Tag: online poker

In the sixth of a 10-part series on the World Series of Poker, the Paul Phua Poker School profiles the only woman to reach the final table at the World Series of Poker

Poker is a male-dominated world. Some estimates put the proportion of female players in live tournaments as low as 5%. There are many possible factors behind this, but the fact remains that only one woman has ever reached the final table of the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event.
It’s for this reason that, although poker guru Dan Harrington won the WSOP championship in 1995, the most notable performance that year was arguably Barbara Enright’s.

Who is Barbara Enright?

When asked to name a female poker pro, you might immediately think of Annie Duke, Vanessa Selbst, or Liv Boeree. But to players of an older generation, Barbara Enright’s name would roll first off the tongue.
Barbara Enright started playing poker with her elder brother at the age of four, and began playing in poker rooms in the 1970s. It wasn’t long before she gave up her jobs as a hairstylist and cocktail waitress to turn pro. She was the first woman to be inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame, in 2007, and the first to win first two, then three WSOP bracelets. And she is still the only woman to have reached the final table of the WSOP Main Event – though Annie Duke came close, finishing in tenth place in 2000.

Barbara Enright’s final table in 1995

With two WSOP bracelets already to her name, Barbara Enright qualified for the $10,000 buy-in WSOP Main Event through an online satellite that cost just $220 to enter. She asked a previous backer to stake her for 50%, but he declined – a decision that would cost him £57,000!
Enright fought her way through not just to the final table of nine, but to the television table of six. The competition was tough: the other five players were Chuck Thompson, Hamid Dastmalchi, Brent Carter and Howard Goldfarb, as well as Dan Harrington.
In the end, however, the poker gods decided it was not to be. It was not bad play that brought an end to Enright’s championship dream, but bad luck. She was knocked out in fifth place when her commanding pocket 8s were outdrawn by Carter’s meagre 6-3 suited, which flopped two pair.

Women Poker Player Magazine

The veteran poker commentator Mike Sexton has called Enright “the most dominating, relentless, aggressive woman on the tournament circuit”. The poker writer Al Moe has said she is “like a heavy rock on a steep hill”.
Inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame the same year as Phil Hellmuth, and made Editor-in-Chief of Women Poker Player Magazine, Enright continues to play to this day, 40 years after she began testing herself in the male-dominated cardroom environment. Her heavy rock is still rolling: in 2017 so far she has cashed in four tournaments, including the skill-testing $1,500 H.O.R.S.E. at the World Series of Poker.
 

Who is Barbara Enright? Poker player profile

  • Barbara Enright started playing poker at the age of four, and has played in cardrooms since the early 1970s
  • She has won three WSOP bracelets
  • She was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2007
  • Barbara Enright is the only woman ever to have reached the final table in the WSOP Main Event
  • Mike Sexton has called her “the most dominating, relentless, aggressive woman on the tournament circuit”

Read part 5 of our WSOP blogs on the youngest ever World Series of Poker champion.
Or come back tomorrow to read about when Stu Ungar wons a historic third world championship.

Paul Phua gets tips on heads-up poker strategy from Dan “Jungleman” Cates in the latest of the Paul Phua Poker School video interviews with high-stakes pros

Dan “Jungleman” Cates is one of the best heads-up poker players in the world. Under his online poker name of “Jungleman12”, he has made more than $10 million profit on the Full Tilt poker site, putting him third on the HighstakesDB.com list of biggest poker winners.

Who is Daniel “Jungleman” Cates? Poker player profile:

— Dan Cates, 27, from the United States, is one of the world’s leading heads-up poker players.
— He plays online poker under the names “Jungleman12” and “w00ki3z”.
— He has made more than $10 million profit on the Full Tilt poker site.
— He has nearly $5 million in live poker tournament cashes.
— He often plays cash poker for high stakes in “the Big Game” in Macau and Manila.
— He is known for his aggressive style of play.

Full-ring poker vs. heads-up poker

In the last few years, he has also branched out into full-ring poker [multi-player cash games], testing himself in the highest of high-stakes poker cash games against myself and other pro players in Macau, Manila and elsewhere. The swings in “the Big Game” can be huge. After one marathon session in 2015, Jungleman (as we all call him) made headlines in the poker press when he Tweeted: “Sooo Manila didn’t go well, only lost about 38m hkd (5m usd)”.
He has made it back since!
In this new video interview for the Paul Phua Poker School, Dan “Jungleman” Cates discusses the differences between heads-up and full-ring poker. He even admits to an early mistake when he first made the switch:
“There are many more combinations of hands in heads-up rather than ring,” Jungleman says, “so a lot of times you can value-bet thinner, when it’s actually quite a large mistake in ring to value-bet thin when, like, a flush draw completes.”
What he means by “more combinations of hands” is that you should play a very much wider range of starting hands in heads-up than in full-ring poker. The winning hand at showdown is also likely to be no bigger than a pair; sometimes even just Ace or King high. Heads-up therefore suits an aggressive style of playing poker, which Dan Cates certainly has!

Aggressive poker playing strategy

One tip I like in this Paul Phua Poker video interview is where Jungleman says, “I guess one strategy for heads-up that I have is I just try to win all the pots that I possibly can. I’d see where people let me take pots from them and where they don’t.”
You see what I mean about an aggressive poker style! Jungleman is constantly attacking and probing for weakness, which puts less experienced poker players on the back foot. They are scared to call his raises unless they have a very strong hand, and in heads-up it’s rare to have one!
Interestingly, Jungleman has found that this skill is transferrable to full-ring. Trying to win many pots helps with the ring poker game, says Jungleman, “because sometimes ring players are so used to having stuff, are so used to playing against strong ranges, that they forget about little pots that they can pick up.”

Poker lessons to be learned

That is something I believe we can all learn from. Many of us get too comfortable playing poker the safe and “proper” way: wait for a premium starting hand, and be prepared to fold if you don’t hit the flop. As Jungleman puts it, you end up folding “because you have, like, Ace-10 off-suit under the gun. ‘Oh, well. It’s under the gun, I have to fold now!’”
But if you apply a bit of the heads-up poker aggression to ring, some of those guerrilla-style tactics of hitting hard with unpredictable hands when your opponents are least expecting it – or representing those hands when you don’t have them! – then you can take down a lot of small pots against opponents who aren’t prepared to take a risk.

Pre-flop strategy from Dan Cates

Pre-flop, Jungleman reveals in the video interview, “I prefer to 3-bet a hand like 5-6 suited more so than, like, Queen-10 suited. But I also try to balance calling and 3-betting with a hand like Ace-Queen off suit because… It’s more of a subtle thing, but if you call so much with Ace-Queen off suit it becomes a really obvious hand that you have.”
The key here is variation. Adjust your poker playing style to whether your opponent is loose or tight, and don’t always play the same hand in the same way. An unpredictable poker player is hard to beat. And they don’t come much more unpredictable than Dan “Jungleman” Cates.
More videos from the poker pros can be found on the Paul Phua Poker YouTube channel. Subscribe if you don’t want to miss out on future releases. It’s free!
 

In a single year, poker prodigy Dan Colman won $22.4 million in live tournaments and four major titles – aged just 23. He rarely gives interviews, so Paul Phua is delighted to introduce this latest video

The latest video interview for the Paul Phua Poker School is with Daniel Colman, who has one of the most extraordinary rise-to-riches stories in all of poker. He was talent-spotted as a teenager by poker pro Olivier Busquet, after Colman kept calling out his hands while watching him play online. In 2013, Dan Colman became the first online hyper-turbo player to win more than $1 million in a year – what’s more, he managed it in just nine months.


“I don’t see poker as being a sustainable source of income a few years down the road,” Dan said modestly in an interview at the time. It must be one of the only times in his poker career that Dan has been very, very wrong!
The very next year, Dan Colman won the $1m-entry Big One for One Drop tournament, besting Daniel Negreanu heads-up at the end, to win $15.3 million and his first WSOP bracelet. He was just 22 years old.
As if to prove this was no fluke, that year Dan Colman also won the EPT Super High Roller in Monte Carlo for $1.5m; the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open Main Event for $1.4m (beating 1,500 players); and the WPT Alpha8 Main Event in London for $950,000; as well as making numerous other final tables. He was named Player of the Year 2014 by Bluff, Card Player and All In magazines.

Drawn to the dark side

Unusually for a player so thrust into the limelight, Dan Colman turned down pretty much every interview request (which makes me extra-excited he agreed to do video interviews with the Paul Phua Poker School). He posted a very thoughtful explanation for this online. He said that though he loves playing poker, he doesn’t like the fact that for him to win, someone else must lose a large sum of money.
“I am conflicted,” he wrote. “I capitalise off this game that targets people’s weaknesses. I do enjoy it, I love the strategy part of it, but I do see it as a very dark game.”
He still loves to play. “It is a beautiful game when you think about it,” he says in this new video interview with the Paul Phua Poker School. “Just everything matches up perfectly where there are straights, flushes, what beats what.”
But he also still cautions players to be careful with their money. In my previous video interview with Dan Colman, he warned of the dangers of online poker for recreational players. And in this new video profile, he admits that he himself lost money for his first five years of playing – which may give hope to anyone still struggling to master the game!
“I had poor poker bankroll management,” he admits in the interview, and he went boom-and-bust several times before hitting his stride. [Discover my tips on bankroll management here.]

A DIY style of poker

The other interesting thing about Dan Colman is that he is mostly self-taught – with a helping hand from mentors such as Oliver Busquet. Phil Ivey recently said in our video interview that players nowadays have it easier: he learned by trial and error because there was less advice out there on strategy than there is now. Dan went down the same route, but in his case by choice rather than from necessity.
Even now, as Dan says in our video interview, “I’m definitely a field player. I don’t use much math, game theory. I’m very intuitive but, that being said, the guys that are very math based, game theory orientated, I always want to pay attention to what they are doing and try and understand the reasoning behind it.”
Whatever Dan Colman is doing, it’s working. He’s made another $2m-plus in live tournament earnings just this year alone. He’s also one of the nicest, brightest and most articulate people one could meet.
And he is still only 26 years old!
More videos from the poker pros will be going live weekly on the Paul Phua Poker YouTube channel. Subscribe if you don’t want to miss out. It’s free!

In the latest in a series of video interviews with the Paul Phua Poker School, poker pro Dan Colman talks to Paul Phua about AI, tells, and the trouble with online poker

In the latest in the Paul Phua Poker School videos featuring top pros, I am delighted to have Daniel Colman sharing his frank views on poker. Dan is an exceptional player. He made headlines when he won the 2014 Big One for One Drop for a $15m payday, but it was no accident: he had already won $2m in the Monte Carlo Super High Roller Grand Final that year, and he has won many more since. With earnings of $28m in all, he is the second most successful live tournament player in the world.


But enough about money! The point I am making is that Dan knows his poker. And what is even more remarkable is that he began as an online player, in his teens.
All this makes him the perfect person to ask about the difference between online and live play. Dan Colman is not afraid to speak his mind: “I think the way the online poker game works,” he says in the video interview with me, “is that it puts recreational players at a severe disadvantage.”
The problem is, he says, that professional players are equipped with all kinds of software and online trackers: “They mine hands from the days and weeks before to get a database on players they’ve never even played with to understand how they play.”
I agree with Dan. I have always preferred to play live. It’s more sociable, more fun than staring at a screen. And, as well, there is more psychology involved. You get a feel for how your opponents play. You may even get a read on them, which tells you what cards they are holding.
There can be a big adjustment for online players looking to move into live games. “When you go from the online realm and cross over to live poker,” says Dan Colman in the video interview, “you’re always uncomfortable at first. [Young players] might know ‘I have to bluff right here’, but then they think about it and they think ‘Oh, maybe they’re on to me, I check’. You have to get confidence to be able to follow through with your game plan in live poker.”
Here is a funny story, which I also talk about in the video interview. I have played for many years in what poker players call The Big Game, which is a cash game at extremely high stakes. Some of the world’s top poker players would fly into Macau, or Manila, and play for huge pots in this Big Game. One of them was Dan “Jungleman” Cates.
I can say this because now he has successfully plugged that leak in his game, but as a very experienced and skilled online player moving to live games, Jungleman had tons of “tells”! We so often knew exactly what his cards were, and when he was bluffing!
Finally, there is one other aspect of online play that both I and Dan Colman are concerned about, and which we discuss in the video. AI programs are now beating even the world’s best players. I have written about this before. How will that affect online poker?
This is what Dan Colman has to say in the video interview: “I think online poker will die down as a result of computers and machines playing. I think this will come in the next one, two, three years.”
So, all you online players, if you don’t want to bow down to our AI overlords, maybe you should try a little more live poker! Play some home games with your friends. Visit a casino that offers cash games. Enter some live tournaments. Who knows? You may well find it makes poker more fun.

With poker millionaires Charlie Carrel and “Xavi666” making headlines for their big wins, Paul Phua explains why it can take years to become an overnight success.

Two players deserve particular congratulations this week. One is a player from Panama known by his online name of “Xavi666”, who has just won over a million dollars in the PokerStars Guaranteed Sunday Million tournament. He is the 200th poker millionaire created on the online poker site.
The other is the personable young player Charlie Carrel. He proved a good ambassador for the game of poker when he was interviewed on a Channel 4 series in the UK called How’d You Get So Rich? It’s not often poker stories cross over to the mainstream media, but many national papers reported on the TV programme’s featurette on how Charlie Carrel turned his initial online stake of just £10 into £3 million.

The reason these stories have attracted so much attention is that they feed into a common dream about poker: that it’s an easy way to get rich quick.

The most famous example in poker history is when humble accountant Chris Moneymaker turned a $39 investment on PokerStars into $2.5 million in 2003. He entered a $39 satellite tournament, which got him into a $600 satellite, which won him a seat in the Main Event at the World Series of Poker – at which this gifted amateur won the whole thing.
But the truth is, all these players have put in a lot of work behind the scenes that you don’t see. I touched on this subject before in my blog on The Iceberg Illusion. Take young Charlie Carrel. He told the TV presenter Katherine Ryan that he started off at very low stakes, playing for 16 hours a day to improve his game, while living with his grandmother. Having studied Maths, Further Maths and Physics at A-Level, he made a detailed study of all the odds. He applied sensible bankroll management, only moving up to a new blind level when he was sure he had mastered the one he was on.
As to Xavi666, after winning his PokerStars million he said that “finally everything came together”. In other words, he had been working and playing hard to reach this point.
There’s a couple of old sayings that I find very insightful. One is, “It takes years to become an overnight success.” The other is, “The harder I work, the luckier I seem to get.”
What they both mean is that every time you see an actor, musician or poker player suddenly become famous, or seemingly “get lucky”, the chances are they have been perfecting their craft, unnoticed by the general public, for many years before that. When opportunity knocks, they are ready for it.
Certainly when I started at poker, I treated it as a challenge, something to work at. I had fun, of course, as I love the game, but I also had the desire to learn and improve. I regularly sat down to marathon high-stakes cash games with some of the world’s top poker pros, not because I felt I would “get lucky” against them, but so that I could learn from their strategy. That was nearly a decade ago, and I still analyse every big hand at the end of a big poker session to see if I could play it better if faced with a similar situation in the future.
So think about it. Are you going to play poker just for fun, staying in more pots than you should do with poor odds of success, in the hopes of getting lucky? Or are you going to play for fun and for profit, improving your game and learning new strategies over time so that, when you do get your shot at a big tournament, you have the skill and experience to become the next “overnight success”?
If it’s the latter, there is good news: some of the poker pros I often play with have kindly agreed to share their top tips and strategy advice with you, my loyal Paul Phua Poker School followers. There’s quite a line-up to my new video series. We have two big Dans (Cates and Colman), as well as Phil Ivey. Discover the full list of names and watch the trailer here.
So if you do dream of becoming the next Xavi666 or Charlie Carrel, a good first step is to go to the Paul Phua Poker YouTube channel and subscribe, so you don’t miss any Paul Phua Poker School videos. It’s free!