Allen Cunningham

It’s the late 1990s and Daniel Negreanu is playing a ring game in Las Vegas. He gets up from the table to talk to a friend who’s railing the game. His buddy asks Daniel who he thinks is the best player in the game. Negreanu points at a young Allen Cunningham and whispers to his friend, ‘He’s got the talent to be the best in the world.’ Ten years, five bracelets and over $ 10m in tournament cashes later, and he’s pretty much proved it…

College poker

‘I went through my first year at university with no problems. Over the summer break I began to play a lot in some of the Indian reservation casinos near my home and sort of got into it.

During my second year at UCLA I began to play in some of the Los Angeles cardrooms, even to the detriment of my classes. About six to eight months after I first started playing I really began to figure the game out.

In 1996 I dropped out of university at the end of my second year to play poker. Back then, of course, poker wasn’t as big as it is today. It was definitely a risk to go full-time. I wouldn’t say it was the best decision I ever made but I made enough to get by. It’s lucky that it’s turned out as it has. If I had to do it over again I would get my degree first. I actually tried to go back to school around 2002 but then the poker boom happened.’

Moving up

‘The clubs I began playing in did have some good players who I tried to learn from. But most of my learning was done on my own, thinking about the game and analysing hands. I also read every poker book available at the time – they helped open my mind to different ways of thinking about the game.

I would take some shots at larger games, perhaps a bit ahead of where my bankroll was. That’s a strategy a lot of winning players take. If they’ve been winning for a while at their current level they take a shot or two and if they win they continue at the new level.’

The pro’s pro

‘Being considered a good player by my peers is good for the ego, but really the only opinion I care about is my own. I’m often somewhat hard on myself and I’m not sure I agree with whoever made the assessment that I’m one of the very best. I’m probably up there in terms of no-limit Hold’em tournaments, but as far as limit games and live cash games go, there’s definitely a group of players that I’m one tier below.

It’s hard to say what my best game is. I feel like I play almost all poker games really well, although if I had to choose it’d be no-limit Hold’em tournaments. I learned all poker games at around the same time – I was never a specialist. Within my first year of poker I played limit Hold’em, Stud, Stud Hi/Lo and Omaha Hi/Lo almost equally well. It wasn’t until my second year of playing that I played no-limit Hold’em.

Recently online I’ve been playing limit Omaha Hi/Lo and H.O.R.S.E. cash games. In the beginning I mostly played the $ 25/$ 50 and $ 50/$ 100 no-limit Hold’em games and some pot-limit Omaha. Depending on where the best games are I can play anything.’

World Series

‘Ever since I started playing, poker players have talked about WSOP bracelets as a measure of how good a player is, so bracelets are important. But it’s still a very arbitrary way of deciding how good a player is. There are lots of other tournaments and a lot of other ways to make money at poker, but bracelets are something that everyone recognises, so it’s nice to win a few.

The Main Event of the World Series is certainly my favourite tournament of the year to play in. The atmosphere is really exciting and it’s fantastic to go deep in it. It has the best value as well.

Reaching the final table of the Main Event in 2006 was both my biggest disappointment and biggest success [Cunningham finished fourth]. It’s my biggest cash and I felt better about making it so far in that tournament than winning any other. However, if it wasn’t quite a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, it was certainly a once-in-a-long shot at winning the Main Event. There’s lots of second-guessing going on about what could have been.’

Cash games

‘In terms of live poker it’s strange because I’m sure I’m known as a tournament player. And in the last couple of years I’ve probably only played 25 days of live cash a year, if that. Generally, though, throughout my career I’ve mostly been a live cash game player, with some tournaments as well.

I’ve never been invited to play on High Stakes Poker, but I’d have been happy to play from the beginning. I have played in some of the other big televised games and I’ve played a few times in Bobby’s Room, but not that often. Against the regular line-up I just don’t see any edge so I only jump in if it looks juicy. And even then I have some reserve, because if you’re only going to play a game that big once in a while and you book a loss, it’ll take forever to get it back at your regular level.’