Ultimate Poker post-mortem

On the day that Ultimate Poker is shutting down in Nevada, putting all my thoughts into writing would have taken a really long time, so I created this video blog detailing my time at Ultimate Gaming.

moving on - saying goodbye to Ultimate Poker

Well, the post title is pretty self-explanatory: I'm saying goodbye to Ultimate Gaming and stepping down as Director of Player Operations.

Over the past 15 months I've had the wonderful opportunity to help with the launching of the regulated online poker era in the United States. I've built the well-received Ultimate Poker Player Care team, something I'm tremendously proud of. In certain ways, I'm even more proud of this customer service team than the PokerStars one, because of all the various challenges and difficulties that UP's service team has faced.  I am very confident that their service will continue to be best-in-breed in US poker after my departure.

I've met some wonderful people throughout the organization, people with whom I hope to continue relationships. That's what's made it hard to say goodbye to them.

I'm not going to go into detail at this time regarding the reasons for my departure, other than to say the move is mostly a personal one and the departure is one that has been in the works for a while. I gave this company my 100% and now I want to take some time for myself personally and see what the next challenge for me should be. I've been taking a lot of thoughtful walks and thinking about would bring me fulfillment and joy in life. I'd really like to find the next thing that gets me up in the morning and excited about my day. I haven't quite figured it out yet, but I'm sure I'll be blogging about it when I do.

Thanks to everyone who has been so supportive in this venture. On to the next!

interview with me on FIGHTLAND

In case you missed on Twitter, here is an interview with me and UFC veteran (and aspiring poker player) Martin Kampmann. The interviewer, Eli Kurland, called me up and pretty much just let me ramble on, so it's fairly off-the-cuff and spontaneous responses on my part.

I'm a big fan of the FIGHTLAND blog overall, so check out some of the other stuff there. There's some excellent written and video content on topics as diverse as the training lifestyle in rural Thailand, to great technique breakdowns of big-name fighters as well as some beautiful documentaries about MMA in some of the last places you'd imagine.

my Ultimate birthday

I've never really been a big birthday person at all. Like anyone else I certainly appreciate a day where everyone is nice to me, but I've generally thought of it as pretty much just another day of the week. My birthday was this past Sunday, and rather than celebrate with some event, I scheduled a building move the day after, meaning that my birthday was mostly spent packing boxes and getting ready for the move.

I had scheduled Monday off for the move, and it took longer than expected so I ended up not going to the office that day at all. I was utterly shocked at what I saw when I came into my office!

The pictures doesn't really do it justice - but that's "HAPPY BIRTHDAY TERRENCE" spelled out on my wall, aa hand-written note there from virtually everyone in the office, decorations, cards and gifts. As soon as I opened my office door on Tuesday, half the office heard me exclaim "holy shit!".

I was impressed and touched by that, but there was another surprise waiting. I'm known around the office for my unholy love for BBQ ribs, and I opened up the fridge to find a gigantic platter of ribs with my name on it!

It was a simple thing, but a very touching and well-appreciated gesture from my excellent Ultimate Gaming co-workers.

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.

UTG+1 with Ultimate Gaming CMO/COO Joe Versaci

I did another UTG+1 podcast for Ultimate Poker. I'm up to five total, which you can view here. This most recent one is probably my favourite because I've been trying to have my boss and company CMO/COO Joe Versaci on the show forever and he has consistently ducked me. This is despite the fact that I've always thought he'd be a great interview due to his epic Dana White-esque rants around the office. Well, he didn't quite go off Dana-style (even if I tried to goad him into it), but it's still a great interview and should provide the outsider with a good idea of what things are like working here at Ultimate Gaming:

New Podcast - UTG+1 with Ultimate Gaming!

I've once again been neglecting the blog, but at least I am now generating content at work!

I've started a weekly podcast with the people I work with at Ultimate Gaming. The idea is that we actually have some fairly interesting jobs, backgrounds, and so on. A lot of people play online poker, but relatively few actually know what kind of work goes into running an online poker site, so I figure some people might be interested. My first guest is our Director of Poker Operations, Scott Yeates, the guy who is, well, the head of all poker room operations. He runs teh gamez.

So, here it is. The name is "Under The Gun +1 with Ultimate Gaming". (Or maybe just UTG+1 if that's a mouthful. Haven't decided yet.) I'm aware the audio quality is not very good (particularly on my mic) but we'll have that fixed next week.



For audio only, go to the bottom of this page, right click anywhere on the grey box, and select Download Document

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!

I'm joining Ultimate Poker!

I've teased a couple times on this blog over the last year that I had something in the pipeline brewing. It's with great pleasure that today I get to announce it.

I have joined the Ultimate Poker team.

For those of you who don't know, Ultimate Poker is the newest venture out of Ultimate Gaming. Ultimate Gaming was one of the first companies to receive an online poker license in Nevada, way back in the fall of 2012. We are also majority-owned by Station Casinos and are partnered up with the UFC (who are of course, also owned by the Fertitta brothers).

It should seem fairly obvious that this is a pretty good place for an MMA-obsessed poker pro to land, from both my side and theirs.

I was first contacted with the idea of joining Ultimate Poker almost one year ago to the day. Since then it's been in my head the whole time. It was a struggle to decide though. I thought, "hey, my life as a poker pro/MMA nerd is great. Why mess with something that isn't broken?"

For the last two years (when I started to seriously get into MMA), my life has been a repeat of: wake up, work out, eat, nap, train MMA, eat again, and sleep - and I simply fill the gaps with a small amount of online grinding. Once in a while when there's an exciting major tournament somewhere cool, I go to that -- and try to find a fight gym worth training at as well.

Despite how content I was with everything, I still couldn't shake the idea. I talked to a few close and trusted friends and they thought it was a great opportunity for me. I thought back to my PokerStars days and how much fun it was to be part of a poker startup, to watch a business grow from infancy into something massive and awesome. At the same time, playing poker started to become less exciting to me. Ten WSOP cashes is great and all, but when you cash ten times, that's a ton of hours at the poker table (and no real big payoff, in my case). In the fall, I played only five live tournaments and had a 1st, 2nd and 4th. I ran super-hot in that period and yet I still wasn't sure if I wanted to play poker for a living. I thought, "if I'm not super-excited about poker when I'm running good, I'm a little worried what's going to happen when I start running bad..."

So I kept coming back to the Ultimate Poker thing. I had been mostly talking with their Chief Marketing Officer, Joe Versaci. Joe was North American Marketing Director at PokerStars for many years. Our respective Stars careers barely overlapped, but we know many of the same people, and the people I talked to all said great things about him. Joe not only wanted me because I had past experience starting up the PokerStars support team, but he also loved the idea that I'm a poker player who lives and breathes MMA and the UFC. So I said to Joe that I'd love to work for the company -- as long as you can promise that I'll still be able to train MMA the way I'm used to. When it came to salary, I didn't ask for a dollar more than they were offering; I only wanted the freedom. He agreed, and in fact told me that not only supported, but actually wanted me to fight and play major poker tournaments as it would be great for our brand. And that's why I'm sitting here with a real j-o-b in an actual o-f-f-i-c-e for the first time in nine years.

On one hand, it's a huge change for me. I know from experience that being part of a startup is crazy work. Stuff always goes wrong and there are always challenges and hurdles you didn't anticipate. But more than anything I'm excited. Excited to be hopefully a good team player and leader. Our Vegas office is a couple dozen employees and they're an awesome group who has welcomed me. We have a lot of fun in the office throwing around poker ideas as we stand on the precipice of the first legal real-money hand of online poker in the United States. There's so much talent here, all channeled towards the same goal, that I can't imagine anything other than success and good times.

As for what you'll be seeing from me: more of the same! Any time anyone ever sees me at a poker tournament, they want to know when I'll be fighting again. Well, I've now relocated (yes, legally) to the biggest fight town in the world. So, let's hope the answer to that question is, "soon!" And I'll still be at the WSOP; look for me rocking the Ultimate Poker gear at the tables. I might not have month-long training vacations in Thailand or be able to fly down to Australia or Europe as much, but I'll still be in the poker scene.

One of the nice things about having been successful and reasonably smart with my money over the years is that I only have to do this as long as it's fun, and if it stops being fun, I'll go do something else. That goes for poker, MMA, or working in a poker startup. But I'm loving the people and the environment so far, and I'm excited to be a part of something big. They say that when one door closes, another opens. But I've walked through a new door here, and I still get to keep the other ones open. Good deal for me!

But that's enough self-indulgent writing for now. If you'll excuse me, there's work to do to get Hand #1 dealt!