Already poker millionaires, three online superstars, including Tom Dwan, talk about the skills and determination required
In just a few short years Justin ‘ZeeJustin’ Bonomo, Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan, and Sorel ‘Imper1um’ Mizzi have risen to the top of the online poker world. Whether it’s crushing cash games or taking down tournaments these three twentysomething maverick players have won (and lost) millions of dollars and gained the adoration of the internet poker community.
But what sets them apart from the rest of the online poker-playing world? How have they ‘cracked’ the game and turned a handful of dollars into millions? What do they make of the established pros on the tournament scene? And, most importantly, are the legions of young online pros about to dominate the ‘live’ game and the world’s biggest tournaments for the foreseeable future?
PokerPlayer: We learnt how to play poker with a pack of cards and a box of matches. Was it the same for the bright young things of the online poker revolution?
Sorel Mizzi: I started to play live when I was eight years old. Back then I was playing Five-Card Stud with my mum for 25 cents a hand.
Justin Bonomo: I was eight the first time I played – for Halloween candy.
Tom Dwan: I started playing with my family when I was really young too. We’d play once a year at holidays. Then, when I was 17, I started playing regularly with friends. Pretty quickly we found online poker and stopped playing live.
PP: How did you get started online?
SM: I’d just turned 18 and my brother owed me a few hundred dollars, which he wanted to transfer to me on a poker site. I was afraid I’d get addicted so I was like, ‘No, no, no.’ But I finally agreed, and went right into $3/$6 and $5/$10 limit.
PP: That’s pretty high stakes for a beginner. Were you winning straight away?
SM: No, I lost about $10,000.
TD: Great bankroll management! How much did you start with Justin? I started with $50.
JB: I lost $300 before I re-deposited $250 and started playing $3/$6.
PP: Let’s get this clear Sorel, your brother owed you a few hundred bucks and you ended up in the hole for $10,000? I can understand your initial fears…
SM: Yeah, I know. I kept on depositing. I lost everything I made, which was $7k or $8k. It was pretty devastating but I just kept playing.
PP: Was it mostly cash back then?
SM: Yeah, I didn’t know that tournaments existed at that time. I did the whole limit thing. I went on a few runs where I’d deposit $50, build it up to $16k or $17k in two days, and then lose it all.
TD: Jesus Christ! You busted $17k when you had nothing to your name? That’s sick.
SM: I know. But then I won two tournaments in one week on PartyPoker and came second in the Friday special. It was a $50,000 week, which was huge, and I was like, ‘I’m going to buy a house, I’m going to do this and that.’ Two weeks later I’d lost it all playing $100/$200 limit on four tables.
JB: I just lost so much respect for you…
SM: After that I took about a month off, then I made $50k and lost $40k, so I took the $10k and invested it in an underground poker club in Toronto, which I sold to my brother. Three months later I returned to poker and realised that tournaments were my strong point. I came first in one of the PokerStars nightly tournaments and have basically been on that bankroll since, with a few exceptions of going broke and having to rebuild.
PP: Is there a danger you could go broke again tomorrow?
SM: I have savings and a little bit more money to buffer any huge loss, but just a couple of weeks ago I was playing €500/€1,000 and €300/€600 no-limit Hold’em with some guy I’d say I had at least an 80% edge on and it was just terrible. He ended up winning on a big hand where I was a 92% favourite. But I’m young and have no dependants, so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t take shots. I know that if I ever do go broke there’s a ton of people who’d be willing to back me. That’s how I am – gambling’s in my blood.
JB: I had my first buy-in when I was 17. I played $0.50/$1 and was a winner at those stakes but I had no idea about bankroll management. I remember one day I was playing $3/$6 limit heads-up with a $200 bankroll and I lost almost all of it before I decided to cash out. I laid off playing poker for about six months until I saw the WPT on TV and decided to buy a book or two. I found out about PartyPoker, deposited $250, and never looked back. I played $0.50/$1, moved up to $3/$6, then $5/$10, and eventually started playing the $200 sit-and-gos.
PP: How did your families react when you told them you were going to become online poker pros?
JB: My parents are extremely proud of me. Before poker I played a different card game – Magic: The Gathering – and they could see the similarities. My mom sits at home all day clicking refresh to check on my chip counts when I’m in big tournaments. If I win a big pot, she’ll call my grandmother. My family’s really supportive of me.
TD: My parents worried a lot, until about a year ago. I was supposed to go on a Spring Break trip and the night before there were really good games online and I played for 12 hours straight. I went to sleep, woke up, played for another 10 hours and skipped Spring Break. My dad was really worried, saying, ‘This poker thing is consuming your life.’ I replied, ‘Dad, I’m going to take a week or two off, don’t worry about it.’ He persisted, so eventually I said, ‘Dad, I made $1.3m last night.’
SM: At first I didn’t get much support from my family because my parents lost money at blackjack and were concerned about me. I was supposed to go to university, so when my parents found out what I wanted to do they weren’t really supportive, but now they see how much money I’m making and that this is actually a job.
JB: Did they know about the early parts of your career when you lost $18,000 and had no bankroll?
SM: Yeah, they weren’t happy. They said, ‘Sorel, we’re very concerned about you.’ I almost quit because I thought that maybe they were right, that maybe I was getting myself into a hole and not making the right decisions. But we’ve all been fortunate to be in the right place at the right time and have the right situations. I’m not one to quit, especially when it comes to poker, because I love the game so much. I was working at a telemarketing job and was depositing everything I’d get from that other than my rent – and sometimes even my rent – into poker.
PP: You’re all over 21 now and legally allowed to play in Las Vegas. And you’ve started racking up some results between you. It must be a good feeling, validating you can cut it as live players…
JB: Yeah, I first experienced that last December. I had a super-lucky streak where I played seven tournaments and made the final 11 in six of them. I was only 21 for three months when that started. After that, I think I always got respect.
PP: Is it important to have respect from the poker community?
JB: Very.
SM: Yeah.
TD: No. I hope they don’t respect me and just give me their money – then I can go to sleep.
SM: There are regulars and players you never see, and obviously I’d rather they think I can’t play. At the WSOPE, I did the strangest thing just because I didn’t want respect on the table. There was one player – Jeff ‘Actionjeff’ Garza – who knew I was a good MTT player, but everyone else, I didn’t know. Getting respect from the guys you’re travelling with, the ones always on the circuit is good, but the other players who just play random tournaments, I don’t want their respect.
PP: What did you make of Phil Hellmuth referring to you with derision as ‘internet boy’ on his blog?
SM: That was probably the best thing in my life. We were on the same table at the World Poker Tour Championship with 16 players left. I think the blinds were 10k/20k and he made it 55k preflop with A-6. I had 9-9 and just called on the small blind. The flop was A-9-2 rainbow. I led into it for 60k, and he called. The turn was an Ace, so I led again for about 100k and I knew if he called on the turn I could get all his money. All this time he’d been saying, ‘I need a Jack to beat you,’ so I was kind of scared when a Jack came on the river.
I was pretty sure he had an Ace, but when I thought about it, if he did have the Jack then he was going to go all-in on the river anyway, so I thought I might as well go all-in and get maximum value just in case he didn’t. I went all-in for 300k or so, and he did that little thing that he does where he moves in instantly. It wasn’t as bad as he does it on High Stakes Poker, but he called pretty fast.
PP: What’s your opinion on live pros?
TD: I don’t want to come across as a cocky asshole, but they underestimate online players.
SM: The live guys don’t give online players enough credit. There are a lot of young online players that are bad. They’re overly-aggressive and don’t know when to slow down, and a lot of the live pros have that perception in their head. But a lot of them have seen what the online pros are capable of doing and it’s always in the back of their heads, so I think we get paid off more than the average bear.
TD: I think people group the two way more than they should. There are very few people I know who play only live or online. It’s not like there’s any specific qualities necessarily. A lot of people ask what I think of the live pros, but if you’re asking me what I think of someone who’s won one tournament and people might consider a pro, then I’d be very happy to have them sitting at my table.
In live tourneys, I’m pretty unhappy to be sitting at the same table as any of the online guys I recognise who are my age, because they’re generally pretty good. One thing I find is that a lot of players have the desire to own us in pots. I find that a lot of the online kids want to win money and a lot of live players want to own online kids.
JB: Especially the old guys – a lot of them have a vendetta, like they’ve got something to prove.
TD: They want to show you up. Obviously it’s a disadvantage for them – there’s no way having that in the back of their minds can help.
JB: I agree with Tom, but at the same time, on average, the online players are a lot better, which is awkward. I think what it comes down to is that the internet is a much better training tool. All three of us have decades’ worth of experience in a matter of years.
PP: The amount of hands you must have played in your relatively short careers must be comparable, if not surpass, a lifetime’s worth played by pros such as Doyle Brunson.
JB: We’ve certainly played more. I’ve played over two million hands. There’s no chance Doyle’s played that many.
TD: What’s really cool, though, is if I’ve played a hand and I’m like, ‘I want to know what I should have done,’ two minutes later I’ll send it to Justin or Sorel to say, ‘This is what I thought.’ You can send friends hands whenever you want, whereas live I’d need to play for 10 hours, and then it’d be, ‘Okay, so I had this session where I won or lost 10 buy-ins, and there was this hand where I don’t remember what happened, but how do you think I played?’
I think that’s part of the reason why live pros don’t talk about hands and don’t adapt that much. It’s a lot easier for me to send a hand history to a friend, so they can say, ‘Dude, you’re really braindead, that’s really bad.’ It’s easier when you’re playing online to evaluate your own play.
JB: The internet makes it so much easier. There’s Messenger, forums and instant hand histories you can copy and paste. It’s so easy to talk to 20 of the best players in the world about a single hand in a matter of minutes.
PP: Tom, you’re known as a cash player whereas Sorel and Justin are more tournament-based, but do you dip into each other’s domain?
SM: I dabble in cash occasionally. I wouldn’t say that I’m a winning player. I just play better in tournaments. I want to eventually make the transition to cash games but tournaments are where my talents lie. I’ve tried cash games and made good money, but it seems like they’re exact opposites. For me, tournaments are a lot less variance and cash games a lot more.
TD: Cash games are definitely higher variance.
JB: At the stakes you play, definitely. If you were grinding at $3/$6, that wouldn’t be the case.
SM: At $3/$6 you could make a decent hourly wage.
PP: What makes someone a good cash player rather than tournament player?
SM: I don’t know. I think I could become a really good cash player, but for some reason I value chips a lot more than money. That’s something I’m trying to overcome – I value my tournament life a lot more than I do actual cash. I don’t even know how that’s possible.
Obviously I value cash a lot, but I play way too aggressively in cash games. I make really bad plays sometimes. I seem to get myself in really tricky spots a lot more. Very rarely in tournaments do I get myself in a spot where I don’t know what to do, or where I have half my chips in and have to fold, yet in cash games I do that frequently.
JB: I’ve had success in both cash and live tournaments, I just happen to be a lot better at tournaments. When you’re talking about $10,000 buy-ins, I find that tournament players are much weaker than cash game players at the same level.
TD: I think live tournaments are a very good spot for any fairly competent poker player, because there are a lot of people who don’t play well. Online most Mondays to Saturdays you can make a lot more in cash games. There are plenty of arguments for playing tournaments instead – I think you keep your sanity more and it’s more fun winning tournaments than winning cash games, although losing both of them sucks.
PP: We all know what we should look out for during live play, but how do you get a read on players online?
SM: Unless it’s a player you’ve been playing with for years and you know how they play and their habits, then it’s more about knowing what people are capable of doing, like how they play certain hands. If you take a note on a hand they played terribly in a previous tourney that reads, ‘This guy’s terrible, he goes all-in when he has nothing,’ it can be misleading.
In general, I don’t keep notes. Most of mine are mental, but if someone does something totally absurd consistently then I’ll write a note. Generally it’s not about how they play, it’s what their range is, because people play differently every day.
PP: If you’ve just sat down in a massive field at a big tourney, what are you focusing on?
SM: I’m going to be looking at their betting patterns and how they’ve been reacting to me on the table. You can pick up a lot of things from the way that people click. Sometimes I know just from the timing that a push was out of frustration, while other times I know it’s strength by the timing and clicks. There are lots of different things, but on the whole I really don’t think it’s profitable to profile online.
Live, I want to know as much information as I can about a player. Everything matters – if they have a family, what they do for a living – everything translates into a specific style on the poker table based on regular things, like their personality, but online it’s very misleading.
PP: Early on in a multi-table tournament, do you worry about building up your chip stack?
SM: I like building up big stacks at the beginning only because people pay me off so much, as everyone wants to outplay me. It’s kind of like the Phil Hellmuth effect. Phil isn’t as good as he is just because he is, it’s because people want to outplay him and they want to go home and tell people they outplayed Phil Hellmuth. Most of the time it’s not going to happen, they’re just going to bust out of the tourney. It’s so much easier to win if you’re a known player.
PP: Now you’re all able to play live universally, it seems to be what you’re all concentrating on…
TD: I’m only playing live tourneys. I’d rather poke a bunch of pins into my eyes than play live cash. It’s just so miserable and slow.
JB: Same here, it’s just so dull.
TD: I want to win a tournament, so I’ll play live tourneys.
JB: Compared to the high stakes players that Tom plays against online, the players in these tournaments are a joke.
SM: You’ve got to look at a guy and ask yourself, ‘Is this guy really that bad?’
SM: It’s hard – you play so many hands with good players, you’re just not sure that the guy sitting in front of you is terrible enough to make a certain play. My biggest pet peeve at the tables is when people try to teach bad players how to play. They’re like, ‘Whoah, you’re raising nine times the big blind, that’s a big raise. Why would you do that?’ Eventually they learn.
PP: What’s your prediction for the future of online poker?
JB: It’s going to get worse before it gets better in terms of legislation, mostly because of the Republican Party. Eventually, I think pretty much everyone in the world will be able to play online poker.
TD: China! China! China!
JB: Yeah, that’s true. We’re going to have to adjust our sleep time to Chinese schedules so we can play all the online fish.
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