The end of the online poker pro?

In the beginning of online poker, there was no rakeback. There was only rake. In the days of Planet, Paradise, and Party Poker, no one thought that 5% to $3 was a great deal, but hey, it was the same or less than most brick-and-mortar rooms were charging. It didn't really matter; the games were so good. If you played poker seriously in the era where Chris Moneymaker, Greg Raymer, Joe Hachem or Jamie Gold were reigning world champions, then money was falling out of the sky and landing in your bank account.

It was, of course, the affiliate system that led to what we now know as rakeback. Poker sites wanted more players, so they turned to affiliates. Savvy affiliates said that they wanted lifetime value players, not to be played a flat CPA. Savvy players then realized that affiliates were making buckets of money from the rake they were paying, and in turn they demanded rakeback.

PokerStars was intelligent in proactively doing an end-around this process. They knew that people were hungry for rakeback and that they would circumvent the rules to get it, so they created the VIP program. And their tiered system was brilliant. The more you played, the higher your status. The higher your status, the more you earned. So you wanted to play more and more, a positive feedback loop that never seemed to end. At least, until this week. This week, Stars pulled out the rug on its highest volume players. With its announced VIP changes to 2016, PokerStars is being very obvious in what they want to do long-term. Stars no longer considers poker pros making 50k or more per year to be partners in their business. Rather the statement made is that poker pros are leeches on our games, parasites on our idyllic poker economy.

Pulling out the rug on the 2015 Supernova Elites in such a fashion is not something that sits well with me. From all indicators, these people entered into a quasi-contract with Stars that they would get an expected amount of effective rakeback for 2016. There certainly would not be the backlash that there is in the poker community right now if they announced these changes 12 months ahead of time. By announcing the changes so late in the year, they continued to make the revenue line look good for investors, keeping the stock price high. Who knows what the volume in 2015 would have looked like had they made this announcement in January? Stars is now under immense pressure from its players to pull back from their announced changes. I hope they do bow to that pressure, but don't be surprised if they don't. This isn't the Scheinberg era, folks.

In any case, the implications the new VIP program are huge. The death of the online poker pro has been predicted many times, but this one is as legit as it comes. It won't be an explosive implosion; the games will not suddenly dry up on January 1, 2016. But at least in the short term, there will be a significant contraction of the money available to win (across all limits) and the marginal pros won't survive. If you are an online poker pro, and you have not made at least 100k/year in the last two years, you should strongly consider applying for a real job somewhere. If you are an aspiring poker pro and haven't quite made the leap yet, you need to look long and hard about whether you really want to sign up for this grind. Stars' goal is to create an equilibrium where everyone is a small loser. It is an uphill battle when you are fighting against the most powerful organization in poker.

I have some further thoughts on how this will all shake down, but I'll have to save them for a Part 2. Tomorrow though I'll be talking about this more on this week's Pokercast (sponsored by the PokerStars VIP Club!) though, and hope to have that Part 2 up soon.

Edit: I want to clarify that with the exception of honouring its previously advertised 2016 commitments, I'm not taking a position on the rightness or wrongness of PokerStars devaluing their VIP program. They have the right (and responsibility) to control that program as they see fit and to maximize the long-term profits of their company. Stars does not owe poker players the right to make a living at their tables. They do, in my view, have a responsibility to deliver on the promises made to them in 2015. But aside from these commitments, I am not taking any sort of moral position on the changes.

Audio interview with me ahead of Saturday's fight

I did a 30-minute interview with Battlefield Fight League's marketing guy, Jamak Golshani, ahead of my fight this Saturday. Check it out here!

Info on buying tickets to watch live, or purchasing the pay-per-view, are available here.

And speaking of podcasts, I'll be the lead host of the 2+2 PokerCast tomorrow for the first time ever. In fact it'll be the first time in the history of the show that neither Mike Johnson nor Adam Schwartz will be sitting in the big chair. I'll be joined by Mazin "MSauce" Khoury in the studios, and that show will be out late Tuesday evening.

Is regulation to blame for the PokerStars rake hike?

The biggest news of the month in online poker and indeed online gaming is PokerStars increasing its rake across a number of ring games and SNGs. Unsurprisingly, most of the online poker community is up in arms about it. While I don't play very much poker these days, I do see it as another step towards the eventual extinction of the online poker pro, at least as we know it now. In the economic parlance, Amaya/PokerStars are now capturing back a ton of the rents that poker players have held for a long time.

Among others, Steve Ruddock of Online Poker Report, has mentioned that the policy changes of the new-look austere PokerStars is part of the cost of regulation. Ruddock writes,

[O]ver the past five or so years, more and more countries have legalized and regulated online poker. This has forced operators to apply for licensing in different jurisdictions, resulting in sometimes-hefty licensing fees and local tax bills. 

These expenses were virtually nonexistent in the unregulated online poker markets during the poker boom.

Ruddock also notes that Amaya pulled out of 30 grey markets (albeit mostly small poker markets) and that would cost some revenue.

I've seen the following on 2+2 written many times in many different ways, and it rings true: "You guys wanted regulated poker, and now you're getting it."

Regulation always costs money, and costs are always passed down to the consumer, in this case, the poker player. What's more is that the costs of regulation are not always obvious. Taxes, license fees, and lost revenue from exiting grey markets are obvious. But I suspect the average poker player (or journalist) does not have any idea how much regulation truly costs the online poker industry.

The truth is, the regulatory bodies attempting to regulate online poker do not understand it very well, if at all. The most recent example came of this is when PokerStars was required (and then apparently, not required) to remove its auto rebuy feature in the UK. Players hated this change, with good reason: players immediately realized there would be situations where they would pay the blinds, get stacked on a hand, then to add insult to injury, miss free hands. But this is the kind of thing that only a poker player would understand. A regulator who does not play poker in any serious way sees only that an auto rebuy feature bypasses the psychological hurdle of needing to click to reload, and could thereby potentially exacerbate problem gambling.

The auto rebuy regulation got a lot of press, but it is downright sensible compared to many of the regulations that I know exist in Nevada and New Jersey. While I was working for Ultimate Gaming, we were prevented from launching Omaha games in Nevada because they required a separate game tab to distinguish Hold'em from Omaha. Because of the way Ultimate Poker's software worked, this was not as trivial a change as it sounds, and Omaha games were delayed.  A situation came up in New Jersey where the Division of Gaming Enforcement were on our case over a promotion where we gave away t-shirts on Twitter. Seriously, t-shirts. If they can give sites a hard time over t-shirt giveaways, you can be assured that quite a lot of more substantive promotions got either shitcanned or altered beyond recognition.

These things may seem small, but they cost the companies a lot of money cumulatively. They also create technological overhead for the product development team. The end result is a poorer experience for the players, which means players play less, which means the liquidity pool shrinks, and the cycle repeats. The cost of regulation is very high, and much of it cannot be measured on a balance sheet. It manifests in promotions that never run, players that never play, games that never get started, extra payroll expense, redundant and replicated work, and more. As you can see, the costs of regulation go beyond simply higher rake.

Here's another insidious thing about onerous regulations, whether ridiculous or legitimate. It's that once regulations are established, the existing operators are often incentivized to ensure they stick around. If some regulator requires that the river card must be exactly 17 pixels from the turn card or that the geolocation be accurate to 75 metres instead of 100, then once the operator has made that required change, they actually want it to stay, because it creates more future work for their competitors. Thus the regulation game, at times, is simply throwing up one barrier after another at your opponent like an action movie chase scene. As soon as one company passes the apple cart in the crowded alley, they try to knock it over to trip up the next guy.

(By the way, this is not unique to online poker. One need only look at what the taxi companies are presently doing in Las Vegas. After months of desperately trying to keep Uber out of Las Vegas and protecting their regulated monopoly, Uber is now operational. The result? The taxi companies are on a rampage of bullying and intimidation, including this disgusting case where a cab company employee hired an Uber, contacted the taxi authority, who in turn showed up in bulletproof vests and masks posing as police officers.

This is an extreme example of government-protected business running amok, of course, but it is to the point: when companies are granted a special legal privilege to operate in an arena, they will do anything to protect that status against outside competitors.)

As should be fairly apparent, very little of this actually benefits the consumers. I should say that the majority of the online poker regulations that I have come across are reasonable, but they are also things that any legitimate operator would do anyways. At no time did I ever come across a regulation and think, "wow, that's a great idea, and no one is doing that!" Again, it's not reasonable to expect them to - they're not poker players and they don't understand poker.

It isn't all hopeless, of course. There are certainly some people who will be attracted to regulated poker who might not have played if the situation were the same as the mid-2000s. There is the hope of legalized poker in major markets like California, shared liquidity pools across state lines, and so on. But I cannot see the monstrous profits of online grinders from 2004-2008 ever coming back. I empathize with the individuals who have invested so much into developing their poker game and playing for a living. I think this tweet from Mike "Timex" McDonald encapsulates how many online pros must be feeling (obviously -- it got 89 retweets).

Spend years branding poker as a "skill game". Analyze winrates of top players. Set rake to be slightly more. Our job is now a carnival game
— Mike McDonald (@MikeMcDonald89) October 30, 2014

As seemingly unfair as this moving of the goalposts seems to the players, we all knew the era of big money for the 90th-98th percentile players would not last forever. I don't think the era of the poker pro is done with entirely, but if I were a poker pro, I'd be thinking long and hard about transitioning to the real world. Might I make a recommendation?

[Edit: A few hours after this posted, Ultimate Gaming announced it is closing operations in Nevada. Sadly, a lot of good people there will lose jobs because of it.]

Crosspost: Going From Poker Pro To Poker Industry Pro

This is a crosspost from content I originally wrote as a two-parter for Ultimate Poker's content page, "The Rail".

Online poker had a tremendous effect on the lives of a number of young people throughout the 2000s. Prior to the last decade, to earn a high-income living as a young person, you needed to be a brilliant inventor or entrepreneur, an extremely talented and famous actor or singer, or maybe a professional athlete in a major sport. Obviously, this represented only a tiny percentage of the population of all young people.

But in the 2000s, with the first online poker boom, a great number of young people were suddenly able to earn high incomes playing online poker. Many intelligent young people put their university and college educations on hold or skipped them entirely because the allure of making far more money than any newly-minted graduate at an entry level position would make – and all by playing a game they loved.

Many of these young people would go on to become tremendously successful poker players and stars of the game. However, not everyone made it in the long run. Some players “burned out”, tiring of the online poker grind. Others saw the games they were playing in getting tougher and tougher as their opponents grew more educated, resulting in a major drop in income.

These players on the margins were now in a tough spot. The former pros found themselves in their mid or late 20s looking for work, but lacking both formal education and any significant traditional job experience.

The good news, if you’re one of these people, is that your experience playing hours of online poker, participating in forums, and generally being involved in the poker industry, makes you a valuable asset to online poker sites, including Ultimate Poker. At Ultimate Poker, we employ dozens of poker players in customer service, game room operations, product management, marketing and technology – all the way from entry level to senior executive.

Whether your poker industry experience ends up being as valuable as that engineering or law degree your parents wanted you to get will be a function of your own talent, skills, and attitude – but the point remains that you do offer relevant experience to companies like Ultimate Poker who are headquartered locally. 

Now I’d like to talk about how to get that job. The key thing to remember when entering the workforce is that despite your job or education gap, you bring value to poker companies! You provide skills and experience. The problem is, so do hundreds or even thousands of other poker pros who find themselves in a similar spot. How do you stand out from the crowd?

SOME DOS WHEN APPLYING FOR AN ONLINE POKER POSITION

Do include a cover letter, always. A customized cover letter is how the person reading your application (hiring manager or HR manager) knows that you spent the time to apply for position with this company and that you didn’t just spam the same resume to dozens of companies. It also should show you communicate effectively.

Do brag about what you know about poker. The cover letter is a good place for this. If you’ve played 2 million hands of poker on 10 different sites, you’re familiar with MTTs, SNGs, and cash games in hold’em, Omaha, stud and draw, brag about it here. While the hiring manager is probably not interested in how many final tables you made or what your lifetime BB/100 is, they certainly are interested in the breadth of your poker and gaming knowledge.

Do demonstrate your knowledge of the company. You should know a lot about the company that you’re applying for, whether it is low-level things like promotions and game features, or high-level items like jurisdictions and relationships with partners.

Do mention why you want to work for the company. A phrase that I absolutely love to see in a cover letter is “dream job”. More than any phrase on any cover letter, this makes me more likely to give a person an initial phone interview. Enthusiasm counts. Of course, you’ll have to be able to follow this up in both the phone and live interview, or you’ll be a big disappointment.

Do be specific about what job you want. “I’m really knowledgeable about poker in general, and I think I could fill a variety of roles in your organization.” I’ve seen this one many times, and honestly, I’d bet that it’s true most of the time. But you also have to realize that even in a new startup like Ultimate Gaming, applications are likely to be siphoned through a more traditional HR manager with a lot of corporate experience in more traditional brick-and-mortar based companies. So, even though you think you would be good at everything, you should indicate exactly what position you would like to have within the company. Gaming companies need people with all kinds of skills, from IT infrastructure to accounting to software development to customer service to marketing. While people with great general knowledge can bring value to any gaming or poker company, it’s the specialists who get noticed by HR.

And obviously, be realistic. If you are willing to work in an entry-level position but you say you’d be well suited as a Senior VP, well, it’s not very likely that the HR manager will consider you for that entry-level position.

AND NOW, THE DO NOTS.

Do not be quiet and demure in your interview. A lot of good poker players are real introverts. And while they are often intelligent, thoughtful and would make tremendous assets to any organization, it simply doesn’t come out in the interview. Your interviewer is not Phil Ivey staring you down for tells, so you shouldn’t be staring blankly, talking softly, and avoiding eye contact. Be engaging and demonstrate that you’re an individual with a personality, the kind of person that people want to have as a co-worker.

Do not hide any skeletons in your closet. In both Nevada and New Jersey, employees have been required to undergo background checks to work for Ultimate Gaming. While it is not always an absolute dealbreaker to have been previously convicted of a crime, it most likely is a dealbreaker if you aren’t immediately upfront about it. Additionally, the more senior the position in the company, the more likely that your background will be thoroughly investigated, so if you harbor hopes of one day being a senior executive in a gaming company, you’ll want to be honest from the get-go.

Do not misspell the name of the person you’re applying to. Seriously, this happens with alarming frequency. It’s not that I’m so egotistical I can’t handle having my name spelled incorrectly, but if I see it that way — after I’ve already corresponded with you — I’m going to be think that you’re not a detail-oriented person, and if you can get something like this wrong, you’ll probably get other things wrong too. I definitely don’t think that poor spelling is necessarily an indicator of lack of intelligence, but when there are potentially dozens or hundreds of people all applying for the same job, why stick out for all the wrong reasons?

There are plenty more dos and don’ts I could mention, but that would start to stray from the topic of how to go from poker player to poker industry into being a general “how to get a job” essay. But if you keep these points in mind, you’ll find yourself a lot more likely to land your desired position in your preferred company.

Until next time, best of luck – regardless of which side of the virtual felt you find yourself on.

It's WSOP time - get after it! (for me)

So the WSOP starts in a week. Holy shit. When did that happen?

I feel like I can't even remember a time where the WSOP would sneak up on me. For the last 10 years, I've had it circled on my calendar and been counting the days. The only reason why today it got on my radar was because I was checking my @ messages on Twitter.

I was tremendously flattered to be picked in a pool by a player I respect as much as Matt, but also a little saddened. First for him, because I expect to be a lousy pick this year. Second for me, because I love the WSOP and for the first time since 2006 I'll be at best a part-time player in it.

"So, about that job thing"

Wow, I can't believe I haven't even posted about the Ultimate Poker launch. Actually, I guess I can believe it. I simply haven't had the time! But since 2005 I've posted every major life event on either this or my previous blog, so it seems bizarre to look at my own blog and see that big gaping hole.

Without a doubt, Ultimate Poker surpassed expectations dramatically. We're doing so much better than we projected, and have had a ton of positive media exposure. We've had our problems too, and lots of people have been justifiably critical of our technology and our support. But there can be no doubts that in 3 weeks we've changed the poker landscape and taken a lot of people by surprise.


As for me personally? I've had some good days, and bad days. Today was a good one. It was a big day for me. Today, I actually left the office at 6pm, something I haven't done since launch. I got a ton of stuff done at work, but what was different was that I also left a bunch at work. My problem I have a really hard time letting go of work that needs to be done. That's what a lot of people have encouraged me to do: to recognize that the work will still be there tomorrow and to pace myself so that I don't burn myself out in 3 months.


So I'm taking small steps towards leading a more healthy and balanced lifestyle, but there's still so much work to be done that it's hard to predict when I'll get unburied. As I wrote a month ago, the best way to put me on tilt these days is to simply ask me when I'll get to fight next. I feel like I'm so far away from that. And that a 13-year poker player would move to Las Vegas for eight weeks and not play a single hand of poker in that time has a most Morisettian irony to it.

In previous years, when the WSOP grind wore me down, I brought myself up by remembering that there were so many amateurs, wannabes, dreamers, has-beens, and never-weres who would die for the opportunity to do exactly what I was doing. It made me feel grateful.

I'm going to try my hardest to be a significant part of the WSOP this year, and as Matt himself says:

(I don't know how "easy" it is, seeing as how I've played 140 of them and made five final tables without winning one, but the point is understood.)

But to those with the opportunity to play a full schedule: get after it. I'm jealous, but I'll be pulling for you.

"...and he was never heard from again."

That was the joke one of my exes, Jacqueline, used to make in a mock-ominous voice referring to individuals who had started playing World of Warcraft. The year was 2006 and she'd encountered an inordinate number of regular bloggers whose last blog posts began with, "so I signed up for World of Warcraft today" and correspondingly got sucked into the game so much that they were never heard from again (at least in the blogosphere).

Just as I have never tried crack or meth, I never touched WoW. But for the last month, I do feel like I've disappeared off the face of the earth. Sure, I've gone many long stretches without blogging, but this last month is the first time in my life I've been so immersed in work that I've had almost no interaction with the outside world. Many times over the last few weeks I've wanted to blog about how the working world has been treating me but the only thing I have time to do once I get home is work out (sometimes), cram a prepackaged dinner down my throat, and fall asleep. The only reason that tonight I have time to blog is that at this moment I'm on call, waiting for a co-worker who is on the road (it's 9:30pm) and could need my assistance online at any time.

Sadly, I haven't really been doing much in the way of MMA training. I make it to jiujitsu once or twice a week. I've hired a boxing trainer to give me private lessons twice a week. I've been trying to keep up general fitness and done a decent job of that. That's about it. Every time someone asks "when's your next fight?" I feel a little bit of life-tilt because there's no way I am in fight shape.

To be brutally honest, if I had known beforehand that this is what my life would be like, I might not have accepted the job. But despite the workload, I'm still glad I did. It's actually been fun in its own way. We have had a tremendously harried week here at Ultimate Poker, but the whole team has come together to support one another and get shit done. It's been nice to be a part of that. My stress level at times has been just through the roof and I have had my share of "omfg this is a disaster" freakouts, but there's definite life-ev in being part of a team.

I also like that I get to dabble in a little of everything in my work. I have had my hands in the technology, marketing, customer support, HR, and finance aspect of things. I definitely don't think I would have survived in a job where I was just doing one thing, and I hope the breadth of my work here at Ultimate Poker continues to increase.

But it is a crazy pace and hopefully things do settle down a bit soon, because I definitely don't think I will last long at the current pace. My hope is to set up and establish systems that largely run without me, so that I can get off the daily grind of burning the candle at both ends and instead work towards making a lasting long-term contribution to the organization. Not to mention getting back to fighting and playing poker.

A lot of people have been asking when we're going to start taking bets here at Ultimate Poker. While I'd love to go into detail, all I can say is that things are definitely getting exciting around here. We are continuing that push towards hand #1 of legal online poker and we really think we have what it takes to be the market winner in Nevada and beyond!

PokerListings "Easy Game" mini-documentary

PokerListings.com's Matt Showell approached me a few months ago to say he wanted to feature me in one of their mini-documentaries. Egotist that I am, I couldn't say no! Matt messaged me to let me know that the video is now online, and here it is.


If the above doesn't work, you can always click through to the original page here.

I think the documentary turned out great and I'm really happy with it! In particular I like the part where I get to talk about my motivations and reasoning for doing this. Matt was super easy to work with and the whole thing was far more fun than work.

Nit or risk-taker?

"Have you ever had an MRI?" she asked, seemingly out of the blue.

"Yes," I answered, with what surely was a look of great confusion. This seemed like an abrupt change of topic because I'm pretty sure the previous question had been something about poker.

"Do you happen to know the size of your prefrontal lobe?"

"Well, no...I had it done on my knee."

I'd only met Jennifer a couple hours earlier, but we found ourselves seated next to each other at dinner. A pretty Chinese-American woman in her mid-20s (of course, the "you can never tell how old Asians are" point of conversation had already been covered), Jennifer was a mutual friend of Bill Chen, who had organized our dinner. The setting was Greycliff restaurant, the well-known 5-star Bahamian fine dining restaurant converted from a centuries-old colonial house. Jennifer's dress and style indicated to me that she was very familiar with such fancy establishments. So I certainly would have forgiven her if she'd largely ignored this poker player, who'd arrived in the fanciest clothes he'd brought on this trip: a Roots zip-up sweater, moderately dressy jeans, and a pair of New Balance Minimus trail shoes.

But if she passed judgment on my attire, it was unapparent to me. She had too many questions to ask. Her curiosity about the size of my prefrontal lobe (that's what she said?) stemmed from her formal education in neuroscience. Apparently, individuals with larger prefrontal lobes are more inclined towards risk-taking behaviours, like perhaps participating in cage fights or quitting one's job to play poker for a living. Hence the inquiry.

I went on to explain that while something like playing professional poker does seem like a risky activity, it was a decision that I deliberated on for quite a long time before acting on it. I further noted that I no longer play the biggest games online, and prefer more medium-stakes games and tournaments in an effort to reduce my stress level. And while I can't argue that MMA isn't risky, I generally don't participate in other risky or thrill-seeking behaviour. I've never been one for alcohol or drugs, I am pretty good about wearing my seatbelt, and I don't really have a particularly strong urge to try skydiving.

Just one day earlier, I was sitting in a side event and playing at a table of mostly young pros. The table chatter on this occasion was also about risk-taking and life. A Swedish player named Ramzi Jelassi was being talkative and splashing around in a lot of pots, at one point late in the day raising on the button, c-betting into three opponents and showing 93o after they all folded. The same man also admitted to being "a total life nit."  Ramzi said he basically takes as few risks in life as possible, saying with a smile, "I'm too good at life, so I can't risk it." Not long after that comment, he called off a large 3-bet shove with A7 from middle position and lost a big chunk of his stack.

At the party on the final night of the PCA, I once again heard the words "life nit" used in a self-descriptive manner, this time from the mouth of British pro Max Silver. I've only played with Max once, but most of it was heads-up. It was the second table of the shootout event of the WSOP Europe in 2011, and Max had gotten most of his chips by 5-betting Vanessa Selbst with 64s, flopping trips and turning quads to smash her KK. I don't know Max well enough to know whether or not he's a life nit, but I faced enough of his 3-barrels on that day to confidently say that he's no poker nit.

The word "nit", in the poker world, is used as a near-antonym of "gambler" (alternatively, "degen", "sicko", "LAG", etc). Whom do we consider nits? The ultra-tight, conservative players who never play above their bankrolls and often even play below it. We picture these guys walking instead of taking a cab to save a few bucks, scrounging around for buffet comps before the dinner break, and eyeing the money bubble of any tournament they play. But is this an accurate depiction? What of the Max Silvers and the Ramzi Jelassis? And what am I? Is Terrence Chan some adrenaline-junkie MMA fighter, or a guy who leaves 10 minutes early on dinner break to make sure there's no possibility he'll miss a big blind? Consider the old adage, "lucky in cards, unlucky in love." Should we add to it, "sicko at cards, nit at life?"

For most regular folks, the idea that there are people even walking around with $1000, $10000, or $100000 of cash on a regular basis strikes them as incredibly risky, much less gambling it in a poker tournament with less than a 15% chance of getting any of it back. But I'm not convinced that poker players are that much more risk-seeking than the rest of the population; rather, they have simply become very good at compartmentalizing that risk. What else would explain all the self-proclaimed life nits in the poker world?

I dislike it when people not in the poker world say, "I could never do that; I'm not much of a gambler." Everyone gambles, because everything is a gamble. Crossing the street is a gamble, and so is driving to your destination. The gamble is simply that you will pick up enough value by getting to your destination (whether it's your office, the gym, the grocery store, or your grandmother's house) that you are willing to fade the possibility of being hit by a bus. To limit the idea of gambling to wagers involving dollars and cents is to misunderstand the nature of human existence.

So just how big are the prefrontal lobes of the poker world? The Jennifers of the world are dying to know.

I won a tournament no one showed up for!

I wish this were a story about winning my first big buy-in poker tournament since the 2009 WCOOP. And, for those who missed it, I did in fact win the "$4600+400" (the scare quotes a result of an irksome hidden juice) buy-in Canadian Open Poker Championships Heads-up Event, which had just 12 players and a first prize of C$34,000 (US$34,437). I did not receive a first round bye and thus beat four opponents, so from a certain standpoint I do feel like I actually accomplished something. Playing heads-up is always a grind because of the sheer number of decisions, and something about live heads-up NL is particularly fun and challenging because there is so much information to constantly process. I had a lot of fun playing the tournament (which had an excellent best-of-3 structure) and was very happy with the win.

@muckingaces tweeted: "Wtg, Terrence. But next time ask them to colour down the chips for the victory photo."

But sadly, this is not in fact a post about me winning a 5k buy-in poker tournament. It's mostly a post about how disappointing this particular tournament series turned out to be.

I was quite excited to come to Calgary for this tournament, as I did in 2009 and 2010. In 2009 I finished 3rd/4th in a 63-player field. In 2010, I lost in the 2nd round in a 64-player field. In 2011, they dropped the buy-in to $2000 but still saw their field halved to 32 players. This year, in an attempt to increase the field size (and in an apparent attempt to defy economic theory) they brought the buy-in back to $5000 using the logic that it would draw more out-of-town players, thereby increasing the field. Well, it didn't work. Unless you are running a 6-figure buy-in tournament and hope to attract a lot of hype, a 12-player field is horrendous.

The ambiance of the my semifinal match stood out in particular. After the other semifinal match finished, the only people in the sizeable tournament poker room (which is usually a room for shows and musical acts) were me, my opponent, the dealer, the relief dealer, and the tournament director. Due to some sort of technical issue, there wasn't even background music. Hell, there wasn't even the slot machine white noise, or the usual ubiquitous chip-riffling sounds (since we held the only chips in the room in our hands). It was pin-drop quiet, and incredibly eerie. The setting was made even more surreal by the fact that we were playing in this empty room on an elevated stage, for the benefit of an audience of absolutely no one. As weird as that was, the 6-max the next day was the true disappointment. This was a $2000 buy-in re-entry tournament which got 17 entries, a simply appalling turnout. I can kind of understand when the locals aren't interested in playing a $5000 heads-up tournament because many casual players are often intimidated by heads-up, but to get this kind of a field for a $2000 6-max NL is beyond fathomable.

There's a lot of speculation as to why this tournament turned out to be such a failure, from staff to marketing, a lack of satellites, and of course conflicts with Legends of Poker in LA, WPT Barcelona, and another more well-established tournament series in Edmonton. I'll leave the public speculation to those better informed, but the numbers are obviously disappointing for a tournament that had a very fun looking schedule on paper and that has done well in the past. What I know wasn't at fault was a poor poker economy, because many big cash games (10-25 up to 25-50-100) were going with regularity. Calgary boasts one of the strongest economies in the country, poker is still big in Canada, and clearly there was already lots of money in the building. But none of it was going into the tournaments.

It's certainly a strange feeling to walk away with a tournament win and $24,800 profit over three days and still feel a bit blasé about the experience, but in previous years I enjoyed this tournament because many fellow Canadian pros and other individuals from the poker industry would turn up for it, and it was fun times. And the Deerfoot Hotel, while a nice enough facility, is in the total middle of nowhere 20 minutes outside of downtown Calgary, and I didn't have a car. Even if I did, I didn't really have anyone to hang out with anyway.

I resolved long ago not to travel to poker tournaments where there wasn't some compelling reason to go other than the poker. In the end, this experience solidified the idea that my heart is no longer into playing poker for a living.  Money and the stuff it buys is great, but at this point I'm really looking to place more importance on having fun and improve my quality of life rather than just making the bank account bigger.

So in the end, I burned a few more Air Canada miles and $100 in change fees to come back home Thursday morning instead of Saturday night, bypassing the $1000 PLO event and the $2000 main, both of which I had originally intended to play. I'll be curious to see the numbers for both, but it seems likely they'll be as underwhelming as everything else this week. In any case, I'm looking forward to home, seeing friendly faces, getting on the mats and in the ring, and catching what remains of the Vancouver summer. And if I really do feel an overwhelming urge to try to win some more money at poker, I hear there's a little series on the Internet starting up this weekend.

WSOP wrap-up and response to Jarred Solomon

The 2012 WSOP has come and gone. I almost wrote, "all too quickly", but of course this is with the hindsight that comes a week after busting the main event. When the WSOP is going on, it's a tough grind that you're always looking towards the end of; when it isn't, it's fun and you miss it. This year even more so for me, as I surely logged more hours than I had in any other WSOP to date.

Although frustrating at times, I went deep enough in enough events to make this year more fun than tilting. I built some stacks and had legitimate shots at a number of events, especially the $1500 NL where I finished 20th and the $2500 6-max LHE where I finished 7th. My enjoyment of the game was definitely renewed by this year's WSOP, the pursuit (as it were) of the cashes record kept me motivated and playing, and of course the camaraderie is always the best.

On that last note, I am saddened by the thought that it may be the last year together for our house. Matt announced his retirement as a pro via Twitter and will be focusing on grad school, Jerrod is already in grad school, Gavin played a very light schedule and wasn't in Vegas much, and another of our anonymous housemates has told us he doesn't plan on coming out for 2013. Jimmy quit, Jody got married. As for me, I definitely plan to play the 2013 WSOP, but it won't be the same with our big happy house, BBQ parties, late night In-N-Out runs, speed chess/Chinese poker mixed games, jiujitsu challenges, pelting Bill with water balloons, watermelon violence, and Apples-to-Apples hi/low behind us.

***

With that covered, I get to the business on which I'm a week overdue. In the blog world that might as well be a year, but as covered before, I had a good excuse. I guess the easiest way to respond to Jarred Solomon's post is to take it one statement at a time. I admit I was pretty surprised when I woke up in the morning to see this post. While I do appreciate that Jarred was critical in a very respectful way, I thought he was pretty off with respect to his analysis of my mindset, but it did make me question the perception that I may have given my blog/Twitter-following public.

Jarred's criticism begins accordingly:

You build something up so that if it comes to fruition you get to experienced an almost enhanced glory,but if things dont work out you simply play it down.In the early/middle stages of the series,you made it clear that the 'cash record' was a big goal for you,and something you were actively pursuing.

I am very confused as to where I ever would have suggested that the cash record was a big goal. It was never even a goal. I'd be very surprised if there was a single tweet that even implied that it was a big goal. Certainly I can't see anything in my original blog post that even suggests this at all. The cashes record was never something I was ever in pursuit of, and I would like to know where this idea comes from.

Continuing:

All of a sudden it's somewhat out of reach and now it's a nit record,and not one that anyone good respects.You even go as far as to say "it's not a record i'd be particularly proud to have". 

It should be noted that at the time of the post that Jarred is referencing, the record was not out of reach. At the time, Puchkov had 10 cashes and I had 9, and both of us were still in the last 1k event. He could have missed and I could have cashed that and the main event to overtake him, so I was still very much in reach of the record at the time of writing.

Whether this is true or not,it clearly wasn't your view when you were leading the cashes tally,or when you folded to three quarters of a blind in the PLO 8 tourney.

For the first part of this statement, see above. For the second part, folding to 3/4 of a BB in the PLO8, that was simply correct, and I knew it. I lost an all-in at the end of Day 1 of that event and left myself with just 8500 in chips to end the day. Since we were 30 off the money, I went home and asked my housemate Jerrod Ankenman what hands I should be playing at this point. Jerrod might more knowledgeable than anyone on the planet when it comes to the intersection of PLO8 hot-and-cold equities and ICM. He felt that while there was a chance I might need to double up, if it looked like people were busting quickly then I should probably only play AA with a wheel card and A2Kx and that arguably even these would not be playable hands (from an ICM, not cEV perspective of course) if there were already multiple people in the pot. I wasn't happy to have to play this way, but if the person you respect the most about this topic tells you that's what you have to do, then it seems foolish not to listen, bruised ego or not.

You doing the same thing with this 1k tourney and your grappling competition.You're going to try your heart out in the tourney,if you bust,you and everyone forgets about it and focuses on the grappling comp.And vice versa if you make day 3.With regards to the grappling,if you do well you're a hero for doing so without much training,but if you don't do well I'm sure you'll highlight the condition you're in and your lack of training(like you have already).

Maybe this happened in this grappling tournament, but I think I was just really telling the truth. If you've followed my MMA career at all (and I don't really expect people to, but if you're going to be critical about my comments on one match then you should at least check the previous ones) then you'll know I usually say pretty much how I'm feeling before the match. When I made my MMA debut last September, I was recovering from the most debilitating injury of my career, a rib injury that two weeks before the fight meant I couldn't even sneeze without pain. This is what I wrote in the blog entry a week before the fight:

On Saturday, September 17, I'm going to win violently and decisively. End of story.

That doesn't sound like something I'd write if I were trying to make myself to be "a hero". I wrote it because that's how I felt about that fight. Maybe I'm not honest with myself or my audience 100% of the time, and I don't know if anyone truly is, but I try to let the words on this blog be reflective of how I'm feeling about the topic. I'm not trying to be disingenuous or make myself out to be a hero.

What I suppose I could take out of this not that I shouldn't try to temper the expectations of my audience, but rather myself. Perhaps if there is a lesson to be gained, it's that I should go into anything I compete in with the mentality that I will win it. But having played poker -- a game where one can be perfect and still lose with regularity -- for as long as I have, it is hard to bring that sort of mentality to the forefront in other arenas. But maybe if there is something to take from this line of criticism, it is that.

Moving forward again:

I probably wouldn't have gone on this rant if you'd simply acknowledged Konstantin Puchkov in a bigger way.Not only did the guy tie the record,but he got a couple big results,unlike you and Joe who's resume was comprised mainly of min cashes.

I'm surprised you would feel it is important for me to acknowledge Puchkov's results in my blog. I've never played with the guy, and have spoken to very few people who have, so I really can't have any intelligent comment on how well he plays. That is why I neither disparage nor acknowledge him. I am not putting down "his" accomplishment when I say the cashes record is "sort of a nit record"; I'm simply saying that's how most poker pros will feel about it. And yes, it is true that Puchkov cashed for either me or Tehan, but again, I don't see why this is important with respect to the discussion at hand.

What makes it even more admirable is that he got it idone quietly,while you and Tehan were boasting about your tally at every opportunity you got.The guy may not look like a shark,but he's a great white,and has earned my respect in a big way.

"Boasting" is a word that I am, again, very surprised to see with regards to my referencing of the record. Again, please find a tweet or blog comment where I boast. The only thing I can think of that might be construed as a brag was this (obvious joke) tweet after Jesse Martin briefly tied me for the cashes lead (a fact that I wouldn't have known had it not been for Nolan Dalla telling me in the Amazon Room) and I re-took the lead. (For what it's worth, Jesse thought it was funny.)

I'm glad you think Konstantin Puchkov is a great player. I wouldn't know, but I'm happy to hear it if it is the case. I'm happy that the record is held by someone who other poker pros can hold in high esteem. (It is generally not the classiest thing to speak ill of the deceased, but from what I heard of people who played with Nikolai Evdakov, he was unpleasant to play against specifically because he was constantly playing very slowly in order to cash.) And even if I don't feel the cashes record is something to be pursued or necessarily held in high esteem, I congratulate Puchkov on his eleven cashes, as many have congratulated me on my ten.

Hopefully that puts that particular issue to bed; in any case, it is all I have to say on the topic for now. Further comments welcome as always.

Jarred Solomon responds to my post

I woke up this morning to see that poker pro Jarred Solomon (who himself has eight WSOP cashes in 2012) had responded in the comments section of my post last Monday, in which I discussed my pursuit of the single-season WSOP cashes record. I don't have time to respond immediately, but the comment is clearly thoughtful and and I don't want to simply ignore it or have it buried in the comments, so I am promoting it to its own post here.

Hey Terrence

I want to start off by saying what a big fan I am of you.Both the way you play the game and the way you are with social media.Your tweets are always witty and entertaining.Most of all,I love how you have such good balance in your life(the martial arts,nutrition,active blogging).I feel it's something that's fundamental and extremely rare in the lifestyle of the modern day poker professional.

I do however have a small grievance with you.You have this knack of 'covering yourself' for lack of a better term.You build something up so that if it comes to fruition you get to experienced an almost enhanced glory,but if things dont work out you simply play it down.In the early/middle stages of the series,you made it clear that the 'cash record' was a big goal for you,and something you were actively pursuing.All of a sudden it's somewhat out of reach and now it's a nit record,and not one that anyone good respects.You even go as far as to say "it's not a record i'd be particularly proud to have". Whether this is true or not,it clearly wasn't your view when you were leading the cashes tally,or when you folded to three quarters of a blind in the PLO 8 tourney.

You doing the same thing with this 1k tourney and your grappling competition.You're going to try your heart out in the tourney,if you bust,you and everyone forgets about it and focuses on the grappling comp.And vice versa if you make day 3.With regards to the grappling,if you do well you're a hero for doing so without much training,but if you don't do well I'm sure you'll highlight the condition you're in and your lack of training(like you have already).I know I'm somewhat clutching at straws,I'm just trying to emphasize my point from the above paragraph.

I probably wouldn't have gone on this rant if you'd simply acknowledged Konstantin Puchkov in a bigger way.Not only did the guy tie the record,but he got a couple big results,unlike you and Joe who's resume was comprised mainly of min cashes.What makes it even more admirable is that he got it idone quietly,while you and Tehan were boasting about your tally at every opportunity you got.The guy may not look like a shark,but he's a great white,and has earned my respect in a big way.

Good luck for the main event and the grappling comp,will be rooting for you...

Regards

Jarred Solomon

I plan to respond to this post this weekend, but curious what others think. Does Jarred have a valid point?

one for the record books...or not

While there have been a lot of really interesting stories in the 2012 WSOP -- Ivey's five final tables in 12 days, Hellmuth's 12th bracelet, Grinder's second 50k victory, the OneDrop event -- one of the minor (very minor) subplots that has been talked about is whether or not I would break the WSOP single-season cash record of ten, held by the late Nikolai Evdakov. As of now, the lead belongs to another Russian named Konstantin Puchkov, who overtook me when he cashed the $5000 NL and I didn't. Puchkov is now tied for the record with 10 cashes, with me and Joe Tehan behind him at nine.

But most people were following my ascent, in part because they know me and don't know Puchkov, but mostly because from the conclusion of the first event and up until a week ago, I started every day either leading or tied for the lead. "So what'd you cash in today," became a common half-joke, half-inquiry among the WSOP regulars. It was frustrating because none of the cashes were significant: zero final tables, and no cashes over $20000. I would trade happily trade all nine cashes for a third place finish in some random $1500 event.

And besides, "most cashes" is certainly a nit record. Serious poker players don't play for cashes. Players have been regularly ribbing me, calling me "Chainsaw", or "Cousineau", referencing a pair of notorious min-cashers. In most of the cashes, I've amassed a lot of chips, but there was also the $1500 PLO8 where I cashed with 3/4 of a big blind. In any case, I'm pretty sure that my run at the record hasn't affected my play in any way; I've still played to maximize my equity (which usually means maximizing my chance of winning the tournament).

The more interesting question is whether it has affected the number and types of tournaments that I've entered. I feel that I have probably entered more $1000 and $1500 NL "donkaments" than I traditionally have, but this is probably a good thing: these are among the highest value events in the series. I have however skipped a number of tournaments either because I felt I wasn't a favourite, or simply because I just wasn't feeling up to playing.

It feels silly to me to care about this record. It's not a record that anyone good actually respects. It's not a record I'd be particularly proud to have. But I suppose it'd be something. I imagine it'd fall under the category of, "sorta neat, I suppose."

If I needed 11+ cashes to hold the all-time record as something to show that I made my mark on the WSOP, then that says something about me, and something I'm not a big fan of. Poker pros aren't supposed to care about such things. We're supposed to care about money, not legacies or stats. We make fun of Phil Hellmuth because he can't stop reminding the world that he is a 10-, 11- and now 12-time "World Champion".  Records and the narratives that surround them are stuff for the media, not the players.  
I certainly wasn't planning this for the 2012 WSOP. As I've written before, most of the fun of the WSOP for me is actually hanging out with friends, but due to playing a monstrous number of hours (for me) in the tournaments, I haven't done all that much of that. In spite of the gentle ribbing, a lot of people have encouraged me to really go for the record. The series is starting to wrap up, and I'll play all the NL tournaments the rest of the way, including the 10k 6-max, but I'm not confident enough to think that I'm a significant favourite in the 3k PLO8 or the 10k NL deuce. If I really, desperately wanted the cashes title, I suppose I would put those events on my schedule. But thankfully my ego isn't that fragile.

a dozen days at the WSOP

Last month, I wrote about how motivated I was for this 2012 WSOP. I said I was confident, planning to play a lot, and play well. As we approach the two week mark, I've done all of these things, although the results have been a little bittersweet. I've played 8 events and cashed in 5 (which leads all players, and is a pace where I would surpass the all-time record of ten), but none of those cashes have been over five figures. The cashes combine for just $23429, and as of this writing I've played $13000 worth of events.



So things haven't exactly been spectacular. Still, the results inspire confidence. Despite the mincashes, I've managed to collect lots of chips every time I've cashed. (The exception was the PLO, which ended up being my highest cash and deepest finish.) Basically, I've just been having great luck on Day 1s and really bad luck on Day 2s.

The schedule has been pretty rough for me though. Each of those mincashes typically means about 15-18 hours spent at the Rio, plus commute time. That's a lot more hours than I've planned to book at the casino. I've only been to train jiujitsu a couple times, Muay Thai once, and other than that it's been very quick gym workouts at UNLV. Matt and I haven't even been able to set up our grappling mats in the house! On top of that my sleep has been pretty funky; I seem to only be able to consistently sleep five hours a night and in the afternoons and evenings I'm a bit of a zombie.

Nevertheless, I shouldn't complain. I'm up for the series so far, which ~90% of people aren't. It's been frustrating to have five cashes without a final table, but as I said I'm happy with how I've been playing, and this thing is not only one-third over.  And, of course, tonight is the $5000 limit hold'em. I suppose might have a shot at a deep run in that one.

Cebu is Ce-bomb!

(You have no idea how long I spent internally debating what Cebu-related pun I would use for the title.)

Well, Cebu was fantastic. For years I had asked my friends who regularly play the Asian circuit what their favourite destination was, and usually the answer was Cebu. I wasn't able to make Season 2 or Season 3's editions, so I was excited to get to go this year.

Poker-wise, there was certainly nothing to write home about. I played two events and a total of 7 hours. I was comfortable and felt I played well in the main event, but I was a spaz and paid the price in the 6-max. I'm now 0-for-6 in 2012 in terms of tournament cashes.

But what a phenomenal destination. I actually spent only 3.5 days in Cebu and I definitely wish it had been more. I saved a bit of money by choosing to forego the Shangri-La Resort, where PokerStars put its qualifiers up, in favour of a 3-star room which ran me about $70 US (and where friends rented out the penthouse suite for only about $40 more). I have somewhat mixed feelings about this because while my hotel was good (and had massages on the 2nd floor for $3/hour), the Shangri-La is amazing. It's a gorgeous resort with lots of free activities and the service seems good as well. For those who have been to the PCA, I think the Shangri-La is everything that the Atlantis in the Bahamas should be, but isn't. The Atlantis has more attractions but the service is atrocious and everything is massively expensive. In Cebu, I found the service and atmosphere everywhere to be excellent.

At the resort, we did some free kayaking, I worked out a bit at the gym (also free), and rented some jetskis (not free, but not that expensive either). The jetskiing in particular was tremendously fun. I'd never ridden on one before, and was really surprised how fast they go. In fact, they go so fast and I wandered so far out that I lost track of where I was and had to ask some fisherman for directions back to the Shangri-La. All in all, I spent about 5 hours in the sun on Saturday and even got a little bit of sunburn for the first time in about 15 years.

And the food. Oh, the food. The Philippines is really not known as a culinary paradise, but man do these people know how to roast a pig. There was roast suckling pig at the Stars party and I had it on numerous occasions, but my favourite was a local place called Zubuchon, which served up this amazingness:

One blog writes: "Zubuchon’s pigs are not from commercial piggeries but are hand-picked from pigs raised in the backyards of certain individuals. They do not use MSG or commercial mixes for flavor. Instead, they use organic ingredients, including olive oil, local sea salt, home-grown lemongrass, peppers, green onions, and other herbs and spices."

Sign me the hell up.

Aside from the poker, beach and the food, there was also a street festival in progress that took place on the street directly in front of our hotel. I mean, really, really directly:

That's my hotel, and that's the party. Here's another shot:

Like Mardi Gras, without the nudity

It speaks to how busy I was eating that I didn't really investigate this street festival at all, but it seems like it would have been fun. I know it definitely made getting a cab a bit tricky.

All in all, Cebu was a great trip. It's not somewhere I'd want to spend a really long period of time, but it's such a great short getaway from Hong Kong and I'd love to do it again. If I were taking someone I were trying to impress, I'd consider staying at the Shangri-La and laze around the beach, but staying at any of the hotels nearby which are a third of the price (not just rooms, but food/massage/activities) and a 10-minute cab ride away are also viable options. Can't wait to go back!

A conflict of interests in Seoul

Things were so much easier when I just played poker.

I'm heading out to Seoul on Wednesday afternoon. The original purpose was the APPT Seoul which has a ~US$2700 main and ~US$5400 high-roller event. I'll be playing Day 1A on Thursday, and a big part of me is hoping I don't make it through the day.

The reason is that on Sunday, the day of the APPT final table, there are amateur tryouts (link in Korean) for Road Fighting Championships. I don't quite understand it fully, but from what I gather through a combination of Google Translate and my Korean friends, the winners will get to compete on the "Young Guns" portion of a future Road FC card. Unfortunately, it's in a small city called Suncheon, 4.5 hours by bus (or an hour by plane) away from Seoul. So if I make Day 2, which is played on Saturday, I'm not going to be able to compete in it. Even if I were to bust out early on Saturday it would probably be too much of a scramble and stress to make it there, I think.

I've been training quite hard and I'm in fight shape. I'm planning to compete at 61 kg (134.2 lb) because there is only four hours between the weigh-ins and the fights; there's no way I can get all the way down to 57 kg (125.4 lb) and compete well under those circumstances. I'm a small guy, but I don't lose weight very easily. I've been very strict on the diet for the last month, cooking my meals almost every day, but in truth I am really always quite strict and rarely fall off the wagon (WSOP excluded). Thus my walk-around weight is generally not far from my healthy weight. I'm currently about 64 kg in the morning so it will be an easy cut, even with the potential difficulties of being in a foreign land, trying to find the right food, saunas, and so forth. I might be a bit smaller than my opponent but I'm just fine with that.

Obviously, I've put a lot more thought into the potential fight than the poker. But a part of me wants to do well in the poker, too. It's been six weeks since I played a tournament (the Aussie Millions) and it'll be just my second tournament series of the year and third tournament overall (excluding the Chinese Poker). 2011 sucked poker-wise and I'd like to get off the schneid for 2012. I'll also be representing Hero Poker for the first time in a new market so it would be nice to make a run and get some publicity. Nevertheless, I am totally antsy I am to scrap, and I really won't be particularly upset if someone manages to find set-over-set on me in the first level.

But once I sit down at the table, I have to be a pro. Otherwise it's not worth showing up at all. If I enter a poker tournament, I'm there to win it, or at least maximize my expectation. And I've done this long enough that I know that once the cards are in the air, I'll be a pro and do what I have to do. The way I see it, there are a lot of people out there with straight jobs who would love to skip out of the office to play golf. Well, MMA is my golf and while there's nothing wrong with dedicating yourself to your avocations, you gotta take care of business first.

Lost in all of this is how excited I am to go to Korea! I've never been, and always wanted to go. I missed Season 1's APPT Korea and due to various legal wrangling, they haven't been back until now. Of course, there's so much on my plate for this short trip I don't really know if I'll be able to see or do much of anything at all. Perhaps most disappointing of all is that because I'm in the midst of a weight cut, I won't be able to enjoy much of the food, which is usually my favourite part of seeing any new country.

That is of course, unless I make it through Day 1A and the competition is off. Then I'm going to smash Korean BBQ like there's no tomorrow.

Wish me luck! Good or bad; either way is fine by me. :)

Making a groove out of a rut

I'm in a bit of a rut.

I've had a few minor injuries that have prevented me from training as much I've I'd like to this week, which has in turn pushed me into this minor rut. When I'm training hard, twice a day, I feel great. I feel purpose-driven, I am chock full of good hormones, food tastes great, and I sleep like a baby. When I'm not training, I am stir-crazy, bored, and don't really know what to do with myself. I mostly read books, play video games and mess around a bunch online, all while wishing I were training. This has been one of those weeks.

Fight addiction > gambling addiction

Last week, I was chatting with my cousin Calvin, who is one of the people responsible for getting me into the sport. He is turning 35 in July and has unfortunately had to scale back a lot of his training (especially standup) due to injuries. I mentioned that when I am his age (I'm 31) I might be done with this fighting stuff. In his words, "you won't [be]. Unless you have some medical issue. It's like crack."

I thought that was an overstatement (well, I suppose the crack part actually is), but then I was kept off the mats for a few days and I fell right into this rut. Also, when I have too much time on my hands, I tend to get way too introspective and spend too much time wondering what I'm doing with my life.

I have scarcely played any poker since coming back from the Aussie Millions. I haven't been motivated to grind online cash and I've never been one for online tourneys (and all the good ones start at terrible hours here in Hong Kong anyway). I'm still beating online cash and when I play I still feel like I play well, and I want to stay sharp with the WSOP around the corner, but I often just can't be bothered. I'll play for an hour and be bored out of my mind. It just seems like menial, boring work now. I do still enjoy playing live tournaments. There is that great vibe, there is the thrill of competition, there's the social interaction, and there is a start and a finish. Is it strange that as a young poker player I was a Joey Knish and now, into my thirties, I am more Mike McD?

The Macau Poker Cup is going on this weekend. It's a large-field, medium buy-in (US ~$1100) tournament that's just an hour ferry ride away from me, so it should have been a slam dunk for me. But I skipped it, because the tournament organizers changed the Day 1 start time to 8pm which means play wouldn't wrap up until 4am. In my prime poker days, I wouldn't have batted an eye at that, but lately I have optimized nearly my entire life around my physical health and fitness. In the past that just meant exercise and nutrition being dialed in, but the more I read the more I realize that sleep quality plays a huge role in both health and sports performance. So I skipped a high-ev tournament right in my backyard that many of my friends were attending.

This would be a reasonable thing to do if I were a professional athlete, but as we know, I'm just a scrub. Since Black Friday, I've basically just been spending money and living off of savings and investments. Mostly the former because other than real estate, I don't have much of the latter. Financially, I am still in very good shape, but eventually I will have to do something for money -- and to keep myself sane. There's zero chance I will fight for a living, and even doing something like coaching is a long way off given my current skill level.

Options, options

One possibility I've been considering is getting into the finance world. It's not one that remotely interested me at all when I was a young adult, even as someone who graduated with a business degree and enjoyed the requisite undergrad finance courses. But I've been reading some interesting books and some of it seems kind of fun. Everyone says that being a poker player is great prep for being a trader (and vice versa), and that the markets are just like a big casino. Yet I feel like I would nevertheless be starting at a knowledge deficit. I honestly know so little about this world. I don't know how it is that individual people or even small firms can beat the market when there are these giant firms with their supercomputers and tremendous access to information.

On top of that, I wouldn't know where to begin. I've never been a person who was really capable of learning anything in any sort of traditional path. Despite being a reasonably smart person, I was a below-average elementary and high school student, a so-so university student, and I've definitely improved slower than average at MMA, so typical learning environments clearly aren't my thing. Besides, I've always felt that typical learning begets typical results, and I have no desire for that. Luckily I do have friends who are smart in such things -- my smart friends are the only reason I have ever been successful at poker -- and so I do have a valuable resource if I choose to go down that road.

That's just a sidebar to my life at this time, though. MMA is still my priority, and despite my bitching, I still love the training and the sport. If I can stay healthy, I think I can stay happy.

Coming Up

APPT Seoul March 7-11. This is an exciting one for me for a number of reasons. I've never been to Korea, and I've always wanted to go. That's a big one. But I also found out that there is are MMA tryouts (link in Korean) in Suncheon, Korea, the same day as the APPT final table. The winners get to compete in the "Young Guns" portion of a future Road FC card, which is the biggest MMA promotion in Korea. It wouldn't be ideal from a preparation standpoint, but if I were to bust Day 1A of the APPT main event, I would have enough time to cut weight, take a 4.5 hour bus ride from Seoul to Suncheon and compete in the tryouts.

Alternatively (or additionally), there is also an amateur MMA event in Hsinchu, Taiwan, on March 31. It is "D-class", meaning really watered-down MMA rules, but the idea is that you win your way up to C-class, B-class and A-class where the rules are progressively less restrictive. I wish they had stuff like that in Hong Kong, or even Vancouver, but Taiwan is only a 1.5 hour flight away, so it's not unreasonable.

On the non-poker, non-MMA front, I have a number of friends either visiting or possibly visiting Hong Kong within the next month or so. Having some real-world interaction with people I like always makes me happy, and so even if I am not at the gym twice daily, I should manage to keep the ennui at bay.

Aussie Millions wrap-up

After my previous entry, I decided to skip the $2500 HORSE, $2500 PLO and $5000 heads-up, all of which were marked as "possible" on my schedule. But I did play one event which I figured I probably wouldn't play, the $2500 6-max NL. 6-max NL tournaments are awesome but it was a 2-day event, the second day being the day I was scheduled to fly home to Hong Kong. I felt reasonably assured that I wouldn't make Day 2 without making the money (with an outside chance of even the final table) so I decided that I'd play it and change my flight later if necessary.

The tournament started out with an annoyance: I ended up being seated at a late registration table with all the other people in the registration line, which included Jamie Rosen, Salman Behbehani and Joseph Cheong, the latter on my immediate left. The other late registration table (the one which opened right after us) was much, much softer, and it tilted me every time I looked over in that direction knowing that I had I registered just a couple minutes later I could have had that table. My HeroPoker teammate Aaron Benton knew the score and intentionally went back in the registration line so he would be seated at the softer table. While I think in general the Aussie Millions is a well-run tournament (and it was universally agreed that the structures were fantastic), this is the kind of stuff that is inexcusable in tournament poker and is really, really dumb. At least at the WSOP when they are forced into late reg tables, they break the table immediately, but at the Aussie Millions they do not break the tables nearly as quickly. As a result I ended up playing a couple of hours at this table, more than enough time for me to foolishly bluff off half my stack to Joseph.

I grinded back to the starting stack of 10k, then proceeded on a big heater. I coolered a guy holding Ah5h to his Jh9h, getting a ridiculous runout of Jc5s2h-4h-3h to get it in on the river. Then I made a set against a flush draw and held, won two flips, and was probably chip leader five hours into the tournament. It was a nice heater and once again, the kind of thing that potentially keeps people coming back to tournaments. But it wasn't to be. After the dinner break I ran ice cold and made a couple of questionable decisions that cost me some chips. I ended up busting less than 10 off the money when my JJ failed to hold against Jonathan Karamalikis' 99.

Despite bricking the Aussie Millions -- and actually not doing that much outside of it -- I enjoyed my time in Melbourne. Last year with Gavin and Amy Griffin was great because I got to explore with two of my best friends, but meeting and spending time with the newest HeroPoker pros, Aaron and Grant Levy, was also good times. And at the risk of sounding like I'm sucking up to the boss, HeroPoker CEO David Jung was awesome in taking care of the three of us. He drove us around, not just to and from Crown Casino, but even if I wanted to go train at the MMA gym. If we were hungry he threw steaks and pork bellies on the barbecue. It was first-class treatment and I feel like I was treated as well as any sponsored pro could be. (Well, without a gross misappropriation of player funds diverted towards obscene player salaries, at least. But who would do that?) HeroPoker itself is also starting to do well in terms of traffic and player base, and our presence was clearly noted at the Aussie Millions when a young kid in the 6-max looked at my patch and said, "wow, you HeroPoker guys are everywhere!"

No real plans going forward for me, but I foresee spending most of February in Hong Kong, playing cash games on Hero and mostly training MMA/BJJ/Muay Thai. I may run off to Thailand for a training trip as well, but it seems like a number of friends will be visiting Hong Kong within the next couple months, so I may well be hanging out for a bit. There's an outside shot I will get to fight MMA on a card in China in late March, and that would be very exciting. Other than that, a short jaunt to APPT Seoul (never been to Korea!) is the only thing marked on the calendar before WSOP time.

to play or not to play, my Aussie Millions so far

It's another beautiful, partly cloudy, 21-degree day in Melbourne, so I'm typing this while sitting outdoors on the front lawn of the HeroPoker house, where CEO David Jung has put up three of his pros -- Grant Levy, Aaron Benton, and me -- for the week while we play the Aussie Millions. David is chauferring Grant and Aaron to Day 2 of the main event, leaving me to sit at home for a while with a little downtime. I've spent most of the morning deciding whether I want to play the $2500 HORSE in the evening or going to train Muay Thai and no-gi jiujitsu tonight. If you're a regular reader of this blog you've probably figured that I'm leaning towards the latter.

I was really excited to come out here for the Aussie Millions. In Thailand while training every day, twice a day, I allowed myself the fantasy of taking down the thing, as I do for every major that I play. I looked forward to it, and I stayed sharp by trying to grind a few hours daily online. Those fantasies were quickly put to an end on Day 1A of the main. I raised with Ad3d, got called in the BB by 88, the flop came 2d2h4d, he check-called, and the magical 8d peeled right off on the turn. Obviously all the money went in and shortly thereafter I shipped what remained of my stack on a flip and lost that as well.

The Emotional Fallout: another bustout, but this one feels different

It was pretty frustrating. Insert here the standard bitching about how I played well the whole day; how earlier I had trapped a guy into floating me with overs and getting him to lose much more than he should have, only for that cooler to happen. Blah blah blah; no one cares. The fact remains that while a the hand was a cooler, I've certainly experienced far worse, as has anyone with a lot of poker tournament experience. It is part of the nature of the game. Nothing has changed except my attitude towards it all. The first thing I tweeted after the hand happened was, "I can't wait to quit poker," and many days I really do feel this way. I feel like I'm waiting for something. That something could be anything: a great professional opportunity, a lightbulb moment for personal development, a big score to go out on a high note. But it certainly seems that I'm rolling through the twilight of my poker career on inertia with no real exit strategy.

They say that no one ever says on their deathbed that they wish they had worked more. Of course, poker has always straddled the line for me, and for most pros, between work and pleasure. We got into it because it was fun, and often it still is. It's a great feeling to be playing well and running well. Those days in the sun in tournament poker are great moments and I relish going deep in tournaments. Those rare deep runs and even rarer wins are what keeps people coming back to tournament poker. But clearly most players have a love-hate relationship with tournament poker, and I wonder these days how that balance looks for me.

The bad days I have in the gym are rarely that bad. When I get tapped out, punched in the liver or kicked in the face, it's usually with a smile. But when I turn the nut flush against the nut boat, the feeling is so different. I want to get the fuck out of the room as soon as possible. I want to be anywhere but at the poker table, waiting for an opportunity to ship an 11 BB stack in the middle, sitting there and steaming about the fact that my chances of winning this tournament have gone from small-to-begin-with to now absolutely dismal. I have made a point of never, ever using the phrase "FML" because I think considering how good my life is that it's ridiculous for me to say it, but in that moment, I felt it.

So, where do I go from here?

And yet I say all of the above, I do so while thinking that I might still register for the $5k HU NL or the $2500 HORSE today, or the $2500 PLO tomorrow. Part of this is that I came to the Aussie Millions to represent HeroPoker and I feel like with a total of 12 hours of table time I haven't done a particularly good job of that. I haven't felt pressured in the slightest way to play more poker but I've been treated very well here by Dave and feel somewhat bad that I haven't done more to generate exposure for the brand. On the other hand, I just don't feel like I'm in that great a state of mind, my limit/mixed games are a bit rusty and I know that I'll be in a pissy mood if the most probable result (i.e. not winning or cashing big) occurs. On the gripping hand, there is always the off-chance I catch a heater, run deep, and feel better about everything again.

There is also the fact that, as I mentioned, while training in Thailand that I was looking forward to playing poker. And now that I'm in the midst of a poker tournament, I want to go train. That's kind of messed up and I wonder if it says something about me as a person. I've never thought of myself as the type of person who sees the other side's grass as perpetually greener, but maybe this is evidence that I am. I think I would also miss the social side of poker, as bizarre as that might sound. For as weird a group as poker players can be, almost all my best friends are poker players. There are exceptions, but I don't really get along with most of the fighters I meet and I can't have a real conversation with most of them, nor do we share much common ground outside fighting. It is bizarre to say, but I feel like walking away from poker tournaments would mean having a substantially less fulfilling social network. I crave real-life social interaction and I would actually miss getting it from poker players.

So, I'm torn.

I wish I could talk to the deathbed me, and ask him for advice. What say you, old man?