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"My real luck was that I got dealt a pretty good number of good hands, and I didn't get unlucky."
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"I Won the World Series of Poker"
$5 million jackpotter Greg Raymer on learning to play, improving your game and ... Honda or Ferrarri?
By Dan Jewel
He doesn't have a cool last name, like last year's champ, Chris Moneymaker. But Greg Raymer, a 39-year-old patent lawyer from Stonington, Connecticut, doesn't need one. After winning a spot in the 35th annual World Series of Poker (now airing on ESPN) on PokerStars.com, he outplayed 2,575 other players at Binion's Horseshoe in Las Vegas to take home the $5 million jackpot--double last year's prize.
Raymer took a break from his hectic last week at Pfizer--yes, he's quitting his job--to talk to CGTV.com.
Congratulations. So, are you turning pro?
Well, I'm working out a deal for the next 12 months with PokerStars.com. They'll pay me a salary, covering all the costs of travel and paying the entry fee into all the major tournaments. Meanwhile, I wear their shirts and mention them in interviews. If I win any money in the tournaments, I get to keep it. I can win, but only they can lose.
What happens when the year's over?
If I continue to do well and can average $300 an hour playing poker, I'll stick to poker, because it's a lot more fun. But if it stops being fun or I'm back to something more realistic, like $50 to $100 an hour, then I'll probably go back to being a patent attorney.
When you won the World Series, the news reports called you an online player and made it sound as though you had never played live poker before.
Right, because that makes a better story. But I've played probably 500 live tournaments. And this is my third year in a row playing in the championship. I only started playing online four or five years ago.
How often do you play online vs. live?
I spend more hours online. Even though I live six miles from Foxwoods, the level of convenience is huge. When I get up in the morning, and I want to play for 20 minutes, I can do it. Or at night, after I put my daughter to bed, if I have to check e-mail, I can play a little poker at the same time.
When did you first learn to play?
I remember playing nickel-dime-quarter poker with my fraternity brothers in college. We were all terrible poker players, to put it mildly. Then I got into blackjack. An aunt gave me a book on card counting, so I started doing that at Indian casinos when I went to the University of Minnesota Law School. But when I got my first lawyer job in Chicago, the riverboat blackjack games were terrible, and there was a charity casino but their betting limit was $10, and you can't make money counting cards with a $10 bet. But they had a poker game I played once for fun, and I thought, "Let's see if I can't make some extra money doing this.'" So I bought poker books and educated myself and found RGP, a poker discussion group on the Internet, and started to learn how to play poker a little more intelligently.
A few years later I moved to San Diego, and in many cities in California, it's perfectly legal to have public poker rooms. I was still playing $3 and $6 poker. but I started working up to $20-$40, where you can win or lose a couple thousand dollars a night. Then I went in-house with Pfizer about five ago and started playing at Foxwoods. I've worked my way up to the point where I'm playing $75-$150 or $150-$300 games.
When did you first win a decent amount of money at it?
Back in San Diego, when I was still playing $3 and $6, they also had a pot limit hold 'em game at this casino. Pot limit means you can bet or raise however much money is in the pot. This was a game where you could buy in for as little as $100. I was playing for the second or third time, and I won around $2,500. It was a Saturday night, so I came home, woke up my wife and sprinkled $100 bills over her on the bed. It was quite a while before I ever won more than that again.
How have you improved your game in the last few years?
When I took up poker seriously, I immediately became good at learning the odds and statistics of the game--what I refer to as the data-analysis portion. In poker, coming up with the right decision based on a given set of data is something anyone can learn to do with a high degree of accuracy. But the other part of the game is data gathering. That's what separates someone who can play at the lower limits and make a small profit from a high-stakes pro. And that's the psychology--reading tells and body language and demeanor. That's what I've really been working on more than anything else the last five years or so.
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