How I Handle $200K Poker Swings | Rampage Poker DSH #1411

Super upset about something he would be upset during the game about

losing a lot of money or whatever it was.

So I caught him in, I guess for me, the most opportune moments because he was not himself.

Airball's, I think, a very good player.

People rag him a lot, but I think he's very solid.

When he's not tilted.

When he's not tilted, when he wants to play well and try, yeah.

Okay, guys, got Ethan here, aka Rampage Poker.

Busy time of year for you.

So thanks for making a time to come on, man.

Yeah,

happy to be here.

Yeah, you're playing 10 to 12 hours a day this week.

It's been really long with WSOP stuff going on.

Yeah, the summertime is like the most busy for poker players and tournament players because there's just always something to play.

And then if you want to win and do well, then you have to, well, hopefully you last the whole day.

Yeah.

And then you start again the next day, and then the next day.

And then there's always something to fire.

So it's been busy.

So do you take time off before it starts to just mentally prepare or how does that work?

Yeah, I took a month off from poker for playing live, basically, which was nice.

And that like kind of prepared me for the next, the, the full six-week grind of playing every single day.

But yeah, I'm definitely like, yesterday was probably one of the worst days I had in poker.

Damn.

I fired so many bullets.

I just kept rebuying and rebuying and rebuying, which is kind of standard and normal for the tournament like play style and the variants of it all.

But to have it all consolidated in like one tournament feels bad.

I bought in six times

at the ARIA and I was there for like four hours or something.

So it was constant death in the tournament.

And then reborn again, and then a little offensive.

Were you running bad or what happened?

Oh, I wasn't running good.

That was for sure.

I actually didn't win a pot.

All six bullets is what I remember.

Yeah.

Yeah, that felt bad, but it's, it's part of like kind of the normal tournament experience and what we sign up for.

So,

you know, I'm happy that I get the opportunity to play poker.

for a living and compete in a card game I love playing.

So how bad can it really be?

Yeah.

All it takes is one good deep run, right, to offset that.

Yeah, it takes one.

Yeah.

It's hard to win, but it's just about showing up every day and just trying to just be there.

Yeah.

Showing up is like half the battle.

What buy-in range is like your optimal range for these tournaments, you'd say?

I'm somewhere, I mean, this summer I've played anywhere between like $800 buy-ins to like 10Ks and then 25K sometimes a stretch.

But I have this like very different prop that this specific summer for the next six weeks is that everything that I've bought in is doubled.

So I allowed people to fade me who think I'm bad at poker.

So I actually have more action on myself.

So like yesterday was a $1,600 buy-in at ARIA because I have outside action, not with the casino, but with other people like booking it, essentially, I have another $1,600 on top

against others.

So they're betting on you to lose.

How does that work?

Yeah, they're betting me to lose.

So essentially.

My profit and loss at the end of the summer, whatever that is, plus or minus, will just be doubled.

Wow.

So I have, uh, yeah, I have 95%.

So I'm just going to round up and just say I have pretty much the whole thing.

So, yeah.

Holy crap.

Did I do that every World Series or is that just a one-time thing?

I did it last summer.

So I had like 78%.

And then I really wanted to do it again this summer and experimented.

I tweeted, asked people who thought I was bad at poker, tried to just get more action on myself, which is fun because now everything's doubled.

So that's kind of why I didn't want to play the 25K because that would have been a 50K.

Yeah, that would have been a big one.

Last year i i played the 25k i was on the bubble and i was all in and my heart was beating out of my it was the most anxiety i've ever felt in my life damn that's interesting to see someone like you still have those emotions yeah something about tournaments man they're they're a lot of fun they're competitive and the the life in the tournament is like very fleeting so you can just be out at any moment and then if that my opponent called then i'm just like a 50 50 of whether I'm in the tournament or not.

And that was the, that's where all the anxiety came from.

Yeah.

I guess you're always on edge because you've invested so much time too into the tournament.

Exactly.

Yeah.

When you're on the bubble, which is like 11, like, let's say 12% of the field pay, you've already knocked out like 88% of the field.

Now you want to at least have a chance to double your money and then have a chance to win first place.

Yeah.

So did you make money last World Series?

Were you profitable?

I made money.

Yeah, that was good.

I made two final tables.

So all the money in tournament poker is all at the final table.

And really all the money is in first and second place.

I didn't win anything, but I made enough money at the final table where I was able to offset all of the tournament buy-ins.

Nice.

Yeah, tournaments seem to be your bread and butter, right?

It's fun.

Yeah, it's the format that I continually keep showing at bed and spend the most time doing for one reason or other.

I like the idea of competition.

Tournament poker feels like the perfect competitive arena environment compared to playing cash games.

I always thought it was interesting how certain players are so much better tournaments versus cash games.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just how much time you spend.

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It's the only bottle that also structures your water and adds red light to supercharge it it's sleek portable and honestly i don't go anywhere without it like studying the game and learning about it and just how many hours you spend on the table yeah but if you keep showing up then we'll eventually get results absolutely yeah like hellmuth is one of them where he'll dominate tournaments yeah and then i've seen him lose a lot in cash games yeah it seems like he i mean yeah he's just a tournament guy he's like the guy for tournaments right it's a different style right you're playing way slower paced a different style more all-ins a lot more leaning on variants and luck for the most part, I feel like, where in cash, you can kind of grind and fold away for forever, really, if you wanted to and wait for good hands.

But here, you're kind of forced in the action to some degree because the blinds keep going up, and then you lose chips.

So,

yeah, you're forced to play hands.

Who do you got winning the 250k high roll?

Are you got any predictions for that one?

I mean, Martin Cabral's chip leading.

It's hard to say.

I don't know who's actually in the field, but yeah, it's hard to bet against the chip leader at the moment right now.

Yeah, he's in chip lead by a lot, too.

He's kind of good at that.

He's good at talking his way into the opponent doing whatever he wants.

Yeah.

Have you played against him before?

Yeah, I'd say I've played against him on the bubble of a like $1,500 buy-in.

He's also an insane person.

He'll play.

I've seen him grind like the $800 buy-ins and that's in the biggest buy-in, the $250,000.

And I was on the bubble right next to him, and he was doing his thing.

And it's good content.

It's good content for the audience.

Being next to him and being part of it is sometimes a lot, but it's a good change of pace.

It's good for poker, at least.

Yeah.

Has he ever gotten in your head or has anyone ever gotten in your head like that?

He got me in my head because I was more focused on what he was saying than, and I forgot how big the pot was.

I remember.

I was playing some pot versus him, like a small pot, but I usually just do the math of like counting out how many chips are in the middle.

And then I was playing this hand where there was like maybe five big lines in the pot, not very big at all.

But I just couldn't do the math because he just kept talking nonstop and he's very loud and he's funny, entertaining.

So I just kind of lost it.

Damn, so it worked.

I ended up just folding.

I was like, I actually, I think I had like a normal fold, but I was just like, I don't even want to deal with this anymore.

Just move on.

That's what he wants, though, right?

Yes, he's great at that.

Yeah, double dank.

That's his skill.

They gave him a time clock this year, I heard like individual personal time clock.

Yeah, yeah, maybe for the bigger events because he just takes a lot of time with his antics and stuff.

Yeah.

So, from like a poker playing experience, I definitely understand how players are annoyed at it because it just disrupts the flow of the game and makes things a lot slower.

And he takes all the advantage of obviously the, of the social side.

But then from an entertainment standpoint, as an audience, like it's just, it's, it's perfect for poker, really.

Yeah.

He just brings.

I'm a fan.

I know he has a lot of hate, but he's like the Nick Kiergos.

If you watch tennis, he's like the Nick Kyrgyz of poker.

Yeah.

A little controversial.

Yeah.

He has a lot of clips.

Both of them have a lot of like controversial clips, but are at the most part very, very entertaining to watch.

I'm a fan.

Like, I also like chess.

And I, normally you can't talk shit during chess, but there's this one guy, Hans Neiman, who's just like talking.

Oh, he does the talking shit.

Yeah.

That's cool.

Yeah.

And I like that.

I think more sports should have that talking ability.

I mean, it's such a cool skill, especially in chess.

It's so much mental.

So to be able to throw someone off their game, like just to break their train of thought is

such a huge win.

Exactly.

You play any chess?

No, I wish.

I'm really bad.

Yeah.

I've never, yeah, I'm really bad at chess.

You still play any video games?

I saw you say on another show you used to play a lot of video games.

Yeah, not, I haven't in a while, but I'll hop in on COD or Fortnite, whenever, just to go back to the OG games.

Yeah.

Like OG Fort, whenever that's out, that's always a lot of good fun to go back to like the nostalgia of just grinding with friends.

I still play Fortnite.

It's a good time.

I'm a sweat.

You're a sweat.

Yeah.

Build or no build?

No build.

Okay.

No, those build games, those kids are too much.

Yeah, they've advanced like insane levels.

I can't keep up.

Dude, those kids are freaks.

I remember I bought a scuff just for build.

They're just trying to like compete.

Oh, you play on controller?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

I'm a, I'm on PC, but I'm on controller because I never learned how to do the most in and keyboard.

And I was too lazy to go through this learning process of being really, really bad and having a miserable time to invest into maybe getting better.

But yeah, I'm on controller.

Yeah, I feel like mouse and keyboard is the way to go.

Of course.

Yeah, it's not even close.

I like seeing like whenever I'm Deem Scrolling, I like seeing some of these clips when they train on with the mouse and keyboard.

I forget like what the software is called, but you just like train your intuition and

just click, click, click, click, click, and it's insane.

It's insane.

Dude, that's nuts.

Wow.

Are you playing any high roller events this sport series?

Are you taking it with the well, everything has passed from the high roller standpoint?

It was all last week.

Oh,

no, I haven't.

It's kind of wild that they scheduled the events in this way where they have all the 25s, 50s, 100s, 250s.

And then after the 250, like my friends that are playing it, they're going to go back to the grind in like the 3Ks.

Damn.

So it's a huge drop off of buying level.

But yeah, I think this 250 that's happening right now is the last high roller.

And the rest would be like normal events.

Wow.

So that's the highest one.

I thought there was like a 500 and a million or something.

No, sometimes like WPT has like this million, like one drop or something that happens from time to time, but that's not during the summer.

Have you ever played in that one?

I was trying to sell action two years ago, I think, just to gauge and see if I could play, because I think from a content perspective, it would have been perfect.

Yeah.

But it never ended up working.

I mean, a million to lie.

So the highest buying tournament I've played is just a 25K.

Oh, okay.

And then I remember I was, I registered for a 50K buy-in in December of 2023.

And I was going to like max late reg, which is entering at the last possible moment before registration ends.

And then I was in line, just like waiting for my seat card.

And then I saw like 10 other people standing around me.

And it's all these crushers.

It's just like Seth Davies, Adrian Mateus.

Ulev, Ponikovs, everyone.

And I just looked around and I just knew I didn't belong to it.

So I just unreged actually.

First time I ever did that.

Yeah, I was probably

I think it was a sharp move.

Yeah.

There's levels and those guys are just next level, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And 50K is like just a normal whatever buy-in for them.

I feel like.

So that's some pocket change for those guys.

I'm just like losing my mind.

Yeah.

Do you play different on stream?

Because I know you want to get these clips, right?

When you're playing in these crazy big hands.

Yeah.

On stream, very different because those are usually cash games.

So I think like the strategy between tournaments and cash are very different.

so and then on top of it like for content and playing in it essentially like a private game there's a lot more gamble and i'm not really trying to win as much

yeah because i know people will hate on you like you're playing weird on the stream or whatever but i i know as a content creator you're you're going for these clips too for the clips yeah that's how it's always been with cash games but with tournaments it's like a completely different thing where i can just be solely focused on trying to win and do my best.

Sometimes my best is like that breaks not super studied.

But yeah, I mean, that's the cool part about tournaments is that I don't need to like feel forced to give action, gamble more, do these things.

I just want to do what's best for me.

Are you vlogging your tournaments?

Yeah, yeah, you're vlogging everything.

I feel like that's the new era of poker content, right?

Yeah, yeah, it's cool.

There's so much more eyeballs and investment of time and content into the space.

Like there's a lot more people making videos from short form, long form, all of it.

So it's good for the space.

There seems to be a lot of interest.

Like Alan Keating's first vlog got like, how many views?

It was crazy.

500.

I think I looked at it recently for a first video is

crushed yeah very impressive have you had him on before no i'd love to he's a very interesting person he would be i yeah it'd be cool to like pick his brain and see what he's doing he's invested a lot of time and resources into the vlogs and content so i'm really curious like

for someone that's as successful as he is what like the motivation is to build this personal brain and stuff i wonder if he planned that from the start because he was always like a mysterious guy like how did this guy get money like he's he's playing million dollar hands right and then he started the vlog later yeah at least he's like I hope you guys are enjoying the show.

Please don't forget to like and subscribe.

It helps the show a lot with the algorithm.

Thank you.

Like blind playing Million Dollar Hands, too.

So I made his cards and he's just playing massive pots.

It's amazing.

What's your most memorable hand with him?

I haven't played with him.

Oh, you haven't?

No.

No, I haven't had a chance to play with him yet.

Yeah.

I've heard some crazy stories with him.

I believe it.

I've seen it all us there at least.

But yeah.

You've played with Airball, though, right?

I've played with Airball.

Did you say you're up or down against him, heads up?

I'm up for sure.

Oh, nice.

Yeah.

I've gotten the best of him in a lot of big spots.

So my history with him has been good.

I will say, though, the last pot that we played against him, he stacked me for a $100,000 pot.

But we played insanely much bigger pots.

And like the thing, the thing is with Airball, I got super lucky because for one reason or another, there was a span.

like two years ago where I would play with him.

I played with him for like five times straight or something on Hustler.

I don't play that much and he's there all the time.

But every time I showed up, he would be somehow max tilted this session.

He'd either come in super upset about something, he would be upset during the game about, I don't know, losing a lot of money or whatever it was.

So I caught him in, I guess, for me, the most opportune moments because he was not himself.

Airball's, I think, a very good player.

People rag him a lot, but I think he's very solid.

When he's not tilted.

When he's not tilted, when he wants to play well and try.

Yeah, he's certainly very solid.

Are you up or down against Mariano?

Heads up.

I think I'm dead.

I'm going to have to be down.

I've lost so many baseballs for him.

I've seen a lot of those pots.

Yeah.

He runs pretty good.

He's running good or you think he's better than you?

He's better than me for sure.

But he's also run pretty well.

I also respect him, his poker ability, and he's also a close friend of mine.

So if I'm going to lose to someone, at least it's going to be him.

But there's one pot that will always burn a hole in my head.

We played like a $200,000 pot.

It was my aces versus Ace King pre-flop.

We just chop.

Wow.

It's just a chop.

Just a normal standard chop somehow.

The odds of that are, what, like 2%?

Higher.

Oh, higher.

For sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I don't know what the percentage is, but it's higher than two,

lower than

18 for sure.

Okay.

Somewhere between 2 and 15, I think.

Do you know the percentages like off the top of your head for the most part with the most common hands?

Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, most of them are like flips, right?

Like Ace King versus Jack 10.

I think like Ace King's like a, I don't know, 60% or something.

Yes, enough to have some people literally memorize those and it's like insane to me.

But they'll know the exact odds of winning.

Yeah.

It's good to know.

I'm not super informed about this, to be honest.

You more play off the

I didn't know like Ace High is better than Jack 10.

And then, but sometimes, but Jack 10 can still win a lot of the time because it's, you know, there's no pairs and stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know people study the solvers like non-stop these days, right?

Yeah, yeah.

That would be smart to do.

Do you spend a lot of time on that?

No,

I should spend some time or more time with it for sure.

But my time has been focused with like videos and content and trying to do new things.

Yeah.

But yeah, I think I should probably study way more.

Then I can actually play like some of the high roller events.

I can be well more equipped to compete at that level.

I mean, it's interesting because I just had Patrick on.

He doesn't really use solvers.

I've had Bryn Kenny on, who's like number one in winnings.

He doesn't use solvers.

Hell move.

Bryn is up so much money.

It's so important.

No, it's nuts.

Like some people are still crushing it without them.

Yeah.

I mean, like, I don't have the experience and intuition that they have, right?

I think like they've been in the game for more years than I've been alive almost, I feel like.

And they've just built up this feel, intuition, and just like normal, like, social cues that they understand that I just don't have the experience with.

Yeah.

They were also saying everyone has access to such good information now.

So people are learning how to play quicker.

Yeah.

And the skill level has gone up a lot for sure.

Yeah, yeah.

The gap between like the best player in the world and like a bottom-tier player, I guess we'll say, is

shrinking for for sure.

Yeah.

So it's harder to find like good games, I guess, right?

I guess.

Yeah, it depends on who you know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or the tournaments, right?

Like what I love about tournaments is that it's all public.

There's no private game.

There's no politics aspect to it.

So you just show up, here's their buy-in, right?

Compete.

When you make it to a final table, are you studying film on your opponents at that point?

No, not say that.

You don't have time, right?

Yeah, it depends, right?

Like, usually, if you make a final table, if it's in an in-person event, then you have like the night to prepare.

But the night, like, so for these like 10 hours of time that you have before it restarts again, you have to fit in some sleep, personal routine, get your like mind mentally good to play.

And then maybe you have like a handful of hours, two, three hours, depends on how much you want to sacrifice sleep to prep for it.

And usually the prepping would just be about, for me at least, is understanding like random situations that may come up.

Like, oh, this guy might be like the chip leader and he's going to be way too aggressive.

How do I respond to this?

That makes sense.

Not like individual, like, what are his tells and stuff like that?

I've never been like a tells person.

Really?

Yeah, I have no idea how to read people.

Whoa.

It's terrible.

I think my like social skills overall are one of the worst parts of my game for sure.

That's so interesting to me because you think at your level, you could pick up on some tells.

Oh, no.

You've never had an obvious tell?

No.

No.

Someone told me recently for this summer, this is how basic and bad my tells are.

My friend told me to start looking at the when you're like about to act, you look at your left, and then the opponent will sometimes like signal if he's folding or has a good hand or calling, whatever.

So, I just realized that what, like six years in.

So, now I've realized that, yeah, like a lot of people at the World Series, like they'll look at their cards, they'll look like super disinterested, and then they're ready to fold, and you can like do whatever you want.

Holy crap, or if they look like they have a good hand, then now you kind of know.

But yeah, I, this is not a part that I'm well versed.

I wonder if that's an attainable skill, like if you can learn it.

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, just need like the right mentor resources.

You might have to hire a Chance Corneth or an Idranu.

I just might, yeah, they're the best at it.

For sure.

Chance said that's his whole game.

He was saying tells are amazing.

Like he doesn't use his phone at the table, which most people do these days.

He's locked in the whole time looking for tells.

Yeah, I think that's sharp.

You definitely miss out on so many key information.

You're just like glued to your phone, not paying attention.

Meanwhile, you're vlogging.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm just in la-la land with my camera.

I wonder if that distracts you from the game.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah, I'm not 100% locked in.

The cool thing about playing on streams at Hustler and stuff is that they take away your phones.

So it's a way different dynamic because no one has their phones.

So you're just in tune with the game more, making conversation, seeing what's going on.

I mean,

are you up or down at Hustler right now?

I'm surprisingly up.

Okay.

I would not have guessed that I'm up.

Well done.

I know.

I've lost a lot back.

Yeah.

I'm up like a million.

If you can, there's like online sites that track results.

According to those sites, I'm up like a million.

Damn.

And I lost a million before I'm down a million.

So I was up two, I guess.

Holy crap.

I need to find that million back.

If you're swinging that much, that's a big jump.

Yeah, the games are big.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think like it's pretty easy to win like 100,000 on like a good session for how big the games are and how swingy they are.

And you can obviously win way more and lose way more at the same time.

Yeah.

So it's they're big swings.

I'm kind of getting tired of those swings.

We're fire playing tournaments.

Yeah.

Because at least you're in for like a certain amount and it's not going to be at least, you're not going to lose like 100,000 a day playing tournaments.

What's your stress levels at right now?

I don't know.

Fine, I guess.

Not too bad.

Not too bad.

Yeah, it can't be that bad.

I'm just showing up and playing poker every day.

So maybe a little stressed.

Yeah.

Not as bad as playing in like a $300,000 pot on Hustler or something.

Yeah, I just feel like Poker Pro has got to be one of the most up and down lifestyles.

Yeah.

Things can go really good.

Things can go really bad.

And then it can turn in a flick of a switch and you never really know when it's going to be your time.

But you kind of just wait patiently.

Like that's how tournaments are, right?

You just show up every day and you wait patiently and hope that this bullet is the one that you get super lucky in and win all your all-in-time.

Yeah.

Club WPT Gold, what's that about on your shirt?

It's the America's newest online poker site.

So it's under the sweepstakes model where

if you're a resident of the 46 states in the U.S., then you can play some online poker on clubwptcult.com and you can use code Rampage.

Sign up.

I've given away hundreds of thousands of dollars and they've got like this really cool promo going on right now called the Gold Rush Ticket where they're hosting a million dollar free roll at the end of the summer.

And on top of that, anyone with a ticket has a chance to win an extra million dollars if they win one of the marquee events.

So someone this summer played in a $1,500 event and he won it with the ticket.

First place paid $250,000 roughly.

Wow.

And then Club WPT Gold gave him an additional $1 million on top of it.

Holy crap.

Part of the promotion.

That's insane.

Which is kind of nuts.

If you're playing heads up and you know that first place is four 4x the first place amount and then second and second place you only get like $150,000.

It's a huge swing which is an insane sweat.

Wow.

Shout out to them.

That's awesome.

You play a lot of heads up these days?

Not a lot of heads up.

I'd love to play more.

It's a really fun format,

but I haven't had much experience in it.

It does look fun.

It's like a mental game going on within the game, right?

Yeah.

That has a lot of like reading and reading into your opponent and figuring out what they're doing and stuff.

That's like a whole different arena.

But that's fun.

Yeah, I think the cool interesting thing is at least for me, I don't play much heads up.

Yeah.

But when you play tournaments, you're playing heads up for the most amount of money.

So it doesn't really correlate.

Guys should be way better at heads up because the heads up matches are all that matters in tournament poker really, because you want to close it out and win.

That makes sense.

If you could play heads up against anyone, who would you pick?

If I could play heads up against anyone, I would love to play against Mr.

Beast.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah.

That'd be a good matchup.

That would be fun.

Yeah.

Just to have that experience.

And he's like one of the like idols of my life and inspired me to do content and be better and stuff.

So really?

that'd be great.

All right, so he's going to be in Vegas for the next month.

Oh, cool.

Filming Nice Games 2 out here.

Okay, I saw a tweet,

like a rumor of the structure being built for it.

So it's confirmed.

Yeah, it's confirmed.

So he was your inspiration for starting the YouTube, though.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, he's just someone I is starting the YouTube, learning from him, and just seeing his journey and seeing how I can at least model some of his like success

and deliver it into poker would be.

Yeah.

I love that you stuck with the YouTube because I was seeing you on another show.

You tried 10 different gaming channels before you did poker, but you still kept going.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I started, I made my first video when I was 12 years old.

And then I've just been trying and failing random ideas and gaming channels and stuff along the way.

And then I found poker and it all ended up at least working out for now.

Yeah.

Good timing too, I feel like, because that was the second poker boom when you were starting the content, right?

Yeah, it seemed that way.

Yeah, yeah.

When I first started my, my uploaded my first video, there's only like five creators at the time on YouTube.

And I think like Brad Owen had like 40, 30,000 subscribers.

Holy crap.

He's got a million now, right?

He's got close to it.

I think he's like six, seven hundred thousand.

Nice.

So he's getting up there.

Yeah, I like his videos.

Yeah, they're great.

And he crushes.

And it's impressive how he's been so consistent for so many years too.

Because my understanding of YouTube when I was a kid was that like this life cycle as a creator was only like maybe five years or so.

And then you kind of not either fall off or just get repetitive or something happens.

But now I think with how the economy has changed, you can just be really sustainable for a very long time.

That's a good point.

The creators I watched growing up are all gone pretty much.

Right.

Other than Eister Beast, but I used to watch like Nigahika, Kev Jumba,

the OGs.

Yeah, I think like in the comedy sketch like genre, that was pretty competitive and tough because they also weren't like able to monetize any of it.

Like they started off as just a passion project.

They were so big and didn't make any like ad sense or ad revenue from it that entire time.

Crazy.

Think about how much money that would have been back in the day.

An insane amount.

Yeah.

If YouTube built their infrastructure to like pay creators back then, yeah, they would be killing it.

Yeah.

Are you going to change up the content?

Are you just going to keep doing the vlogs and the games?

I'm investing a lot more into trying to put more effort into the videos.

Like I'm in this process now trying to like hire a media team or internally at least and slowly build it out.

So that's been taking a lot of my time with just like hiring, meeting new people, experimenting with this because I have no idea how to hire and build a team organically.

But yeah, I want to like put more time and effort into the videos, experiment with like shorts and stuff, which is a huge opportunity that I've been ignoring for the past few years and you've been crushing on it.

Yeah, we're like the opposite.

You're on the long form, crushing there.

Yeah, yeah, I always liked doing long form.

Well, that was natural to me.

And then when shorts came out, I just like didn't have the bandwidth to do it.

But now it just like seems silly now to just keep ignoring this massive opportunity.

I think attention spans are dropping.

I see shorts continuing to grow.

That makes a lot of sense.

I don't know.

I'm doom scrolling myself like two, three hours a day.

But that's also like, you're kind of doing productive doom scrolling, right?

At least you're seeing trends, understanding what's

market research.

Looking for guests.

Yeah, I'm looking for what's trending.

Right.

Most people aren't doing that.

Yeah, but it's always some, at least you can like tie it into some sort of like productive use of time, I imagine.

Yeah, at least I tell myself that.

Who actually knows?

I'm definitely frying my attention span doing it.

You are?

I mean, dude, I'm scrolling.

If I'm not interested in two seconds, I'm scrolling.

But now you understand the audience and how it works.

Yeah.

So then you just like kind of use it for your stuff and how you make like a good hook and then keep the retention longer.

Yeah.

I mean, with you, you got probably 10 years of poker content.

You could probably whip up a lot of good shorts.

I know.

It's well, here's the thing with poker, right?

Everything is like handheld from an iPhone to the table.

So there's no like personal brand along with it because it's just no, no face, no branding, no image or whatever.

Just poker and playing.

So there's not much like brand affinity.

That's a good thing.

People like steal, not steal, but like copy or clip and repost and stuff.

I don't know how to turn that into something that can help like the overall rampage.

Interesting.

So yeah, it's a first person point of view.

So they don't see your face is what you're saying.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I see a lot of clips of your hands where you're not the person posting it.

Oh, yeah, that happens all the time.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

So it's like, it makes a lot of sense for like IRL content, your stuff, like you just have your brand here, your voice, your image, your face, everything.

Everywhere on the mics, on the TV.

It's perfect.

But then with,

at least the poker vlog stuff, it's really hard to scale this in a productive way.

That's an interesting problem.

What about a podcast?

Would you start one of those?

I like it.

I love the idea of starting one.

I've been playing with the idea for a while.

Just starting up the infrastructure and building out like a new vertical seems really difficult.

Yeah.

I would think of a unique concept for it rather than just two people talking, maybe incorporate poker somehow or something.

Yeah, just like dive deeper into the niche and go that route.

Yeah, that would be the more like scalable way to distribute like shorts.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't run out of shorts.

I have like 20 a day going up right now.

Yeah, that's amazing.

So 20 a day, a bunch of different accounts and channels.

Yeah.

So we have my page that posts like three to six.

And then we have like the clippers.

I don't know if you've heard of those, but they post on their pages.

Yeah, I think the clipper economy is like really, really interesting.

It's super interesting.

Like it's like, I don't know how new it is.

I imagine like.

It's probably like mainstream new, but it's been around for a couple of years.

Like it was more like if you know, you know type of thing back then, but now everyone knows with WAP and stuff.

So.

Okay.

Yeah.

That seems to be the service.

I've seen that before where you just get like affiliate revenue and you also get to keep the like TikTok revenue that's generated on your.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's multiple ways to structure it.

The way I do it is I pay per million views.

So like if a teenager just gets like five million views, he'll get $400 for every million views, which is $2,000.

Right.

And I pay out monthly.

And but the accounts are owned by you?

They own the accounts.

They own the accounts.

Yeah.

So they get paid from you along with the ad they keep the ad revenue.

But I've heard of the model you're talking about too.

Yeah, they they've earned both.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's perfect.

Yeah.

I mean, that's so much sensitive.

It's yeah, the TikTok payouts are actually decent.

I've heard of them.

Yeah, I've seen them.

Like the minute long ones, they pay out really well.

I'm getting like, you know, a couple thousand a month, nothing crazy, but Snapchat is the big money.

Yeah, everyone's told me about Snapchat too.

You got to get on there.

I mean, poker has to be like censored in some way, no?

Oh, I didn't even think about that.

I've heard that they're really strict with poker because the audience is

a younger.

Oh, that's a good point.

It might be a prohibited category.

Are you on Snapchat?

I'm not.

Okay.

Pod clips don't do well on Snapchat.

Yeah, it's really just like images.

Images.

Selfies.

So you post 50 to 100 selfies a day.

Yeah.

Crazy.

My friend, like Tommy,

you know, he just takes pictures of everything.

And then his camera roll is just insane filled with.

Him and Bryce Hall, they just be snapping it up, man.

I would do it for 100K a month for sure.

I know.

I mean, how hard should it be?

I didn't even hate on that.

Pretty sweet.

Have you ever been offered money for your World Series of poker bracelet that you won?

I have not.

No, mine's an online one, so I think people don't care as much.

Oh, those don't get the same respect as in person?

No,

I don't think so.

I have looked it up on eBay, though, and they go for surprisingly way lower than you would expect.

Really?

Yeah.

How much?

A couple hundred bucks.

That's it?

Probably.

I thought it would have been way more.

Like, definitely not no more than like 2,000, I would imagine.

Damn, from what I've seen.

There are a lot, I guess.

There's a lot of tournaments.

A lot of bracelets being given out now.

Yeah.

That's like one of the complaints that I think poker players have is

just like diluting the brand and the bracelet equity and all of these things.

Cause I think, I guess back then, right, like, I mean, if you compare it to like 20 years ago, there used to be like 20 bracelets given out a year or something like that.

Wow.

And then now there's like a couple, few hundred probably

every single year.

But that just shows like the growth of poker, which I think is pretty cool as an industry where people love showing up for these specific events and want to win that coveted prize.

Yeah.

Is there anything you still want to achieve in the game of poker, like another bracelet, another title or anything?

I need a Triton tournament.

Triton tournament.

I need one of those.

Is that like the gold standard for poker right now?

Triton?

I think so.

Yeah.

I would consider Triton to be like at the top of the industry with how the events are run, the buy-ins, the prize pools.

I mean, I went to Korea this past year and I only played like five events.

The quote-unquote smaller events were the 15Ks up to a 30K.

And

all of them had like over a million dollars for first.

Totally cool.

It was outrageous.

They like.

They completely crushed.

And the level of play was way better than what you're used to there.

Yeah, you definitely have all the top pros for sure.

Like all the best players in the game are there, which makes it feel obviously a lot more prestigious because you're playing against the much tougher competition.

But then the structures of it are pretty quick, though.

So you have to win all ins and you're not playing that many big blinds deep.

Oh, they're faster tournaments.

Super fast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I wonder if that means more luck is involved.

For sure.

More luck is involved, more variants, essentially.

And

you have to be all in a lot more.

That makes sense.

Yeah,'cause we when we play in the celebrity poker tournament, say like four hours, you're all in every two hands.

I feel like

it's not as extreme as that, but it's pretty close, to be fair.

That makes sense.

Do you have a coach?

Do you have like someone that you bring to these events with you?

No, I don't.

I have friends that are very good, and then sometimes I'll bounce off ideas from them, but I don't have like a specific coach.

No one on the rails?

No.

Yeah.

I think more my time now is like, obviously I play a lot of poker, but I also just spend a lot more time with content now and be more involved in that process.

Yeah.

So I'm trying to split my time as efficiently as possible with both and something has to give.

So my poker like training and coaching and getting better and stuff is kind of falling off.

That's an interesting dynamic.

Yeah.

Cause if you want to go all in on content, it'll sacrifice your game a little bit.

Yeah.

I think like if I had to like pick the perfect person to model my life after, it would be Bryson DeShambo.

He's crushing it on both ends and I have no idea how that's possible.

That's true.

I don't know how he's doing that.

Yeah.

Because if I were to pursue something full-time right now while doing the podcast, it just wouldn't work.

I'm spending 80 hours a week on the podcast already.

So if I were to do something else.

Yeah.

I mean, how do you allocate more time to be really good at something else?

It just seems.

Yeah.

You're basically doing two full-time jobs.

Right.

And you have a team to help you, I imagine, with the pod and everything too.

Yeah.

And you obviously still have to be.

I still have to prep for the guests.

I still have to do all the other stuff behind the scenes that people don't see.

Yeah.

There's so much to do from a pre-production, production standpoint.

And then.

Yeah, it's hard to be really good at both things.

Yeah.

I mean, you're playing 10 hours a day, you said.

Is that weekends too?

Or just three days?

Every day.

Wow.

70 hours a week.

Every day.

Yeah.

10 hours would be good.

I mean, the past, yeah, the past couple of weeks, I've been playing a lot.

I've been doing this really annoying thing in tournaments where I play all the time, all the hours, and then I min cash where it's nice to have results, but you don't make any money because all the money is in first place.

So I would love to just like play 10 hours a day for each, for one specific tournament.

Not instead of like playing like five different tournaments in a day or something like that.

Oh, got it.

Min cash.

I haven't heard of of that.

So do you get burnt out then?

I'm sure by the end of this World Series, you'll be like done playing for yeah, I'm tired, right?

I'm already tired, but it's like a cool opportunity to have.

And we've still got another month, right?

We're in the early stages of the summer.

Yeah, I think we're like two and a half weeks in and I'm tired.

That's crazy.

Yeah, there was a vio clip when Helmuth came on.

He said like the main events and endurance event now.

Yeah, 100%,

which it's always been, right?

I'm too young into poker to know what it was like like 10 years ago, but it's always been like a long day six, seven, a seven day long tournament.

So I don't know why that would be different from now.

I guess

there's way more players now and it's like 10 days now, right?

It's like nine or nine days.

I don't, I don't know how I've never even been close to playing that many days in a row.

Yeah, it's a lot.

I remember last year I made my first ever day four.

And I also skipped day one.

So really, I played three days and I was exhausted.

Damn.

Mainly Mainly the turnaround time is tough.

Once again, like going back to just having to go home, rest, you have like 10, 11 hours from when you bag to when you restart for the next day.

Just not much time to like drive home, not at all, compress, relax, be a human being again after being at the poker table for 12 hours that day, and then sleep, recover, and then show back up again.

I'm sure it's tough to even sleep because you're probably replaying some hands you lost too.

Something like, yeah, that's the decompression part.

It takes a lot, everyone's different, but for me, maybe like I need to do some doom scrolling, spend like an hour home just to chill and do nothing.

Like, that's my decompression time, shower, do all the things.

Like, doesn't, it doesn't just have to be a human being after being at the casino for 12 hours a day.

Yeah.

No, I'm so hard on myself.

Like, I feel like for me, if I lost a big hand, I just couldn't get it out of my head.

I'm like, what did I do wrong?

Yeah.

The more you play, the more you're able to let go of this because then there's just always a next hand to play.

And then you just try to refocus up for that.

But yeah, if you don't play a lot of poker, and especially in such a huge event like the main event, I can see how you really like yourself after it.

I mean, I do that all the time after I bust a tournament and stuff.

Yeah.

It's hard to like, it's just easy to be hard on yourself because now you're sitting out of the tournament.

I mean, you could have been in if you didn't make this mistake.

Like, what could have been

all those scenarios?

Yeah, there's a hundred different things you could have gone back and did different, I bet.

Right.

Do you still get tilted or do you feel like you have good emotional control at this point in your career?

I don't think I've ever been known to have good emotional control,

but I'm working on it.

You know, yesterday i did something really so yesterday i fired six bullets in the aria tournament i did something i'm really proud of i just took a break for like 45 minutes called some people said happy father's day and stuff like that but um long break 45 minutes 45 minute break to detilt and i still fired six bullets

uh the whole time i still busted the tournament six times wow so within this break like during uh registration period i was there for like four hours i was really only playing for like three okay and i died i I busted out six times.

So you could just keep buying in?

Like there's no limit?

Yeah, this one I like.

I like having no limit.

It's

in pain for me.

At least, or more chances to win.

I feel like you play way more aggressive if that's the case, right?

You can.

I don't change like the way I play based on that, maybe subconsciously.

And definitely after like the third or fourth bullet, subconsciously, things start to kind of break down a little bit where you may be a little more gambly, do a little more splashy stuff.

But for the most part, at least in my head, consciously, I like to think that i'm trying to i'll use the same strategy

are you playing sober completely sober yeah no alcohol or immigrant no alcohol it messes you up right uh yeah for sure it was just the recovery thing you know when you're sitting there for so long the whole summer is an endurance test in the marathon so you just have to keep showing up every day and just try to be as well equipped to play Negrano had an interesting take on this.

So he said he plays his best with a little bit of alcohol.

I can see that.

Like not to the point where you're drunk, but there's like an in-between phase, I guess, where you're just playing nice and loose.

Yeah, I can see that.

You feel a lot more comfortable and loose and you're not afraid to do what you think is correct versus when you're fully sober, then maybe there's some apprehension of like pulling up and being bluffed or something.

Yeah.

That makes a lot of sense to me.

Yeah.

It's like you try it out.

Yeah, some of my biggest wins are when I was super drunk.

Oh, really?

Oh, that's super drunk?

Super drunk, a little drunk, somewhere in between.

I don't know.

Shots kind of just get carried away sometimes.

So you're up when you're drunk huh yeah yeah i've also lost being drunk but yeah i've definitely been up being drunk for sure interesting when you play on hustler and stuff you know there's always drinking involved and shots being passed around so yeah sometimes you

pound and

well uh good luck the rest of the tournament man anything else you want to close off with here um no thanks for having me man yeah likes for coming on check out wpt gold all right

wpt gold the newest online poker site in america my personal favorite place to play and i'm actually winning on the site so I can win, I feel like anyone can.

We'll end it there.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Yeah.

Yeah, check them out, guys.

See ya.