Stephen Chidwick
What’s your journey to the super high roller world?
It was a gradual process of just playing live and getting more comfortable and as I got more comfortable, moving up slowly in the stakes. It didn’t happen overnight. But just from having relationships with a lot of good players who had confidence in me and enough faith to buy action gave me the confidence that I could play higher. I just did it, I guess.
Is that typical?
Different people take different paths. You see some people storm on to the scene, someone like Dzmitry Urbanovich just come out of nowhere and start playing and win 100Ks. Then a year or two later, he’s disappeared again. Then other people, maybe a David Peters type character, he’s just been playing forever and ever, has grinded every stakes online, every stakes live and has built his way up in a similar way to I did. But I guess there’s not really one standard way.
Do you all share the same skill set?
You definitely need a lot of different skill sets to win at each level, and it’s not necessarily the same against each level of opposition. You do benefit from playing each one and learning as you go along.
How do the crews operate?
I guess it just starts off with groups of friends who are playing together and trying to learn together and getting better and talking. Discussing strategy, stuff like that. Maybe there’s a more formalised study group, where you’re looking at specifics, taking specific projects, trying to study in a more theoretical way. Then you have players who are not necessarily even players, people who have a lot of money to invest and see these high stakes tournaments as an opportunity to buy action of who they consider to be the best players, and treat it almost from a business perspective. There’s been a number of different groups who have typically bought a large portion of the action in any given high roller tournament. Obviously when the buy-ins get so big, most of the professional players are playing with small to medium pieces of themselves and selling the rest of their action to investors. So you see these groups who may have different levels of organisation. For some of them, the only thing they do is seek out players and make them offers and try and buy their action to play these big tournaments.
How careful do you need to be with a bankroll?
The nice thing about selling action is that you can make the buy-in whatever size you want. Throughout my whole career, ever since I was playing low-stakes online, I’ve practiced bankroll management to limit my downswings and basically always have money and never go broke. That’s something I’ve managed to do basically since I started. I’ve never been backed, never gone broke. The percent of my bankroll that I will risk on a given tournament varies a little bit based on how soft the field is, how good the structure is, what mark-up I can sell for. I guess the most aggressive I’ve been is to be risking about 2 percent of my net worth, per entry. I think that was much too aggressive when I was doing that. The swings were way too big. Now I aim for around, on the higher end, 1 percent. On the lower end, about half a percent of my net worth is what I’ll put into a single tournament.
Is that typical?
There’s lots of various strategies that people use. Some people take very small pieces of themselves and basically pocket the mark-up and are not swinging very hard one way or the other when they do well or do poorly. Other people have all of their money in action at all times and like to either run it up or go broke in any given good stretch or bad stretch. I don’t think there’s really a typical approach.
It’s definitely a very important aspect of being a professional poker player, trying to maximise the growth of your bankroll. For me it’s something I’ve paid more attention to as I’ve been playing less online and more high rollers. A few years ago, I’d be making a more consistent chunk of money online, whether that be through sit n goes or the lowest stakes online tournaments. Only a much smaller percentage were at my buy-in cap. Consequently, my approach was a bit more aggressive. As my average buy-in shifted higher and I stopped playing as much online and I started playing more super high rollers, more high rollers and the lowest stakes I was playing increased, I had to shift my approach and become more conservative as more of my buy-ins were at the cap of how much I wanted to play for of myself.
Are you exclusively a high roller player now?
Definitely the high rollers are where I focus my most attention. I enjoy playing them the most. I really like playing the same players over and over again. I find the game to be really deep and really interesting. At the moment, at least, that’s where the biggest opportunity is for me just because the stakes are so, so high. If you have a reasonable edge, you’re making a lot of money every time you play a tournament.
Is it purely about the money?
I would say that I’m less financially driven than I have been in the past, and maybe I could make more money seeking out the big private cash games, but I guess it’s a balance of the two things: poker tournaments and competing against the best players is something I really enjoy, and it happens to be — at least in the current climate — fairly lucrative. It’s the best of both worlds. I think I would still be playing tournaments, even if I could be making more money playing cash games.
How many Tier 1 pros are there?
You kind of need to define Tier 1. It’s a big spectrum from the best player in the world to the worst player, and everyone fits somewhere on that spectrum.
How many people have an edge in a given field?
It’s going to vary a lot based on the specifics of a field. There are some super high rollers that are known to be a lot softer than others. So in a tournament like…I don’t even necessarily want to name specific tournaments because I don’t want to be derogatory to any of the recreational players. At some stops there are just more recreational players. More rich guys who take the game less seriously and in those tournaments you’ll see a lower tier of players who maybe don’t grind every super high roller, but they’ll show up to them because they know they can be beating these fields, even if they’re not beating the top players. And then I guess there’s another tier of players who will basically show up to any super high roller and will be confident that they’re winning in pretty much any field.
Is it fair to say that these tournaments are being paid for by the rich businessmen?
Yeah, I would say that’s fair for the most part. You’ll see the professional players kind of flux, who’s playing, as players get better and gain the confidence of people to be able to play in the game and other players perhaps fall behind and don’t take the game as seriously as they have in the past. You’ll see them maybe lose the confidence of their backers and stop playing in the games. For the most part the games run around the recreational players, as they do in all areas of poker.
Something I’ve really enjoyed about tournament poker is that you meet all these guys, these businessmen, and they’re all just clearly super smart and super competitive and interesting people. I think a flaw I had earlier in my career was to stereotype all the recreational players, “Oh this is a fish, I’m just going to play in a certain way and beat him easily, he’s never going to fold to my bets” and not take it seriously. But playing against these guys in super high rollers, yeah, they’re recreational players but they’re very switched on and they’re very capable of seeing if players are treating them in that way, and thinking that they’re never going to fold or not going to bluff in a certain spot. These guys are very capable of competing with the best players, so it’s a fun challenge.
Is it important to keep the recreational players happy? Do the pros consciously try to ensure that? It seems that the games are much more relaxed than other buy-in levels.
There’s a few things going on there. One is that it’s such a small player pool, everyone knows everyone really well, you play with the same people over and over again, people’s personalities shine through a bit more when you know them better. You just kind of know what they’re like, know what they find funny. You have a bit more of a personal relationship with the people you’re playing with, so it is a very friendly environment in that sense. But I think it’s also that the headphones on, sunglasses on, taking it really seriously professionals kind of get a bad rap. Poker is really very, very, very difficult to make a living at. And for the most part these are just people who are just trying really hard to play as best as they can, not give anything up, and get to the top level. In the super high rollers, you’re seeing basically the pros who have made it already, and have a nice bankroll they have built up, some success, some money in the bank. So for that reason, I think there’s a bit less pressure to play super seriously. That probably contributes to the more jovial atmosphere to be found in those tournaments.
What are the key skills of a tier one pro?
I think that poker requires so many different skills and not everyone has the same skill sets. You’ve got to have very good discipline, very good mental focus when you’re at the table. You’ve got to be very good strategically, have put in a lot of hands. Different people are going to be strong in different areas. But I think what you see in the top, top guys is just that they never stop trying to improve. They’re looking for any little edge anywhere they can find it, whether it’s their diet or their meditation in the morning, or it’s the way they study or it’s the way they approach bankroll management, or who they’re working with, who they’re getting coaching from, what they’re doing away from the table, constantly looking to improve. Because if you’re not, there’s going to be other people who are, and they’re going to overtake you.
What have you learnt to improve your play?
I don’t really think I can point to one thing. It’s just a constant mindset of looking to improve. There’s no secret, “Here’s my five tips to tournament poker”. It’s just if I can go to bed better in some small way than I was when I woke up, I consider that a successful day. If you just string those days together every single day, eventually you can achieve, or you can get to a level that didn’t seem possible when you started out.
Has GTO moved in?
Yeah, there weren’t really the tools that there are now five years ago. The only way to really improve at the game was to talk to other players and hash out the strategies and try and decide who you thought was better. Of course there were some range theoretical concepts that you could try and do by hand, but the tools that are available now are just so powerful and provide so much information that I think the game has changed quite fast. You can study the game now from such a deeper level of complexity than you could in the past, and really get answers to questions that in the past were just very unquantifiable.
Will NLHE ever be solved?
No, I don’t think it’ll ever be solved because there are more factors than you can account for and even if you’re playing a perfect GTO style, you’re not going to be making the most money unless you’re exploiting the players who aren’t playing that style. So I think there will never be a time where there’s not an opportunity to identify what people are doing wrong and exploit that. And then also when you factor in lifestyles or psychology and stuff like that, I think there are too many unquantifiable factors that even if you have Google Glasses that tell you the GTO solution is in every spot, yes you’ll be playing amazing, but that’s never going to be the full picture.
Was there a big leap over the past three or four years?
Yes, probably the introduction of PIOSolver, specifically, to the market, which I guess happened three and a bit years ago, and the adoption of that software and people using that to improve was a huge jump forward in the game. Everyone knows about them. There are a few people who aren’t using solvers, but I think that number is going to continue to diminish.
Is the super high roller world drifting away from other tournaments?
I guess so. Yeah, you have the Triton tournaments that are pretty much only high rollers. You have the Aria high roller tournament schedule, which doesn’t really have main events. Yeah, I guess they are separating somewhat.
How have the sums got so big?
It’s just a proliferation of really high stakes tournaments. It wasn’t that long ago that there weren’t any 100Ks and now seemingly there’s a 100K at every stop and that’s not even a big deal anymore. This year there were five or six tournaments with a buy in over 250K.
What was it like when these buy-ins first appeared?
I wasn’t playing them from the outset. I remember I guess the first ones were in Australia, and the PCA and Monte Carlo added 100Ks. It’s exciting to watch the elite players play with their hole cards exposed and see what they’re doing when they’re playing for really large sums of money. So there’s always going to be a draw there for the viewing public and also for the players who might be on that stage.
Can it continue?
I’m not sure about that. I think maybe the market might be getting a bit saturated with these high buy-ins. But it’s kind of self regulating. If the market can’t support it then some of the tournaments will just dry up and we’ll stop playing some of them. I’m not sure how sustainable it is long term, but at the moment the trend just seems to be more and bigger tournaments.
What happens if the businessmen get bored?
I think there’s a rotating cast of businessmen who enjoy the game and enjoy playing for very high stakes. But if tomorrow every recreational player decided that they were bored of it, then I’m sure we wouldn’t see 100Ks for much longer. You would just see, as the recreational players dropped out, you would see the worst pros, who before were slight winners, will turn into slight losers. And they would stop playing. And then the next tier of players, who were slight winners, would turn into slight losers. The rake in these things varies but you’d get to the point where nobody is beating the rake. At that point no one would play the tournaments.
Is crypto money propping up the game?
It certainly was at the end of last year a bit more than it is now. I guess we’ll see what direction that goes in.
Can poker continue to evolve to keep people interested?
Yeah, I think so. I don’t think it’s really going to go anywhere. Poker is such a fun game, and so deep and complex, that you’ll just continue to find people who are successful in other areas who want to test themselves and want to play this game. That’s one of the coolest things about poker. Anyone who has the entry fee can play in any tournament pretty much. If you make a lot of money in whatever field and play poker as a hobby, you can play against the best players in the world, and that’s pretty cool I think.
Could you ever have envisaged your career when you first started out?
No. I don’t think so. It just happened I guess. I started playing when I was 15 or 16 online. It’s been pretty consistent. I’ve definitely had lulls in my motivation to play, and I’ve played less or more. But pretty much the last 11 years this has been my primary focus.
Why do people leave?
It takes a lot of time if you want to be very good. And constant work. You kind of need to have not many responsibilities and lots of time on your hands, and to be comfortable with the insecurity from the financial aspect of it. Not have a consistent pay-check. I’m sure a lot of people leave the game just to have more stability, or they get bored of it. Or they go on a big downswing, and that breaks a lot of people. There are varying reasons why people would leave the game.
But you’re still happy?
So far I’m still really enjoying it. As long as I continue to love the game and feel like I’m playing well enough to compete at the highest level then I’m going to continue doing so. When that changes I’ll re-evaluate.
Why are you moving to Vegas?
The tournaments are really good there. The Aria is running more and more tournaments all the time. I wouldn’t say I’m going to be spending much more time in Vegas than I already am, but it’s just a thing where I figured that I’d had a good year, I had some disposable income that I thought that would be a good idea to invest in a house, not have to pay rent when I’m there. Have somewhere to have all my stuff, not that I have much stuff. Just a base to go back to, when I start a family and stuff, it will be nice to have that as a home base. I’m still going to keep travelling for the moment at least.
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