Charlie Carrel
Interview date: November, 2018
Is it still possible to climb the ranks in poker, up to the Super High Rollers?
It’s a lot rarer now than it used to be because poker has got a lot tougher. But it’s still definitely possible. I started with $15 in my PokerStars account and focused very very much on the lowest stakes possible, $1 buy-ins, $1.50 buy-ins, and used the time in parallel when I was doing my A-Levels, just used the time to learn poker instead of trying to make as much money as possible. Just trying to acquire the knowledge that was necessary to keep building a bankroll for the higher stakes. At the beginning of your poker career, if you do want to be super successful, you have to focus more on getting good at poker instead of making loads of money straight away. That’s a really, really common mistake in my students and other people I spoke to.
How do you do it?
It depends what kind of learner you are. I was definitely a very hands-on kind of learner. Ninety five percent of my education in poker was playing myself, trial and error. But some people need bigger nudges in the right direction. There are training sites out there. There are coaches that you can get. There’s a bunch of different things. I’m actually making my own training site, which is going to be coming out in a few months.
I’ll keep my students. I have a group of maybe ten of us that I’ve got to know pretty well and I’m going to still do some one-on-ones with them. The training site is going to be aimed more for people who are outside of poker, if they want a chance to escape from a 9–5 job, then we’ll give them the opportunity to. As well as things like trading and cryptocurrency and becoming a yoga teacher and shit like that.
How did people learn pre-online poker?
You can definitely tell, when you’re an expert in the game, how people used to play and learn. Because when you play against the people that learnt back then, you can see through their play what kind of styles they used to have. There were more like geographical bubbles of knowledge, in the sense that people from Finland were really crazy, and that perpetuated because they’d teach each other all that crazy stuff. Whereas people from America were a bit more tight playing. Different groups of people would have their own different ways of playing, stylistically. And then they’d play against each other and see who got to the top. It was a lot more interesting. Now, information is a lot more homogenised because the internet has brought everyone together. It’s not really a geographical thing any more. It’s just which stable you go in, which coach you listen to online.
Is knowledge share the best route to the top?
It depends. I would recommend it for 99 percent of people who are going to try. But every now and again you’ll get a little spark of genius in someone and you can see they’re going to learn the game no matter what. I’m tooting my own horn a bit here, but factually I never really had anyone to speak to properly. I wasn’t in any groups. I was in Skype groups, but it was pretty much just teaching myself until I came across my best friend, still my best friend, and we travelled the world together and spoke poker every day and I definitely owe a lot of my success to being able to talk through hands with him specifically. For some people you need to be in a huge group of people and you need to have all the information force fed to you. For some people, you can do it by yourself or maybe with one or two other people.
And for some it isn’t going to work?
This is one of the most difficult topics for a coach to bring up. And I’m definitely going to be addressing it a lot on my training website, and that’s why I want to be offering alternatives. Other training sites, they’re not really incentivised to say: “Hey, by the way, most people aren’t going to be able to be a professional poker player.” That’s one of the dark sides of poker. If you take three years out of your life to really pursue a career, that you could have been doing loads of other stuff with, then you might be really detrimenting your life in the long run. There’s a natural aptitude. You need to be good at decision making, is the main one. You need to be hard working and motivated. There are different skills depending on which style of poker you have, but I’d say those two are probably the main ones. You kind of almost need to be addicted to poker, but in a non toxic way. So you can stop when you’re meant to stop, but also you don’t ever feel bad about having to play for eight hours every day.
Do you need to have a resilience to roll with the punches?
Yeah. Mental game is a huge thing that I teach my students, but I do think that that’s something that almost anyone can learn, although there is a proportion of people who are entering the poker sphere who don’t learn that, who are just like absolutely going haywire because they can’t handle losing 20 percent of their bankroll in a day.
Were you good at maths?
Yeah, I was super, super, super into maths and I was probably going to be doing mathematics. But I got into it randomly, just from a friend mentioning that he was doing online poker, and I thought I’d give that a try. Basically from day one I felt so at home playing it. It really felt that my mind was way more suited to poker than it was to maths.
Are the players in the Super High Rollers the best in the world?
Yeah. It depends what you mean by best in the world, but yeah, basically. There will be some people that will play online cash games who will be way better at online cash games than the super high roller players. But then tournaments are really, really complicated. There’s a lot of bullshittery that goes round as to who’s the best, but I try not to look at it in those terms. In the specialised field of high roller tournaments, it’s definitely a kind of Darwinian thing, where most of the cream rises to the top. Occasionally, because of the luck and variance in tournaments, you’ll get some people who maybe aren’t the best but are playing maybe the 100Ks because they had quite a few big scores, which is one of the cool and fascinating things about poker. You never really know how good you are.
How many players are actually good enough to play there? 30–50?
I would imagine it’s somewhere near that.
Why do people come in and drift out?
There are a lot of people who have a go at the high rollers, but I think they may underestimate the skill gap between the high rollers and the level below. One of the things that’s happened with poker getting a lot harder recently is that there are fewer people rising up through the ranks, which means there are fewer people making the jump between, say, tier two up to tier one. Which means it’s the same people at tier one, which means that they’re playing against each other, getting better and better and better and there aren’t as many other people that are really able to get up to that level. They don’t get to jump in the deep end. They don’t get to just shoot up the ranks anymore. I think the skill gap is becoming bigger between the best players and the tier two, tier three players.
Is that a shift you’ve noticed in the time you’ve been playing?
Yeah. There haven’t been…I would say that there have been pretty big shifts, but not as big as some people might expect in the last three or four years, amongst the top players. Something else that is worth noting, and this is my opinion and it probably contradicts a lot of other high rollers’ opinion, I believe that there is still so much gap to be filled in terms of how good a human being can get at live poker because, in my opinion, and this is my field of expertise, the live players they’re not very good at live reads, reading someone’s body language and things like that. So even though, at the beginning of someone’s career, being able to make good live reads and pick up on people’s tells isn’t particularly relevant, because you’re going to be playing online if you have any sense, if you get up to the high rollers, and you’re real good at that, then I think that stuff can set you apart.
Do others think that’s untrue?
Yeah. It’s one of those things that people who are very confident in their own opinions, they can automatically just talk away any kind of alternative theories. If I say I think live tells are a thing, they’ll say: “He’s just got confirmation bias because he notices the times when it goes well and he doesn’t notice the times when it doesn’t.” Which is not true. I’m 100 percent sure about that. There are a few people in the high roller scene who are pretty good at that, but there seems to be this misinformation going around the high roller scene, and really the whole of poker, about how irrelevant live tells are, whereas in actuality every single person has a whole variety of live tells available on their face and body. It’s probably less than average [among the SHRs] but they are still super common.
Where does the money come from in the SHR scene?
In the million dollar buy-ins, a lot of it is people who have taken it from business. So, for instance, my friend has just started playing the 100ks and he only started playing poker a few years ago, and he’s not a professional by any means, but he crushed business and he’s now decided to start playing poker. Then there is a lot of money coming up in this pyramid scheme, where the worst players will join, people will lose their bankrolls — which is the dark side of poker that you never really hear about — to the people who are slightly better, slightly better, slightly better. It’ll just trickle up to the top. There’s a distinction from a “pyramid scheme” — it’s not a scam, like in business — it’s a pyramid system where money is going to be…it’s not unsupported. Money is going to be coming in as long as there are new players.
*Are* there going to be new players coming in?
I believe for at least the next 10 to 20 years there will still be quite a lot of new players, because I believe that poker is going to grow. But when people start to get really good, even at the lower levels, which will happen eventually, that will be when the newer players stop coming in because it’s just impossible to make any money. They’ll start losing even quicker and quicker. With the businesspeople, it has already started becoming a bit of a thing, where they’ve started moving their action away to private games instead of playing the public tournaments because they’ve stopped enjoying the public tournaments so much because everyone’s so slow, everyone takes the game too seriously. But there is a new wave of competition coming for PokerStars. I’ve counted maybe six to eight new poker sites coming out, and a bunch of new training sites, including mine, that are going to be reaching out, trying to market, trying to find new people coming into poker. I do think we’re about to see, due to the failings of PokerStars, we’re probably going to see a hell of a lot of new people coming into the market and that will probably expand the market.
These people will be coming in at the bottom of the pyramid?
Yeah. There may be people who jump in the higher stakes, but that will be a mistake. Even if somebody has a lot of money, it’s not smart to jump in the high stakes. The learning experience needs to be layered. It needs to be that you set your foundations and then you move up. You get to the next level of thinking. You move up. You get to the next level of thinking. Whereas if you just play against great players, you’re going to be trying to think on a level that’s way too complicated for your current knowledge.
Is it the case that it’s just the same players sharing money, and then feeding off the newcomers?
It’s more false than true. I think there’s a lot less sharing going on than people believe. It’s one of those situations where it’s unethical to share too much because, you know, if you have 10 percent of yourself and 10 percent of your friends, then you’re incentivised to soft play your friend. There’s a good amount of self policing going on in the high roller scene at least.
What is going on with private games?
In most private games, there will be barely any professionals in. The current scene in private games is how many recreational players with loads of money can you get in a game? I’ve been really lucky and I’ve been invited to quite a lot of private games. It’s valuable to be fun and not to care and be a splashy player and play loads of hand. There was a TV cash game with Kevin Hart that I appeared on. I knew that I should play ridiculously on that because I knew that loads of people would watch that and I’d get a name as someone who is just having fun, getting drunk, that kind of stuff. It’s what I like doing anyway, but it’s an illustration of the kind of things that people are looking for in a private game. That definitely opened some door for me.
I’ve played some in London. I’ve played a couple in Marbella. Macau, Hong Kong. I’ve played a few in Cannes, and I think there are a lot in LA, Vegas.
What sums?
Anything from buy-ins of $10,000 to buy-ins of $2m I think. Actually, even higher I think, but I’ve not been invited to them.
So $16m on the table?
Yeah. There have been some way bigger. There have been games with probably $50m on the table, but they’re the ones that aren’t really public knowledge, or even known amongst the high rollers because they would never get invited there.
Is that because they’re too good?
Yeah, and they’re not as much fun. I’m thinking about the Macau games specifically, because they would rather play against fun people. With all the love I have for the high roller scene, their version of playing poker is not very fun.
So is a 100k or a 250k actually not that big?
Yeah, to a lot of people. Once you get used to the money, then it’s not really a thing. People sell action. You won’t find too many professionals who have all their action in a 100K.
[The SHR player pool] will be trying to get in, a few will be getting in, but the private game scene is really, really stringent and strict about good players not coming in.
If someone’s Hendon Mob profile says they have won $10m, how much have they really won?
It really depends how much they have played. So, for instance, using mine as an example, [looks it up]. I’ve won $6.2 million. But I would imagine, if you weren’t counting selling action, out of that 6.2 I’ve made probably 4 million. But then selling action, it’s probably half that. Then for other people, it’s probably less than that. A lot of the high rollers, they might only have about 5 percent of themselves in a lot of the tournaments they play. Then you have to take in expenses, travelling around and things like that.
I guess the average amount of money they’ve made is probably going to be between 10 and 20 percent of what their total earnings are. But the lower down the pool you get, the lower down the list, the less it’s going to be. These are the people who have exceeded, they’ve crushed, and they haven’t spent, so their ROI in the tournaments are going to be higher. But if you get down to 300th, 400th in the GPI rankings, then someone who has made a million may have only made $50K from that. It might just be that they’re losing. That’s not uncommon.
Could what happened to Bonomo have happened to others?
Yeah, maybe more than 10 others.
How do you explain how someone wins $25 million in six months?
The mainstream explanation is that it’s mathematical variance. He may be, on average, if he played that whole summer making $500K on average. But if you ran that 1,000 times, sometimes he is losing $500K, $300K, whatever. Sometimes he is winning $1 million, $10 million. If you just create a normal distribution through that, it might be 0.1% of the time he makes over $5m. 0.01% of the time he makes over whatever he made. Bonomo has definitely worked really, really hard on his game, so it’s well deserved to some extent.
What characterises the 20 top players in the world?
Just the online background and the desire to be up to date with the current knowledge. It’s such a high value industry that people dedicate their whole lives to it. The best online players play every day. They’re running sims on their computer every day. They’re talking hands, they’re thinking hands all the time. Whereas Hellmuth and Negreanu, they made it already. They don’t have the kind of life incentives to push those edges. I would say that the skill set that was required 10–20 years ago is a lot different to the skill set that’s required now, and I don’t think either of them — especially Hellmuth — doesn’t have the mathematical mindset and logical mindset to keep up with the people who are crushing now. Whereas if you maybe took the kids and threw them in 20 years back, they maybe didn’t have the psychological skill set, and intuitive mind set that was required to crush 20 years ago, when you didn’t have artificial intelligence telling you how to play poker.
People are a lot more sensible these days. Before, people just used to gamble half their bankroll in one tournament, whereas there’s a lot of good information about bankroll management and game selection. People tend to stay in their lane.
Why did the buy-ins go so crazy?
I’ve no idea. The cash games always used to be big. I think tournament poker just became more fashionable. I’m definitely not the correct person to ask about this because it was before my time. But the only explanation I can think of is that tournament poker is a lot more glamorised than cash games and that just drew more people in. Also tournaments are a lot easier than cash games, which makes them better for professionals to play, which means there’s more money in tournaments, which means the prize pools can grow like that.
Is it that people wanted to make more money more quickly?
I can see that being a part of it, but the players weren’t really the people that were setting up the big tournaments. They were the demand for it, as were the recreational players. It might just be that places like EPT just came about and decided that, OK, we’re doing $5,000 tournaments, why can’t we do a $10K? We can get more money. Oh, we can do a twenty-five. You guys want to play a 50? All right. It was just something that the market was waiting to happen.
Why is it that players now seem to want to play more and more single-day high rollers?
Fucking addicts. No, they realise there’s a demand for it, and they realise that the recreational players also want to keep playing, so it makes a lot of sense.
How do staking arrangements work?
It’s when somebody doesn’t have enough money to play the stakes they think they’re good enough to play. Let’s say someone happens to have spewed off half their bankroll, or has got really, really good at poker but doesn’t want to have to wait to grind up their bankroll online, then they’ll go to a staking company, or someone who has more money, and say, “Hey, I will play for you if you put up all the money. We’ll split the profits 50–50.”
The way that the deal has to work for it to be fair on both sides is, let’s say that a player loses $50,000, before he can make money for himself he has to win back that $50,000 for the person who is putting up the money. Let’s say he wins a tournament for $100,000, he gets $25,000 of that because he has to pay the 50 back and then they split the second 50.
How many people are staked in the SHR world?
Not too many. I think most of them are selling action. If I was guessing, I’d say 10 to 20 percent. Most of them keep their own action, but just sell. There are a couple of groups of people…there are a few Germans who made money ages ago in poker who buy loads of people’s action. People go to them. But yeah, they’ll also swap, just to reduce variance. They’re extremely well known in the high roller community, among people who sell to them, but they’re not at all well known to people outside of those circles.
Why?
I guess they don’t really have any means to make themselves well known. Unless they just came out and said, “Hey everyone. I’m the one who gives everyone else money.” The other players are really well known because they get their names out there for winning a tournament.
Is there a crossover in skill sets between poker and big business, or other pursuits?
Yeah, there must be, right. At least some underlying denominators like intelligence and hard work and a lot of decision making. It’s interesting looking at the realms that link on to poker pretty well. You’d expect chess to be pretty good, but chess grand masters tend not to be good at poker, whereas chess *not* grandmasters — people who are pretty good at chess but not great — tend to be pretty good at poker, and there’s a few reasons for that. The banking world tends to have pretty good crossover. The trading world has good crossover, because it’s the same kind of decisions, and people who are good at losing money tend to gravitate towards those kinds of things. The big gamers. People come from Starcraft or Magic: The Gathering and realise they don’t need to be playing for not much money. They can actually just be playing poker.
Why have you backed away from the game?
I’ve started a charity and I believe that the charity is going to be world changing. I am dedicating my life to it. The training website is more supplementary to the charity, because I’m not making any money off the charity, and I’ve got to make a living somehow. But it’s going to be very very linked in to spirituality and health and things like that, and that’s also going to be linked in to the charity’s realm as well. It was very, very difficult to say goodbye to poker, and obviously I haven’t said a complete goodbye. But I’ve stopped doing the things that I really loved, which was going around playing against the best people in the world, doing live poker. I haven’t played live poker in a long time, which is very, very difficult for me. But I think even though you wouldn’t call any of the top high rollers addicted to poker, because they take time off and they’re doing all these things, it’s not the sign of a classic addict. But I do believe that the vast majority of them are addicted to the lifestyle and the identity of being a poker player. You see a lot of people trying to quit, but then they go back to being a professional poker player because they’ll get depressed, they won’t know what else to do with their time. And it’s understandable because poker is such a glamorous lifestyle and poker really is so fun. If you enjoy it, you can just do it over and over and over again. You do see some people managing to break free from that, and going off and doing other things, which I think is really cool. And I think that’s really really good for them. Even though poker is an incredible thing and anyone who can make it in poker is insanely lucky in that the lifestyle they get is extremely liberating, I do believe that in some sense, if you dedicate your life to it it can be quite incapacitating. It can be quite limiting to your development as a person. There’s something about going around and trying to win at poker — deceiving people, and not spending time doing other things, learning all the time to try and keep up — that I think it does swallow some people. Their whole identity becomes a poker player instead of a person.
That could have been you. Is that part of the reason why you’re backing away?
Yeah, I always said that poker was just going to be a stepping stone for me. As soon as I realised I was going to do it professionally, the progression I thought it was going to go education, school, then poker, then business worlds, because that has a higher ceiling of money you can make, and then philanthropy. It turns out I’ve managed to skip the business part, which is very good. I’m doing it at the same time as the philanthropy, but it turns out that philanthropy was actually a bit different from what I thought. It turns out you can make loads of money for the charity, rather than having to give it to charity.
I was split between being an investment banker and being a theoretical physicist before poker. Banker would have been less enjoyable, more competitive, more money. And then you can do more with that money, and probably have a better life after the age of 30. Whereas a theoretical physicist, you just get to do what I would have enjoyed doing. So I wasn’t sure about that.
Is that kind of thing true for most people?
I don’t think it’s the case. I think that most poker players who are real, real good poker players, they would have been successful because they are really smart, but I don’t think they would have been rich. I think that’s one of the really cool things about poker. Instead of the way normal catalytic systems sway the money towards whoever is the most greedy or the most cunning and the most conniving — and also, sometimes, the most smart — poker tips the table towards whoever is the most intelligent and hard working. For poker players, “nerdy” is a really common thing. You have to be into computers and into doing online poker all the time, and those people, on average, want to do better things with their time than other people.
Is that especially true at the top end?
Yes. It’s definitely not always true, but the tendency is definitely there. Actually, weirdly, at the very top it almost gets slightly less nerdy. Because to be a really, really high functioning poker player, you also need to have balance to your life. You need to be happy, not depressed. You need to be balanced in your relationships and your exercising. If you’re into meditation and stuff like that. Whereas the hyper nerds tend to run themselves into the ground a bit at poker, I’ve noticed.
How long does a player last at the top level?
It’s really hard to tell. I don’t have too much insight into other people’s minds so I don’t know. I probably would have been able to carry on playing poker forever, just because I enjoyed it so much. But I think when people really work themselves into the ground that much, most people who are machines, like Jungleman is, they probably get bored of poker or realise they need something else in their life probably like seven or eight years in.
That’s actually one of my favourite things about online poker, you get all these people and they’re like: “Oh he’s so fearsome, he’s so tough I hate playing against him,” and then you meet him in real life and he’s just this little nerdy kid and you’re like, “Oh, I don’t hate you anymore. I love you.”
SELECTED OTHER INTERVIEWS: Adrian Mateos, Daniel Negreanu, Dominik Nitsche, Erik Seidel, Fedor Holz, Jason Koon, Justin Bonomo, Stephen Chidwick and Winfred Yu.
