Ben Roberts

	You cannot be a great player unless you are indifferent to winning or losing

You won’t find Ben Roberts in the current European tournament rankings. It’s even possible you’ve never heard of him. But I have a feeling that will change. ‘Something good is going to happen in the next couple of years,’ he says. And I believe him, for three reasons.

First, he’s a great player – one of the country’s top cash game players, maybe even the best – and has been for 30 years or so. He reckons he needs to win at least £200,000 a year tax-free to meet his expenses and his family’s expensive lifestyle. He does just that by taking on the best high stakes players at the Commerce Casino in LA, and the cardrooms of Las Vegas and Tunica, Mississippi (his favourite place), in games where you need at least £25,000 just to sit down.

His low profile reflects the fact he rarely plays in the UK because he can’t find games where the stakes are high enough, and rarely plays tournaments because they’re too time consuming for someone who can make money relatively easily in cash games.

Second, Ben is not a gambling poker player… he’s calculating, quietly ruthless, a realist, and someone who never stops learning. (‘Continuous learning is the minimum requirement if you’re going to be a great player.’) If he says that he’s going to play a lot more tournament poker and do well, that’s exactly what he’s going to do.

Third, he’s now been drawn into the Full Tilt fold and that’s good for him. Up to now he’s been a bit of a loner. ‘The Full Tilt deal means I’m playing more under the spotlight and that has disciplined me to concentrate even harder on taking the right decisions. And poker is about discipline and decisions.’

That discipline extends to never going on tilt and not having a leak – you won’t find Ben on the golf course playing Phil Ivey and company for $20,000 a hole, nor will you find him alongside Willie Tann or T.J. Cloutier at the craps table. And you certainly won’t find him seeking the spotlight – when it comes to fame and fortune, he’ll settle for the fortune. Ben is the ultimate professional.

Win-win situation

Talk to the London Vic casino veterans and others who know Roberts, and most will admit they don’t know him very well. He is always courteous at the table, sportsmanlike in defeat, a gentleman. But he doesn’t give a lot away. And they’re under no illusions that he’s there to win, which means taking their chips. He has to because he has never had any money except from poker, and previous to the Full Tilt deal has never had a sponsor. ‘I had to win at all costs.’

A boyish-looking 50-year-old, he’s always neatly dressed, always friendly but never effusive, quick to smile but usually serious. He’s also very fit (‘you have to eat properly, exercise, look after yourself if you’re going to play at the highest level – good decisionmaking is partly about being in good physical condition’), and he’s a thinker.

I first met him in his luxury apartment literally over the road from the Vic. It was impressively minimalist and spotless. He was reading a book called Unlimited Power: The New Science of Personal Achievement. This choice of reading reflects his ambition and his intellectual approach. The poker life has finally broken up his marriage (as it has to so many top poker players) but he still keeps his family in a beautiful house in Lincolnshire. His three children are all being privately educated. All this has been financed by poker.

English lessons

It was never meant to be like this. He was born Mehdi Javdani in the north of Iran and his father was a maths teacher with big ambitions for him. So he sent him to England with instructions to get educated and earn a degree.

He arrived at 18 with only rudimentary English and no family or friends for support. He began studying at Peterborough Technical College and his fate was sealed when he met some other Iranian kids who were on a poker kick. From the start he loved the game and was soon neglecting his studies to play it every night, albeit for small stakes. In those days he lived on about £10 a week – £5 for a trolley-full of food from the supermarket and £5 rent. He was also a good snooker player and considered a professional career before deciding he wasn’t good enough.

So poker it was. When he was about 23 he turned up at the Vic. He was now called Ben Roberts, at the suggestion of his young wife who planned on children and thought it would be easier for them. The older Vic stalwarts remember him as being a talented player who was handicapped by never having an adequate bankroll. Ben agrees. ‘I needed a bankroll and I had to fight this problem all along because I had no help from anyone. So I sometimes didn’t have the courage to make the moves I should. I remember when I moved from the £100 game to the £250 game and I was kind of backing off with fear. I learned – and I believe this even more now – that you cannot be a great player unless you’re indifferent to winning or losing. Now I’m almost completely unconcerned when I lose, but in those days it was a burden. It affected my confidence and my logical process.’

And logic is the key to the Roberts game. That and attention to detail, especially to the other players. He’s always watching, always sizing up how they’re playing, whether their game is changing, and how they respond to the ups and downs.

Tournament forays

He first dipped into tournament play in the mid-90s and in 1998 went to the World Series; despite his relative inexperience at this form of poker he reached the final table in the Main Event, coming sixth and winning $150,000 – a remarkable achievement given the circumstances. He was knocked out on a bad beat, beginning with A-A to Scotty Nguyen’s A-Q when Scotty hit trips.

Roberts admits, though, that he had already ‘won over $100,000 in relatively small cash games and really discovered for the first time that I could make good money from no-limit Texas Hold’em’.

He went back in 2001 and came ninth in a pot-limit Hold’em event and later that year won a tournament in Amsterdam. He then went back to concentrating on cash games for a couple of years, before going to the WPT event in Paris in 2004. He won $100,000 by taking down the pot-limit Omaha tournament and made the final table in the WPT Grand Prix de Paris Hold’em main event, winning another $124,000.

He continued to focus mainly on cash games, resenting the time that the tournaments took and needing to make a certain amount of money to pay for the lifestyle him and his family had become accustomed to. But he still picked up the occasional result, including third in the Victor Chandler Cup and second in the Five Diamond World Classic in Las Vegas in 2005. He also made two cash finishes at the 2006 WSOP, including one final table.

Now with the Full Tilt deal he’s beginning to look at playing more in tournaments and that’s why I believe he’s about to become much better known. And, after keeping a low profile for so many years, he seems to be ready for the greater publicity that comes with that. So, Ben Roberts – proven player and now a potential star. Remember, you read it here first.

Career highlights

2/12/05 Fourth Annual Five Diamond World Poker Classic, Las Vegas $3,000 No-limit Hold’em; 2nd, $143,555
17/7/04 WPT – Grand Prix de Paris, Paris €10,000 No-limit Hold’em; 5th, €101,980
11/5/98 29th World Series of Poker, 1998 $10,000 No-limit Hold’em World Championship; 6th, $150,000