Is it time Ben Grundy was front page news? PokerPlayer finds out
The Brits are dominating poker right now. Everyone knows it. From Sam Trickett in Macau to Jake Cody in Vegas, the past few years have seen a new British Empire spread with ruthless efficiency. But that’s not where the story ends. Far away from the spotlight one Brit has been quietly amassing a bankroll some of our newest stars can only dream of.
Behind the doors of his west London home, Ben Grundy has been casually smashing up the online games in 2012. And it’s time for Britain’s most unassuming star to step back into the spotlight.
From the ongoing debate over his mind-boggling graphs, to his daily battles with poker’s high-stakes all-stars, the youthful 34-year-old has crept into poker’s headlines more and more over the last year.
Finally, Grundy is making noise. A lot of noise. At the start of 2012, he set a personal goal of reaching $1 million profit for the year. Three months in and the goalposts have moved. Grundy’s already made a staggering $1.2m grinding the high-stakes and it’s a figure that’s come as a surprise to many, not least him. ‘It’s the most I’ve ever won in eight weeks,’ he tells me. ‘Back in 2008, I won $3m for the year but I was banking $2-300k each month consistently. I’ve won $500k in the last week alone. It’s completely unsustainable… but I was saying that two weeks ago.’
As he walks round his newly designed pad in West London, Grundy is surprisingly honest about his game. ‘I just want to keep playing and running good,’ he says modestly. ‘I think my dollar per hand this year is among the biggest winners on PokerStars and I’m only second to ‘RaiseOnce’ (rumoured to be Phil Ivey). I just want to keep that up.’
What singles Grundy out in the high-stakes player pool, is that he’s willing to take on all comers. He’s ‘never had to pick and choose’ because no one’s ever been good enough to beat him consistently. And to prove his point, the Milky Bar Kid has been sparring with some of poker’s biggest heavyweights in recent months.
‘I never played on PokerStars till the end of last year,’ he says between sips of his drink. ‘I’ve always played European sites but people just kept sitting out to me and I’d only get action from the regs. But If I look on PokerStars now at the heads-up $50/$100 tables, there are about 10 people there and I guess they would all sit out to me. I don’t mind.
‘It’s fair enough if they don’t want to play me. The only heads-up matches I’ve had recently have been against Isildur1 and Phil Galfond. That’s the only kind of action I get.’
Running Scared
In many ways Grundy is a nod to the poker pros of old, which is a difficult concept to grasp when it looks like he still hasn’t started shaving. He never uses a HUD, doesn’t believe in running scared from poker’s young-guns and there’s no flashiness, no one-off spin-ups, just year-after-year of consistency at the game’s toughest PLO stakes.
‘I am old school,’ he concedes. ‘But Ivey’s the biggest winner online and I doubt he’s sitting there with loads of software running. He’s just playing poker which is what I do. I don’t use a HUD other than to track my results, so I don’t spend time looking at players’ tendencies, I don’t worry about any of that. I just play and seem to do well so why change things? I don’t agree with these programmes, you should be playing poker not the programme. I’d love sites to stop them.’
It’s a philosophy that’s made him rich. I ask him what he thinks he’s actually up in his lifetime from online poker. ‘$10m’ he says after a quick mental calculation. ‘Yep, about $10m.’ That figure puts him behind only Phil Ivey and Patrik Antonius as poker’s all-time online money winner. Strange then, given his years at the top, that Grundy’s profits are so often the cause for feverish debate.
Up until recently he’s never played on ‘tracked American sites’ and forumites have been quick to accuse Grundy of doctoring his profits. In September 2011, it annoyed him so much that he issued a $50k bounty to anyone who could prove he hadn’t won ‘at least $5m’ online. He’s still waiting for someone to accept the challenge. And the forums have gone a little quiet since.
‘I blogged for years and my graphs just were what they were,’ he says. ‘I used them to track how I was doing and when you blog you want interesting material, so I’d put up a graph. Sometimes there are questions on TwoPlusTwo so I just offered the bet and no one’s taken it. I’ve gathered quite a lot of proof just in case anyone took me up, and I’ve got a letter from Betfair with my results from four or five years that were over $4m on that site alone.’
You might think the forumites bother Grundy. ‘Not really,’ he adds. ‘I just think they’re stupid.’
Milkybar Whizz
All this talk of head-spinning graphs, consistency and a ‘take on all-comers’ mantra does nothing to dampen the idea of Grundy being the best. But Grundy’s too humble to say he’s number one. Well, not yet anyway. ‘I don’t see myself that way but I’d definitely say I’m in that pool of players,’ he admits after a brief hesitation. ‘I’ve been around for eight years playing $25/$50 or higher and I’ve always won. But just because you play bigger
doesn’t necessarily mean you’re the best.’
Arguably, the one thing stopping Grundy from reaching superstar status is his live tournament record. His live earnings are uncharacteristically small ($600k) and his last live cash was way back in June 2010. ‘Money-wise, it’s minus EV for me to go to tournaments,’ he adds. ‘If I had an edge in hold’em tournaments when I first started, that’s been taken away by the number of good players there are now. If you want to chase the fame and sponsorship you grind the tournament circuit. But I don’t need either that much.’
That’s not to say Grundy is swimming in cash Scrooge McDuck style. At the start of the year, Grundy didn’t have enough cash to play $50/$100 because he’d spent so much renovating his aforementioned house. And although he admits his old staking deal with Badbeat was ‘brilliant’, he wanted to play higher. Step forward a new deal with SharkStaking.com.
‘If I lost 200k of my own money now, I’d be so tilted to log into my bank account and see it missing. But when I’m backed it doesn’t hit that spot so much. If I lose, I just lose their money and go back into makeup. If I win, I just get money as usual.’
Grundy says there is something special about the swings and the elation you feel when you’re on a run like his, where you’re ‘buzzing’ because you never thought it would happen, ‘but you’ve got to stay level-headed and not get too cocky’. ‘You’re not going to win every time you sit down,’ he adds. ‘If you look at someone like Galfond, He was down $700k at the start of the year, he took a break and now he’s won $1.7m. You’ve just got to make sure the downswing isn’t anywhere as big as the upswing.’
Friends Like These
Unlike Galfond, whose recent blogs and interviews paint the picture of a man at times struggling to balance poker with real life, Grundy doesn’t give off that impression. He’s easy going, likes a drink, ‘chilling with friends’ and is known for blowing the ‘odd $50k’ in drunken nights at the tables, as you do.
‘I’ve probably done $70k or £80k playing drunk once,’ he tells me through gritted teeth. ‘It’s not playing bad, just drunk tilting. If you lose that much when you’re sober it’s bad enough, but when you’re drunk you just think oh my god, what did I just do? Catch me at two in the morning, that’s a good time to play me.’
One part of Grundy’s private life he seems especially pleased with is his new West London home (rumoured to cost over £2m). It’s the house that PLO built, the fruits of hour upon hour of high-stakes labour. And on a sunny spring afternoon, he’s clearly proud of his efforts. ‘I literally chose every single fixture and fitting,’ he beams. ‘It took months and months. I’ve got a cool office set-up with two screens and a television. I’ve got speakers in every wall. Speakers in the garden. Someone came over and said my garden was like a Miami nightclub with all these lights changing at the switch of a button. It’s pretty cool.’
But with the property finished, a great new staking deal and his best upswing of all time what’s next for Ben Grundy? ‘I’ll quit when I can’t win,’ he says. It’s a simple response to a simple question. Dig a little deeper, though, and a plan emerges. Apparently Grundy’s a keen cook, his new kitchen is lined with recipe books, and when not crushing the PLO online, he’s a dab hand with a pot and pan.
‘I’ve done chefs courses and I want to open a restaurant. I’ve got 50 cook books and if I fancy a good dinner I grab one off the shelf and try the recipe. It’s completely relaxing and I’ve got time to do it. If you’ve got a job, making a complex recipe can be a pain in the arse. But I can go out, get the ingredients and spend some time away from the tables.’
Milk It
Grundy’s now in full flow, telling me everything from how his nickname came about – his grandparents entered into a Milky Bar casting as a ‘ridiculously blueeyed, blonde-haired nine-year-old’ – to how he started began playing poker by the time he was 12. Back in 1990, his best friend was British Main Event champ Mansour Matloubi’s son, and after watching him casually waltz through the front door with a $1m WSOP cheque, Grundy knew poker was a way of getting that ‘doss job’ he’d always dreamed of.
‘I was playing with a World Champion when I was 11 or 12,’ he says, almost sheepishly. ‘By my teens I was a degenerate gambler on the fruit machines. And once university started I began playing PLO at casinos in Cardiff and went from there. It was a lot of fun.’ To be fair, his life still seems to be pretty good fun. His schedule is hardly packed, and it’s easy to see poker eventually dropping out altogether. ‘I only like to play for an hour or two a day. When I played Galfond recently, I only played for a few hours and I could feel my concentration going towards the end.
‘I’m not someone like Isildur1 who can play for 14 hours straight. If you look at the amount of hands I’ve played compared with everyone else it’s probably about half or a third in 2012.’
Listening to Grundy talk about ‘someone like Isildur1’ gives the impression that he thinks he’s not got what it takes to cut it with poker’s young guns any more. Like Daniel Negreanu and his Kid Poker nickname, the Milky Bar Kid seems a little outdated given Grundy’s mature, propertyloving lifestyle.
‘I’m a bit old now to be the Kid,’ he laughs. ‘I’m ancient now. But apart from not being able to play eight tables, I don’t feel it. Although any more than three heads-up tables at a time and I forget who raised preflop. Those people who can play 12 tables for 12 hours and still make a huge profit are ridiculous’.
‘I’m sure they haven’t got the same graphs as you,’ I joke. ‘Yeah,’ he responds. ‘But theirs might be real…’ Anyone want to bet on that?
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