I quit playing poker professionally on April 15, 2011,
better known as “Black Friday” in the community cause it was the day the
biggest online poker sites pulled out of the U.S. market. I always knew I
didn’t want to be a pro the rest of my life and that was a timely opportunity
to pivot. I quit cause I didn’t want “professional poker player” on my epitaph,
but also cause the games were escalating in difficulty and I believed that
escalation would soon reach a terminal velocity of unprofitability.
I drifted like a ship without a sail for the rest of the
year, then went to Africa to figure out who I was and what I wanted to be. I
taught and traveled for four months and determined Pride was my personal
poison. I also realized playing games would always be fundamental to my
existence. I thought I might get into the board game industry. But shortly
after returning, I began teaching at the elementary school I went to. I’ve been
working there and tutoring ever since.
I can’t say teaching is as fun as playing games, but I don’t
think any teacher would choose “fun” as one of their top adjectives to describe
it. I’ll write more about the classroom teaching experience someday; for now I’ll
just describe it as holistically difficult, engrossing and rewarding. It forces
you to be the best version of yourself. For a young man afflicted by laziness
and indetermination, teaching turned out to be the perfect supplement to
balance life out.
I use “supplement” to describe my teaching career cause it’s
rarely been my primary income and I’ve been careful not to work more than
thirty hours a week at school for prolonged stretches. Just when I thought I
was done high-stakes gambling, daily fantasy sports exploded onto the scene.
Like many poker pros and ex-pros, I was predisposed with the traits and skills
needed to succeed in DFS. I was really
fortunate that my poker friend Chris Viox wanted my help with NBA DFS as it
detonated. With a little of my assistance, Chris quickly graduated into one of
the best NBA DFS players in the world. Suddenly I found myself playing a game
for big money once again. The difference was balancing it with teaching: I felt
great about who I was and my impact on the world, which freed my conscience to
fully enjoy a game meant to extract money from opponents.
I kept playing poker in my thirties. I live an hour from
Black Hawk, Colorado, which happens to feature some of the softest poker
tournaments on earth. There are about ten $1k-$3k tourneys a year in Black
Hawk, landing it in the Goldilocks Zone for me in terms of stakes, frequency
and competition level. I enjoy playing poker when I can play intermittently,
when I can win meaningful money without serious financial risk and when I’m one
of the best players at the table. The tournaments at Bally’s Black Hawk
(formerly Golden Gates) have been another blissful supplement to my livelihood.
I’ve done rather well up there, largely because the heartbreaking second-table
finishes that defined my tourney pro career transformed into emotionally and financially satisfying top-three finishes.
Meanwhile, a funny thing happened in the poker industry. No
limit hold ‘em didn’t shrivel up, get solved and die. Much to my surprise, it
expanded in scope and strategic depth. I don’t fully understand the factors
causing this growth; others have explained it with more illumination than I
could hope to. Clearly, there is plenty of profitability out there for the
intrepid and the studious. Now seems as good as time as any to be a
professional poker player.
Poker has long been thought of as a social game. It has been
a game of personality, of social interaction, sitting on the contradictory razor’s
edge of competition and camaraderie. It owes its mid-aughts explosion to
colorful on and off-screen characters like Doyle Brunson, Sammy Farha, Mike
Sexton and Norman Chad. They grew the game by glorifying its social dynamics,
whether they were the subjects or spinners of gambling lore. The ethos of poker
– saloons, cowboys, riverboats, underground clubs like Teddy KGB’s, tells, staring
into the soul of your opponent, Vegas, Johnny Chan and Phil Hellmuth –
enchanted many, including me.
Twenty years zooming in the microscope reveals a different complexion.
Math is the core of poker. While social and psychological factors complicate
the terrain, poker is a game of hardcore strategy. The best players in the
world are no longer garrulous gamblers, but nerds devoted to studying gametheory simulations. I was recently struck by an observation my friend Will
Jaffe made – that introversion is now a beneficial trait for the professional
poker player. It takes a fixation on strategic precision, not gallantry and
gestures, to stoke the fires of continuing education.
Gallantry and gesture-reading are not my strong suits. I was
always a squeamish player, scared to make the big move lest it blow up in my
face. As a pro, I watched nervy players with less acumen shred live tournaments
while I folded to 14th place finishes.
Since retiring, the poker landscape has shifted towards my
strengths. I am fixated on strategic precision. I love analyzing the minutiae
of games. I am infatuated with nerdy board games like Caylus and Agricola. I
study Pio with some of the players I rolled with back in the day, better
players who remain pros because of their own devotion to strategic precision.
And I enjoy it.
Poker isn’t really about making big, ballsy moves anymore.
It’s just about making the right decision at every step of every hand.
Sometimes, this might appear to be a big, ballsy move, but in the hands of a thinking
player it’s just proper strategy. I am much more afraid of misplaying a hand
than I am of bluffing off a stack in a big moment.
I believe I would be a wealthy, high-level pro if I hadn’t
bailed out on Black Friday. My devotion to strategic intricacy would have
served me well as the game became more scholarly. I don’t think I would be a
top-tier super high roller because I don’t have the work ethic. As fascinating
as I find the game, I don’t possess the drive to grind through those days my mind
is less keen. But the persistent appeal of hardcore strategy would’ve kept my game
sharp and dynamic.
Yet I don’t regret that decision on Black Friday. The last
decade was the best of my life. I gained a buoyant balance I didn’t know
existed from the cobblestones of the gambling streets. For me, poker has turned
out to be the perfect hobby – endlessly intriguing, exciting and profitable
without consuming my identity. Truly, that shift in identity unlocked a world
of contentment for me. I have no regrets, only gratitude for this beautiful game.
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