Avoid These Costly Poker Mistakes: Insider Tips | Phil Galfond DSH #786

Would you say there's more skill though in the high roller tournaments than low tournaments?

In a sense, there is, but it's not about the buy-in so much as it's about the field size.

When you play in a tournament with 40 people, the long run doesn't take as long.

So if you don't get first, second, third, or fourth,

you're not making money, and that takes a lot of luck to get there.

All right, guys, got a poker pro here, Phil Galfon.

Thanks for coming on, man.

My pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

During the main event, too.

So I appreciate it.

Yeah, no problem.

Day one went well?

Day one went really well.

Yeah.

I mean, but, you know, it's a really long tournament.

I try to not get excited about it till day four.

Right.

Because at this point, you know, 10,000 people or so play.

And it's just like, if you're good,

you have a lottery ticket to like, you know, one out of 2,000.

And if you're average, it's one out of 10,000.

But it's just...

It's such a long rind.

And, you know, any individual tournament is so much luck that I try not to get, emotions tied up in it.

I try not to get too attached.

Yeah, you were saying off camera 96% luck for these big tournaments.

Yeah, I mean, I made that number up, but that's what it's like.

Any individual tournament that you play is like almost all luck.

There's a little element of skill.

And then over time, that little element of skill, you know, shows itself in the long run where pros win over time.

But especially as a tournament pro, which I've never been, you can go a long time without winning.

Wow.

Yeah.

And we just saw it with Negrano, right?

10 years.

Yeah.

I mean, he, so he managed, he, he just just came back and won like a really awesome bracelet.

I think it's his seventh after winning six, you know, but way back.

He's continued to win in tournaments, win money in tournaments most years.

And he actually is one of the only people I know of that posts his results publicly at the end of each year.

But he'd had that drought in the World Series of poker.

And I mean, I think that's the perfect example of somebody who's a great player, who's continuing to show that he's a great player because he's winning overall.

But in World Series of poker tournaments, even though he plays a lot of them each year,

he didn't win one for a decade.

And that's just, yeah, like luck.

Luck plays a big, big role.

Would you say there's more skill, though, in the high roller tournaments than low tournaments?

So in a sense, there is,

but it's not about the buy-in so much as it's about the field size.

So when you play in a tournament with 40 people,

the long run doesn't take as long because it's not as much of a crapshoot.

The money's not all like, like when you play, let's say a 3,000-person tournament, all the money is in the top like four spots.

So So if you don't get first, second, third, or fourth,

you're not making money, and that takes a lot of luck to get there.

But when you play a 40-person tournament, yeah, all the money is still in the top four spots, but you get there much more often.

And so the long run doesn't take as long.

Okay.

I just assumed because the people are better if they could afford the higher buy-in.

Yeah, well, they're definitely better.

And

it's a tougher field to play in by quite a bit.

But,

you know,

like in the huge tournaments, a pro's edge can be really high.

Um, so

you'll look at it like there are two stats that you track as a tournament player, again, which I'm not, but uh, one is ITM percentage in the money percentage, and the other is ROI, so return on investment.

And so,

and

in like a high-roller tournament, somebody's ROI over a long period of time.

I mean, people are guessing their ROIs, but it's going to be, you know,

they're making, you know,

maybe

10%, so 110%, you know,

a year, no, No, no, no.

So like on an individual tournament.

So let's say they buy in for 200K

and they're one of the better players in the field.

On average, they'll win 20K.

But

the average takes a long time to hit.

In a big tournament like the main event, I mean, people think that

people speculate that you can have 300, 400% ROI.

I remember I was sitting in a cash game, high-stakes cash game at Aria.

This was...

15 years ago or so.

And

I believe it was JC Tran and I forget the other player he was talking to, but he was trying to back this other player for the main event.

And the other player was asking the table, like, is this a good deal?

He was, he was giving him 70%, which means I'm going to give you 10K

and you get to keep 70% of the winnings.

I'm only going to keep 30%,

which means like, I think you're a huge, huge favorite to make that a profitable investment for me.

And I was just like, yeah, you have to take that.

That's too good.

And then JC took 10K out of his stack and pushed it towards me.

And like, I could afford to play in the main event.

This was a big, a big, bigger cash game, but I was just like, yeah, that's too good.

So I took it.

So one year I was backed in the main event because it just happened in a cash game.

He was offering a really good deal.

But that shows you

how much of an edge people think that a great player can have in the main.

How'd you do?

I didn't cash.

Oh, I see.

Was he pissed?

No, no.

They're used to losing, I bet.

Yeah.

And I mean, when you, like part of being a poker player, even if you don't back other players, a lot of times you'll take pieces of each other.

So

in tournaments, you'll often have like people swap 1% or 2% in these high-roller tournaments, or like in a big field tournament, like 5%.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

And so, and also, you know, people play in games, whether it's cash games or tournaments, and it's just like a little bit too big for their bankroll and they're trying to be responsible.

Yeah.

And so one thing they can do is sell money or sorry, sell.

a percentage of their action at a markup.

I've seen that.

Yeah.

But also like in my career, I've never done that.

I've just like sold the extra pieces to friends.

And then when they play something that's a little too big for them, they sell me it back

at face value.

And what I always say, like sometimes when I buy action from somebody, they'll come back and say like, sorry, I lost.

I'm like, come on.

And sometimes they'll say, sorry, like I blew this, like I made this mistake.

And I always say,

every poker player makes mistakes all the time.

And if I'm investing in you, I'm investing.

in the fact that I believe you'll make fewer mistakes than other people.

But it's not because I don't think you'll make mistakes.

I'm investing in the good and the bad.

Right.

And so people in poker who have done enough of that understand that not only is there a lot of luck involved, but people have good days and bad days, good hands and bad hands.

Yeah.

I didn't know you could buy people's action in the same tournament as you.

Yeah.

You can kind of spread your money out.

Yeah.

You can spread your money out.

It happens a lot.

There's like a

so there's a Sometimes people, especially in the high rollers, because there's kind of smaller fields, there are people who watch who complain about it because they think it's like unethical.

And if you were swapping like 40% in a 40-person tournament, I think that that would be because there are spots that would come up where it's just like

you would be incentivized to collude.

Right.

You could fold a good hand.

Yeah, yeah.

But at 2%, at 3%, at 5%, it just...

You're not going to run into them.

It just, well, like, you...

you might run into them in a small person field, but if you've swapped 3%, it just kind of doesn't matter.

It doesn't change the way you play.

So it doesn't give other players an unfair disadvantage.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

It's not like you're back in their whole bankroll because that probably wouldn't be allowed, right?

No, I mean, there are no rules against it because you don't need to disclose it.

Oh, wow.

So there's no way anybody would know unless you want them to.

So there are no technical rules against it, but the poker community does a lot of self-policing and calling out.

I noticed

people that do that.

Yes.

Yeah.

Dog Pulk, man.

There's drama.

Yeah.

There's drama.

You know, every month, there's a new, I know, a new drama bomb.

I was upset with the Tom Duan one because I grew up in Jersey where he grew up and that was like one of my favorite players.

Yeah, no, I mean, Tom,

like early on, he was one of my best friends in poker.

Oh, wow.

He taught me a lot, especially when I moved from No Limit Hold him to PLO.

And like he had been playing it for a few years.

I didn't know anything.

And it was actually, he's a very generous person.

And I just remember I had known him for like six months because we ran in the same circle of poker friends, but I didn't really know him that well.

And

he was telling me I should get into PLO.

And I was like, well you know i don't know the first thing about and he's like oh just watch me play and then he like i sat down next to him as he played for six hours um and that's something that you know someone of that stature um

like to just give that away without thinking about it is is really common right right that's interesting so you got to know him personally yeah yeah were you shocked when all that stuff came out or i i mean

you hear things when you're part of the poker circles and there are people have different side of the story there was like the the one

there were a few different things, but I think like two people involved in the drama were, you know, Peter Jetton and Heralibus, and I'm friends with both of them too.

So like, it was all, I was sad to see it.

Yeah, but

yeah, I don't know.

It's,

I feel confident.

Like Tom and I don't hang out as much as we used to.

But I just like, I got to know him so, so well back then.

I'm confident that

he's he's a good person who means well.

And I think sometimes like what it sounded like happened,

he can be like, he can be aloof.

And so he can lose track of things.

He can also

like

think that it's going to, think that some things are going to come together and he's going to be able to

optimize it.

Yeah.

So I think that it's accidental.

It's still, you know, like if we're to take,

let's say, Peter's story at face value, which I have no reason to distrust him, it's still not fair to Peter, but I don't think Tom does those things intentionally if that's what he did, which, you know, I don't know.

And a lot of cheating.

Yeah, there's always, I mean,

any, like, any,

any activity where there's a lot of money to be made will bring some cheaters, scammers.

Yeah.

Have you run into any in your games?

You usually don't know when you get cheated.

Um, there,

no, I mean, I, I do know,

I've been, I've been, I've been not paid

many times.

But as far as actual cheating, other than going way back to like, I don't know if you're familiar, but like the ultimate bet super user scandal, which was like 18 years ago or something,

where there was cheating and then people got refunds.

So I know that I was cheated because I got a refund from the site.

Other than that, no, nothing.

I don't know of times I've been cheated, but I probably have been.

There was a site recently online that got exposed, right?

Doug exposed a site.

There was, I'm trying to think.

So

there was a vulnerability that was exploited in GG's software.

I mean, GG's the biggest site.

And apparently, and

I,

again,

I want to be careful because this is my hazy recollection of what was said by all parties.

But what I think happened was they pushed an update to the software and it opened a vulnerability that somebody who was actually like a hacker, a developer, figured out.

how to exploit.

And because of this vulnerability, he could see cards that were going to come before they came.

Wow.

And

it's a massive edge.

And it's unclear how long he exploited that for, at least to me, I don't know.

But they did figure it out and close it.

And so, yeah, like the ultimate bet scandal was actually like an inside job, somebody at the company who could see everybody's cards.

And so that's like, whereas this, this recent, more recent GG scandal was just an oversight, like an accident

by the developers that somebody, you know, like I'm not a, I'm not a hacker.

I wouldn't have been able to exploit it, but because somebody had these skills and noticed it, then yeah.

Do you prefer playing online or in person?

I prefer online.

Really?

Yeah.

There's something about, I mean, part of it is that I'm introverted.

And I just like being at a live poker table for like 12 hours and just like even just the social element, I get burnt out.

But there's also something about poker where like poker for me,

I just absolutely love it and I love diving into the problem solving of it.

And so when I'm playing online and I'm just thinking through each and every decision, I get into this flow state that is just so fun.

And when I'm playing live, I don't get into that because I'm just interrupted.

I have to think about like, okay, my posture, what's my face look like?

Am I, am I moving correctly?

Oh, I have to talk to this person now and I have to talk to this person now.

It just like breaks the flow and it breaks it.

There are a lot of things that distract from just like.

the purity of the game that I wow.

I never saw that point of view, but that makes sense.

There's a lot of factors in person, right?

Yeah.

people are so good at tells at your level oh yeah so you have to like yeah it's funny like after a day of poker live like my body hurts just like sitting stiff like this yeah you know I didn't even know they were looking at your posture yeah I mean here's the thing I think a lot of people are terrified like a lot of amateurs and even people who play a decent amount are terrified that players are going to pick up tells

again I'm making up a number but you know 95% of people out there who think that they're picking up tells are not they're just like they're they're seeing noise.

There's confirmation bias.

And, you know, like they say, oh, he, he moved his, like, he moved his chips this way.

I think he's weak.

And then he shows down a weak hand.

They're like, yes, I knew it.

I was right.

And then the next time it happens, they show down a strong hand and they like ignore that.

And so they think they have these tells that they don't.

But there are some people who are very elite at tells and those people can be dangerous.

Phil Ivy, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, that dude is a machine.

Yeah, he is.

I think, I mean, so we all just have to guess who's great at tells by the way that they play.

And I mean, some people talk about how they're good at tells and then, you know, how it's a big part of their game.

Others don't.

But I think Phil Helmet's another one.

Just based on the way that I see him play,

there's a lot of some way or another, he's guessing pretty well what other people have.

Interesting.

I mean, there's no arguing with his results.

He might be the GOAT of tournaments.

Yeah, World Series of Poker bracelets.

Nobody's close to him.

And it's impressive.

I mean, it's impressive for many reasons, but it's impressive that he was somebody who did it kind of before my generation and continues to, you know, every, I don't know how many, every year or two,

managed to win another bracelet.

How many people are still around from your generation?

So my generation, I'm about to turn 40, and this, my generation was like the online boom, which was, so 2003, Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of poker, and that coincided with a lot of online poker sites popping up.

around, you know, within a year or two of that.

And just like that, that event, like it was a TV poker boom, which led to the online poker boom and um there are a ton of players

still around from my generation a lot of them and a lot of a lot of top players came like most top players these days i would say

is that true at least i think half came from my generation oh wow more or less so they're still around okay they are because i i look at the old tv shows and i'm like which one of these guys are still around and making money because poker is a really tough game to be profitable in yeah so i can if uh if you watch tv back then uh poker on TV back then, like the high-stakes pokers, uh, which is my favorite, which was just the best, um,

a lot of those guys are not around anymore.

And that was the generation before mine who kind of started basically the way I split the generations is who started playing online by playing online and who started by playing live

before online happened.

And so a lot of people from that generation aren't around anymore, partially.

I mean, some did very well and retired and moved on to other things, but others it got too tough because

players who came up online, they had so many more tools to learn with.

And

the natural selection process was just so much more powerful because there were so many more people playing online.

So the ones that rose to the top had to rise to the top in a much tougher environment.

And so they just, you know, got sharpened along the way.

And when you're pulling from that large of a base of people who try, you're going to find more elite people.

Absolutely.

Have you seen the skill level go up every year?

There was a big gap, honestly.

So

in 2011,

we call it Black Friday in the poker world where online poker shut down in the U.S.

And

at that point, there stopped being ⁇ I mean, basically that was kind of marked the end of the poker boom back then.

The poker shows on TV were largely funded by the online poker sites.

So in some cases, they actually just paid for the production.

They paid like Game Show Network to put the show on.

In other cases, were the commercials.

So, therefore, you know, the networks could make money from the commercials and then put the shows on.

So, when they got shut down in the U.S., which was far and away their biggest market,

about half of, so like half of revenue from online poker sites, which were global, came from the U.S.

Wow.

So, when that was shut down,

they got crushed and the poker boom kind of stopped.

And there was a long lull in new players coming up.

And only in the last several years has it picked up again.

It's because of YouTube.

So at first it was TV,

but then the money was gone.

So the networks were not producing more shows.

But then on YouTube, you don't need a network to put your show on.

And a lot of people kind of started.

Well, there were Twitch streamers and then there were vloggers that kind of started it.

And now there are a whole bunch of different kinds of poker YouTube channels.

I have one that's more educational than vloggy.

Yeah, I feel like guys like Brad Owen really revitalized poker, right?

Absolutely.

And now when you like anybody,

so my wife plays a lot of tournaments.

She's a poker player too.

And I don't get out there as much, but she says, like, anytime she sees somebody who's like under 24, she gets curious.

I like playing in a reasonably high buy-in tournament.

She's like, how did you find poker?

How'd you start out?

And then it's almost always YouTube.

Wow.

Yeah.

And now there's like these lodges, right?

Yeah.

Streaming games.

There's tons of streaming games.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's become really big.

Yeah.

So first it was the bloggers.

Now, I mean, people still do those vlogs, but I do think streaming is now getting more damage.

Massive.

There's million-dollar games being streamed now.

Yeah.

It's insane.

Yeah, it's right.

And these are the types of games that used to be on, you know, cable

back when I was younger.

And now, you know, they just stream them for free.

Nuts.

What's the highest buy-in game you've played?

I played in a game, the blinds were 2,000, 4,000.

So it was

4,000,000 minimum.

Oh, my gosh.

Were you freaking out?

A little bit.

So it was like a

so that I had regularly played in $500, $1,000, which is $100,000 buy, and that was normal for me.

But I'd never played even double that.

And this was quadruple up.

And it was a private game, which I never get into.

But there was just this, like I had a friend reach out and he's like, okay, this huge game was running, but people are leaving and there are actually open seats.

So sometimes they run private games in casinos and they block people until there are just no more people people to fill the seats.

And then it's kind of open.

And sometimes what happens is then pros fill the seats and the game breaks, people leave, but

sometimes they continue for a while.

And so friends were like, hey, there's a seat.

And I was like, okay, I don't have 400K right now.

And then like, you need a few buy-ins.

So like, I had, I don't know, I probably had like 300K in my account there.

And so I had to contact like six friends.

I was like, okay, do you want a piece?

I need some money right now.

And it was like a huge hassle to get all of it together and get there.

And then,

you know, know, I lost a couple small pots.

I lost like $150,000 and the game broke in like 20 minutes.

So 20 minutes?

Yeah.

Damn.

Yeah.

That's nuts.

Yeah.

400K buying.

And that was just at a casino casually.

Yeah, it was Arya.

Oh my gosh.

I didn't know the games got that big over there.

Yeah, they don't these days.

So there was,

they used to have a private game that ran there.

I mean, semi-private game that ran there all the time.

It was usually like $100,000 buy-in, but sometimes got bigger.

But these days,

I don't know of any that run in casinos and like the public poker rooms.

A lot of them have gone into apartments or homes.

Why did the casinos kind of get away from that, you think?

I think it's more that the people who ran them

to avoid things like what happened, like people, you know, seats would open and people would get in.

Whereas if you can go in somebody's home,

you know, they control the environment.

Pros can't show up and knock on their door and get into the game.

The benefit of having it at a casino, in addition to the amenities, is that that you can have more confidence that the game is safe.

There are a lot of stories of home games being cheated,

and certainly not all of them are, but it happens a lot more often in home games, whereas in a casino, they have all these security measures.

And it's not that it can't happen, but it happens much, much more rarely.

Especially with that much money involved.

Yeah.

I mean, hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions.

Yes.

I've heard of home games getting in the millions.

Yeah.

Which is nuts.

Yeah.

No, they get huge.

The biggest games are

run out of casinos in people's homes.

Do you still play a lot right now?

Right now, no, because I kind of have nothing to play.

So

before we hopped on, I was saying I don't really play tournaments.

Tournaments are not my thing.

I play cash games.

And cash games have all gone private.

And so the only thing, if I wanted to play high stakes now in a public game, it's basically just tournaments are my only option.

Wow.

Because you're too good.

You won't get invited, basically.

Yeah.

I mean, there are some games who they don't really care who they play with and they will invite you, but

they haven't haven't called me and yeah usually what happens is there's a host who runs a game and they either make money from the game like rake or they make money playing in the game or like they maybe they don't play in the game but they back a couple people in the game and they make money that way um and so they don't want good players in yeah unless they're going to have a good player that they have a have a piece of potentially and um so yeah they it's they they try to sometimes pros get in and um

but usually it's just because they're friends with the people in the game and they like their presence there.

Makes sense.

But not too many of them usually.

In other sports, it seems like there's rivalries, but in poker, it seems like you guys are all friends.

Is that true?

Like all the top guys?

I mean, yeah, it's kind of interesting how it works because

you make friends with

your peers and then sit down across the table from them and take a lot of money from them, lose a lot of money to them, and then go have dinner.

Yeah, I mean,

there are not everybody loves each other.

There, there are people who dislike each other, but I wouldn't say there are rivalries in the same way that there are in other sports.

Yeah.

Yeah, I noticed that.

It's fascinating to me.

Like you take a hundred grand for someone to go get catch right after

nothing happened.

Like I would imagine that, I guess I don't know other than I don't know this world other than watching, you know, fictional TV shows, but I would imagine like lawyers might have the same kind of thing.

It's not respect, right?

Yeah, it's just like a, yeah, this is the job.

I'm going to try my best.

You're going to try your best.

Like, as long as we're playing fairly, this is the game.

Like, this is what we signed up for.

We're two people.

We, we understood the rules.

We sat down at the table and we're going to try to take each other's money while we're at the table.

But then, yeah, we can be friends.

Makes sense.

Have you been profitable the whole way through every year?

I had a,

let's see, one or two years.

I had like a break-even year.

I had a slightly losing year, but yeah, it's been 20 years.

That's impressive.

Mostly profitable.

Yeah.

That's like unheard of in poker, I feel like.

In tournaments, it's actually not as unheard of as you might think.

In tournaments, there are more losing years than in cash games.

And you do kind of have some control over it.

It's actually, it's pretty annoying if you live in the U.S.

because

if you have a, let's say, a winning year,

you know, you pay taxes on your winnings.

And if you have a losing year,

you know, you can't carry those losses forward.

Right.

So like if I lose 500K this year and I make 500K last year, I'm actually down money because I've paid tax on the 500K I won and I didn't get any back on the 500K I lost.

So you actually, there's an element of strategy where it's like, okay,

it's October.

How am I doing on the year?

And like, what risks can I take?

Because you just really don't want to have a losing year.

That makes sense.

Same with crypto, though.

Yeah.

I've lost it.

I mean, it's down bad right now.

Yeah, but you can, I think in crypto, and I might be wrong.

You can carry losses forward at least like capital like so like capital gains Which is long if you've hold held for over a year.

Yeah, I know that like capital gains and capital loss, you can carry forward.

I think it's so minimal what you can carry, though.

Yeah, like I think if I don't know the exact number, I don't want to misquote it, but I remember I lost a lot, and they were like, You can carry over this amount, and it was so little that didn't really matter.

Interesting, you know, yeah, similar with stocks, I think.

Yeah, so that changes the strategy, yeah.

Um, but 20 years and only one losing year, man, congrats, thank you for real.

You've really found and you love the game, it's like you found that perfect.

I love the game right now.

I don't have games to play, so it's kind of sad, um,

But

I'll like, it ebbs and flows, especially the kind of like very high-stakes poker economy.

It just changes like where the action is.

The last few years, it has been high-stakes tournaments and home games, cash games.

But in years past, it's jumped around and it might go back online.

You never know.

Have you played against Alan Keating yet?

No, actually.

Have we ever?

Maybe, maybe like 15 years ago, but no.

Wow.

He's everywhere now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What about Nick Arbaul?

I haven't played against him either.

I arbitrated a match between him and Matt Berkey, which was quite an adventure.

Who won that?

Matt Berkey won.

It was a million-dollar heads-up match.

Damn.

And because they had a rivalry.

There was a lot of smack talk beforehand, and finally someone issued a challenge.

That's respect, though.

Yeah.

May the best man win.

It's funny.

So I've played a lot of heads-up matches,

never stemming from a rivalry, but there are a lot of matches that have started as kind of like poker beef that often what happens is they play and then afterwards they they gain respect for each other.

And so like the biggest one that happened was Dan Ronio Doug Polk.

I saw that.

So like they they really disliked each other and after the match I think both gained respect for each other and I don't really know their you know friendship status, but I think it like certainly the way that they felt about each other changed as a result of playing against somebody.

And I've played a lot of challenges.

Like that's the main poker I've played in the last four years has been heads up, like months at a time challenges.

Yeah.

Wow.

Because that's like the most fun to me.

So like, I love,

I love hand reading across multiple streets.

I think I was telling you that before we hopped on, but I also just love

breaking down the tendencies of one person and like really trying to figure out how they think and how they feel and adjusting them.

And so a one-on-one match over like three months is just like, I love it.

That's the most skill right there, right?

I mean, you could argue

it's the most interesting skill, I think.

Like, that's the part I find most interesting.

Tournaments where,

you know, you end up just like getting all in pre-flop a lot.

I think that's a much less interesting.

Like, I don't have fun with that.

However, tournaments are super dynamic because the stack sizes vary all the time.

So like cash games, you're usually deep stacked.

And so there's not a lot of variation hand to hand in terms of how that affects strategy.

But in tournaments, stacks change all the time.

So you're always having to adjust the way that you play because, oh, now there's a big stack on my left.

Oh, now I don't have as many chips.

And as you approach the money, there's an ICM, it's called, which comes from independent chip model, doesn't matter.

But basically, you know, if we're playing a tournament and there are three of us left and we all have even stacks, and you know, first place pays a million, second place pays 500K, third place, 250K.

If you and I get all in on a coin flip,

we both lose because the player who's left automatically moves up into the top two spots.

And so in tournaments, you don't want to take certain risks.

And depending on what the stack sizes are, how close you are to the money, how big the pay jumps are, it changes strategy all the time.

So I think tournaments are extremely skillful.

There's so much to think about, but it's not the skill that I find interesting.

All right.

What's your heads-up record?

So I issued a, like, it was called the Galfon Challenge.

And this was kind of in my return to poker after like focusing on business for a few years.

And I played,

I organized a series of matches that were extended.

And the first one

was a really tough one against an online player called Benny Viti.

Nobody knew his real name.

I know his name, but I don't think anybody does.

Just because we talked to arrange the match.

And

it was a

25,000-hand match,

which I thought was going to take a couple of months.

It took like three months.

And it started out

terribly.

Oh, yeah.

Like with it started started out as bad as it could go.

And it was, it was really tough because this was like my return to the spotlight of it.

And that was your first match back?

You know, just like lose and lose and lose.

So this was a $20,000 buy-in, 100, 200 blinds.

And

I was down after like 10,000 hands, I was down 45 buy-ins.

Wow.

Which was, well, it was 900K.

We were playing in Euro.

So like over a million U.S.

Holy crap.

And I...

At that point, we had a side bet where I was risking like 200K on the, who wins the match.

But at that point, I'm like not going to come back and win.

It's just too far out.

There were betting markets, but they had closed at that point because it was just too astronomical.

And I thought about quitting at that point.

I actually took some time off and decided if I wanted to continue.

And I continued.

And kind of just,

long story short,

it was kind of just like, it was seeming like this fairy tale where I started and I started winning and then continue to win and continue to win.

And before I know it, you know, I'm not down a million, I'm down 500K.

Okay.

And now I'm down 300K.

And we got to a point with

about

2,000 hands left in the match and we were back to even.

Wow.

And so, like,

obviously, at the beginning, there was a lot of luck going on in his favor.

We both don't know who the better player was.

You know, usually when the buy, when like the swing is that big, it's going to be because you're outmatched.

But you never really know.

Like, the chances of that happening, if I were the favorite, were like 1% or 2%.

Dang.

But it's still possible.

But then also on the return, the flip side is true.

So anyways,

then it was anyone's game.

And

it actually came down to the last like 50 hands.

Holy crap.

So the way that the structure works, because there's a side bet,

if you're up enough money, at some point, you could just kind of like effectively take a knee and fold the rest of your hands.

Like, so just pay the blinds and you're automatically going to win.

You're going to win the $200,000 side bet.

And I thought that was going to happen at like, you know, 500 hands left or 1,000 hands left, but it was just so close throughout like the whole time.

And it was 50 hands left that

I made like a full house over full house against him and won a pot that put me like just over the edge.

And I could fold the last 50 hands.

Wow.

And so that it was like, it was such a

storybook ending.

Like you couldn't have written it any better.

What a comeback, man.

And so I won that, and then I won the next four.

So I'm five for five

in those matches so far.

I have one

with Daniel Jungleman Cates.

You beat Dan Cates?

No, we're actually halfway through, and we're like dead even.

If you beat him, I mean, not much better people than him in the world.

Yeah, he's fantastic.

He's fantastic at every game.

So these matches were all in Potlum and Omaha, which is my specialty.

If I played Dan and had some Nolam and Holdham, he'd beat me up.

That hasn't been my game for like 15 years.

Got it.

So Omaha, what's that game look like?

So it's dealt like Hold'em,

except you have four cards instead of two.

And you have to use two of them.

Got it.

So in Holdham, you could end up using just one of your cards and the board.

But in Omaha, you have to use two.

And it's pot limit instead of no limit, which means you can only bet up to the amount that's in the pot.

You can't over bet.

Interesting.

And I kind of found that game, like I was saying earlier,

I learned it at the very beginning from Tom, Tom Duan.

And

it was just because online, the highest stakes games had kind of moved from No Limit over to PLO.

And I liked to follow the high stakes games because I wanted to keep playing big.

And so I learned it and it just kind of stuck for me, something about it.

I don't know.

So yeah, that became my specialty.

And actually, I love No Limit Hold'em, but I've had no opportunities to really like learn it again and play, like no reason to learn it again and play it.

Yeah.

Do you use those analyzers?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You have to use solvers to play at a I shouldn't say that.

I think you should you'd be silly to not use them if you want to play at a very high level.

Oh, wow.

But I also think that beginners should not start out that way.

It's too complicated for beginners.

It's too complicated.

They're going to misapply everything because what a solver will give you is it'll give you the exact strategy that it would play in any given conditions.

But poker is so big.

There are so many ways that the action can go.

There are so many different flop combinations with turn and river and so many different hands that you can have that there's just like nobody can memorize it.

There's no chance.

So

what you have to do is not like look at the strategies and memorize them.

You have to look at the strategies and say, okay, why is it doing this?

Why is this the right way to play with these hands?

And then what are those heuristics that I can take away?

And then when I'm in a hand, not try to think back, oh, what was the, what was it doing here?

Think back to, oh, well, what like human logic logic can I use to figure this spot out?

Interesting.

So you're kind of thinking like an AI almost.

Yeah, because they don't tell you how, they don't give you reasons for what they do.

They just say, play this hand this way.

Kind of like, you know, the chess engines.

I think, I know chess engines are more advanced.

And maybe they explain more now.

I don't know.

But yeah, it's just like, this is the move.

Yeah.

I don't know why it's the move.

You got to figure it out.

But, and so the way to study with solvers, in my opinion,

to get the information out faster and actually have it usable as a human with our limitations for our weak human minds, is to figure out kind of what it's thinking, even though it's not thinking in the same way we do.

Do you analyze all your losses with solvers?

Yeah, I mean, I look back at

not all of them.

No, I tend to look at spots that I found interesting.

So there are some times where, you know, you feel like you played a hand really well and you're pretty confident that you understand the spot, but it just didn't go your way that time.

Um, but when I'm playing a hand and I find myself in a spot, I'm just like, I'm lost here.

Uh, that's when I get really interested and I got study.

Yeah, when you get a weird bluff or something, yeah, something that just, yeah, you can't, yeah, it's confusing.

Yes, it's unique.

You play chess too?

I don't.

I mean, I know the rules, but yeah, I'm a chess player.

I notice a lot of them are switching to poker, though, right now.

A lot of, yeah, a lot of chess players play poker.

A lot of

Magic the Gathering.

Magic the Gathering.

Yeah.

Wow.

A lot lot of pros started in Magic the Gathering a long time ago.

Yeah.

Interesting.

I guess it is strategy.

Yeah.

I don't know how that game works, but yeah, I actually don't know.

I remember those cards growing up.

They were all like shiny and stuff.

Yeah.

Wow, man.

So what's the next move for you?

So, right now, like I was saying, I don't have games to play.

I'm playing the main event right now, kind of for fun, because I mean, it's the most fun experiment of the year.

But

I have started doing

group coaching.

Okay.

And I've really kind of fallen in love with it.

So

I've long taught, I've been a poker coach

through training videos for about 15 years.

And I've always just taught high-level strategy to pros and through videos.

And I love to teach and it comes naturally to me.

So I've always done that, but this group coaching experience is new.

And I'm really focusing a lot more on.

teaching poker players instead of like the actual skills to play poker and strategy, like everything surrounding being a professional and having a good kind of life and career while playing poker professionally, because, you know, I'm almost 40 now and I've kind of lived through it and I've gained a lot of experience that I wish I had had when I was 25.

And so catching some people when they are 25, when they're 30, they haven't learned these lessons.

And I mean, I've coached people older than me too in this program, but

I've just like really enjoyed working with people more directly.

That's cool.

The intangibles, right?

That's not really talked about or taught anywhere.

No.

I've never seen it taught anywhere.

Yeah, it's rare.

So there are mindset coaches that will focus on

performance.

And they have, I mean, in a lot of sports, they'll have these, you know, like sports psychologists or

in poker.

One, the one who I work with now, Elliot Rowe, he's the most well-known.

He's does like hypnotherapy.

And I would do that, you know, pre-session during my Galfon challenges to get ready for the day.

Wow.

But yeah, what I'm doing is not so much that, but it's more kind of just like holistic approach to like being efficient, productive, performing and studying

and like not making mistakes.

Right.

Because they're an athlete.

That's the way I see them.

You know, you got to take care of your body, your mental health.

You do.

And that's something we didn't, we didn't realize a lot of poker players these days are very healthy.

15 years ago, that was not the case.

You know, it was Mountain Dew and gummy worms and

smoking at the table back then.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now I feel like any mental edge can give you a huge edge.

I believe, so especially when you're playing the type of poker I do, where it's usually against a pro one-on-one,

and,

you know, we both think we're the better player.

One of us is wrong, who knows?

But I know that I could show up on a given day and be the better player by quite a bit, and then show up on the next day and be the worst player.

So much of the edge comes from figuring out these nuanced spots in a way.

that you can only figure out if you're just like reaching that top 10% of your brain.

Wow.

And so, yeah, there are times where, you know, just in an individual hand, I'll, I'll figure something out and I'll be like, okay, this is like a

figuring that out in this moment where in a 20K buying game just made me 8K, like just this one decision right here.

And so, and those are the decisions you miss if you're like autopiloting, if you're not all the way focused.

And those just, that's where the win rate comes from is in tough games.

Now, if you're playing in softer games, you can autopilot.

It doesn't matter because people's mistakes are going to just just kind of throw it, they're going to throw money at you.

But when you're playing against pros

who are really good, it comes from outmaneuvering them in some really tricky spots.

Yeah, because they've seen everything, right?

So have you.

So it's about those little details.

Yeah,

they're not going to make a huge mistake.

And I'm not going to make a huge mistake.

So it's about figuring out what kinds of mistakes your opponent's making.

and adjusting to them, both like adjusting your overall strategy, but also then in an individual hand, think about, okay, so if he were to get here and play this spot correctly, he would have to bluff all of these hands and you'd have to value bat all of these hands.

And I don't think he would have played these hands this way on a previous street and I don't think he knows to bluff this, this, and this, because like what I've, what I've seen from him, you know, and so then I realized something that goes from like a break-even caller fold decision goes to like a very clear fold and call would have been a huge mistake.

Wow.

So you're analyzing that many hands?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

So like thinking about your opponent's range of hands, all the hands that they could play that way is

kind of the name of the game in

high-level strategy.

It's just, you know, there's an element, I think on, you know, poker on TV and movies, people think you just look at the person, you're like, I know you have Ace King.

But those kind of things are pretty rare.

It's okay, I think you could have Ace King or Ace Queen or Ace Jack or Jack's Plus, or I think you could have, you know, middle set or bottom pair or i think you'd have a missed straight draw and you think of all of the hands that they could have and then you think of their actions and say okay well which of their actions have have led me to want to eliminate some of these hands and so you're like okay so he did that on the flop cross that one out cross that one out um okay on the turn he did this he wouldn't do that with this hand he wouldn't do that with this hand and i think the biggest edges in poker by far and actually like the most fun for me is when my opponent is trying to represent a hand that they think they can have that I know that they can't have.

So, like, when you know better than your opponent how they would play a certain hand, that's that's when the huge edges come.

And that's like what I love.

It's really

the game within the game, man.

Yeah, I didn't know that much went into it.

Holy crap.

I got a player for you after your match with Cates that I think would be a good match.

Yeah, Maureen Cabrell.

Have you heard of him?

Yeah, yeah, I know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You laugh.

So is there some story there?

No, no, he's just like

sometimes I've played with people like live who I think I've had an edge on, but just the kind of just sitting across the table from them for that long is kind of unpleasant enough that I don't think it's worth it.

I think that's part of his game though.

I do too.

I think he does it on purpose.

It's unclear to me.

I mean, I think that's likely.

You have to have some element of that in your personality.

But yeah, I think he.

Yeah, because what he did last year was hilarious.

I mean, I know a lot of people were pissed, but when he was standing and looking at the cards.

I mean, the thing about that, I was, I mean, I wouldn't say I was pissed and I wasn't playing in the tournament.

I didn't have any, I didn't have a dog in that fight.

But I do think like, I felt like that was crossing a line because it's one thing to annoy people.

And I mean, that's annoying, but it's, it's one thing.

But I felt like what he was doing there was making people feel like he was cheating.

And so

I think he probably wasn't cheating, but

I feel like that's over the line to make people feel unsafe in the game.

I could see that.

Yeah.

Dan Smith, I think, said he might be cheating or someone called him out.

A lot of people thought, yeah, like the way a lot of the things that he did seemed like somebody who was cheating right

um i'm i mean i'm obviously speculating i don't think he was but i think he was making people think he was yeah i wonder how we do in uh your style i've never seen him play that style uh like online oh plo or online or both online yeah i've only seen him in person yeah yeah because some people suck online right and they're really good in person yeah so

yes and no the thing about that A lot of people say that.

They're like, I'm good live, and then I go online and I lose.

And they either say it's because I'm bad online or because the game's rigged or something like that.

Really what it is is that online games are much tougher at the equivalent stakes.

So like the rule of thumb that I use is that the online games are like

the equivalent of 10 times higher the stakes live.

Wow.

So if you're playing like one, two blinds online, that would be like 1020 live and those are more equivalent.

And so what happens is people play 510 live, they go into 510 online and just they get massacred because like 510 online is like 5100 live.

Why is it so much?

Like 10x?

I think the best way to think about it is from the perspective of the player and kind of like my earn rate.

So when I play live,

I play maybe, you know, 30 hands an hour.

And when I play online,

depending on what I'm playing, but I could play like if I'm playing six-handed games and I could play like six of them, then I'm probably playing

like 500 hands an hour.

You're playing six games at once?

Yeah.

Holy crap.

And so if I had the same win rate, you know, playing 30 hands an hour versus 500 hands an hour, I'm, you know, I'm making almost 20 times as much playing online.

And so that's kind of why you,

because then if the games were the same quality, everybody would go online.

Right.

And so the games get tougher.

And so it reaches this equilibrium of where, you know, okay, I can make kind of the same amount playing live or online.

You know, I could play all these tables of 510 online, or I could play that one table of 5,100 live and it kind of equals the the same hourly rate.

That's a good way of looking at it.

Wow, I never would have thought that, to be honest.

Yeah, yeah.

A lot of people, yeah, they think it's, you know, online's rigged or everybody's cheating or just like, oh, I just, when I don't see the person, I can't figure it out.

And I think it's just, no, they, they hop into the same stakes online and it's much tougher.

They probably have really good anti-cheat by now because I know on the chess.com app, they ban cheaters within minutes.

Yeah.

They do have, it depends on the site.

So like the bigger sites have very good security generally.

People still get away with it for a while sometimes.

Generally, that happens at the highest stakes only because

I think.

So

when people are cheating at lower stakes, they're usually like there's a bot ring.

So they have a bot that like 100 accounts have.

And that is easier for the site to detect because they can see patterns that like all these accounts are playing similarly.

They can look at financial data and like account identities and just see patterns.

And so like those can get caught easily.

The cheaters that have gone on and cheated for a longer period of time are players in high-stakes games who have paid a developer 150K to build them something custom

that nobody else is using.

And so their patterns are a little different.

They also can like, they don't have to always listen to what the bot tells them to do because they can use their own mind as well if they're decent at poker.

And so that does become harder to detect.

The sites are pretty good at it.

They catch most cheaters for sure.

But there's a risk.

There's a risk.

Where can people find you, man, and keep up with your World Series run?

Yeah,

probably the best place is Twitter or X.

All the poker guys are on X.

Yeah, it seems to be the place

poker players hang out.

Yeah, that'll be X.com slash Phil Galifond.

And on YouTube as well, at Phil Galfond and Instagram, Phil.galfond, and Philgalfond.com for the newsletter.

Perfect.

We'll link everything below.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Cool.

Yeah, my pleasure.

That was fun.

Thanks for watching, guys.

See you tomorrow.