Tag: professional poker

The latest Paul Phua Poker School video interview is with French poker pro Rui Cao. Paul Phua explores the lessons to be learned

Rui Cao, the subject of this new video profile for the Paul Phua Poker School, is recognised as one of the best poker players in France. I first played against him six years ago, when he came to Macau to play in the high-stakes cash game known in poker circles as “the Big Game”. Rui Cao is an aggressive, risk-taking player, and he loved the excitement of these huge pots. Anyone who can thrive in such a high-pressure situation, where even the most experienced players can be at risk of losing their bankroll, deserves respect.


In his previous video interview for the Paul Phua Poker School, discussing aggression in poker with myself and Wai Kin Yong, Rui Cao admitted that he sometimes plays a little too loose: “It’s an ego problem,” he said. So this time we asked him what he considers the most important attributes for success in poker.
“I think being smart is a good point,” Rui Cao says in the new video interview, “and being able to learn fast is similar, to adjust fast to the game. Other than that, some human factors as well like discipline, patience, the ability to control ourselves, I think mostly.”

How not to go on tilt

I very much agree with him on this last point. In fact, I wrote a blog about this a few months ago. Even if you have total mastery of poker strategy and poker odds, you will still be a losing player if you don’t have the patience and discipline to apply the theory in practice. What is the point of knowing the best starting hands, for instance, if you get bored of folding and start to play everything you are dealt?
Part of not going “on tilt” is developing a philosophical attitude to the game. Yes, you got unlucky this time. But the longer you play, the more luck evens out. You get unlucky sometimes, you get lucky sometimes. If you make the right decisions, over time you will be a winner. So don’t let temporary setbacks affect you.
When asked in this interview how he deals with losing, Rui Cao says, “Quite OK. I just sleep for 15 hours and try to forget!” The swings in poker, he says, “are just part of the game”. The one thing you can do, he adds, is to examine whether any of the hands you lost were the result of bad play rather than bad luck. “I try to improve my game and losing is part of the game, I would say.”

An epic struggle with Isildur1

Rui Cao originally made his name playing Omaha, which can have even greater swings than Texas Hold ’Em. Asked which of his many matches was the most memorable, he recalls one marathon PLO session against Viktor Blom, better known under his online name “Isildur1” as one of the most skilled, aggressive and feared online players of all.
“We were four-tabling,” Rui Cao recalls in the video interview, “and maybe at one point I was down 30 buy-ins or something, and two hours later I was up like 30 buy-ins, and it was a pretty crazy upswing. We were, like, playing crazy, and it was a really, really fun session to play in.”
I like the way Rui Cao considers this game his favourite not because he bested one of the world’s top players, or because he made a lot of money, but because it was “really, really fun”! We poker players talk a lot about strategy, and discipline, and improving our game. Of course that’s important; in fact, it’s fundamental to the Paul Phua Poker School. Without it, we would lose money. And if we lose too much money, we can no longer play.
But let us not lose sight of the reason we all took up poker in the first place: it’s just a really, really fun game to play!
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!

Poker player Mike Noori’s bet to supersize himself on McDonald’s this weekend is part of a long tradition of outrageous prop bets. From Paul Ivey to Dan Bilzerian, Paul Phua picks out 10 favourites 

Starting from today (Friday May 19), poker player Mike Noori has just 36 hours in which to eat $1,000 of McDonald’s food. Many people believe it cannot be done, estimating that he will need to consume about 70,000 calories – the recommended daily amount is less than 3,000! Others say it can: hundreds of thousands of dollars have by now been wagered on the outcome by poker players.
And why is Mike Noori putting his body through this ordeal? Because he was challenged to do so in a prop bet.
Some poker players will gamble on just about anything: whether it’s as small as what the next woman to enter the room will be wearing, or as big as eating several weeks’ worth of food in 36 hours! The most outrageous of these prop bets make great stories. Here are just ten of them, starting with some old-timers:

Titanic Thompson and the golf ball

Titanic Thompson, who hosted the very first World Series of Poker, is one of the most famous gamblers of all time. Sky Masterson, the hero of the musical Guys and Dolls, was based on him. He was no fool: when Titanic Thompson made a prop bet, he always had an angle. He would first secretly count all the watermelons in a truck and later wager, during a seemingly casual conversation with bystanders, that he could guess the exact number. Another time he bet he could throw a walnut over a building, having first secretly weighted it with lead. And when he bet he could drive a golf ball 500 yards, further than any golf pro had managed at that time, he found no shortage of takers for this seemingly impossible feat. But he simply waited till winter, then drove the ball, bouncing, over a frozen lake!

Amarillo Slim and the ping pong battle

Amarillo Slim was one of the great old-school poker players, who won the first of his four WSOP bracelets in 1972. He, too, would bet on almost anything. Perhaps his most famous prop bet was when he challenged Bobby Riggs, a former tennis champ, to a table tennis match. Slim’s one condition was that he could choose the paddles they used. He showed up with two frying pans, having secretly practised with them for months beforehand. He won the match. He successfully repeated the trick years later against a Taiwanese ping-pong champion, though this time his weapon of choice was Coca-Cola bottles!

Brian Zembic and his 38C breast implants

A magician and high-stakes gambler, Brian Zembic was famous for his bizarre prop bets: he lived in a box for a week and in a bathroom for another week. For another bet he slept the night in Central Park with $20,000 on his person. But one prop bet in particular made the headlines. In 1996, for a $100,000 bet, he agreed to have breast implants – 38C, to be precise – and keep them for a year. He even won the $4,500 cost of the operation from a cosmetic surgeon at backgammon. Not only did Zembic go through with it, he kept the implants for two decades. It was only last year that he appeared on the reality TV show, Botched, saying he had finally decided to have them removed.

Antonio Esfandiari and the lunges

What is it with magicians? Poker pro Antonio Esfandiari is also a former magician, and one of the most entertaining people you could share a card table with. His willingness to take a prop bet is legendary, though he often lives to regret it: he once swore off eating bread for a year, but cracked after a few minutes; a bet to remain celibate for a year was cancelled after nine days. But the prop bet that made the headlines, for all the wrong reasons, was one where for 48 hours he was not allowed to walk, only to lunge forward (going down on one knee then the other). It caused him so much pain that at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, rather than face going to the toilet, he made use of an empty water bottle at the table, and was promptly disqualified for “breach of tournament etiquette”. To Antonio Esfandiari’s credit, he offered up a sincere public apology for taking things too far, and donated his $50,000 winnings from the prop bet to charity.

Phil Ivey and the $150,000 steak

Phil Ivey is another player who is never afraid to take a big bet. His golf course wagers with Doyle Brunson and Daniel Negreanu are the stuff of legend, and he famously had a $5 million wager on whether he could win two WSOP bracelets in two years (despite his 10 bracelets overall, he only managed one bracelet in that period). But his craziest prop bet was when Tom Dwan challenged him to go vegetarian for a year. Phil Ivey stood to take down $1 million if he could swear off meat, something he had been thinking of doing anyway. But in the event, Phil Ivey said, he was too busy to work out how to eat healthily, and found eating pasta three times a day affected his poker. So he bought out of the bet after just nine days. The cost of that first juicy steak? $150,000…
Read part two of this Top 10, along with the eagerly awaited result of this weekend’s McDonald’s prop bet.

The latest in the new series of Paul Phua Poker School videos is a revealing interview with a true poker great, Phil Ivey. Paul Phua, who talks with him in the video, picks out the highlights

Phil Ivey, the subject of this new Paul Phua Poker School video interview, is definitely one of the all-time poker greats. He has ten World Series of Poker bracelets to his name, having won the first when he was just 23. He has more than $20 million in live tournament earnings, even though he spends most of his time playing cash at high stakes. His famously intimidating stare has become almost a brand in its own right, even though when you get to know Phil Ivey, as you will see from this video, he is actually warm and funny.


This interview was conducted in Manila in February, during the Triton Super High Roller Series, but it seems especially interesting now, since it was announced this week that Phil Ivey will no longer be making videos for his Ivey League site.
And one of the things that strikes me about this interview is an irony that will not be lost on long-term players. When you first start playing, the adrenaline is incredible. If you dare make a bluff you think other players will actually see your shirt moving up and down, as your heart is beating so hard. That’s partly why I used never to bluff when I first started playing!
So you learn to calm your emotions and dampen the adrenaline rush, in order to be hard to read. But does that take some of the thrill out of the game? This is what Phil Ivey has to say in the video interview:
“When you’ve played so much and you’ve played for so many years, it’s really difficult to get a huge thrill… The actual thrill of like, ‘wow I’m betting a lot of money on it’, that’s not really there for me. I don’t really feel that. I haven’t felt that in quite some time, actually.”
Don’t make the mistake from that of thinking Phil Ivey is finished with poker! I am certain he will go on to win many more big tournaments and WSOP bracelets. Because, of course, Phil is still passionate about poker, as am I. As he says in this interview, “I don’t look at it like I’m going to work, because I love doing what I do.”
Maybe it’s just that with poker, as with so many things in life, you never quite recapture the same strong thrill of your first times, of your youth. So my advice to anyone still starting out in poker would be, “enjoy it!” Poker can be hard work, the bad beats can be upsetting, and you must study to improve. But poker is also a fantastic game: a mixture of strategy and chance, where no two hands are ever exactly the same, played against some of the brightest and most interesting people.
Phil Ivey definitely falls into that last category. I have had the pleasure of playing with – and learning from – Phil Ivey many, many times in the last few years, and we have developed both a friendship and a bond of mutual respect. He is kind enough to say in this interview, “What makes Paul Phua so amazing is that he started off playing with some of the best players in the world, and now he is playing in games constantly with the best players in the world and he’s winning in those games.”
Of course, what Phil Ivey is too modest to say outright is that he himself is one of those “best players in the world”! So enjoy this revealing video interview with one of the greats, then go and subscribe to the Paul Phua Poker School YouTube channel. There are many more videos to come in this series, including further interviews with and tips from Phil Ivey.

Poker is a fun game, but in order to keep playing, let alone make a living from it, you must learn to manage your money responsibly.

Paul Phua explains why you must be a rock with your ’roll

Last week one of my readers emailed the Paul Phua Poker site with a question: “Paul Phua, please tell me: how can someone make a living from poker, how much cash and/or income would they need, and what stakes should they be playing?”
This is a great question. In fact, I will soon be releasing a video of tips from top players including Phil Ivey, and he says in it that managing your money is one of the most important things for beginners to learn. I hope the following insights will be helpful to players wishing to take poker seriously:

Bankroll management

When poker players talk of their “bankroll”, it means a sum of money they have set aside exclusively for poker. It is very important that this money, whether it grows or shrinks through playing, is kept separate from all your other funds and financial dealings. One reason is so that you don’t start dipping into money you should be using to pay important bills. Another is that it enables you to tell whether you are making or losing money at poker.
Equally importantly, your bankroll should be money you can afford to lose without giving you problems in your daily life. We all hope to win, but no one can guarantee to make money at poker – even the world’s best players can simply have a run of bad luck.
How big should your bankroll be? It could be $500 or it could be $5 million. The principle is the same: it’s money you feel you can afford to risk at poker. The only thing that will change, according to the size, is what stakes you are able to play at.

Choosing the stakes

The bigger the bankroll you have, the higher the stakes you can afford to play. This doesn’t mean you have to play at the highest possible stakes – billionaire Bill Gates supposedly enjoys a bit of poker, but only plays at $1-$2 blinds – but it does mean you shouldn’t play at stakes that are too big for your roll. For one reason, you may be playing scared, and that never results in the best decisions. For another, if you play for too large a proportion of your bankroll, just a few unlucky games could wipe you out.
Poker is a marathon, not a sprint. Only once you are making money consistently at one level should you consider moving up to the next.
So where do you start? Typically, the cheapest live cash games you will find in casinos are $1-$2. Since it is recommended that, in No-Limit Hold ’Em cash games, you sit down with 100x the big blind (some might say 200x is preferable in order to maximise your potential winnings from big hands), you would need $200 to play each time; with another $200 in reserve in case you need to rebuy. And since you may lose in that game no matter how well you play, your total bankroll will need to be several times bigger than $400.
Tournaments are a superficially cheaper option. Though entry to one-off tournaments can be anything from a few hundred dollars to many thousands, regular casino tournaments can be found for $50 or so. Bear in mind, however, that only the top 15% or so of players get paid anything at all, and only the top 5% or so get back a significant return; so again, you will need to have enough in your bankroll for many tournaments.
If your bankroll is not big enough for the above stakes, you will find every possible size of cash game and tournament in online poker sites.

Can you make a living from poker?

There’s an old saying about poker: “It’s a hard way to make an easy living.” And that’s never been truer than today, when so many players have understood that they need to read up on strategy. All the same, it is at least possible to make a living from poker. There is no such thing as a professional roulette player, but there are professional poker players!
Most people will start out losing money, until they develop the experience to become winning players. My advice at that level, when you are still likely to lose, would be to spend no more on a session of poker than you would spend on a typical night out. Poker is, after all, a fun game. A lot more fun, in my view, than most forms of entertainment!
Whether you can then convert that experience into making a living from poker, that will depend on you. You will need skill, strategy, an understanding of the odds and of psychology, a calm temperament, the ability to learn from your mistakes. A good start is to follow the above rules on money management – and to keep reading my strategy blogs on Paul Phua Poker, and watching the videos on the Paul Phua Poker YouTube channel.
— Paul Phua

I was asked the other day at a Texas Holdem poker tournament how I was able to become the poker player that I am now even though I started playing Texas Holdem at a pretty late age – only in my 40’s. It got me thinking. There are lots of things. Here’s a list of them in no specific order…

  • I was lucky in that I started play Texas Holdem with a bankroll. Most players start out with just a few dollars’ stake. If you are a beginner, you will pretty much always lose more than you win at the start. You have to get quite a lot of miles under your belt, played thousands of poker hands, made a few mistakes, and learned from them, before you can turn the tide. And if you don’t have much money and lose it can take a long time to get the confidence and game experience until you start winning as a habit. So, I accept that I was very lucky to have had a successful career as a businessman beforehand that gave me a bit of money. So that when I lost, as all beginners at Texas Holdem do, it wasn’t too much of a problem and I didn’t get too downhearted.
  • I am very calm under pressure, even when there is big money on the poker table. You can’t make good decisions if you aren’t calm. In business l learned how to deal with pressure. That’s useful for me at the poker table, particularly with some of the big hands I find myself in nowadays.
  • I am fit. Not as fit as I was though. The younger Phua Wei Seng Paul was very fit – swimming both before and after games! Physical and mental fitness are very important. Mental fitness has come naturally to me after so many years in business, particularly in the junket business. If a junket customer isn’t happy, you have to learn how to deal with it. You have to have an agile and patient mind.
  • Since I started when I was older, I had the benefit of life experience. As you grow older, you learn to deal with situations that are quite similar to those that have come before. You learn to recognise them. You get more patient when you are older too. That’s very useful in poker, particularly in cutting your losses when you are having a succession of bad beats.
  • I’m a humble person. I never tell myself “Phua Wei Seng Paul, you are a great player!” – pretending I’m better than I am. I am honest about my abilities. There are better players than me. There are worse players than me. I’m still learning the game. Even today, in my mid-50s, I still have so much to learn. If you have the time and the dedication you can use your humility and willingness to learn and move forward.
  • Learn from Texas Holdem poker players who are better, and from yourself. During big tournaments, after I have finished playing for the night I will go back to my room and have a beer before I go to sleep and think. I will write down the games where I don’t think I played at my best level, or I didn’t make the best decisions. So, the next day I will go and see some poker pros who are there playing with me and ask them, “what would you have done in this situation?” You improve a lot that way. It is human nature to think you did the best you could. It’s hard to admit weakness to yourself when you are around the card table or at the casino. But a neutral observer can evaluate you better. Not many players think this way, but I think more should.
  • If you want to play in big games, for big money, you have to make an effort. You have to learn, think differently, recognise that this is a serious business. That’s what I did. When I realised the sort of money that was needed to buy into these games, perhaps $200,000, I said to myself, “wow, this is no joke!” So I read books. I watched a lot of videos from the big tournaments, cash games. I spent hours and hours on YouTube.
  • I used to have a very good memory when I started. I trained it. Now I am older, it’s not so good. I have to learn to win using different methods. There are lots of ways to skin a cat luckily!

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