Jason Koon
Interview (by phone): October 15, 2018
How has the super high roller world got to where it is?
What it comes down to is if there’s a market for it. If there’s a recreational player and they want to play for giant stakes…it’s centred around the recreational players. This market hasn’t been created by the nosebleed tournament players, it’s been created by the recreational player. And if there were a $10 million tournament next week and there were four recreational players who wanted to play, well, me and my crew would show up. We would accommodate that. It’s almost like a fund. There are investors. And if we have a really good sense of what our ROI are in a specific tournament, if you take away the rake, ask then what the quality of the field’s going to be. And it’s like anything. You have to be willing to have a strong understanding of variance of what the buy-ins are and what the relative pieces that you’re comfortable taking of yourself. There are a lot of things that come into play there. Not only your bankroll size, if you’re in a country that taxes income on gambling. You’re incentivised to gamble harder if you’re up a lot of money on the year. And if you’re getting brushed that year, there’s no incentive to play higher buy-ins.
How is it different from how it was during the early boom years?
What has happened is people look at the legendary gamblers that we all saw in 2003, the Farhas, etc., these guys who are total legends — they’re talented but they’re also total degenerates — who will bet $10 million on a football game. Now, the sharpest poker players are entirely different. They’re all learning mathematical theory and they’re studying game theory optimal play, and every single calculation that a lot of us make is down to expected value of every decision that we make. If it’s travel. If it’s workload. Or if it’s the tournament, you equate the happiness EV of what your life is going to be like if you play this much or that much. It’s pretty calculated now, and I think that the best guys overall are really, really trying hard to make an appropriate [indistinct] of everything that you need to not burn out, that you need to be the sharpest. And it’s quite intimidating and competitive. Yes, that’s just the nature of the beast, anything where you can make a ton of money and you can play a game that’s appealing over the years, it’s just going to evolve to the point where there’s no over left. There’s still edge, but you have to be much, much, much more calculated nowadays to make a good living at poker than you had to be back in the Full Tilt/PokerStars days, where people were just throwing money online and handing it to you. I’m not going to say any names, but whenever Cirque de Soleil guys and losing $30 million, those days are behind us.
But there are more bug buy-in tournaments than ever
Yeah. Like I said, it’s because there is a market for it. Even though there aren’t mega whales, there are still enough people who want to play those stakes. They don’t want to play $10Ks, they don’t want to play $25Ks. A lot of these guys are billionaires and they want to compete…These guys are super sharp and they learn, and they’re actually great poker players. Take a guy like Cary Katz, who’s the founder of Poker Central, and he’s played as many high rollers as just about anybody at this point. This guy would take the average poker player and just shred him apart. He’s an extremely, extremely good poker player. He’s really, really sharp, but he’s got more money than he’ll ever need. If he’s taking the worst of it, it’s a very small clip at this point because he’s so good, and he likes to play big. Cary is not a great example. You’re not going to make your living pushing Cary Katz around. He’s losing small, if he’s losing at all. But there are guys, like the Chinese guys, great guys, great poker players, they’ve got unlimited amounts of money, they’re going to laugh at you if you ask to play $50-$100 no limit or whatever. A lot of guys are like, “You’re playing €5,000-€10,000 no limit hold’em, what the hell’s going on here?” And it’s like, “Well, yeah, I didn’t have any say in the matter.” If they want to play a game that I’m a specialist at, I’ll do it. They’re making these tournaments. They’re creating them.
Is it ethical to be taking money from the whales?
High stakes tournament players kind of get a bad rap. There *is* — this is gonna be kind of controversial: there are two different philosophies happen with tournament players. There are the guys that are specifically focused on making the most money that they possibly can a year and they’re not necessarily chasing tournament ranking systems, they’re have really big pieces of themselves. A lot of the professional, you’ll meet the standard heckler who’ll be like, “Oh, right, this guy played the 300K where he probably only had 3 percent of himself.” That just isn’t true. A lot of these guys, you’re talking poker players who have been playing high stakes for over a decade, and they’ve worked very, very hard. You can count of them having gigantic pieces of themselves, over half of themselves in 300Ks, 500Ks, it’s not out of the question to see that.
Well, that’s the one guy. That’s the rare kind of elite nosebleed player. And then there are the players that…[inaudible] their action, because there’s a media exposure to it, there’s a competitive element to it where you get to play the best players in the world, they get to play the most prestigious events. And they get to sell at a mark-up. Let’s say a player has a 20(inaudible) ROI in a tournament, well there might be a market where an investor might say, “Well I’ll pay you 10 percent mark-up, play the 300K.” So this guy might sell 90 percent of himself and have a 10 percent freeroll. He’s got the 10 percent mark-up and zero risk in a 300K. There’s that type of player too. There just in there and they’re loving it. All high roller players aren’t the same, even the pros. They’re not just in there trying to win player of the year in these different polls. They’re not doing it so they can be on TV. A lot of these guys have had it for that.
Poker skills have got to be incredibly high?
Every pro that plays is incredibly good. Every pro that plays isn’t the best player in the world though. Even the worst high roller reg is probably one in 10,000 good, or something crazy, but there are players who are significantly better than other players who are playing. It’s not like these guys, just because they kind of try to emulate the same style, they study similar information. I can be sure that there are guys that are sick good, and there are guys that are pretty good but maybe not as unreal, maybe not as gifted, maybe not as rolled, they don’t have the best team to study with, maybe limited with their options. There are a lot of different things that can happen. There are great players, but there’s not like a clone of a great player and every player you sit down with is the same. We’re still not at the point where all of these players play the exact same way. There are leaks that players have, there are strengths that players have that are different. And I think it’s too much of a generalisation to say that poker’s at a point now where all the high stakes players are the same.
Who has an edge anymore?
A lot of these tournaments have incentives. They probably have discounted rake, or no rake at all for the first bullet. You can take the Super High Roller Bowl this year, it was rake free. Last year, you had one entry who was a movie star so you can count on him losing over 50 percent of the tournaments, so they basically added on $150,000 to the prizepool to be distributed through whoever the winning players are. In order for these things to survive, the rake can’t be big and, yes, there needs to be players that are losing. And there are thresholds for winning players that are losing to players that are better than them, up until the best player in the tournament. And there is EV being pulled and taken from all these different directions. Sure there is a lot of ego, and there are people [inaudible] that they’re winning, or having false confidence. But the sharpest guys are really working hard trying to figure out where their edge lies. If they can’t see it they’ll stop.
Players are pooling resources/information?
It’s absolutely true in a resourcing point, not only just information, but playing poker is such a difficult way to make a living, you have to have a support system. Your wife at home can’t be the only person helping you deal with this shit, because they don’t understand it to begin with. You need people to see eye to eye with, who can pull you out of the gutter at times, as simple as that. You need support systems to help cope, to help stay focused, to then study with. To pool bankrolls together, whatever it may be. You look at Di and Hac Dang, from back in the day, the legendary brothers from back in the day in Virginia, who won maybe $20 million in online cash games. They shared bankrolls, but on top of that they studied together, they very rarely played against one another and if they did they went at it real hard. But they supported each other. See the young German guys, those guys travel together. They’ve got bad raps before, but I don’t see them playing each other soft. I think we all understand that so much of this stuff is being televised. You only get one reputation in the poker world. (http://somuchpoker.com/hac-di-dang-crushing-highest-stakes-online-family/)
I know with people that I’m close to, anything there is a…I have such a good feel for the way we both think of the game, we try to approach them the same way I would approach…I basically know the strategy that I’m supposed to execute against the guy I’m closest to. And I’m going to do my very best to play the best I can against them. But at the end of the day we support each other, we study together, we will buy pieces against each other, we’ll swap if the tournament is huge. But that doesn’t mean that we’ll swap such a significant portion that we have incentives to not play against each other…
What does it look like from the inside?
With me, I moved in with Ben Tollerene, who is one of the greatest online poker players of all time. He’s won eight figures on the internet and in cash games. Plays high stakes tournaments as well. He started veering in the direction of: you have to look at this game from a mathematical perspective. Being a [inaudible] isn’t going to make you money as the games suffers, you have to have a solid foundation. Well that was seven years ago, eight years ago, and not only did he become a mentor to me he became a close friend who I still, to this day, have so much gratitude towards for helping and showing me the light. Now I’ve worked really hard, and I’ve done a lot. There were a few years where I was a lone wolf and I was just doing my own work. [TALKS ABOUT HOW BEN AND HE GOT TOGETHER.]
We get on Skype, we’ll talk online. For instance this Powerfest/WCOOP time, he came to an apartment of mine in Vancouver and we played online, hung out for a few days, talked a lot of hands together in the five-minute breaks. We’ll review hand histories together, we’ll do our best to go through hands that each other played and try to help each other figure out mistakes. We’ll study the solvers that exist, the Pio Solver, artificial intelligence sort of stuff. We’ll study that. We’ll do a lot of things. We work collectively on what we think metagame is, which the poker world kind of exploits. Everything you can imagine that a player does to improve, we do it together.
I work at least 65 percent more off the table than I do when I play. And I play all of the time. Like today, I’ve already put three and a half hours of poker study in. Really, really into poker study actually, just in specific spots. I actually worked on three different games today, which is kind of rare for me. I work every single day, Monday through Friday, every single day I have a personal requirement that I meditate and exercise before I play poker, and that I study poker every single day.
I think it’s required for everyone. For me, it’s absolutely paramount. I wasn’t one of these guys that was classically schooled. I was very poor, raised in West Virginia, one of the poorest states in the United States. Education just wasn’t something that was valued in my household. Luckily I was good at sports. I did OK at school and I got a track scholarship. My perspective on the value, of just being a human being, started changing in college.
I guess I had a poker aptitude and a game aptitude. I was just kind of figuring it out at home, and getting pretty good, at least enough for college or whatever. Once I was exposed to the different ways that you can learn, you could learn, that’s when everything changed for me.
You don’t have to be a savant. You don’t have to be one of these guys who went to an Ivy League school and has a science background. Right here is this stuff that if you work at it hard enough, and you have a natural gift — which I do think it important. A high aptitude for a lot of different things, elements that I don’t even completely understand — there has to be something there. You can’t just show up and be a great poker player, but I’m sure that playing it every day for 11 years, like, something has happened on top of that. But the work…I did work and I could start to feel an edge in places. I saw the mistakes people were making. If I see great players making mistakes, well, there you go. There’s the money.
How do you get an investor’s trust?
That’s the thing. You have to have been around forever and not scammed people. I’ve been playing for 11 years and most of my career was at mid-stakes. I was playing $5Ks and $10Ks, but I made a lot of friends and earned a lot of respect. I think this is a common thing. Sure there’s the online phenom, who people are happy to [inaudible] on, because they just seem so good, and everybody kind of has their own road to playing high stakes. But for me, I just ducked around and didn’t do anything too stupid for a long time. I worked hard and I always tried to pay people back as quick as I could. On top of that, my coaches and my players were among the best in the world.
You need to be a trustworthy individual to play in the top games.
Yeah, and on top of that, the amount of ability it takes to be a great poker player nowadays, it’s requires someone who’s organised. It goes hand in hand. Poker players now, they’re not like the feel players, savants, the Stuey Ungars who show up after they did a bunch of coke and win the main event. That’s not going to happen anymore. The best players in the world are the guys who work really, really hard. And if you work really, really hard at poker, you’re probably not a degenerate. You’re probably a [inaudible] human being. And you’re probably going to do your best to not be an asshole at the poker tables because you want people to know you.
How many people tick all the boxes?
Worldwide right now, the guys who are just extremely good everywhere, I think 30 is a pretty good guess. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was pushing 45 to 50 globally, but there are about 30 elite professionals that are doing everything they can do to win at the biggest stakes live. There’s this little subgroup of amazing poker players who just never want to get out from behind their computer, and even though the expected value of the best player in the world, I doubt it’s even seven figures a year now just because of how hard it’s gotten, but the best players in the world online are making a great living and a few of those guys just don’t care to be in the live element.
After Justin Bonomo’s streak, does that make him even better?
With Justin, it would be unfair to say he belongs in a group of 35. I think that Justin is one of the very best, most experienced tournament players in the world, and there’s probably 10–15 guys in the world could have done what he’s done. There needs to be a few things that need to happen. One, you have to travel to all the biggest stops in the world. A lot of the world’s best tournament players still don’t travel to everything. It’s just exhausting, going from country to country, dealing with all these exchanges and this and that. You take a guy like Justin, you take a guy like Stephen Chidwick, they’re showing up and they’re playing the toughest tournaments, they’re playing the biggest buy-ins, and they’re playing every single one. Those are your kind of guys that are going to do it. Not only are they the best — it’s indefinable who the best player is, but they’re right there in that group — maybe between seven to 15 players in the world that are going to go on that kind of run.
It sounds insane, but when you really think about it these things are always going to happen. One: confidence is a real thing in poker. I don’t believe momentum…These aren’t giant field tournaments. They’re just not. He’s won, like, a 70-man tournament, a 30-man tournament and like a 27-man tournament. It’s rare. It’s extremely rare and this probably is the best run the poker world has ever seen in tournaments, but there’s going to be the gigantics of money won whenever your average buy-in is $150,000. That’s kind of the same thing, I’ve had a month or a year in terms of earnings, and profits too, but in my opinion it’s not even that ridiculous. I’ve played a 300K, I’ve played a $170,000 rebuy in China. I played a million dollar buy-in. Picking up $11.5 million in earnings is just kind of one of those things I would consider above average, but not rare, given the buy-ins I’m playing. It’s not like this stellar achievement it looked like from the outside. It just isn’t. It’s rare. It’s good. But it’s not one of these one in a million things.
Can this continue?
I think that a threshold will be met, and you have to test the boundaries to find it. At least for now a lot of it is going to come down to…it’s really as sensitive as maybe 10 recreational players deciding that they want to play or they don’t. The entire, global super high roller economy rests in the hands of 10 to 20 losing recreational players. I think it’s that small. Even from a micro perspective, if you look at Vegas, the high roller community, Aria tournaments go, they run and they run and they run, but they’re kind of drying up to some degree at least now. They’ve been OK lately. They used to be insane. And then a small group of losing players have now retired or, as Cary likes to say, are in the poker hospital. Once those guys disappear, you’ll see the medium/intermediate level pros decide that they’re not winning and they’ll stop playing, and then it’s basically the best players just sitting there. And they’re going to get bored because they’re not winning that much money. And they’re going to find better things to do with their time to make more money. And that’s going to happen.
But if there are little fads that take place where, the Asian culture legalises poker, there’s more than enough money to support what we’re doing right now. If 10 Chinese guys decide that they want to start playing nosebleed tournaments, we could run three times the amount of super high rollers than we run each year. If you take the high stakes player, if you can basically set $500 to $1 million in EV a year in front of 30 guy’s faces, a million to two million dollars EV in front of 30 guys faces, you’re going to have an economy. It’s not like these players need to have expected value of five million dollars a year to keep on doing this. If you can make a half a million dollars a year as a high stakes poker player, guaranteed EV, and occasionally have an out-of-this-world year, have three or four million dollars, well, guys will be keen on that.
If a rec wins, do you guys like that?
I wouldn’t say we mind it. And honestly, a lot of these recreational guys…they are very very few and far between that a recreational player is just an asshole. And I don’t have any sentimental attachment to…I just don’t want them…It’s like anybody else, you don’t want to root for a guy that’s mean to people. But most of the recs that I play against are actually just really good friends of mine. The Chinese guys are just such cool dudes. Paul [Phua] and … they play a lot of high stakes poker, they enjoy it and they’re poker players. But they’re just like really great guys. They treat players well, they’re respectful and they create a really fun environment for everyone to play poker in. It truly special what’s going on in the higher stakes. It’s much more of a laid back thing at those stakes than it is anywhere else. You’re getting this kind of laid back environment to work in, which is great. It’s hard and intense and fulfilling. These guys have created a fun little platform for us to do our jobs on.
How come chat is so much more relaxed the higher the stakes get?
We’ve all been here doing it, for the most, that’s a general statement. Almost all the guys that are regular in nosebleed cash games or nosebleed tournaments, they’ve been doing this for a long time. They know what it’s like to lose a gigantic sum of their net worth. They know what it’s like playing for a gigantic sum of their net worth. And they’re in there doing things that they know how to do. It’s not going to blow their minds to win a tournament and it’s not going to end their life if they lose a bunch of money. They’re seasoned pros. What you’re seeing at lower stakes is people really feeling the heat. They’re kind of shot. They might have a $5K bankroll, and the guy’s in a 2K tournament with 40 percent of his worth. It’s like, “Ah, I need to win or I’m not going to pay my bills this month.” You’re not really seeing that at the higher stakes. The guys are a little more professional.
Where does the money end up. Who are the investors?
The investors are almost solely poker players. It’s been a pool of really smart guys, they’ve all made a lot of money, and they’re all saying, “We see a gigantic goldmine here laying in front of us. Let’s all pool our …. together and invest in some of these players, or invest our time and help players improve. Or put them in tournaments.” You have a collective bankroll put together from a lot of poker players, not exclusively poker players, but most of the investors are the actual guys themselves that are playing these tournaments. Then there’s a few guys that, say, won their money in poker in online cash games and they just had a good eye for where the money was. And they started getting horses and putting them in these tournaments and helping educate them. So the money is kind of staying with poker players, almost exclusively from what I’ve experienced the investors are poker players.
Is this the JohnnyBax model, but with more money?
A bunch more money. It’s much more precise now. Backing deals, the old school, kind of “Whoa, I’ll put you in, we’ll chop the profits 50/50” that kind of stuff is completely gone. If someone is still like that, their backer is kind of an old school player. Now you’re talking guys that are estimating ROI and working on all kinds of different pay incentives for the players. Making sure the players have their own amount of risk involved in each game that they’re playing, and also have a very calculated payouts, weighted towards a ton of different factors.
Is it formalised in a contract?
Yes. A contract, activation periods, with a lot of these guys. Must play x amount of tournaments online, or must play x amount of buy-ins, x amount of hands. You’ll be paid this much and your BB-per-hundred win rate. Almost always exclusively written down, contracts with accountants, the whole deal.
Are these people employees?
You could say they’re partners. I’d say a lot of the guys you’re seeing on the Hendon Mob have done a good enough job…I can’t say that for everyone, but they’ve probably done a good enough job that they always get to take around the amount that they want of themselves, and then they have [inaudible] who they give action to under an agreement. But I wouldn’t say that there’s one guy that’s handing them every time. It’s more that I’ll say I have the bankroll to play 200/400, but they’re playing 1K/2Ks. So I’m going to [inaudible] you 8/16 or whatever. It is formal. It’s a lot more technical than it used to be, I believe.
Is the SHR world separating itself from the rest of poker?
Yeah, I believe so. In the beginning it was kind of blurry, and Super High Roller was kind of a prestigious rare thing that happened, where guys that were playing that buy-in of 10K could play 100K. Now, when you can play in these things all the time, there are select groups of specialists that have just decided this is the best way that they can use their time. They can make the most money playing this thing, and financially it doesn’t make sense to travel to a stop to play a 5K or a 10K. There are great players at lower stakes and I’m sure guys that if they work really hard, that are specialists at 5Ks, they could come up and give…But there is separation. But there is a huge separation in overall skill level too. The high buy in tournaments, unquestionably they have the best players in the world in them, and they are dramatically different from, say, a main event.
SELECTED OTHER INTERVIEWS: Adrian Mateos, Charlie Carrel, Daniel Negreanu, Dominik Nitsche, Erik Seidel, Fedor Holz, Justin Bonomo, Stephen Chidwick and Winfred Yu.
