didn’t feel normal again for eight or nine days after I stopped. I had 15 pills left and I kept them next to the bed because I wasn’t sure how bad it was going to be. I was throwing up all this sh♠t and then I flushed them. I was, like, I have to just get the f♠ck over this sh♠t.

LOW

Downward spiral

I had a good childhood and I was a straight ‘A’ student in high school. I’d never had anything to complain about. And then I was just experimenting with drugs like a lot of young kids do and I got hooked on them. I became dependent on stimulants. And, after being three years clean, I got hooked on depressants. I had gotten clean at 18-years-old and had made a lot of money until I was 22. When I turned 23, I felt I had to be a grown-up so early. At 18 all I did was play poker. I wanted to enjoy life again. That’s part of being a drug addict. We trick ourselves into thinking it’s something we can do one time. That snowballed into drugs taking over my life. Poker has saved me. It was definitely my main influence on getting clean in the first place. I didn’t get clean just to make money. I got clean because I had almost no hope in life anymore. I was so depressed. I wasn’t competing at a high level. Competing is more to me than the money. Money is good, but I wouldn’t trade my girlfriend, family and friends in for $20m. I had a different outlook on [life] the second time. Poker has been a good replacement for me. It keeps my mind stimulated and keeps me clean because it keeps me busy. Life is so much better being clean, but it took a while. I was frustrated at first. The first time I was clean I went broke for the first time in my career. I had $30,000 when I got clean and I lost all of it in the first two months. I knew my mind was just going through the adjustment stage of thinking differently, [instead of] being f♠cked up all the time. I knew that it would turn around and it started clicking again in February of 2012.

Neil Stoddart

I got clean because I had almost no hope in life anymore. I was so depressed

Merson went from cold turkey to Main Event champion within a year

28 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

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The WSOP Main Eve nt win was an emotional moment for Merson

The year 2012 was the high point of my life. I met my girlfriend, who will probably be my wife one day, and I had my best year in poker. I was starting recovery all in the same year, so it was the sickest year ever. It’s hard to top the Main Event win, but if I had to pick one thing, I remember winning the six-max bracelet more. Six-max no-limit was all I played online. So it was the championship format of the game I’ve dedicated five straight years of my life to. That’s something that I always wanted to win at the WSOP. I never got to let that soak in really, because I just played the Main Event right after and won. A lot of people don’t even know that I won that tournament, so it means a lot to me. I don’t know if I’ll ever win something that means more. The Main Event is just crazy because it’s not realistic to think you’re going to win something with seven thousand players in it. But the $10k six-max only got around 200 people and so if I played it 40 times in a row, I can expect maybe to win it one time. It’s reasonable for me to have that goal. But the Main Event is such a crapshoot that no matter how good you are, you have to get lucky.

HIGH

Priceless friends

[In 2012] I met my girlfriend and had my best year in poker – it was the sickest year ever

It was crazy because I started 2011 expecting to be a millionaire by the end of the year, but I lost $400,000 by being messed up on drugs. I’ve always set high financial goals through poker for the year, because it’s the only way to keep score for a cash game player. I just knew when I hit that tournament that I got back all the money that I made a mistake losing, playing f♠cked up. It was really emotional for me. It was like a reset button. It put me back to where I should have been, which would have taken me normally around 15 to 18 months to earn. Tony Gregg and I met in 2007 and he really took my game to the next level. All the tournament success I’ve had is credited towards him for sure. He actually had a piece of me in both bracelets that I won and writing him those cheques was the best feeling ever, because how could I ever repay someone that taught me to make millions of dollars. It’s the best feeling ever. I also had other friends who had pieces, who were having bad years after Black Friday, and had two per cent. So writing them cheques was an awesome feeling because I boosted their bankroll and got them back in action instead of them quitting poker or getting staked. PP

March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 29

DEAL High stakes poker

High stakes heroes Barry Greenstein

Rene Velli

In a new series looking back at the best players in High Stakes Poker history, Barry Greenstein talks about the conception of the show, playing $900,000 pots with Tom Dwan and what makes Phil Ivey so special

30 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

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High Stakes Poker revolutionised the way we view poker on TV

igh Stakes Poker is the best TV poker show of all time. It revolutionised the way that poker is shown on TV, created superstars out of some of poker’s greatest players and even now, eight years after its first season, nobody has been able to replicate the magic. One man that was always at the centre of the action is Barry Greenstein. The American is one of only four players – alongside Daniel Negreanu, Antonio Esfandiari and Doyle Brunson – to ever compete in all seven seasons. Greenstein has been involved in many of High Stakes Poker’s most memorable moments too, from having his Aces cracked by Sam Farha to playing what was then the biggest pot in TV poker history against Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan. We spoke with ‘The Bear’ to get his side of the story on those legendary battles… PokerPlayer: When the first season of High Stakes Poker was filmed in 2005 were you onboard with the concept from the start? Barry Greenstein: In those days I was a cash game player and really didn’t play many tournaments. For me it was a great thing because I’d get to play in cash games

with people who had made their names in tournaments – that’s juicy. The truth is that I didn’t really play in it for the TV exposure, it just sounded like a good high-stakes cash game to me. How closely did the show resemble the high-stakes scene in Vegas at that time? It didn’t resemble the high-stakes cash games at all because at that time those were all mixed games. We’d sometimes throw in PLO but never no-limit hold’em. Even though I wasn’t playing much NLHE at the time I knew I’d be in good shape against tournament players as it’s a pretty different game. It proved to be true

I’d get to play in cash games with people who had made their names in tournaments – that’s juicy

and I did well most times. I don’t think I ever had a show where I lost more than one buy-in, and if you look at all-in EV I ran the worst of anyone. I ran $1 million below EV. Even with that I ended up breaking even. In the final season I lost a $600k pot to Antonio where I had a set and he had a gutshot and flush draw. It was the biggest pot of his life and probably helped catapult him to his success after that. Those are big money pots and they do make a difference going forward to how each of us did. In season one the game started out with $300/$600 blinds and a $100 ante. Was that a big game for you at the time? It wasn’t that big initially for me. In those days I would have had a couple million in my safe deposit box so even losing $500,000 wouldn’t have been that big a deal. However, as the years went on the Vegas cash games actually went down in stakes while the stakes on the show went up, so it got pretty big. Black Friday and the failing economy took money out of the poker economy and things like endorsements also stopped. [It meant that] when I lost that $600k pot to Antonio, and the $900k pot to Tom [Dwan] it was a big hit financially. March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 31

DEAL high stakes poker

Unlike most players, you became famous on the show for only ever running it once. Why did you do this? I thought it gave me an edge. A lot of people would say that running it once, twice or whatever is actually the same mathematical thing. But what I know, and especially as I could afford it, is that there are a few reasons to run it once. In Vegas we were playing cap PLO with players like Gus [Hansen] and Sammy [Farha] and they would just shoot the money in. When I first played with them I felt like I could afford the game more than them. Running it twice was really what they looked for – it meant they could play free and easier. If they got it all-in they’d have a good shot to win their money back at least. It also meant they could try to knock players out of pots by playing aggressively [because they knew they’d get two runouts]. The second reason why it was important for me to run it once is that after a player suffers a big loss in a hand they often can’t handle it and then go off for a big number. I have very high confidence, and I think anyone that has watched me play will agree with me that I handle my losses better than anyone. So what

The Bear was involved in some of the most dramatic High Stakes Poker hands

I handle losses better than anyone. If you don’t steam and you can afford it you should always run it once

happens is that when I win a big pot I normally bust the guy that I win it from later. By running it once I get a lot more equity than just that pot, whereas my opponent doesn’t get that much out of me steaming. If you don’t steam and you can afford it you should always run it once. Phil Ivey used to run it twice like all of those people but once I explained it he looked at me and said, ‘I’m never going to run it twice again!’ I don’t think he ever has for the rest of his life.

Hand 1: Killer Aces

Barry Greenstein vs Sammy Farha, High Stakes Poker Season One Pot size: $361,800 In a famous hand from season one of High Stakes Poker Barry Greenstein raises to $2,500 with Aces on the final hand of the day’s filming. Farha wakes up with Kings and three-bets to $12,500. Greenstein pumps it up to $52,500 and, after a long think Farha moves all-in. The pot is $361,800 and Greenstein gets unlucky on the 6♣-K♥-8♥-7♠-3♦ board to lose the biggest pot of the season. In the Aces versus Kings hand with Sam Farha do you think that Farha should have folded in that situation? I don’t think so. I remember thinking that he actually had Queens. I thought with Kings he’d just have to get his money in. Sammy and I had played a fair amount together in 32 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

cash games and he knew enough about me that even on the last hand I was capable of trying to play him off a hand. With the way the bet sizing was and the depth we were I would not have gotten away with Kings against him. Was that one of the biggest pots you had ever lost? I lost $180k in the pot and it was a pretty big loss even for myself and I was playing as big as anyone else at that time. Obviously I would go on to lose bigger pots after that though! Given that it was the last hand of the session how did you take it mentally? I could afford that loss at the time so it wasn’t that crippling financially but I had to leave the next day to give a talk at the University of

Illinois. [Losing that pot] definitely got in the way of my preparation for the talk and I apologized to the crowd for not being totally coherent. I had to explain to them that I had just lost a huge pot with A-A versus K-K! They definitely didn’t get my best performance that day.

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Hand 2: Battling with durrrr

Barry Greenstein vs Tom Dwan, High Stakes Poker Season Five Pot size: $919,600 Tom Dwan and Greenstein have already battled in a few big pots when Peter Eastgate raises to $3,500 with A-K. Greenstein three-bets on the button to $15k with A♦-A♣ and Dwan calls from the small blind holding K♠-Q♠. Eastgate also calls. The flop is 4♠-2♠-Q♥ and Dwan leads out for $28,700. Eastgate folds, Greenstein raises to $100k and Dwan comes back over the top to $244,600. The two get it all-in and decide to run it once. Dwan declines to take any of the money back. A Queen comes on the turn to ship Dwan the $900k+ pot. Had you played with Tom Dwan much before season five of High Stakes Poker? Unfortunately I had only played with him once for a short time. I remember thinking he was pretty wild. When I sat down I said to myself that he would probably try to pull something on me so don’t get bluffed by him. People might know him now as a well-known player but to me he wasn’t – he was an online kid. Were you happy with your play in this hand? I pretty much assumed he had that but I

thought he might have A♠-Q♠ where he wouldn’t have an Ace to hit. I thought I would be a favourite and it turned out we were dead even. It was actually Peter [Eastgate]’s fault that I didn’t win this pot! He had been playing scared because he’d never played that big before. With A-K he should have just moved all-in preflop and knocked durrrr out. It was a huge mistake on his part. How did you put Dwan on such a specific hand? Durrrr didn’t think about calling at all preflop so it was very clear to me that he didn’t have 4-4 or 2-2. That meant on the Q-4-2 flop he couldn’t have a set so I knew it would have to be a flush draw/pair combination. [I decided to raise] because I didn’t want to guess on the turn if the Queen paired or a King came down. There are a lot of cards on the turn that I wouldn’t be able to figure out. My read was that I was either a decent favourite or at least even. It was clear the money was going in and also, I was ahead of the game $750k going into that pot. It was a sweet set-up. If I won that pot I would have been winning $1.2 million, the biggest ever win on High Stakes Poker.

What is the true story behind the conversation you and Dwan had about running it twice or taking some of the money back? At that time I was a bigger player than Tom and I didn’t know what his bankroll was. People totally misunderstand what happened there [when I asked if he wanted to take money back]. In the maths it was a pretty even hand. When he asked me to run it twice I felt he was saying, ‘This is a really big pot, the biggest I have ever played.’ I felt it was probably like that for both of us but it didn’t scare me because I was going to be ahead even if I lost the pot. I was actually trying to be nice. I didn’t want to be a jerk about it. I was thinking I was going to be the first $1m winner on the show if I won the pot. When I offered to take a couple of hundred thousand back I was trying to be nice! To me he’s a kid. People don’t understand his rejection. They thought Tom was being a baller by saying no. What actually happened was he thought he was a slight favourite and he didn’t want to look stupid on TV by running it twice. He didn’t want to look like a chump to me, like I took advantage of him. People totally misinterpreted what went on.

The magic of Ivey Barry Greenstein and Phil Ivey have been friends for many years. In Greenstein’s words here is why there’s no one like ivey and why everyone else is just playing catch-up… Barry Greenstein: A lot of people think Phil is an idiot savant but he’s not, he’s a deep thinker. He really worked on his game and would do a lot of thinking about situations. He seemed to be the best at figuring out what his opponents were doing and coming up with a counter to it. I have watched Phil play online against players ten times where he would be losing $500k to them before turning to me and saying, ‘This guy is dead. It is just a question of how long it takes until he quits me.’ Phil was right almost every time. He gets to the point where he really knows what the guy’s responses are going to be with different hands in different situations – he’s like a chess player. The guys usually didn’t last a week before they had to quit him! It’s scary. I remember the day I said to Phil that he was now a top player. I saw that he was a step ahead of his opponents. He used to run over people but then he matured his game and stopped bluffing. He was always a step ahead. I have played with the greatest players of all time and I cannot see anyone I have ever played with who is as good at knowing what the other players are doing as Phil Ivey.

Greenstein says Phil Ivey is a step ahead of his opponents March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 33

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Get the knowledge – beat the field

STRATEGY S O YO U WA N T TO B E A PRO?

TIP of the month

’Nobody teaches us how to be poker players. Poker culture teaches us how to slowplay, how to set mine, how to manage our bankroll. It teaches how to think, how to talk, what is cool and what is not. We absorb these teachings eagerly. But when was it going to teach us how to be poker players? If you know the lives of many professional poker players, you know this is a question that sorely needs answering. Professional poker is a strange and isolating life. Nothing you have ever done before will prepare you for it. This is my attempt to rectify that, and recount everything that I think every poker player ought to live by – and what I wish I had heard when I began playing poker.’ Haseeb Qureshi on how to be a poker player, p48

A little experimentation st will give your game a boo

36 MTT moves Add these five weapons to your tournament arsenal

52 pokersnowie The world’s most advanced coaching software is here

40 the joy of sets Get the most from your sets

56 jason koon Don’t focus on your results

42 pokerplayer quiz Early stages of MTTs

57 Your call Can you play like a pro?

44 the perfect start How to play suited connectors

58 it’s time for a little experiment Shake your game up

48 the life of a poker player What it takes to be a pro

62 brian rast Find your balance

March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 35

STRATEGY Tournaments

There are certain moves every winning tournament player must know. Ross Jarvis is on hand to teach you five essential skills

Tournament poker is constantly evolving. Players are more aggressive, new variants seem to crop up every month and prize pools are bigger than ever. Despite all this, the most basic strategy moves are still very effective. From stealing the blinds to abusing the bubble, these are the foundations every top tourney pro builds from. It’s only once you become a master of these concepts that you should try and add in the fancy highlight-reel plays that get all the attention on TV and online. Join us as we list the five most important skills any beginner needs to be a tournament poker champion.

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Tournament Moves You Must Know 1

Attacking weak players in the early levels

If you’ve ever watched the WSOP Main Event on TV you will know that Phil Hellmuth usually shows up a few hours after the cards have been dealt, often in lame fancy dress attire with scantilyclad women on his arm. If you decide to imitate the Poker Brat in your next live tournament you will achieve two things: looking a like complete idiot and missing out on tons of value! However, do feel free to bring the women along – it’s better than ogling a field of slightly overweight male poker players. The early levels of poker tournaments are exceptionally important and can help define how far you progress in the whole thing. At the start of a tourney every single player that has paid their buy-in is alive and fully stacked. Crucially, this means that all of the fish are ready and waiting to hand their chips to you! It’s one of the easiest points in

any tournament to chip up because of all the dead money in the field so make sure you’re ready and focused. Stacks will be deep early on so you can afford to see a ton of flops against the weaker players at your table. Look to play hands that can make the nuts like small pairs, suited connectors and suited Aces. A common leak that fish have is overplaying their big hands postflop and being unable to fold. Time and again you will see these players knocked out in the early levels because they can’t fold an overpair when it is clear they are beat. Keep the pots small when you don’t have it and make big raises and bets when you do have a monster – simple poker. You should never bluff against fish that call too much. It is an obvious statement yet ‘good’ players continually try it, only to roll their eyes and mutter

At the start of a tourney all the fish are ready and waiting to hand their chips to you

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Stealing the blinds

You must constantly accumulate chips in tournaments to combat the rising blinds and antes. If you don’t, you’ll go bust. One of the easiest ways to do this is by stealing the blinds. It’s very simple to do – when action is folded to you in late position just stick in a raise with a weak hand and hope that everyone folds. Of course, like most ideas in poker, stealing the blinds can be more complicated than that. It’s important to target the right type of player first. If you have very active or aggressive players in the blinds they will likely look for any excuse to call or raise rather than fold, so avoid stealing in these spots. The perfect targets are tight players that won’t try any moves such as light three-betting. Poker becomes very easy to play against these guys as you can just fold all but your strong hands whenever they show aggression. Your chances of success increase when you attack the right stack size. It’s a bad idea to try and steal from a player with less than 15BBs because they will be shoving all-in on you fairly widely. Similarly, a player with a huge stack may be less inclined to fold because they have enough chips to gamble. Aim for players with a 25-40 big blind stack – these players are somewhat handcuffed by

their stack size which forces them to play quite tight. It’s a license to steal. Back in the old days, when raises were respected, nobody would play back at you without a monster hand. In 2013 everyone at the table knows what you are up to when you steal the blinds – and some of them will try to shoot you down accordingly. Be aware of your table image and recognise those spots where it looks exactly like what you are doing (stealing the blinds with a weak hand on the button for example). If you get three-bet in these spots the chances that your opponent is bluffing will rise significantly. Make sure you discourage them from doing this in the future by throwing in the occasional four-bet bluff yourself. As long as you’ve read the situation correctly you will be surprised how frequently this works. Finally, it’s key that you adjust your opening raise sizes throughout the tournament. Early on it’s fine to open to three big blinds when you want to steal, but once the blinds get really big a min-raise will do the same job. This is because the average stack size of the field will have shrunk due to the blinds, meaning they cannot afford to loosely call preflop. It also becomes a less risky bluff for you, which is a bonus.

The perfect targets are tight players that won’t try any moves like light three-betting

insults when the fish inevitably call down with third pair. If you’re one of these players trying to bluff the fish then you are playing like one yourself. In the early levels it’s crucial to put yourself into a position to possibly stack the weak players – by value betting strong and attempting to hit lucky flops on the cheap – but do not force the issue if you are card dead or frustrated. A good spot will eventually come if you are patient. Inevitably, the latter stages of a tournament will be predominantly filled by good players, making it much harder to accumulate chips and highlighting just how important those early levels really are.

See it in action! Cash game legend Sam Farha takes advantage of actor Oliver Hudson’s inexperience by knocking him out of the 2005 WSOP Main Event in the very first hand. It may look like a cooler at first but a better player would have avoided going broke in this spot. tinyurl.com/nomoreoliver

AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 37

STRATEGY Tournaments

Searching for information

There are lots of poker websites around that offer you important information on your opponents in either a live or online tournament. TheHendonMob.com’s famous poker player database lists every significant live tournament cash a player has had in their career. Once you arrive at a tourney look for the names of your table mates on the TV displaying the table draw and then type their name into the Hendon Mob’s database on your smartphone. There’s plenty of free reads that you can get from doing this. If you see that a player only has one or two small cashes – or isn’t on the database at all – you can assume they are either inexperienced or plain bad at live poker. By contrast, some players will have frequent live results that date back years in low to mid-stakes tournaments. These will typically be very strong live players that are well-known on the circuit and very experienced. A third player group to look out for is those that have one

38 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

major score in their back catalogue, but have then gone on to have very few results. You’d be surprised how many of these players exist and it’s often a sign that they simply ran amazingly in that one event before their lack of skill became apparent. Don’t let these player’s reputations intimidate you as they are rarely going to be that great. Online poker now has even more sophisticated database tools at your fingertips. Perhaps the most useful is

Look for the names of your table mates and type their name into the Hendon Mob database

www.OfficialPokerRankings.com. Search for any player on this site and you will receive an instant breakdown of their total online poker profits, average buy-in and ROI (Return On Investment). Not only will this immediately alert you as to whether a player is good or not, but you can also manipulate this information to your advantage. For example, if a player’s average buy-in is just $5 but they are deep with you in a $200 online tournament you can rightly assume they will be feeling nervous and a bit out of their depth. Now that you know this it makes sense to push them around more than usual and expect them to play back only with premium hands. They say poker is a game of information and it’s important that you gain as much as you can on your opponents before you play them – luckily enough there are tons of websites out there waiting to help you. Making good use of this information will help you gain an edge, no matter how small.

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Lose the fear of busting

You will not win any money from the vast majority of poker tournaments you enter. The sooner you realise – and expect this – the better. Even excellent pros will only cash in around 15% of the tournaments they enter. Appreciating the huge variance in tournament poker should help you get over the irrational fear of busting that many players have. There is no shame in getting knocked out of a poker tournament! Far too many players value their ‘tournament life’ more than they value making the correct decisions in every spot possible. I saw a perfect example recently in a $200 live six-max freezeout. An older gentleman raised only for a very aggressive young kid to move all-in for 22 big blinds (the initial raiser had a similar stack size). After muttering about how he’d travelled ‘a long way’ for this tournament the older guy eventually folded pocket Tens face-up. Given the situation it’s a terrible fold heavily influenced by the fact that he didn’t want to be eliminated from the tourney in its early stages. You must be willing to take risks in tournaments by playing aggressively with draws or making the odd hero call when you sense you are winning. If you play too tightly good players are going

to exploit you over and over again as they will be aware that you must have a monster if you ever decide to risk your tournament. More importantly, taking on this strategy means that you will never win lots of money! You will get quite a few min-cashes on your record, and maybe even a final table or two if you run well, but you won’t win tournaments outright. All of the most successful tourney players are aggressive and willing to gamble it up when they have to. That’s because the vast majority of the money is to be found in the top three spots. Who cares if you blow an opportunity to finish 28th by losing a huge coinflip for the tournament chip lead? In the long run a solitary victory will often pay for a 28th place finish many times over.

Abusing the bubble

The money bubble offers a great opportunity to win chips by playing aggressively. Too many players – especially those that value their ‘tournament life’ too much – will be hanging on desperate for a min-cash, and only playing with monsters. So long as you have a decent stack you should view this stage as one of the most critical in the tournament. Raise a ton of hands to steal the blinds and win lots of small pots. Abusing the bubble is especially effective in live poker tournaments for the reasons we have listed previously. There’s no worse feeling in a tournament than being the nut bubble boy – some players will sink to the tightest levels to avoid this being them. It’s important that you don’t get carried away though. Targeting the correct players to abuse is crucial. If you’re playing against someone that you know is good and is short on chips, do not try and steal from him – he won’t care if he min-cashes or not! You want to target players you suspect the money is important to, not those that are playing PP purely for the win.

See it in action! German EPT winner Benny Spindler is known as one of the craziest players on the circuit. Watch as he and fellow sicko Martins Adeniya play a huge pot early on the 2012 EPT London final table. tinyurl.com/eptspindler

AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 39

STRATEGY sets

r e n n i g e B Concepts

Flopping a set puts you in one of the best situations you can be in at a poker table. Now all you’ve got to worrry about is how you’re getting paid... A set is a three of a kind when you hold a pair in your hand. It’s a very strong, disguised hand that has the ability to crush players holding big overpairs to the board. It doesn’t rank as high as a flush or a straight, but it’s very infrequent that anyone flops either of those big hands and, unless you’re unlucky enough to run up against a better set, you’ll always have plenty of outs to hit a full house. It’s often a good idea to fast-play this hand if someone shows strength (it’s easier to get their chips in) or it’s a draw-heavy board (you don’t want to give someone the right price to draw to a straight or flush). The only time you might think about slow-playing is if perhaps you’re heads-up on a non scary board and are extremely unlikely to be outdrawn by a flush or a straight. Slow-playing here gives someone a chance to catch up and pay you off.

Magic numbers But how do you get the set in the first place? First, you need to be dealt a pocket pair, which will happen about once every 17 hands. Second, you have to flop your third card, which will only happen about 12% of the time by the flop (although you’ll make a set around 20% of the time if you see all five community cards). The main point to keep in mind is that if your pocket pair needs to improve to win the hand you need to make sure playing the hand isn’t going to cost you too many of your chips. In a lot of situations you don’t need your pocket 40 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

THE JOY OF

SETS

If your pair needs to improve to win you make sure playing isn’t going to cost you too many chips

Aces, Kings, Queens or Jacks to hit three-of-a-kind for you to have the best hand, but with smaller pairs there is an increasingly smaller chance of your hand being able to stand up to action without improving. For this reason, make sure that

if you’re calling a raise to make a set, you’re not putting more than 10% of your chips in at any one point (seeing as you’ll only hit it 12% of the time).

PostFlop Play There are a lot of questions to ask yourself when you flop a set but the first, and most important one, should always be: ‘How can I quickly get all of my opponent’s chips into the middle?’ If the blinds are small compared to the chip stacks (for example, you’re playing a cash game or it’s the early stages of a tournament) and you’re first to act, it’s often a good idea to check-raise on the flop

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but don’t think of this as an opportunity wasted. You’re making the play for the times they do have a hand and you can get a lot of chips.

When sets go wrong!

Aggression lessons

Sets in numbers 11.69% How often you will flop a set with a pocket pair 0.69% The chance of being dealt a pair and flopping a set in any hand 33.4% The chance of making a full house or quads by the river when you have a set 4.34% The chance of hitting quads by the river if you flop a set or turn, trapping money in the pot when they take a stab at the pot with nothing. Check to the raiser with the expectation that they will continuation bet and then raise them to around 2.5 times their bet. If they have absolutely nothing they will fold,

when two top pros flop a set you know there’s trouble ahead…

You should try to judge how aggressive your opponent is. The more aggressively they play the faster you should play your hand, as snap-calls and rash all-ins from them are more likely. If the board looks dangerous with high cards and a flush draw you’re best betting out straight away. Leading out on the flop will not only build the pot, allowing for increasingly bigger bets on the turn and river, but will elbow weak draws out of the way and almost certainly still get action from a player with top pair or two-pair, who will be in huge trouble against your hand. If the pot is already fat compared to your opponent’s chip stack, and you’re acting before them, a check will give them the chance to bluff-shove all their chips into your monster. In this case, trapping is the best option because if you bet first your opponent must have a good hand to play on, as they’ll know that they’re committed for the rest of their chips. Give them the rope to hang themselves.

Watch it! www.tinyurl.com/kidcooler

1 Gus Hansen raises to $2,100 with 5-5 and Daniel Negreanu three-bets to $5,000 with 6-6. Hansen calls and they see a flop.

2 The flop comes 9-6-5. Both players have flopped a set. Negreanu bets and Hansen raises him to $18. Negreanu just calls.

Multi-way pots Playing a set slowly against one opponent can be worthwhile, but doing so against multiple opponents can be a recipe for disaster. Only the very driest of boards, such as K♠-8♣-3♦, will bring a turn card that isn’t going to have you worrying about a straight or flush, so don’t give away any free cards. Bet anywhere between half to full pot and hope to get action from drawing hands, flopped two-pairs and, if you’re really lucky, fish that can’t get away from top pair. The worst possible scenario is being on the wrong end of flopping a smaller set to a bigger set. It is one of the worst possible situations in no-limit hold’em. But the odds against it happening are slight, and you can’t read too much into it as it’s just one of these things that happens in poker. When someone makes a standard raise with pocket Jacks and you call with Sixes and are ‘gifted’ a 5-6-J flop you’re very unlikely to get away from the hand. If all the chips go in, which is very likely given the situation, you’ll be drawing to just one out to win the hand. Not good. But don’t let it put you off – if you can get your chips in every time you flop a set you will be a big winner in the long run.

3 The turn is a Five giving Hansen quads and Negreanu a full house. Hansen bets out and Negreanu calls once again.

4 The river is an Eight and Hansen makes an amazing check. Negreanu bets $65k and Hansen moves all-in. Negreanu reluctantly calls and loses a $410k pot.

You can watch Negreanu explain the hand here

www.tinyurl.com/kidexplains

MARCH 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 41

STRATEGY QUIZ Q1

Small warfare

Players 9 Blinds 25/50 Your stack 10,000 Your hand A♣-K♣

QUIZ MTT early stages In order to win any multi-table tournament you’re going to have to get a good start out of the blocks. Find out if you can hit the gun in style with Ross Jarvis’s testing quiz

Set ‘em up

BB FOLD

ACTION It’s one hour into the same live tourney and things are going well. You call a raise to 300 from a weaker player with 3-3 and four of you see the A♦-T♦-3♠ flop. The initial raiser bets 1,000, two players fold and the action is on you. What should you do?

FOLD

150

Pot: 375

BUTTON FOLD

Decision a) Call b) Raise to 2,000 c) Raise to 3,000 d) Move all-in

PLAYER 2 10,000

FOLD

Decision a) Fold b) Call c) Three-bet to 600 d) Three-bet to 1,500

Stack it right

Players 6 Blinds 75/150 Your stack 4,500 Your hand A♠-A♣

FOLD

150

FOLD

ACTION You’re playing in the $200 PokerPlayer Tour Grand Final and it’s the first hand of the tournament. A player opens to 150 UTG, another in mid-position calls and you have A-K suited in the small blind. What should you do?

FOLD

Pot: 2,350

YOU 12,500

FOLD

BB FOLD

1,000

42 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

YOU (SB) 10,000

PLAYER 1 10,000

FOLD

BUTTON FOLD

BB 10,000

Players 9 Blinds 50/100 Your stack 12,500 Your hand 3♣-3♦

SB FOLD

PLAYER 1 (UTG) 10,000

FOLD

850

SB FOLD

350

Pot: 1,275

BUTTON FOLD

ACTION You’re in the early stages of a $50 six-max online MTT. You raise to 350 with Aces and a very good, aggressive player three-bets you to 850 from the big blind. What should you do?

FOLD

Decision a) Call b) Four-bet to 2,200 c) Four-bet to 3,000 d) Move all-in

YOU 4,500

Decision a) Fold b) Limp in c) Raise to 500 d) Raise to 1,000

YOU (BTN) 8,500

FOLD

Pot: 525

FOLD FOLD FOLD

Rag heist FOLD 450

0-4 false start Phew! What’s that fishy stench – oh, it’s you...

your score 10) You get a double-up in the first hand of an online tournament. What should you do? a) Chill out, you’re almost guaranteed to cash b) Continue to play your normal game c) Turn up the heat – you have chips to burn! d) Instantly post the hand on Twitter 9) A famous pro known for table talk sits next to you and asks how much poker you play. What should you do? a) Stay quiet b) Change the subject to something else c) Tell them everything d) Ask if they have seen Howard Lederer 8) When you sit down in an online tournament what can you do to gain an extra edge? a) Stay hydrated b) Look up your opponent’s past results on a site like SharkScope c) Close all distractions like Facebook and Skype d) All of the above

Decision a) Fold b) Call the 5,000 c) Four-bet to 9,000 d) Move all-in PLAYER 1 10,000 450

Pot: 2,450 5,000

FOLD

7) At what stage should you start playing more aggressively? a) In the queue for the dinner buffet b) If you get moved to the TV table c) When you need the restroom d) When the antes come into play 6) If you’re new to tournament poker what is the best approach to take in the early stages? a) Tight-passive b) Tight-aggressive c) Loose-passive d) Loose-aggressive

The big gamble

March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 43

5-7 start me up Not bad, but you still have a way to go before mixing it with the big boys

8-10 head start You can negotiate the early stages and are clearly set for MTT glory

1 b) Call. This may surprise you but, even with really strong hands, it’s often best just to call a raise preflop when the blinds are so small compared to the stack sizes of the table. By calling we disguise our hand and can either win big pots postflop or only lose a small one when we miss. 2 c) Raise to 3,000. Big hands are hard to make and you must try to get maximum value from them. By betting into three other players the initial raiser is indicating he has something, probably an Ace. A weaker player will find it very hard to fold top pair so you should raise here to give yourself the chance of building a big pot. 3 a) Call. All good tournament players are very aware of stack sizes and you must be too. He will be three-betting you with a wide range here because you have an awkward stack size for playing postflop. As it’s a wide range he will often just fold if you decide to play back at him, making calling slightly better. 4 a) Fold. This is a close spot and there’s a good argument both for calling and jamming. However, when you think you have a big edge on the field it’s sometimes better not to take on spots where you suspect you will be racing and rarely ahead. 5 c) Raise to 500. This would be an easy fold before the antes kick in but now, with an additional 225 chips in the pot, it’s worth trying to steal the blinds preflop with any two cards. Even if you get a caller you have position so could win it with a c-bet a lot of the time. 6 b) Tight-aggressive. If you are only playing premium starting hands it should be impossible to make any huge mistakes, especially preflop. Until you get more comfortable with tournament poker this approach is the best chance you will have of going deep and hopefully cashing. 7 d) When the antes come into play. Antes change the complexion of a tournament. Now there is a significantly bigger pot to fight for and your stack is also under more pressure as you must contribute chips every hand. It’s important to try and grab your share of the pots now to keep ahead. 8 d) All of the above. If you are willing to put the effort in there are tons of small changes you can make to improve your edge at the online tables. By doing these you will be more focused and instantly get some general reads on your opponents. 9 b) Change the subject to something else. Talking at the table can make the game much more fun. However, it’s important not to reveal too much about your poker history as this can give perceptive opponents an early advantage on you. 10 b) Continue to play your normal game. As great as it is an early double-up really isn’t that important in the grand scheme of a tournament.

ACTION In a $22 online MTT the ante has just kicked in and it’s folded to you on the button. You have an ugly-looking 7♣-3♣. What should you do? SB 00,000 BB 00,000 FOLD FOLD

Players 9 Blinds 100/200/ante25 Your stack 8,500 Your hand 7♣-3♣

ACTION In a $100 soft local tourney you raise to 450 with Queens and get two callers. The big blind then squeezes to 5,000. The only times you’ve seen him play aggressively preflop he has shown down Kings and A-K. What do you do?

PLAYER 2 10,000

BUTTON FOLD

450 SB FOLD BB 14,000

YOU (SB) 14,000

FOLD

Players 9 Blinds 100/200 Your stack 14,000 Your hand Q♣-Q♥

round Quick-fire

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STRATEGY starting hands

The perfect start Part 1: suited connectors

In a new series examining starting hands, cash game pro Simon Hemsworth looks at the ultimate way to play suited connectors

Suited connectors are great for cash games where deeper stacks allow your hand to see more flops, turns and rivers and hopefully put a cooler on your opponent. If played correctly they are hands where you will be looking to either lose a small pot or win a big pot. Suited connectors can hit boards in all sorts of different ways which makes them much more attractive to play with deeper stacks where there are more ‘nutted’ hands you can make. When we talk about suited connectors we are not exclusively speaking about cards that are entirely connected as hands with one or two gaps (such as 8-6s or T-7s) still have great potential to hit different boards. However hands that are suited have much more relative implied odds compared to unsuited hands. In this article we will look at how best to play suited connectors at different stages of a hand, with some common examples thrown in to help. We will also consider some of the potential pitfalls of playing these sorts of hands, which could cost you money. 44 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

Assuming you are playing six-handed then it’s perfectly fine to open 7-6 suited from UTG

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Preflop In cash games you can typically open very liberally from all positions with suited connectors. This is unlike tournaments where there are usually short-stacked players that won’t let you realize the postflop potential of your hand. Assuming you are playing six-handed then it’s perfectly fine to open 7-6 suited from under the gun. Generally it’s good to have a wide opening range in cash games and, as we will see, suited connectors

Suited connectors are great to call three-bets with, particularly when deep and in position

have enough good postflop equity to be opening preflop. However, if there are active short stacks in play who could three-bet you and not allow you to call to see a flop it is not a good spot to open a hand like 7-6 suited. Another consideration is if there were aggressive players to your left. Such players can make your life extremely difficult postflop when you hit only one pair and are left with tough

bluff-catcher situations. Suited connectors are great hands to call three-bets with, particularly when deep and in position. Being deeper adds the benefit of being able to profitably see more turns and rivers, which could potentially improve your hand. Also, if you are deeper you can win a bigger pot if you do hit a nutted hand against an opponent with a weaker hand. March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 45

STRATEGY starting hands

On the flop Your suited connectors can hit the flop in all manner of ways ranging from a complete miss to hitting the absolute nuts. We are going to concentrate on a few specific situations which people frequently get wrong. Firstly there are the occasions when you flop a weak one pair hand. This can often be the downfall of suited connectors if you commit too much money with this type of hand on this type of flop. Let’s look at an example: l You call a three-bet in position with 8♥-7♥ in position 150BB deep and the flop comes 2♥-6♠-8♠. The villain bets two thirds of the pot… This is a standard call against almost all opponents. A mistake some players make is to raise here – neither for value or as a bluff – but rather to try to gain information on their opponent’s hand. However, if the villain decides to three-bet this flop it is conceivable they have a big hand like an overpair, a combo draw with a hand like K♠-Q♠ or a bluff, thus giving you very little of the information you wanted. Calling makes more sense as you might be able to get

Flopping a weak one pair hand can often be the downfall of connectors if you commit too much cash

to showdown with your pair of Eights and win. You have good equity with two pair or trip outs, as well as back door straight and flush draws, where if you hit could win a big pot against an overpair. Although just calling can leave you with difficult turn and river decisions if you don’t improve, raising will make your life much more difficult in the long run. l You call a three-bet with J♦-9♦ in position 100BB deep and the flop comes T♦-3♠-8♦. The villain bets half the pot… In this situation it is usually best to raise and look to get all-in. You have excellent equity against almost every hand unless the villain happens to have a set or a higher flush draw. These hands are not only unlikely but you will still have great equity against them anyway. The disadvantage of just calling with a hand like this is that if you miss the turn completely then your equity is massively reduced and you will face a difficult turn decision. Also, if you call and hit with a card like the A♦ then your opponent might be able to fold a hand like Q-Q. By playing the combo draw

The turn and river These are the spots where you should be looking to either extract value with big hands or find situations to bluff/semi-bluff. Also, if you have called the flop with a weak one pair hand and haven’t improved by the turn or the river it’s usually a good idea to fold your hand to further aggression. Sometimes with suited connectors we will get a turn card that gives us more outs so let’s consider a good turn semi-bluff spot: l You call a three-bet with J♣-T♣ 120BB deep and see a flop of 4♣-5♣-7♠. The villain makes a standard c-bet to which you call. The 46 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

turn is an 8♠ and the villain bets… In this situation a shove would be a very effective play for a few reasons. Firstly, the only feasible hand the villain can really be betting is a hand with a Six in it, which is difficult to have as the preflop three-bettor. If for some reason the villain is betting again with a hand like an overpair then our shove should look very credible, and we can certainly have a Six in this situation. Either way a shove should get lots of folds with hands that don’t have a Six in them. If the villain

fast you ensure that you always get your money in with great equity but also don’t allow the villain’s bluffs, with hands like A-K, to end up winning the hand.

l You raise 6♠-5♠ preflop from the cutoff and are called in the BB by a villain 100BB deep. The flop comes 8♠-9♥-T♠. The villain checks, you bet two-thirds pot and the villain raises… On this occasion you have flopped quite well with a flush draw and a gutshot. Some people would make the mistake of three-betting this flop and then getting all-in at this point. The better play would be to just call and see a turn card. This is because this is a flop that smashes the range of a typical opponent calling out of the BB. Flopped straights, sets, two pairs or superior combo draws are all well within the villain’s range and you are in very poor shape with 6♠-5♠ here. If you call you could still hit one of your draws on the turn and potentially get value from straights, two pairs or trips. However, caution should be advised as cards that improve your hand could also improve the villain’s hand.

does have a value hand then we have plenty of outs with a gutshot and a flush draw. Though calling the turn is not a bad play with such good equity, the difficulty arises when we miss our hand and have to fold to aggression. Sometimes it is best to call flop and turn with a combo draw and then bluff the river when you miss. Consider the following:

Sometimes it is best to call flop and turn with a combo draw and bluff the river when you miss

l You call an UTG raise on the button with 9♦-7♦ and see a flop of A♦-Q♦-K♠ and call a c-bet. The turn is a 7♣ and you call another bet. The river is a T♣ and the villain checks…

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Thinking beyond the flop In this infamous hand from High Stakes Poker Daniel Negreanu is having a bad session and thinks his luck might be turning around when he flops the nuts with T♥-9♥ on Q-8-J. However the board pairs on the turn and gives Erick Lindgren quad Eights. This is a good example of how you should not be caught up on how great the flop was for your hand and must re-evaluate each street as the board (and therefore the players’ ranges) change. The way the hand goes down it is very possible for a straight to no longer be the best hand on the river. When Lindgren goes all-in it’s incredibly unlikely a straight is the best hand and becomes a mandatory fold. Negreanu, aided by some clear frustration and sense of injustice, is still thinking about how great his hand was on the flop instead of thinking rationally about how it’s now clearly the second best hand on the river. Negreanu ends up making a crying call and loses a huge $233k pot.

WATCH IT! www.tinyurl.com/LindgrenQuads

The preflop and flop plays are somewhat standard, although three-betting preflop or raising the flop could be advantageous against certain opponents. The turn play is more debatable. Although you pick up a pair, quite often your two pair or trip outs can be dead against the villain’s flopped set or Broadway. On the river this is a mandatory bluff spot. There is a very small chance that your pair of Sevens is good but that’s unlikely. Usually in situations like this the villain is checking to try to get to showdown. It’s very unlikely he has a Jack, but we can credibly represent one. A bet of somewhere around two-thirds pot will likely get the job done. You want to bet an amount that you would typically bet with a Jack in this spot.

Lessons to learn The beauty of suited connectors is their ability to hit lots of different board textures and give you situations where you can hit a very strong hand to win a pot from a weaker one. They play greatly in cash game poker where stacks are deep and you can benefit from having lots of outs to hit on turn and river cards. The high equity you can flop also allows you to play big draws fast. Caution should be taken with such hands when stacks are more shallow, such as in a tournament. You must be willing to throw away your hand when you do not hit the flop, turn or river

sufficiently to continue and not bluff in bad spots just because you missed. Care should also be taken to evaluate exactly how strong your draw is on different boards. Just because you have a pair and a flush draw it does not mean you must always want to commit lots of money to the pot. An evaluation of how a certain board hits your opponent’s range as well as your own is essential.

NEXT ISSUE!

Simon Hemsworth reveals how to play small pocket pairs perfectly

March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 47

STRATEGY book extract

The life of a poker player

48 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

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In this extract from his new book How To Be A Poker Player: The Philosophy of Poker high-stakes pro Haseeb Qureshi explains the everyday steps you must take to be a serious poker player Nobody teaches us how to be poker players. Poker culture teaches us how to slowplay, how to set mine, how to manage our bankroll. It teaches how to think, how to talk, what is cool and what is not. We absorb these teachings eagerly. But when is it going to teach us how to be poker players? If you know the lives of many professional poker players, you know this is a question that sorely needs answering. Professional poker is a strange and isolating life. Nothing you have ever done before will prepare you for it. This is my attempt to rectify that, and recount everything that I think every poker player ought to live by – and what I wish I had heard when I began playing poker.

Structuring your poker lifestyle

HEALTH

Freedom is a double-edged sword. Your freedom as a poker player means you can live almost any way you want. This often leads us to unhealthy habits. To counter this, structure is extremely important. As adept as you may think you are at playing poker at any time of day, structure and regularity are highly beneficial to learning and health.

Poker drains us. It muddies out sleep, health and diet. Many poker players have trouble balancing their lives; some never do. The bedrock of your constitution comes from diet and nutrition. Learning healthy habits is perhaps the most valuable thing you can do to immediately improve your health.

Set a daily schedule for yourself Decide when you’re going to play poker, and for how long. I recommend not playing any sessions for longer than three hours, and taking a short break every 90 minutes. Studies show that there is a drop in performance and mental acuity around the 90 minute mark; taking a break will make you much

sharper throughout the entirety of your session.

Always play at the same time every day Plan these times out in advance. If it is difficult for you to keep to these times, try setting timers. Try not to play outside of these times, especially in serious games. Train your brain to think, ‘this is when I play poker. Only at these times.’ If you don’t do this, and break your structure, you will be more susceptible to tilt and bad decision making.

Stop eating processed foods Try to throw them out completely. Cut out as much sugar as you can. Ideally, limit your diet to fruits, vegetables, nuts, meat and unrefined grains.

Always review sessions

Cut out fizzy drinks

Go over hands in detail. Remind yourself what you did wrong and how to change it. Don’t review your session immediately after you finish it, though – your memory is still too fresh, and you’ll be biased towards thinking that your reads were correct.

They are essentially liquid candy and energy drinks are especially sugary. Drink as little alcohol as possible (and always lock yourself out of your poker accounts when you plan to drink).

Taking a break will make you much sharper throughout the entirety of your session

You don’t have to do all of this at once If your diet is in an especially bad place, then take just a few of these and implement them in your life. Remember your environment will always be more powerful than your self-will. March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 49

STRATEGY book extract

The art of quitting A great player once told me that quitting is the most important skill in poker. The more I came to understand the poker life, the more I realised how right he was. Almost all poker players quit too little when they’re down and too much when they’re up. It is imperative that you treat quitting as a skill, and practice it mindfully. Don’t ever be afraid to quit when you’re down.

It is fine to quit fish sometimes Some of the players I respect most have been known to quit fish. After

If there’s one inevitability in poker, it’s that things will be unfair. But how can we embrace this fact?

all, 10% of the time, the people who you think are fish are not fish at all. And 1% of the time, even if they are fish, their strategies may be exploiting you.

Only play when you’re having fun It doesn’t matter if he’s a fish, doesn’t matter if you’re supposed to play a session today, or if you think you have to keep playing this guy – if you’re not having fun, quit. Never mentally penalise yourself for a good quit. Poker should be fun! It's a game that is 'played'. If we enjoy playing it makes us perform better.

How to be happy for people Every single day, some fish somewhere will win a tournament. This is a statistical certainty. Sitting in his mother’s basement, clicking buttons and going all-in with his lucky cards, he binks more in one sitting than you make in an entire month or year. How does that make you feel? Perhaps it doesn’t bother you. If you’ve played poker for a while, it probably shouldn’t. So imagine instead one of the regulars at your stakes. Think of the fishiest, scummiest, trash-talkiest nitreg you know. And then imagine him binking a tournament for $400,000. How about that? Steaming yet? If there’s one inevitability in poker, it’s that things will be unfair. Great players will sometimes fail, and bad players will sometimes succeed. But how can we embrace this fact?

Try being happy for other people Even people you don’t like. It’s not easy. We are inundated with stories 50 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

of other people succeeding, while poker constantly nags at us: ‘why not you?’ But your life as a poker player will be better when you can genuinely be happy for others.

Stop telling bad beat stories The desire to complain to others about your bad beats derives from a nearby artery – wanting affirmation that your failures are not your fault, and that you deserve more than you have. Just by repeatedly re-living those spots, you reinforce negativity, and the belief that all of your losses are unjust.

Practice being happy for others Tell a friend good job on his winning month. Write someone who won a tournament a private message applauding him. Do little things. Make sure they hurt a little, kick up your bitterness, or make you a little sick to your stomach. Lean into your envy and, eventually, it won’t bother you anymore. You will find great relief in being happy for others.

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The power of exercise In a lifestyle as sedentary and chaotic as poker regular exercise can feel like it’s difficult to maintain. But getting regular exercise is one of the most valuable investments you can make in your life. Regular exercise triggers rushes of endorphins, which not only make us feel euphoric, but also increase our mental clarity and stimulate learning. It also helps to keep energy levels stable throughout the day. It’s been proven time and time again that exercise is the most effective treatment for depression and it also increases your lifespan, immune system and makes you look better!

If you’re not exercising, start Find something easy and doable. It may be something like power walking, a basic regiment of pushups and sit ups, jogging, or

some mild yoga. For poker players who travel often, it is important to remember that you can do very intense body-weight workouts anywhere. When I was travelling through Europe, I would often do my workouts in a hotel room, out in a park, or on a secluded street corner.

Develop skills, don’t just work out Focus on building strength, improving your flexibility, or developing skills like kickboxing or yoga. The more motivating and goal-oriented you are, the easier it will be to exercise continually.

Don’t fear overtraining Workout as much and as often as you can. It will hurt at first, and be cumbersome, but eventually you will start to enjoy it – I promise. It takes time to get over the initial hump, but the fruits of good exercise are invaluable for your body and mind.

Exercise triggers rushes of endorphins [and] increases our mental clarity

You are more than poker

If you are to be a professional poker player, then poker will be the chief focus of your waking life. But you must remember that you are more than your poker-playing self. I failed at this when I was a poker player. After enough time I could not sever my larger identity from my identity as a poker player. I lost myself to the game. Do not lose yourself. Find balance. Integrate yourself in the world. Keep in touch with friends outside poker. Always be learning new skills, reading and learning about the world, making new friends and challenging your sense of reality. Let poker challenge you, let it raise you up. Let it make of you a greater human being than you were when you came to it. It can do all of those things if you treat this game, and yourself, with dignity. l For more information on Haseeb Qureshi’s How To Be A Poker Player: The Philosophy of Poker PP and to buy a copy go to: www.haseebq.com

The obsession Most poker player’s relationship with poker begins out of obsession. If you have never spent hours tinkering with Excel sheets, PokerStove, your HEM stats, or railing the $25/$50 games immersed in a personal fantasy, then you will probably never be a great player. Every great player I have ever known has started with this obsession.

You need to be crazy If you do not have this – if your mind has never been taken over by poker – then you should give up. Walk away now. You will never be a great player. The chances are that you will only lose money and time. If

you are not a little bit crazy, you will never reach the level of excellence and dedication required to master poker.

Tame the obsession But let’s say you are a little bit crazy, that you wake up in the middle of the night to dream of hands you played the night before. Perhaps poker is for you. The real work begins in taming that obsession. When you are developing as a player, poker is constantly pumping through your veins, like a drug. But after a while you need to retake control of your life and create more balance. It may take a long time but it’s essential if you want to be happy.

WIN! Three copies of How To Be A Poker Player! Simply answer this question: What was Haseeb Qureshi’s famous online poker username? a) CatIsHead b) HorseIsHead c) DogIsHead All answers must be sent by April 30 to contact@pokerplayeramerica.com. Winners will be drawn at random. The editor’s decision is final.

March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 51

STRATEGY pokersnowie

SNOWIE The world’s most powerful poker coaching tool is finally here, and it may change the game forever. Ross Jarvis finds out more about PokerSnowie

oker players are naturally suspicious of anything that threatens to help the game evolve. Doyle Brunson was castigated by the high-stakes poker world for releasing Super/System in 1979, CardRunners were accused of making online poker unbeatable when they opened in 2005 and now there’s a new kid on the block looking to take the education of poker players to the next level. PokerSnowie.com launched in August 2013, billing itself as ‘the world class Game Theory Optimal artificial intelligence engine’. That all sounds very impressive, but what does it actually mean? I spoke with PokerSnowie co-founder Johannes Levermann to find out more. German-born Levermann explains that the roots of PokerSnowie actually lay in the

52 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

game of backgammon, ‘I used to be a professional backgammon player, I was ranked number three in the world and traveled to all the big tournaments.’ Along with grinding the backgammon circuit Levermann was also busy at work studying the game of poker, for which he developed a complex poker algorithm to complete a Masters degree – that same algorithm would go on to form the basis of PokerSnowie many years later. Before he could get to poker though, Levermann and his partner released Backgammon Snowie in 1998, which could ‘analyse your game and

the game of your opponent. You could very quickly determine who was the better player [and when] the player who is supposed to lose sees that he will just stop playing – it’s only fun if you think you have a chance.’ Backgammon Snowie was so effective as a teaching tool that it effectively killed off the burgeoning online market, where players had started to bet on matches.

The advice es is Snowie giv it’s objective – ent not depend o wh on a coach is tells you h opinion

A new way of learning Poker players understandably had some concern when PokerSnowie was launched but, as Levermann explains, the two games are very

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[GTO] is that a strategy ody means nob u. yo can exploit y You just pla r good poke

different, ‘Both games have a component of luck and a component of skill but because you cannot see your opponent’s hole cards in poker there is no way that [our software] will kill the game because you cannot get all of the information to [definitely] see who is the better player.’ PokerSnowie is, essentially, a computer program that has mastered the art of playing game theory optimal (GTO) poker. By signing up to PokerSnowie.com – a one year license costs €149 – you get full access to the ‘brain’ of Snowie, where you can import hands you have played online and get objective analysis for every single move you make before being given a ranking from world class to beginner. Levermann views this method of learning as far superior to a video training site, or even hiring a private coach, ‘The advice that Snowie gives you is objective – it’s not dependent on a certain coach who tells you in his opinion that you should have done

this or that, before a second voice disagrees. PokerSnowie is also cost-effective versus hiring a coach because you just pay the one-off fee and don’t have to pay by the hour.’

This is in contrast to the more familiar ‘maximising’ strategy of playing poker where you adapt your game to exploit the Johannes Levermann is weaknesses of your the brains behind PokerSnow opponents as much as ie possible (for example, not bluffing a player who calls all the time). Levermann uses a simple Theory test preflop example to show the differences So what is GTO and why is it so important between the two approaches, ‘an online to be aware of it if you want to be a top player will open the button around 70% of player? GTO, as Levermann explains, ‘is a the time, especially if the players in the style which means you play independently blinds are too tight. This can sometimes of your opponents. You just play very good make it profitable to raise with any two poker. It’s as if you have never seen your cards. In GTO you cannot do this because opponent and have no data on them at all the big blind will defend much more, so and you always play the same. It’s a very Snowie will only open around 40% of the powerful strategy that means nobody can time on the button so that it can’t be exploit you.’ World class cash game players exploited [by light three-bets etc].’ Of like Isaac Haxton and Ben ‘Sauce1234’ course, the best players use a mixture of Sulsky are big proponents of GTO poker both strategies. for precisely this reason.

March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 53

strategy pokersnowie

Challenge accepted Think that you can take on PokerSnowie and beat it at its own game? Here’s your chance One of the most fun reasons to get a PokerSnowie subscription is so that you can use the Challenge PokerSnowie feature. Here you get to play the AI engine at heads-up or six-max and simulate what it’s like playing a world class GTO player. Sadly no money is at stake, but when you consider that PokerSnowie is currently beating challengers from around the world for 22BB/100 – a huge win rate – that might just be for the best. Snowie co-founder Johannes Levermann says the results are not particularly surprising, ‘It’s proof for us that its not easy to win against this AI. I expected Snowie would crush most people and that’s the case!’ Now that over 1.6 million hands have been played against the AI the major mistake players are continually making is that, ‘Most players are very unbalanced. This is bad against GTO strategy as Snowie now has so much experience and is always perfect when considering implied odds and so on.’ If you feel like you want to take a shot at poker’s equivalent of Robocop then be our guest – but don’t say we didn’t warn you!

By plugging your hands into the PokerSnowie client you will be taught instantly whether your plays were correct under GTO poker. Levermann says that improvements can be made instantly, ‘Even the first time you use Snowie you will learn something. Even an average player, who plays once a week, can profit enormously.’ This theory was put to good use in the testing phase of the product, where Levermann says there were some great success stories. ‘We set up a poker school in Montenegro and we basically picked up some people from the street that had no job, were young and had an interest in poker. Some of them didn’t even know the rules but we gave them the poker coach to train and to learn – then we staked them all to play online and now many of them are winning players at pretty high stakes.’

Looking ahead Levermann has incredible confidence in his PokerSnowie baby, ‘If I redesigned Snowie’s brain so that people had not seen it before then there is no limit to what it could win online.’ Of course, we’ll

54 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

We don’t l the want to kil he industry. T ecome goal is to b rd the standa or software f poker

Jungleman had a tough battle with Poker Snowie

never see that come to fruition – the use of any ‘bots’ or artificial devices is against the terms and conditions of every online poker site – but it’s a bold claim from Levermann that was justified somewhat when world-class pro Dan ‘Jungleman’ Cates ‘challenged’ Snowie to a heads-up match – the results were practically even. Making money at the tables is not in the future for PokerSnowie but what is? ‘We intend to work together with the sites and we don’t want to kill the poker industry –

that would kill our own business! The goal of our company is to become the standard software for poker like we are for backgammon.’ Levermann sees a day when PokerSnowie will be plastered all over televised shows from industry giants like PokerStars and WSOP too. ‘We used our backgammon software for world championship matches to determine who had played better and it helped the TV commentary. It would be very useful in poker too – the showdown equities you see on poker TV shows are very boring but if you could see the EV numbers from our game theory engine instead it would be much more exciting.’ Just as the first wave of strategy books followed by video training sites helped to revolutionize the way that poker is played, PokerSnowie looks set to take the game one stage further. It’s the most advanced training tool out there and, if you’re serious about poker, you should at least see what all the fuss is about PP for yourself. l You can download a 10 day free trial today at www.PokerSnowie.com

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STRATEGY PRO Column

Focus on the process not the results Too many poker players are chasing an unrealistic dream. Focus instead on making optimal decisions, says Jason Koon, and the rest will fall into place

ike many poker fans, I developed a love for the game watching late night reruns of the WSOP. I imagined staring across the table at Chip Reese or Phil Ivey with only a bracelet and a pile of cash between us. After a four hour nap, the alarm clock would agitate me enough to roll out of bed and rush to class. My school, West Virginia Wesleyan College, was making a push to go completely digital and encouraged students to bring their laptops to class. That was pretty convenient for me, because it was during Dr. Shaafi’s MBA finance class that I developed a talent in heads up SNGs. I somehow finished school, but within a month of having a real job, I realized that being a professional poker player was my true dream. It’s hard to believe that was seven years ago. I still love poker as much as I ever have; I just approach playing for a living in a very different manner. Having a dream that you’re hell-bent on achieving is certainly a powerful motivator. When I first started playing for a living, I was on edge every single session. I’m not sure if it was just my insecurity of not knowing if I was actually good enough to make it as a professional, or my inability to cope with things that were out of my control. My mood was a direct indicator of how poker was going for me at that moment. It took a ton of highs and lows before I really learned what it was going to take to thrive as a poker pro.

Keep it real

Success in poker comes from making the right decisions

focus on continuing to make optimal decisions, will lead the healthiest lives and produce the best results. This doesn’t only apply to the downsides. Oftentimes people, including myself, are blinded by the dream. I’ll be at a live poker tournament, see how much first place is and be like, ‘Wow, first place is two-million dollars. Let’s go!’ I’ve already made a massive mistake before a single hand has been dealt. It’s these types of unrealistic outlooks that will almost always have you leaving the casino in a worse mood than when you came in. Develop your skills and get a good feel for how much money you’re making every time you click ‘register’ in a tournament. If my ROI in a specific $10,000 main event is 100%, I know every time I enter, I’m making

Develop your skills and get a good feel for how much money you make every time you register

Poker (like life) is a game of uncertain outcomes. Regardless of what steps you take to take create the ideal result, sometimes things won’t go as planned. The people that learn to accept misfortune for what it is, and

Got a poker problem you can’t fix?

Jason KOON Jason Koon has been a poker pro for seven years. Starting from the smallest stakes on the internet, he now plays the biggest buy-in tournaments in the world. He was a collegiate athlete at West Virginia Wesleyan College and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Finance as well as an MBA. After Black Friday, Jason has been traveling the world for work and play, but spends most of his time in Vancouver, BC.

$10k no matter how the cards might fall. Too many of us are out there chasing the big bink. Regardless if it ever comes or not isn’t important. By approaching situations rationally you won’t be a prisoner to silly expectations. If you’re good, you will win. You almost certainly will one day get ‘the big bink’, but it really doesn’t matter. Focus on PP the process, not the results.

We’ve enlisted Sofia Lövgren, a young pro from Sweden, to tackle your poker problems next issue. Lövgren started playing poker online when she was 18. Fast forward five years and she’s a regular on the EPT circuit, and crushing high stakes cash online. Send your poker problems to her by email (contact@pokerplayeramerica.com) or on Twitter (@PokerPlayerUS). We’ll publish a selection next issue and send a pack of PokerPlayer playing cards to the best one. 56 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

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YOUR CALL

THIS ISSUE’S TEASER...

Karl gets into a raising war with a super-aggressive hoodie EVENT: £400+£40 Genting Poker Series Nottingham STACK: 28,000 BLINDS: 200/400/a50

Karl Mahrenholz tests out your poker skills with this tough hand from a recent major tournament. Can you work out the best move?

SITUATION: This hand comes from the fifth level on Day 1 of the recent GPS event in Nottingham in the UK. I’ve been playing at this table for about an hour. I didn’t recognize many people and the standard and playing styles seem very mixed. My opponent in this hand was a young guy, presumably with an online background. He didn’t seem technically very good but fitted into the standard young hyper-aggressive mould. Since being at the table I saw him open very wide from under the gun and he got into a raising war with me the very first hand we played against each other where he five-bet me button versus big blind and quickly folded to a

UTG+2 ALL-IN

FOLD FOLD

FOLD

25,000

YOU (BB) 20,500

FOLD

Pot: 17,750

SB 20,000

CUTOFF 30,000

FOLD

draw. The small blind checked, I bet 2,600 and the Villain made it 6,900. He had me covered reasonably comfortably. Everyone else folded and I decided to call. The river was an offsuit Ace. I checked and he set me all-in. The pot was 17,750 before he shoved and I had just over 20,000 behind. What is the best play?

shove. My table image had been fairly active. In this hand he opened from early position to 875 and the players in the cutoff and small blind called. I called the extra with 6-5 suited. The flop was J-6-5 rainbow giving me bottom two pair. Everybody checked. The turn was a Ten which put up a flush

HERE’S ONE I PLAYED EARLIER

Karl makes a flush before things get ugly on the river EVENT: £800 Genting Poker Series Grand Final STACK: 32,000 BLINDS: 50/100 SITUATION: In this hand I opened to 250 UTG+1. The Villain called in mid-position and both blinds called. The flop was Q-J-7 with two diamonds giving me a flush draw. I bet 525 into 1,000. The Villain raised to 1,900 and both blinds called. I raised again to 3,200 total and he called after quite a long think. The turn was the 3♦ to make me a flush. I bet 5,200 and he called again after a dwell. The river was the J♣, pairing the board. The pot was 17,840 and we had 22k left in our stacks. What is your play?

Win! pokerplayer playing cards

Think you can play like a pro? Tell us what you’d do in the hand that Karl played above and the best answer will win a pack of playing cards. We’ll print the solution next issue.

Think you can solve the problem?

SOLUTION: The important factors in this hand are the history with the player, my current table image and the stack-to-pot ratio on the river. I had a strong hand but it is easy to look at the board and think there aren’t actually many worse hands

YOU (UTG+1) ALL-IN

FOLD

22,000

SB 26,500

Pot: 17,850 22,000

SB 30,000

that may call. I had the lowest possible flush and now the board has paired. If we consider there is already almost 18k in the pot and 22k back are we willing to fold if we check and he bets it all? I suggest not. So the decision is what is more likely – that he will call with a worse hand if we bet or that he will bluff/value bet a worse hand if we check? I don’t think he will value bet trip Jacks in a spot where

EMAIL contact@pokerplayeramerica.com or

HIJACK CALL

FOLD FOLD

we are representing a stronger hand, or a bluff. There aren’t many missed draws he can have, bar K-T with a diamond. He may have played a set or two pair this way but he could also have a top pair hand that he is getting stubborn with. I decided to shove, hoping that my three streets of aggression on an ever-changing board wouldn’t make sense. He tanked and eventually called with A♦-Q♣.

TWEET @PokerPlayerUS using the #YourCall March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 57

STRATEGY self improvement

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time for a little experiment CardRunners pro [vital]Myth talks about the importance of experimenting with different tactics if you want to be one of the best In association with

58 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

www.pokerplayerAMERICA.coM

Over time the greatest poker players have been the ones that experiment with their game and strive to be even better, despite already reaching a high level of skill. You should, like many of those stars before you, experiment with the things that you do and observe so you can figure out how to become a better player. The players that have taught me the most tend to try things out. High-stakes legend Cole South is a great example. In an old CardRunners video he pointed out that he used to watch the highstakes games when he was playing $100NL, just to see what they would do differently to him. He would get some ideas from the patterns winning players would exhibit. In seeing those things he tried them out in his own game. The interesting thing is that these were never crazy big pot 300BB bluffs that he was learning â&#x20AC;&#x201C; instead he would talk about simple mechanics like basic preflop moves and small pot stuff â&#x20AC;&#x201C; moves that would happen several times per hour and not once per month. This allowed South to think about things that he could actually apply to his own

game instead of highly situation, player-dependent spots. Noticing basic patterns and simple changes is where you will make the biggest improvements to your poker game. You are going to have some slight leaks in your continuationbetting strategy, or three- and fourbetting game and if you can improve those you will quickly see dramatic increases in your win rate. Here are two examples that South noticed from the higher stakes that he started experimenting with.

Crazy stealing In certain high-stakes games some players will open the button every single time it is folded to them. When South saw this he realised that those players must sometimes be sitting with absolute junk like 9-3 offsuit! South thought heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d try to emulate them. He moved down in stakes and tried stealing with literally any two in every single situation to see what happened. It was a new form of playing so almost a new game. Through that experimentation he really improved his button play.

Noticing basic patterns and simple changes is where you will make the biggest improvements to your game

Preflop gameflow South is known for pioneering some moves we take for granted now, like double barrelling on scare cards. He saw that you can develop a sense for the preflop gameflow. If you have three-bet one player a lot preflop you must adjust because they will now be ready to four-bet you back. South would move to call them preflop with a very wide range and play aggressively postflop instead. The sense of timing for making this adjustment was something he got from deliberately experimenting.

March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 59

STRATEGY Self Improvement

HOW to experiment time to experiment When I say you need to experiment I don’t want you to change your style completely. I mean being inquisitive, scientific and trying something out to see if it works for you and confuses your opponents. I’m not talking about a huge paradigm shift in your game. This is a short-term gathering of data and here’s how to do it:

You should make small investments When Cole South would experiment with things like stealing every single button or three-betting a huge amount he would move down in stakes substantially. Don’t dump 12 buy-ins trying to figure out if something new is working. If you play $5/$10 then you can probably move all the way down to $1/$2 because there are still a bunch of regs in those games and the games won’t be so different that you can’t learn anything from experimenting.

Data collection The point of experimenting is to collect data and see what it says. Approach this to see what happens and then make a judgement call. It takes a long time and a lot of data to make a real decision. In NLHE we are looking for small edges. For example, let’s say you are experimenting with a new bluff line to win a small pot. This could be leading into the preflop raiser with an overbet. Don’t try it out just five times and then make a decision about it. Don’t be all giddy if it works the first few times. And it’s also important not to overdo it with a move that seems to be losing over and over again. It’s probably better not to give yourself the stress of losing a ton of money right now, even if the new move may be profitable long-term. Be scientific about this and manage your stress level.

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When to experiment During times of low stress Its important to manage your stress level and make investments into changing your game wisely. You should experiment more in low stress situations, like when you have just come off a good winning month, or have a good day job. As long as you’re happy it’s appropriate to experiment. But if you’re under lots of stress, like when you are losing, I don’t advocate experimenting. Yes, you should try and tweak your game but you can do this through free means like forum discussions, talking to people and using software like Hold’em Manager. If you have your life straightened out then experiment and try to improve your game. Even if you fail its not going to drive you crazy. For example, you could try bluff shoving rivers on scare cards when you think your opponent only has a one pair type hand. That’s a common experiment. The problem, though, is that it’s also an experiment that guarantees a lot of risk and a really big pot. I wouldn’t recommend

Manage your stress level and make investments into changing your game wisely

doing that when you’re coming off a month running 20 buy-ins below EV – it wouldn’t be good for your stress level!

In typical games I think you should also experiment in games that are normal for you. You shouldn’t always move down in stakes to do so. If you

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Why to experiment Emulate better players Watch the high-stakes games to try and figure out why those players are better than you. Then use that to experiment with their moves in your game. Watching can be very healthy because when you are involved in the playing of hands it can be easy to judge them wrong or feel too financially invested. But when you watch someone else you can look at the action objectively and learn. Emulating better players is behaviour that is a hallmark of the best players in the world.

Emulating better players is behaviour that is a hallmark of the best players in the world

Learn about players

are going to do something once per hour to work out a new line or tactic then just try it in your usual game. But if you’re trying very volatile, high risk moves then move down in stakes.

Learning about how people play and the way they think is important. How do people adjust to their opponents or react to something that is happening at the table? You’ll never learn how the regulars in your games tend to react to bonkers, crazy play unless you put them in a situation where they are forced to confront this. This learning process can give you some really good insight into other people in general, not just your opponents. This process also helps you learn about yourself. For example, you experiment with an overbet bluff but you’ve never done it before because you always assumed that the move looks stupid, bluffy and very suspicious. You think everyone will call. However then you try it and find out that actually most people just fold. Suddenly you’ve learned not only that most people fold to overbets – which is useful information – but also that you yourself are quite a bit more suspicious, and apt to look for bluff

spots than many of your opponents are. It’s a simple example of how experiments can help teach you more about your opponents and yourself at the same time. You can now adjust your own poker game to get correct assumptions in future.

Round out your game A lot of people only have ten standard lines that they take, or less. The best players I have ever seen will occasionally deviate from these at a frequency of twice per hour and do something very different from what mid-stakes players always do because they have a good sense of when the mould is broken and a situation is different. Those standard lines such as c-betting two thirds of the pot, or three-betting light from the big blind versus button are sometimes no longer appropriate and the PP best players recognise this.

Know when to stop When you are happy with the results of your experiments you don’t need to continue mixing it up. For example, you feel that your preflop game just isn’t that good and you can’t see why you would have a preflop edge over your opponents. Your general feeling is that everyone is so good preflop that you don’t have an edge. Now, I promise you that’s not true – the edges are still there but you just have to find them. You have to experiment to do this. Over time you will improve to the point that you do feel you have a preflop edge. At that point you no longer need to keep experimenting. Don’t keep pushing it if the problem no longer exists. Instead look for something else that you can work on.

NEXT ISSUE!

[vital]Myth looks at examples of unusual lines that you can take in your experimental poker adventure March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 61

STRATEGY column

The world according to Rast Think of a poker player and you don’t immediately picture a happy family behind him. WSOP bracelet winner Brian Rast argues that it’s possible and desirable

o, you play poker and you fell in love. Now you want to get married (or maybe you already are), but you’re worried about how to make it work with your unorthodox lifestyle? It’s well worth making the effort. I’ve come to learn how important balance is in my life, in order to maintain success over the long-term, and nothing has helped me to achieve this more than my wife. As a prerequisite, it’s important that your partner believes in you. They don’t have to understand poker (at this point in time, my wife, Juliana, doesn’t really even know how to play), but they do have to believe that:

challenges involved in being with a poker player. First, you don’t have a stable income. Sometimes it rains and pours, other times there’s a drought. Second, especially if you play tournaments, you likely travel a lot. To combat the wave-like nature of your income, a few things are key: planning ahead, communication and self-control. It’s crucial that your partner understands the cyclic nature of poker, and that you discuss ahead of time what your plan is for the good times and the bad. This requires honesty and plenty of communication. So don’t be afraid to talk! And, the ball is in your court in order to maintain a level head and control your gambling urges. For some people, this might be very easy – but for others, very difficult. It can be tough on the ego to step down in stakes if you’re on a losing streak, or to analyze yourself properly and realize that a certain spot or game isn’t +EV for you. It can be tough to be critical of yourself, identify your leaks, and turn off those faucets (casino games, sports betting, playing too long when you’re tired, quitting good games to book wins, etc…). You

It can be tough on the ego to step down in stakes if you’re on a losing streak

1) Poker is a game that you can win at over the long-run. 2) That you are a good and dedicated enough player to win. If you don’t have this baseline, than it’s hard for me to believe you can make that relationship work. Now, let’s say your partner believes in you...Great! How do you go about making sure you don’t lose her? There are definitely

have to remember, now, that your responsibilities extend beyond yourself.

Give it back… One of the ways I have dealt with the traveling issue is to extend an open invitation for my wife to travel with me, but that’s not realistic for most players and in Juliana’s case, she’s often busy with other responsibilities (including caring for our son). So, in the cases where I’m away without her, I have learned that a bit of daily attention can help. Women are like flowers, in this regard: a little water every day goes a long way. If you leave a few daily reminders that you’re thinking about them you’ll find time away passes much more pleasantly. A few ideas: leave Skype video messages (go to YouTube, find a karaoke video of an appropriate song, you can figure out the rest!), send Facebook messages, write a short poem, have flowers delivered, set up times to Skype, hide presents for them to find while you’re gone, send an occasional text, that sort of thing. Just let your partner know you miss them! They’ll love it when you focus that amazing, creative, analytical mind that you use to win at PP cards on them.

Brian’s bio

Balance in your life is a big help to long-term success

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The valedictorian of Poway High School, Brian went on to Stanford where instead of finding a passion for academics and graduating, he found poker. Prior to Black Friday, Brian played a lot of online poker under the handle tsarrast. He is currently focused on nosebleed live cash games wherever in the world he can find them. And while Brian has been predominantly a cash game player throughout his career, his tournament resume rounds out with over $5.8m in live cashes and two WSOP bracelets, including the Poker Player’s Championship in 2011. He is married to his wife Juliana. They live together with one child, Krishna, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

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Global Poker Index

rankings

The GPI is the world’s most respected ranking system for live tournaments. We count down the best players in the world this month

How the rankings work

Every open poker tournament with over 21 entrants and a buy-in of $1k-$25k is eligible for points in the GPI

Tournament results from the past 36 months will count towards a player’s ranking

global player rankings

Neil Stoddart

rank nat

name

GPI score is determined from a combination of finishing place relative to the field size, the size of the buyin and the amount of time passed since that result

For more details on the scoring system see www.globalpokerindex.com/about

uS player rankings score

rank GPI rank name

score

Jason Mercier

3,516.36

2 #6

Dan Smith

3,465.30

3,669.24

3 #7

Vanessa Selbst

Jason Mercier

3,516.36

4 #10

Shannon Shorr

3,316.72

Philipp Gruissem

3,478.73

Erik Seidel

3,241.50

Dan Smith

3,465.30

6 #14

Ravi Raghavan

3,189.83

Vanessa Selbst

3,415.39

Paul Volpe

3,154.68

Mike McDonald

3,370.84

8 #17

Scott Seiver

3,097.44

Michael Watson

3,339.52

9 #18

Steve O’Dwyer

3,056.10

Shannon Shorr

3,316.72

10 #19

Bryn Kenney

3,045.83

Daniel Negreanu

4,031.82

Ole Schemion

3,830.04

Marvin Rettenmaier

STAR PICK

#11

#15

STAR PICK

3,415.39

star pick MIKE MCDONALD

star pick Vanessa Selbst

The Canadian finished second at the PCA main event and the $100k Challenge at the Aussie Millions. A third place finish in the $250k Challenge took his total 2014 winnings to $4 million inside three months. And he’s still only 24.

Selbst had an incredible start to 2014, coming third in both the High Roller and the Super High Roller at the PCA for a combined score of over $1.3m. She also cashed in the main event for good measure. She’ll be looking for her third bracelet at this year’s WSOP.

The Global Poker Index™ (GPI™) is a patent pending system that ranks the top 300 live tournament poker players in the world. Data used in calculating the GPI is provided in partnership with The Hendon Mob. March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 63

all-in exclusive news

Got a stor y? Tweet us @PokerPlay erUS using the #muckraker POKER NEWS AND GOSSIP FROM AROUND THE WORLD

Chip Dump

feeling flush: Lusardi is a Loo-ser

Poker chump Christian Lusardi was fingered by the cops after allegedly flushing $2.7 million worth of fake poker chips down the toilet at Harrah’s Resort and Casino in Atlantic City. The shifty pro from North Carolina had been using the counterfeit chips at event 1 of the Borgata Winter Poker Open. Lusardi had won $6,814 during the competition but officials discovered imposter chips and cancelled the tournament. And just like that, Lusardi’s plan – and the remaining hooky chips – went down the pan, creating a blockage that even Ray Bitar would struggle to match after a night on the Vegas buffet circuit. And he might even have got away with the whole caper had pesky guests at Harrah’s not complained of leaking pipes. Plumbers traced the blockage back to Lusardi’s room and he was subsequently arrested on charges of theft and rigging a public contest. And as if to prove that he doesn't just restrict his shady dealings to the poker table he has also been charged with copyright infringement after pirated DVDs and a bootlegging operation was found in his home. Cheating at live events is extremely rare, thanks to vigilent security. From this, it would seem you've got to be really stupid to try to get away with it.

Lampoontang

Off the strip

l Another month, another late-night perusal of Dan Bilzerian’s Instagram account. As Joe Hachem bleats on about the modern poker player being a dull nonentity we have to interject and present exhibit A – Big Bad Bilz and his holiday snaps. In what was, by his own standards, a quiet month our man Dan posted a series of pics including him being straddled by four topless honeys, a sub machine gun above a headboard, more naked women, more guns, a goat and the best painting based on National Lampoon's Vacation you’re likely to see. It is a continuing chronicle of carnal craziness but we have to ask – is he happy? We’d hazard a guess that he is – immensely. Bilz, you may be a gigantic arsehole but we once more take our hats (and Acting the goat: trousers) off to you. A peek at Bilz's art

A major casino in the UK landed itself in hot water after it appeared that it had projected a 30-foot image of a scantily clad woman on the side of a local church in order to promote a Valentine’s strip poker event. Parish priests got their robes in a twist after the snap made its way around social media and Father David McConkey said, 'I am appalled, and I want an apology from the perpetrators'. Various spurious reports emerged of shocked shoppers on the Saturday night and a queue around the block of converts on Sunday morning. Alas, it was a case of the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, as Aspers Casino apologised and assured the Church of England the picture doing the rounds had been doctored and not actually projected on the building itself. The Valentine strip poker event had yet to go ahead as Muck Raker went to press but we’ll let you PP know how we get on next month.

64 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER

Priests got their robes in a twist after the snap went viral

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Next ISSUE

Jay Farber the main event runner-up who rules las vegas

PLUS

SMALL PACKAGE

The ultimate pro guide to playing small pocket pairs

the Cheat sheets Poker’s biggest cheaters are flogged in public

sofia lövgren

The ice-cool Swede joins our crack strategy team March 2014 AMERICAN POKERPLAYER 65

American see you next issue!