Poker — once a shady back-room game, played by snarling curmudgeons in cigar-filled rooms – has been taken over by the nerds.
Bourbon whiskey, Stetsons and swagger have been replaced by dual 32-inch computer screens, mathematical theories and a multi-billion dollar online industry.
Millions play the game online for recreation, but only about 5000 worldwide use it as their sole source of income.
With a credit card, internet connection and a computer, a generation of kids exploited the poker boom of the early 2000s to call themselves “professionals”.
I was one of them.
It takes a specialised skill-set to win long-term at online poker. Any old “luckbox” can win a tournament by getting the rub of the green, but success over months, years, or decades can be achieved only by being better than your opposition.
For a year of my poker education, I lived with the best and most successful online tournament player of all time.
Chris Moorman’s skillset was complete. He was obsessed with the game, patient, disciplined, super-aggressive and a MacGyver-like problem solver.
Moorman has won more money than the best All Black will earn in a lifetime. That includes $20 million on PokerStars and the now defunct Full Tilt Poker, $7 million in live earnings, and two occasions where he has won a tournament for more than US$1m.
“I joke with friends that I can remember hands they’ve played against other people better than they can,” Moorman told me recently when we caught up again. “If I’m involved in a hand I seem to have a photographic memory, which, oddly, is the complete opposite in real life where I can’t remember anything.
“But poker takes over my brain and I can remember so much useless stuff, but some of it is quite helpful. If I played against a guy a few years ago, but haven’t played him since, I would still have really strong reads on the player and I remember their weaknesses.”
When I first met Moorman seven years ago he was 25 and a laidback, socially awkward, softly spoken millionaire. He listened more than he talked, was strongly opinionated, quick witted and deeply analytical. It seemed his brain was operating on a slightly different frequency.
He had all his money tied up in online poker rooms and, although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, he was living the most stressful year of his life.
“At that point I had about 20 different players that I was bankrolling by myself,” Moorman said.
“It got to the point where my poker didn’t matter. I remember winning a tournament for over $100k on a Sunday and losing money on the day. It was a bit out of control – I was investing so much more into other people than myself. Good or bad days weren’t determined by me, but other people.”
Moorman cut all his “horses” after Black Friday and put more time into improving as a player and dominating the live scene. His change in focus was rewarded with two million-dollar-plus tournament wins within five months.
“In 2010 I had a really bad year, and lost about $200,000.”
“When you’re playing every day and it’s not going well, you feel terrible. I’d had a lot of success before, but I did wonder if it would ever turn around. It doesn’t take long to wonder if they’re every going to win again during a downswing. Being down on certain sites over the course of a year is hard to take, because you figure the variance would sort itself out, but I had to realise I wasn’t playing great either.”
“On the flip side, my best year of online poker was in 2011, so it shows that I was able to use that bad period as a positive.”
Moorman’s work ethic was insatiable: he was a freak, playing 20 tables at once, seven days a week, 10 hours a day.
“At peak time I was playing more than I would sleep. I would choose playing poker over going out with friends and justify it in my head because if I played I might make $1500, so I would evaluate the opportunity cost of it. I would say, ‘Okay, if I don’t play I will spend a couple hundred and miss out on making $1500, so is this night really going to be worth $1700 to me?'”
Moorman was a bad loser and his obsessive nature drove his determination to fix mistakes in his game.
“If I had a bad day, other people might get down and sulk about it and not want to play the next day, but it motivated me to get better. I wanted to figure out why I lost and just didn’t accept that I ‘ran bad’. I worked really hard to improve.”
Moorman now lives in Las Vegas with his wife. He accepts that online poker’s glory days are probably over.
“Back in the day I would play online six days a week, but you can’t do that now. Online is probably only good one or two days a week. Back then, a lot of the professionals weren’t even that good, but they made money off the amateurs.
“But now all the pros are working really hard on their games, so it’s pretty tough.”
If the world’s most successful online player has doubts about poker as a long-term career option, it’s got to be troubling for the average grinder.
“10 years? I don’t know, I don’t really know what I’m doing in 10 days. I still see myself playing some poker, but maybe not as my whole career.”
Full article can be found here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/indepth/sport/my-life-as-professional-online-poker-player/