Danger risk do Lang again, as relaxed Psalms. Jen, it's hard to know this will be good Hello, and welcome to episode 387 of the thinking poker podcast from Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Carlos Welch.
And from Owings Mills, Maryland, I'm Andrew Brokos, we are going to be joined shortly by Kevin rabbit Chow, who is in Vancouver, maybe somewhere in Canada. Anyway, Kevin is a professional poker player and coach has played, I think, for a long time was with a heads up cash specialist. And we talked to him a fair bit about transitioning into tournaments, which are kind of his focus now. And in particular, he has a course which I think will be available by the time this airs, maybe it's already they'll believe in as we're recording this on run at once, which is called the game plan and is kind of as much about like, studying poker. Again, this is something we'll talk to him about in the interview. So I don't want to undersell it. But he is someone who has really thought systematically about how to how to study poker and like, what's what's most worth paying attention to? And how can you translate your work into actionable things that at the table? Do you feel like that's describing reasonably well, what he what he talked about?
Yeah, he's talked about it, you know, from a sense of learning it and also from, you know, teaching it as like, he's not a traditional teacher, but you'll hear us discuss that he has done some coaching outside of poker that kind of like, you know, informed his ability to teach in a systematic way. So whether you're learning poker or teaching it, he's he does a good job of breaking it down into different concepts that are easier to understand.
Yeah, you know, we've had a lot of people who have come like out of the chess world into poker, we've had bridge players backgammon players Magic, the Gathering players, baseball players who have gotten into poker, Kevin, I think is our first Ultimate Frisbee player. Coming into the into the poker world.
I imagine there's several poker players who play ultimate frisbee seems like that will have like some overlap there. But, yeah, as far as someone who's doing it professionally, or at least did it professionally at some point. He is probably going to be unique in that.
And I don't know if he was he was he's literally like getting paid to do it. But he is still like coaching a an ultimate Frisbee team.
Yeah, yeah, at least serious, if not professional, like, more serious than like the average poker player, just you know, they probably get together. I know, there's a group of poker players they get together and like, play soccer in the World Series every year. So there's probably a group that does like Ultimate Frisbee lay that frisbee like that, but not as serious as Kevin.
Yeah, exactly. So I think that's a both a very fun interview, and is a lot of strategy content. We talk about how to work with solvers. And again, really how to, like get the most out of doing that. So not not just the mechanics of, you know, which buttons do click or something like that. But how do you really do meaningful work and make the most of the time that you put into your study, whether it's with a solver, or with anything else?
Yes. And according to his LinkedIn, I think he's from Ontario.
Okay. So yeah, there's a lot of strategy in our conversation with Kevin. So we're not going to do a separate strategy segment. Now, I do want to make sure that we remind you or let you know about thinking poker daily, which is where you can get lots of strategy from the two of us, you get a 10 to 15 minute strategy segment every day of the week from the two of us if you sign up at patreon.com/thinking Poker daily. And I guess I just want to emphasize here how fun these are like you and I, Carlos, we just recorded a bunch of these before we recorded this. And I think the I feel very good about the quality of the strategy content that's in there. But we also just have a ton of fun recording these things. I think if you if you give this a chance, I think you're going to really enjoy listening to it.
Yeah, I definitely agree. It's easy to give it a chance you can sign up for as little as $5 and it's not a long term commitment. You can just listen For one month for $5, and be done with it and just as a teaser, we recorded an episode today about the meaning of poker life. So if that's something that you will be interested in hearing Andrew and I discuss, I highly recommend that if I say so myself as a listener, I will be interested to hear Andrews take on that. So yeah, definitely check that out.
You can also get other stuff from us at Nick cast.com. And it cas t.com. We've got some older stuff like premium podcasts that we or I have done with Nate. And then also some strategy videos and more recent things that Carlos and I have done together. Anything else that you want to plug Carlos, before we bring Kevin?
I will see you can check out other products of mine with Alex Fitzgerald at poker hairbrush.com, sign up for the newsletter there. And I'm sure we'll probably send you an email about a discount coming up pretty soon. So I will say this though, you know, if I you know, though mine pat myself on the back every now and then. This is the first time we've recorded since I won my surgery.
Oh, that's right. Yeah. Congratulations.
Thank you. Thank you. So I want to circa ring and online tournament for 16k. And then the next day, I got fifth in up bracelet event. This was a 1k six max for 20k. So it's been a pretty good September for me. So if you'd like to learn more about how I'm getting deep in these WSOP events, you can check out poker hairbrush.com, sign up for Alex's newsletter, and get a discount on how to win an online bracelet. I did it last year. I definitely did it again this year.
Yeah, very cool. I'm sorry. I made you pat your back on that that was coasting on my back.
I don't mind it.
All right. Well, thank you everyone for listening. And please enjoy our interview with Kevin rabbit Joe.
Some some strong
Kevin rabbit Chow, thank you for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
So you know, I know you're kind of on the radar right now. Because you've got this this new course at run at once, which we'll talk about in a second. But you know, let's catch up first on just kind of who you are. In the poker world, you know how to do get get started in poker and get better at poker and that kind of thing?
Yeah, of course. So, I've been playing for about 15 years. Most of that professionally, although the first four years were in college. So I guess I got started kind of in the, in the era where the Two Plus Two forums were really big. I attribute a lot of my like early progress to the Two Plus Two forums. And I was playing mostly heads up cash online. Once I started taking the game seriously, and had moved my way pretty high up the stakes, I want to say like pretty secure playing mid stakes online in like 2010 and then leading into Black Friday. I lost a big chunk of my bankroll right around the time I was graduating university and in Chicago and and I moved up to Toronto to continue pursuing professional poker.
Do you mean less your bankroll like, like lost it playing to other people or lost it to full tilt and
No, no to the whole, like full tilt and PokerStars it was a combination of things for sure, the way the way I've told that story in the past is basically like, I had three quarters of my bankroll seized and then lost the rest of it at the World Series that summer. So that and that's like, pretty accurate, although, of course, like PokerStars paid out pretty quickly. And I believe a lot of that money was just part of what I use to fund my World Series that year. It was that was like, perhaps the most financially irresponsible decision that I made in my career was like still playing a full World Series schedule when I just had most of my bankroll, like seized by the government, essentially.
And you got that back eventually the the filter of money.
Yeah. When was that? 2014 20 years? It was two plus years after Black Friday. Yeah. And I think there was a, a rebate from absolute poker as well. Not long after that. This these were literally like, like 95% of my bankroll was spread between those sites. I played a little bit on other sites, but I just didn't, didn't have nearly as much there. So yeah, but but by that time, I had kind of like I spent probably the first two years that I lived in Toronto, just He's playing heads up cash online, like non stop, I got a backing deal so that I could start right away. And then I got out of that backing deal within the first year. And then just started like selling action to friends and move my way up to high stakes by the probably before Full Tilt refunded our bank rolls. I don't remember that having like a huge impact at that, at that point.
I'm curious, you know, I know that it used to be the mean, there used to be a pretty robust, high stakes heads up market, you know, or you get to sort of play whatever stakes you wanted and find people to play against you. My my guess and it's not something that I paid close attention to, is that I would expect that to get more efficient over time where like, there's only so many people who are looking to play, you know, high stakes heads up games, and like, for the most part, you know, which one of you is better than which one of you and there's not a lot of reason for you to like, butt heads with each other? Like, what is the what is the market or the economy look like there?
Yeah, it's it's not a format that I really play. A lot of now I was invited to play the legend showdown with one run at once poker was was operating worldwide. A couple of years ago, that was like a fun format for heads up no limit, to continue. Now, but but for the most part, what I understand like some of my old students still play heads up cash. And I believe it's really sparse, right. So it's, it's the type of thing where a concentration of talent at the top are the only people who sit any of the networks and like a lot of the networks just don't even offer the the format anymore. Or like PokerStars has long been adopted the Zoom format, which which helped alleviate some of the predatory natures of the heads up format. But a lot of sites just don't, they just barely run the game. And there's like a handful of players who care to sit and try to find a match. But a lot of the heads up action now is privately arranged, heavily promoted, you know, the, the Doug Polk first annual McGraw new type of matches, but but perhaps, you know, smaller on a smaller scale a little more private. Those, those are the majority of the matches that I hear about.
I was just gonna say on the the zoom thing or my understanding, and you can correct me if this is wrong, but it might not be obvious to some people, essentially, what's happening there is there's a pool of people who are saying, like, I'm willing to play 510 Heads up or whatever, I guess is bigger than that. And obviously, you don't know any given hand could be against any person in that pool. So it's not like you're just sitting down and then someone has to be willing to challenge Kevin Ravenel, or else there's no match that happens.
Exactly, I actually thought it was a it was a great move at the time. I want to say it was 2015 or so that that PokerStars rolled that out in the in the heads up format anyways. And I thought it was really like it, it seemed really smart. Because the previous lobby system was kind of this like waiting room where however many people who want to wait, just wait. And then you're, you know, you're hoping to get lucky and have a live one, you know, just have a live one hop in the seat. But when that happens, like it's yours, and you play and you play the only match that's happening on the whole network and like nothing else happens. Zoom was really action generating for a while there, because anytime someone logged on, like someone recreational logged on and wanted to play 1020 No limit. There's like 20 people whose attention that grabs and all of a sudden, we've got a huge game going right. And that game might continue after they leave, or it might encourage other people to jump in, might encourage two or three other recreational to jump in. And all of a sudden, there's like quite a good economy. But that that didn't really last. I don't believe that runs any significant volume these days.
Do you know what happened there? Like why why did that not prove to be a viable format? Or do you have thoughts on that?
I guess I would say two things happened. One is that, like the volume of recreational interest in that format declined over time as as the sites offered more like action generating formats, right. So they, you know, heads up used to be fun, especially heads up sitting goes used to be fun for recreational is I think because they were looking for like a quick way to double their money or a quick way to try and like steal a big blind, you would you would get a ton of a recreational like way back, let's say playing 2550 Heads up, you would get a ton of action where someone sits and they're only intending to play one hand, because they really need $50 They're literally just trying to win the first hand by whatever means necessary. And if they lose that hand, they're gone. Right? And if they win that hand, they're gone. So it's actually like it was it was pretty well known strategy among heads up regulars that like if someone sits down and seems to be trying really hard to win the first hand like they they are. That's exactly what's happening. So I think now you've got spin and goes right like prize pool type things. You've got hyper turbo formats everywhere you've got you've got a lot of other options for that that aren't as expensive. You've got a lot of ways to win a quick 50 bucks in on PokerStars these days. So I think that contributed to the lack of interest in heads up I think the other part is that the what you might call like, second tier regulars, or like third tier regulars who were trying to join in for the battle, started to recognize their disadvantage in the format. The heads of specialists, I think, performed quite well in comparison to let's say, like the six Max regulars or the I don't know, PLO heads up players or something, who would spot a game running and think, Oh, I could, I could jump in there. Maybe I could be profitable in this game. And like, over time, they realize, oh, no, I'm not. So they just stopped joining.
I would guess there's also this kind of, from my experience of more recreational players in like a live tournament setting. But I know that it's like very unpopular when a table breaks, like people find that very disorienting. And so I think, you know, a heads up obviously, like a zoom format, where you're just like playing a different player every time I think for you. Obviously, for someone like yourself who's very like solver studied, it's, I mean, no matter who you're playing against, but you're also like, you have a strong baseline where like, I know what I'm going to do here in the absence of some some read on this player. And I think for more just someone who was actually trying to like play a full heads up match as a more recreational player, they, they're much more like play the player sort of mindset. So when they're just like, matched up against some random person, and then it's like, some different person the next hand, I think that's like, much more disorienting for them than it would be for you.
Yeah, for sure, it was disorienting. In general, at first, like getting getting used to playing zoom was kind of strange, I'm sure, I'm sure players, like even in sixth Max experienced this, you know, going from playing against the same five players to a pool of 100 is very different. And it makes you lazy, and it could turn on that autopilot a lot more often. And it just takes a lot more focused effort to to make unique decisions in whatever hand it is you're playing, and not just like turn off your brain and and keep clicking, because the game is moving so fast. That's kind of what it's designed to do. Right? The game format is literally designed to like speed up play and have as many hands happen as quickly as possible. So that more rate can be generated. So it's it's a it's a challenge for sure. Even for the better specialists, I think.
So the transition into playing MTTs for you Was that something you want to do anyway? Or was that kind of driven by the high stakes heads up action drying up?
Definitely. The action drying up was was a contributing factor I was I was kind of like halfway out the door on on poker in general, because of the action starting to dry up and in combination with just kind of like my own. I don't know, maybe lack of interest in the format or like things starting to feel repetitive. I suppose it was probably burnout and in retrospect, but tournaments were not really like a plan of mine. While I was playing heads up, I kind of dabbled in like six Max games online, I dabbled in those app games when they started to grow. I played live a little more often than I used to. I just wasn't really sure what I was going to do. And once I started seeing like the the scale and the excitement that was happening in life tournament poker, that really appealed to me. And then when live tournament poker shut down for COVID, then, like moving online really appealed to me to play online tournaments a lot. So it just kind of happened organically. as I as I tried to find like my, my new place in poker.
So your big I think even relative to like other very successful poker players here big it seems like on the kind of preparation and purposeful learning, when you decided you wanted to focus on MTTs. How did you I assume you set out sort of like a game plan or a study plan for yourself of how to go about preparing for them. And I'm curious what that looked like.
Yeah, I did it. It didn't all come together at once. I would say that like my, my emphasis on this type of preparation or what you're calling purposeful learning, like that's, that's come together in more recent times, as I've started to figure out like what it is that I'm good at. But the process for me when I first started getting into MTTs, like the first thing I did was I just bought, like a fair bit of material that I thought would help get me up to speed quickly. Because my my plan came together quickly to focus on MTT. So I bought like the razor edge course I think it was relatively new at the time that I was getting started. I bought like HRC. And like other tools that are kind of ICM specific that I had no need for previously. And I just sort of dove into like studying that sort of material. I think what I realized pretty quickly was that the biggest differences were going to be in preflop play. And this was just where I was seeing like the majority of my mistakes happening. So I started to like map out for myself, the preflop weaknesses that I wanted to focus on. So this is like I guess kind of my intentional approach was that I'm I was taking note like as I played tournaments as I kind of went in and failed pretty frequently. I was taking note of like all the things that I knew I wasn't like happy with my performance that right so not like my results but just my decision process was just so clearly wrong in a lot To preflop areas. So if I could like keep track of what it is that I need to learn preflop, then all I had to do was hop over to the course and like emphasize the preflop section, there's probably a good chunk of the course that I never even opened, because it wasn't really an area that I felt was lacking in my game, you know, some stuff was going to translate quite naturally from heads up, like blind versus blind or, or DeepStack, you know, single raised pots, or DeepStack, three bet pots, I just didn't really need to review that stuff in a tournament setting. But like shallow preflop, you know, the stuff that was way different, I just hammered as much information as I could in those areas.
So this is probably a good time to talk some about what I guess the development of the material that ultimately goes into this course, which is called the game plan. Yeah, that's right. So it sounds like this is this is you developing the material that you're sort of innovating for yourself, the material that ultimately goes into the course, do you want to talk a little bit about what that is?
Yeah, for sure. So the the kind of like overall process that I go through in the course is is very much parallel to the process that I took when I was preparing for the legend showdown. So that was a heads up, like tournament, I guess, tournament format, cash format hybrid. That happened on run at once poker in August 2020, I believe. And as I was kind of just describing, I didn't really play that much heads up in the years prior, like the couple of years prior to that 2018 I wasn't playing so much poker 2019, I was playing like all live tournaments. So I really wanted to be intentional about developing a game plan, it's kind of tongue in cheek, but for, for what it is that I was going to like prepare for leading into a big heads up match. Knowing that I was gonna be up against like a variety of players, some who were probably better than me at the time, because they were still playing heads up all the time, some of which I was going to be stronger than because they weren't specialists in the format. So I tried to come up with like, a specific process for what needed to be improved, and how I was going to improve it. And then just like write out the strategy. On paper, I had these like, very poorly formatted notepad documents that just outline like what my preflop strategy was, and what my flop strategy was on different board textures. And so what I started to realize was that I was I was building out like a very useful framework for, for learning the game or for getting better at the game. And later on, as I was working with a lot of private students, and kind of feeding them that process, I realized, like, oh, this, this process could be built into templates, it could be packaged into a course, like this is probably the most beneficial thing that I could cover up provide on a trading platform to a wider audience. Because so many people who approached me for private coaching, we're basically just asking for exactly this. And I don't need to walk them through, you know, the same thing every single time. Right? So it's, it's this very clear system of like evaluation, improvement, and game planning that I think a lot of even like very serious poker players don't bother to put down on paper.
Can you say a little bit more about what each of those three things is? I mean, obviously, I know, like broad strokes, but you know what? It sounds like? Those are those are pretty core steps.
Yeah, yeah, of course. So evaluation is is hard as an individual, I think so. A lot of times, like, let's, let's say, I'm doing a consultation call with a new student, and I'm just asking them like, what do you want to get better at? What do you you know, what are your goals? What are you working on? A lot of people have an idea of what it is they need to get better at. But they don't know like, how important each thing is, or they might have like 20 things. And it's just unrealistic to work on all of them simultaneously. So the evaluation section of the course tries to quantify this in some way. So it's like a starts with a big survey, that the user goes through and checks off, you know, preflop, flop, Turn River, mental game, live presents, like psychology, theoretical knowledge, all of this kind of stuff, you're rating yourself, you're forced to give your yourself a rating relative to all the other factors. And they're labeled by importance. So they're labeled, you know, these are fundamental skills. These are these are intermediate skills, these are advanced skills. So what you come away with after going through that section is like a roadmap that says, here's like, the most important things that you don't think you're very good at, here's the here's the not so important things that you don't think you're very good at. And then you convert those into some kind of plan of attack. So that's evaluation moving its way into improvement and an improvement is kind of the, the, the way that section of the course developed. Started as me going through the mistakes that I see people using with like various tools to get better. You know, imagine something a program like Pio solver which is very ubiquitous with With poker study, and I think a lot of people just buy it because they think that's what they're supposed to do. But they don't really know how to like take advantage of it, they don't really know how it's going to help their game, specifically. So I thought this was a big problem that I was seeing in my students. So I kind of just went through the process of explaining, like, here's what this tool is good at. And, and here's how I use it. And here's how you can kind of make it effective for whatever the thing is that that you identified in the evaluation, I tried to do that with like, all the major types of study tools, poker content, like preflop, solvers, range viewers, you even PokerTracker like, like a regular database tool, because that's, that's something that I use a lot for, for self evaluation, as well. So I'm realizing I'm going on quite quite a lot on the detail of, of the format. But just quickly, like the last section that I mentioned, the game planning like that's just what I was talking about doing for, for legend showdown. So that's just like, taking all the things that I think I'm trying to accomplish at the table, and like putting them in writing, putting them in some sort of format that says, okay, when I'm, when I'm playing flops, this is my strategy. This is what it looks like, this is the shape of my strategy. Because I think that having visibility over that, it's a big step in the direction towards knowing like how to get better and tracking your, your progress. And also just like playing better in practice, like executing better.
Yeah, I don't know that I ever, I certainly was not doing it to that degree. But I did used to enjoy playing heads up like pre pre Black Friday, and heads up tournaments, in particular, because people couldn't just quit, you know, you didn't have the same problem of just like, once it becomes apparent that you're better than someone, I actually, I used to factor that into my decisions to some degree of like, if, like, if you make this this really thin value bet on the river, they might just quit. And this isn't like is the end of that, oh, you're making this one call or whatever. Like, even if it's slightly Plessy v, but it's gonna get you quit is it worth? Yeah, but part of what I enjoyed about the Heads Up tournaments, and I mean, I would imagine this is getting less true as people become more like theoretically solid, was that like, the way you might approach the match would be so different depending on how much of an edge you expected to have in the match in general. And then how the particular person played were like, there were some matches where I was like, you know, just never raising or never threw that in preflop, because the person was, was such a poor player that I just like, didn't want to force large preflop pots, because I thought I was like a huge favor, at the bottom of small. And then there's other times when your heads up with someone whose name I recognized, I was like, oh, this person actually knows how to play heads up. Like now I want to do a lot of dirty betting just like force the large preflop pots as much as I can. And of course, there's room for like much more subtle things as well. But I did use to have like, you know, a notepad open while I was playing and just trying to jot down and there's just not room to do that as much. And like, if you're playing a full ring tournament, you have nine people even if you have a great read on the player in the big blind, if you're under the gun, like there's still seven other people who can read about you like if you're like opening to it.
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think honestly, by having a notepad open and like even trying to formulate thoughts around what it is that you're doing is like above average for how much effort people put in, in like structuring their game plan. With games being like more complex, I think that the challenge in doing what I'm describing is like making sure that it's as simple as possible. Almost like, you know, I'm sure that, for example, a mental game coach would probably recommend to their students to make like their mantras as simple as possible, right. So like things that you say to yourself, for motivation for, for releasing till whatever it is, if it's four sentences long, and it's very cerebral, it's not going to have much of an impact, right? Like, you wouldn't, you wouldn't speak out two paragraphs to yourself to calm yourself down, you need like two words. So I think it's similar with with strategy in that, like, the more complex your strategy is, the less likely you are to remember it. And therefore the less impactful it is to even have that strategy in the first place. So what I try to do is strip away as much information as possible that's just like, I feel as a distraction. And set up like, it's a template. It's not meant for like every user to copy it unnecessarily. But just a template for thinking, Okay, if I wanted to write out my strategy in as few words as possible, like what would i What's the one of the core components, what's the information that I really can't leave out, and everything else doesn't, doesn't need to be written down.
And this is something you're doing in advance of the game or something that's kind of like evolving, as you're playing?
I would I would say, this is in advance of the game. Yes. I mean, I, I do like my my own game plan. And I think that this will continue to be true, like changes over time, depending on I guess how confident I am about certain parts of the game. So for example, to have I guess, a better way of visualizing what I'm talking about when I used to play heads up like full time let's let's say 2015 2016 or something. If I only had one Flopsy bet size, so my my Flopsy, bet and game plan was like, let's say 75% pot, I forget if I'm using the right year, but this was true at some point, right. And that's just all I knew so so what I did was I made a strategy that worked really well within those constraints, like I had constrained my strategy to only 75% pot sizing on the flop. And I knew how to play that strategy really well. And I thought that it worked pretty well against my opponents. So I just stuck with it. At some point that was no longer true. Like, at some point, probably through the use of solvers, I realized that wasn't even really that good theoretically. But also, my opponents were not making the same mistakes that they used to make against that like broad strategy. So now I might be looking for three different sizes, a 25% pot of 75% pot, and 150% pot. But to still constrain it in a way that I can remember it, I'm only using one size, per board texture. So I'm not trying to mix I'm not I'm not trying to branch out multiple trees based on one board, but I am still adding complexity that that feels achievable for me. So I'm gonna It's like a pretty straightforward example of how my game plan might change over time. But it's not necessarily something I'm doing like live right. I'm not doing it like at the table by any means. This is this is pregame preparation, or offseason you might call it like preparation.
