What It Was Like to Win $1,500,000 in a Poker Tournament at Age 22
Hey guys! I’m a professional poker and Daily Fantasy Sports player. Here was my introductory post with an overview of my career and some Q&A: https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@daut44/introduction-and-ama-ask-me-anything-about-being-a-professional-poker-and-daily-fantasy-sports-player-cross-post-from-poker
I’ve been tentative to do so because I don’t like to brag or talk about big wins, especially when I have a self-deprecating sense of humor, but some more experienced Steemit users such as @steemrollin @stealthtrader and @razvanelulmarin have urged me to write a longer blog about my big tournament win in 2007: going through the lead up to it, how each day went, how I felt as the tournament progressed, and my emotions and thought process towards the end.
22 year old me with slightly more hair than 32 year old me:
Beforehand
The two main formats of poker are cash games and tournaments. Leading up to 2007 I played almost entirely cash games: players join a table, play as long as they'd like or as long as the game runs, can reload money along the way, and whatever they sit and leave with is how much they win or lose.
In tournament poker, generally (exceptions exist) people enter and play until they bust and the tournament runs until there is 1 player remaining, with the payouts reserved for the top 10-15% of finishers and increasing from the first payout to the tournament winner. For instance, if 1000 people play a tournament with a $1,000 buyin (usually $1000+100 with the house taking the $100 cut), there is a $1,000,000 prizepool, the first 850 people out receive nothing and the top 150 people get paid. The lowest payouts are usually about 1.5 times the buyin, in this case $1500, and they exponentially increase with first place receiving roughly 20% or $200,000.
As said in my introductory blogpost, I deposited $45 online, and over the course of a year and a half grinded it up to a little over $100,000 playing almost entirely cash games. Before this big win I rarely played tournament poker. I was at the time enrolled in a math PhD program, but between first and second semester there was a large poker tournament in the Bahamas called The Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) with an $8,000 buyin. I tried to cheaply enter, playing a few satellites that cost $300-$600, but I never qualified. At the last minute I decided to get a passport and buy in directly for $8,000 to play the event.
Day 1 of PCA
Nowadays if you sit down at your first table in a big tournament, the entire table is young aloof looking kids with steely demeanors and headphones on. Generally the more of them there are the tougher the table will be, these are the kids who honed their skills playing online for countless hours. I sat down at my first table and was pretty sure of the 9 other players there was at most 1 other professional. I was extremely focused and for the first half of the day ran my table and more than doubled my stack. I don't remember the exact details, but I do recall a hand early on day 1 where I check raised a T9x flop with QJ, turned a flush draw to go with my straight draw, bet again, then went all in on a blank river. My opponent thought for at least 5 minutes before folding. This instance is a microcosm of the variance in tournament poker: if he calls I bust on day 1 and who knows how my poker career ends up, he folds and I go on to win the whole thing.
As some of the weaker players busted, better players joined, then I was moved around to other tougher tables. I also wasn’t accustomed to the long hours of a poker tournament because I was used to playing 2-3 hour sessions of cash games, so my focus drifted away later and I coasted out the day, ending with 32,000 chips from a starting stack of 20,000.
Me looking extremely uninspired towards the end of day 1
Day 2
Since 937 people entered the event, the staff running the tournament split half the field into day 1A and half the field into day 1B because there likely wasn’t enough room for the entire field to play all together day 1. I played day 1A meaning I had day 1B off. Like a moronic 22 year old on vacation, I went out, got drunk, and woke up hungover for day 2.
At one point during day 2 I started having extremely bad gas from all the beer the previous night--I just couldn’t stop farting. I tried to hide it but it was pretty obvious to everyone around me I was having a rough day, but that’s the upside of unstoppable farts, at least I made it so they were having a rough day as well.
I mostly coasted through Day 2 playing small pots, managed to flop a set of 7s and double up one hand, but other than the extreme gas, the highlight was that we made the money. This tournament paid slightly more than 15%, so the top 180 made the money. By the end of day 2 there were 121 players left and we were all guaranteed $11,797.
Day 3
I came back to Day 3 feeling significantly better than I did day 2. I started the day with about 120k in chips at 2k/4k blinds (forced bets which drives action at the table). Early on day 3 I was able to win a big pot.
Barry Shulman (owner and CEO of cardplayer.com) raised to 10,000, I called in position with Th9h (Ten of hearts, 9 of hearts). The flop came Qh 9d 4d. Barry bet, I called. The turn was the 9c giving me three of a kind. Barry bet again, I called. The river was the 8h. Barry put me all in. I was slightly worried since Barry is known as someone who only plays premium holdings, so there was a chance he could have QQ (full house), JT (straight) or a better 9. But ultimately I decided I had to call because not only did I block some combinations of JT (I have a ten in my hand means he has less possible JT combos), it was extremely unlikely he had a 9 due to me having one and Barry only playing premium holdings, and he could also have AA, KK, or AQ and underestimate the strength of my hand. Barry had KK, and I was up to over 300k in chips and one of the chipleaders.
Finally have a formidable stack to play with instead of donking around with peanuts
For the next few hours my stack plateaued, and as the blinds increased I was getting short stacked despite maintaining my chip count. With 27 players left I won a big pot where I more than doubled up with AA v QQ and I ended the day strong. We stopped play for the day with 16 left and I was in 6th place.
Day 4
I wasn’t very nervous prior to this point, but now I was getting really tense. Here were the remaining payouts:
While $45,000 is a great payday, especially for someone with only about $100,000 to his name, it was a far cry from the higher payouts up the ladder. I really wanted to move up and guarantee a bigger payday before doing anything risky.
With 16 players left, we were split into two tables of 8 players each. Unluckily for me, I drew the much tougher table with the better players who had more chips. Justin Bonomo, who is still one of the best tournament players in the world today in 2016, was at the time by far the best player remaining, and he had a huge chipstack. Also at my table was the chipleader, Isaac Haxton, who today in 2016 is also one of the best players in the world. This tough table draw gave me even more incentive to remain conservative.
Within 45 minutes we were down to 11 players, when Justin and Isaac played a 6.6 million chip pot (1/3 of the chips in play). Isaac had AA, Justin had KK, Justin was eliminated, and we consolidated to a 10 player final table. Although having 10 players at the table meant I could remain cautious, I was even more nervous. If I could outlast 4 more players I would guarantee my payday up from $99k to nearly $250k and the final 6 would be aired on the Travel Channel a few months later.
I slowly chipped up and then won a big hand. I raised AK from early position and was called by the button. I bet 110k on a Kd 9s 4s flop and was raised to 300k. I called and the turn was a Kc. I checked, my opponent bet 400k, and I called. While I had an extremely strong hand here, I simultaneously wanted to play it safe verse possible better hands and also not scare off hands that were worse but would fold if I played it stronger. The river 5s brought a possible flush, we both checked and I won. Soon after two players were eliminated and I had made my first TV final table.
Day 5
Before Day 5 I was required to do some interviews for tv. I did just what you would expect a nerdy, immature 22 year old to do: make an ass of myself. Not only did I wrongly guess that a 28 year old player at our final table was in his 40s, but I told my farting story in another interview. I was off to a great start.
the final 6
The upside was that my nerves were gone. Just at the time we are playing for huge amounts of money and I assume everyone else’s nerves are increasing, I felt more relaxed than ever. I was guaranteed nearly $250k, I had a solid chipstack (was tied for 2nd in chips with 2.3 million and had about 12% of the chips in play), and I thought I was the best player remaining. I considered anything more as just a cherry on top, but at the same time I was focused and ready to play my best.
I started off playing aggressively, then backed off the gas and let players eliminate each other. As the field shrunk, I stayed cautious but never fell below 2 million chips. By the time we reached heads up play, I had roughly 25% of the chips in play and was guaranteed $861,789.
The Tell
I’m mostly a mathematical player. I try to play game theory optimal (GTO) and unless I have an extremely good reason to do so, I rarely deviate from what I view is the optimal strategy in a situation. But an acquaintance of mine named Jason Laso, known in the online poker world as mkind16, informed me that he noticed a physical tell on Isaac. Many recreational players would stare right at you when they were weak (trying to convey strength) and look away when they had strong holdings (trying to convey weakness). Isaac knew this and tried to do the exact opposite. If he looked away he was weak, if he looked at me he was strong.
I spent some time on the final table trying to confirm this tell, but by the time we reached heads up I was confident in Jason’s read. Every time I had a close spot and I used physical tells to make my decision I was right. I started winning more than my share of pots and evened the chip counts when i doubled up with an ace high flush draw against his straight draw.
The Bluff Rebluff re-re-Bluff Hand
I think Isaac was getting a little frustrated with how heads up play was going. This frustration combined with a gigantic set of balls led to us playing one of the most famous hands in poker tv history:
Due to the physical tell, I was convinced Isaac had nothing on the river. I also thought it was conceivable for me to have a queen, which made my raise believable. I didn’t know this at the time, but Isaac is brilliant. He has one of the best poker minds in the world, and even though he was at the time a less experienced player, he was able to deduce that I likely had nothing because of the way the hand played out prior. Two young unknown kids vying for $700,000 and playing like controlled maniacs, this is what poker is about.
After that hand, it was all downhill for Isaac. I won a few big pots to cripple him and eventually finished him off with AT preflop against his Q8. The final payday was $1,535,255.
Since poker tournaments are so expensive, many players make deals prior to entering, sharing action with friends or selling percentages to investors to decrease the buyin. I swapped 5% with my good friend Steve Costello (known as Pooruser in poker), so I had to send him a little over $75,000 after the tournament, but generally players have much less than 95% of themselves in an event and I had more than 15x’ed my bankroll so I was ecstatic. This tournament would forever change my life.
I invited some friends over from a poker forum I frequent. They didn't participate in the AMA, but I'm hoping to get some more bright poker players with years of experience on internet forums on steem, so they may ask me completely unrelated questions to this post. But feel free to ask anything about the event, poker in general, or any of my other interests.
Brilliant bluff raise against Haxton, and brilliant re-raise by him.
When you started to get to the high end of the tournament, and things started to get to those crazy stakes, did you start to get nervous, panic or freak out at all? Do you have any background in breathing exercises, or meditation? Or had the amounts you played for online, and the amount of times you moved up stakes, prepared you for it?
Well played, sounds like a well-deserved win.
Leading up to this event, I played almost exclusively cash games. There was one tournament I went deep in a few months earlier, I want to say I finished in 12th place for 7k when 1st was a little over 200k. But in my cash games I'm not sure I ever had more than $5,000 on a table prior to playing PCA. So when the money started getting bigger I was initially very nervous.
I'm not sure what kind of background you have in math and poker (I hope this is followable), but everybody's stack has chip equity. At the start of the tournament, when everyone has the starting stack of 20k chips, everyone's equity is the buyin, or $8000. If two players are HU for the prize, first place is 1.5million and 2nd place is 800,000 (to make the numbers easier), and they have the same number of chips, then each person's stack is "worth" 1,150,000. If one player has 75% of the chips and the other player has 25%, then the player with 75% has a stack worth 800k + .75*700k = 1.325M and the other player has a stack worth 975k.
I bring this background up because when there were 30 players left, despite the next player busting out being paid $21,898, everyone's stack is worth more than that. Even if you are last in chips, you still have chances to double up, get lucky, and put yourself in a position to win the tournament. An average stack remaining is guaranteed $21,898, but his expected payout is probably closer to $150k. So there were moments from 36 players down to 6 players where my nerves were firing up because I was guaranteed a relatively small amount of money compared to my expectation. I stopped being nervous once I was guaranteed a large enough amount of money that I deemed life changing (250k), but from 16 down to 6 I was very on edge.
I've done some meditation in the past year, but back then I was just an unarmed kid thrown into the deep end of a pool and came out on the lucky end.
Very cool. Yes, I have a background in poker. I used to play at Crown in Melbourne every day, if you know it. I was semi-pro for a while, I guess you could say, playing low stakes cash games $2/$3.
That's interesting that your nerves settled down once you were getting closer to winning even more. But I suppose at that stage, it was difficult for you to contemplate what winning a million dollars even meant.
Yup I know the Crown. They run the Aussie Millions tournament series every January. Lots of players like to go down, play in the series, then watch the Australian Open. I've somehow never made it out, but if there was one distant spot I'd go for a tournament it would be there.
There's decent money to be made at 2/3, but the rake is generally ridiculous. Still beats private games, but there is incentive to try and move up stakes quickly to avoid the rake traps.
I tended to have better success at the private games, where the rake was lower. There are pros at that level, but there are also egos, and drama queens, tilt addicts, super nits... And even the pros make bizarre mistakes which you wouldn't expect.
Melbourne is a great town. Next time an opportunity comes up, definitely take it, go to the restaurants, the theatres, the art galleries, the street art especially. It's amazing.
Now I live in Guadalajara, Mexico. I've been living here for a couple of years, but I still haven't checked out the casinos here
can't reply to other comment, reached maximum depth level already. but interesting that the private games have lower rake there. In America, lots of times when you play a private game it's uncapped rake. The players are usually much worse, but it's still hard for many people to overcome playing 5k pots where they sometimes take out hundreds of dollars. Small stakes in a casino is rough too since not many pots exceed the rake cap. The rake is just always too high :(
Geez. The thing is, Crown has a near monopoly on legal games in Melbourne. Even Sydney only has two casinos, last time I counted anyway. So the private games sorta have to compete against Crown, so they lower their rake.
When decentralised poker becomes a reality, rake might get very close to zero
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/etherpoker-raising-stakes-ethereum-1551331
By the way, if you want more people to read your posts on here, there are a bunch of Steemit Facebook groups you can join.
Oh cool, yea I'm all for joining them. Have any specific recommendations?
I guess start with this one https://www.facebook.com/groups/SteemitGroup/?fref=ts
just because it has the most people. But just search for Steemit and press groups, and join everything which strikes your fancy
As a former poker player this was a great story to read. Sick hand aswell.
Look forward to your lifting blogs
One other thing I wanted to talk about is a poker concept called ICM, which stands for independent chip modeling.
So imagine I put you to the test in a poker hand, you are getting 2:1 odds to call and are trying to calculate what % your hand is against my range of hands. If you are > 1/3 to win you call and if you are less you fold. To illustrate this, imagine you are getting 2:1 and are 35% to win. when you lose you go -1 for calling the bet off. When you win, you gain the 2 out there. 35%2 +65%(-1) = .7-.65=.05, a positive overall gain.
But in poker tournaments, we can't do that. Since the payouts increase exponentially, players who are shorter stacked towards the end of a tournament have incentive to be more conservative when running into the big stack. So with 3 players left, say I have the chiplead, you are in 2nd place, and someone is in distant 3rd. Same scenario, I go all in and give you 2:1 odds to call. In this situation you probably have to be something like 55-60% to win rather than >33.3%.
But when players get down to HU there is no more ICM. Players revert back to making the standard best poker play and there is no worry about laddering up as other players bust out. So despite lots of conservative play before, once we got to HU our aggression levels went through the roof
This is what I am taking about @daut44!
I'm curious, due to how they edit these shows, if he saw your gulp at 1:18 or not. ;)
Never thought about that before, but this far removed from it I don't know. It's certainly possible I thought for more than 15 seconds before raising and he saw it, but also possible the split screen accurately showed each of us at that moment. Regardless nice catch!
Fantastic story! Great details and really gives a great perspective on what it's like to participate... and even better win! You know I probably watched this tourney on the travel channel a while back come to think of it. I used to watch a lot. Never thought that a 'passing gas' strategy could be another dynamic in Poker. Yeah money management, being conservative and surviving seems to be pretty important especially with the large differences in payouts. The story about the tell is fascinating too. People try to do the opposite when bluffing... but Isaac was doing the opposite of most and you realized that. That's neat!
thanks, and thanks again for the advice in a prior blog. I personally find the opposite side of the gambling world fascinating, not necessarily losing players, but winning players dealing with extended losing streaks. As stated in another comment in this blog, I'm currently on a 55k downswing in DFS and will probably write a blog about that next time. I really don't like talking about the big wins because it feels like bragging and comes off as hard to relate to, but the losses sometimes have more emotion and self doubt and require far greater levels of discipline, which I think will be interesting but also less popular
Yeah I think both kinds of experiences are valuable and will be appreciated by the community. I think there is a realness to our community unlike other places so struggles are really part of the sharing and are appreciated. This post should really do well and hope people are awake to see this! It has a lot of great insights. Don't worry about feeling like bragging. It's an incredible accomplishment and I'm sure people want to hear about it. Just be yourself about it like you just did. Anyways look forward to reading more stories about the ups and downs...ttyl!
Great write-up. Definitely something you will always hold dear to you. The coolest thing about that WPT was that more than any other tournament it embodied the playful youthful spirit of LP before real tough choices had to be made in poker. Everyone was so friendly, happy, had bright-eyed belief in poker and that their luck and destiny was firmly in their grasp, all they needed was a chip and a chair. Best of luck in the future <3
Yup, the poker world had it good. Downswings were not worrisome because we played for fun and we knew an upswing would come. Sad to see how things have changed, but the economy was probably unsustainable
Awesome read. What happened with the math PhD?
I loved Math in undergrad. When I got to grad school it was no longer fun. I didn't enjoy going to my classes, the material was boring, my professors spoke poor English, my classmates were not native English speakers either so study groups weren't a thing. Maybe I would enjoy it more now at 32 than I did at 22, but it wasn't for me.
I took 3 classes my first semester: logic, abstract algebra, and analysis. I got an A-, B+, and a C+ and found out the C+ was not a passing grade. I also started falling too far behind to keep up with the required exams I had to pass at the end of first year, didn't want to continue teaching classes, and math PhD is not guaranteed after research is done. In other subject areas if you do the research and get an unexpected result, you still have a thesis. In math you need to come up with something new. I wasn't ready to commit to a 5 year program that I wasn't that enthusiastic about and that may take longer if I hit roadblocks.
Damn! I only just now made the connection that you were the guy on the other end of the insane Hollywood Haxton bluff!
I loved this tournament FT so much, what a great write up Ryan, after you won this, I Moved from cash games to tournaments and had some of the most successful months of my poker life, you inspired me more than you would ever imagine. I can always remember when you won the tournament, you wiping off your elbows like, psh that was easy, and going for the interview. Amazing write up man :) Who woulda knew Ike was actually on his way to becoming a sick savant himself (or already was) :) Great idea for a blog man! :)
So much entitlement on my part. Winning my first live tournament without ever having the worst hand while all in was an incredible feat of luck, but at the time I looked at it as me solely skillfully navigating through a sea of people who constantly made mistakes. Of course it was a little bit of latter but almost entirely the former, but my confidence through the end of the tournament and in the months after was way higher than it should have been.
I bet that was intense. @halo
Very. Going deep in a large poker tournament is a crazy rush when you compare the payouts at the top to payouts further down the ladder. Even small tournaments get the blood pumping. If I played tonight in a $10 200 person tournament that was $500 to first I would still feel some type of rush making the final table and going deep. It doesn't translate linearly, there's no way this rush was thousands of times greater, but the rush is always there.
Invest in bitcoin ;)
I do now, but wish I did much earlier
The Talented One making a cameo. I remember watching that on the Travel Channel and being so stoked. Good times.
Tom is a legend