Interview with 1rake1

Beach club in Bali: 1rake1 mavrickkk adamc1988

Charles Hawk: As I know you are a super motivated grinder, one of the most motivated out there at the moment. Tell me how you are able to keep up the constant passion for the game and avoid burnouts.

1rake1: I think that even though my lifestyle is heavily work orientated, I manage to avoid ‘burnouts’ because I get enough balance during my free time. I’m not waiting for the next release or holiday that I guess alot of other people might experience in poker or other jobs. Since I started working for myself I have always been kind of obsessed with being very time efficient (I’m writing this now on a plane as I travel back from my older brother's wedding in France). I never really grind alone. I’m more of a social person and would not be able to sit at home on my own and work anywhere near the hours I do without going insane. So I think it's just about creating an environment best suited to you.

I don't really work to keep passion for the game in anyway. I get my motivation from the money at stake and by thinking of the lifestyle I want to live, not only now, but in the future. I have always had complicated deals in place throughout my poker career which have been oriented around making everyone involved as motivated as possible whilst being unaffected by the monetary swings that are inevitable and I think can dishearten some people. I guess I have always been naturally very competitive in any sort of games growing up. Maybe that's as a result of growing up with an identical twin.

Charles Hawk: What does your ordinary workday look like? Describe your work ethic and grinding routine with some specific examples.

1rake1: Well mavrickkk, adamc1988 and myself all started poker together and have treated it like a job from the off with very disciplined work schedules. I think a good work ethic is essential to succeeding in anything, and we’ve been lucky enough to be in an environment where we are constantly pushing each other. As for my work day, it changes a lot depending on where I’m living and what my current strategy is. A recent routine which I did for some time involved sleeping late evenings and working 3am-noon or as late as 3pm (depending on social plans or lobby situation). We often don’t leave the office during our grind hours and even eat at our desks (luckily our office has an en-suite!). After the grind, I generally go to the gym or do some other activity with friends, then a few of us often meet for dinner around sunset and just chill out for a few hours. I generally just take days off when we have an event or holiday planned and don't really feel the need to take any random days off in between these events.

I think being a poker professional and being your own boss is great in the fact you have so much freedom to organise your work schedule to suit your current lifestyle. I always look to maximise both work and play and I certainly haven’t lacked any creativity in this area haha. I had one pretty ridiculous routine near the start of my poker career when it was just myself, mavrickkk and adamc1988 that lived together in Thailand. At this time, we all were heavily invested in each others' success. We were excited by the idea of ‘polyphasic sleep’ in order to maximise the amount of free time we’d have around our intense work schedule. There are several different types of polyphasic sleep patterns but they all work to reduce total amount of sleep hours by spreading the sleep across smaller, more efficient bouts of sleep. So, we would wake up at 9pm after a 4.5 hour core sleep. It would then be a 3 man operation to prepare breakfast and food for the day before we began our grind. We would grind for 12 hours with a 20 minute nap (actually I think we found 23 min was most optimal ha) in between, then we’d have another 20 minute nap before we all went to the gym. We’d then just chill out at beach bars before going to a nice restaurant, always trying our best not to fall asleep as this would ruin the whole sleep pattern!

It was fun but very exhausting. One of the ‘side effects’ (which we kind of enjoyed) was insanely vivid dreams, which I'm sure anybody who has tried this for any length of time can relate to. This is also the torture poker dreams. We continued this sleep routine for more than a year. Although this sleep pattern wouldn’t suit me now, I think at the time it served its purpose very well. We were able to maximise the amount of hours we had in the day and my body definitely now requires less sleep than it did prior to that year.

Charles Hawk: Tell me about your previous working day: What did you do before poker?

1rake1: Before poker, Mavrickkk and I ended up getting into online Sports Arbitrage whilst waiting to be accepted by graduate jobs, which we slowly stopped applying for. Sports Arbitrage usually involves placing bets on all outcomes of an event at different bookmakers when there is a big disparity regarding how the bookmakers have set their lines on a particular event. These circumstances don't arise often, but when they do, it enables you to tie in a guarenteed small profit margin of usually around 1-2.5% but occasionally as high as 4-5 %. So it's just a case of finding as many of these opportuntiies as possible and accurately wagering as much money as possible across all outcomes of the event.

We later modified this approach to include effectively some sports trading. Unlike the stock market, sports trading never 'closes' until the event starts. I can rememeber during some juicy tennis events where we would have open trades that need watching around the clocking and we would both be doing alternate 12hour shifts to keep an eye on these.

We did Sports Arbitrage for about 18 months, over which time we'd had over 100 accounts banned between us. Whilst it beat the alternatives at the time, it wasn't something that was sustainable or provided enough progression, and that's when we discovered poker. More specifically, online Heads-Up SNG's!

Charles Hawk:  What is the most valuable poker lessons which you learned not from studying but from practice

1rake1: I think the most valuable lesson I learnt from poker is probably a recent one. After having played a huge volume of reg games recently and being around people that have also put in massive volume (somewhere around 60-70k reg games in the last 6 months), it has made me very aware of the EV variance that is involved in reg warring. After speaking with a lot of other professionals, over time I get the impression virtually no one fully understands this, or they would rather try and put trend lines in places that don't exist to ease their mind. But this year has taught me to look at things a lot differently. These days I am a lot less focused on EV but more focused on analysing where I think I have an edge on my opponent whilst trying to keep an open mind about where I could be leaking. If you are able to look at things this way confidently with an open mind, I think not only will you be less missguided by short term variance but you will find it helps to keep a more steady pace of motivation during both short term upswings and downswings. I can accept people's misunderstanding of variance, but sometimes I hear people quote results over small samples in actual, thats when I struggle to bite my tongue lol.

Charles Hawk: How did you come up with the idea to attack the cartel as a team? How is it proceeding? Why did Campbell-Gee and majcy quit?

1rake1: Well, let's start by outlining prior to us attacking the catel, what the 'fair' system looked like for fair entry. You would be made to build up samples with each cartel member, when it suited the cartel member not yourself. If the cartel member was playing another shot taker you would have to wait your turn. If the cartel member was playing another shot taker and sitting lobbies behind to earn some extra money from fish (just to ensure this reg battling wasn't affecting his income too much) you would have to let him do this. If not this was called 'teaming' and that is NOT ALLOWED. To survive your shot take you have to on average be beating everyone in the cartel for rake (after rakeback). If you managed to keep this rate up this means you will earn exactly zero money every day you're working. Whilst you're trying to build your samples with everyone putting in as much volume as you can every day, this volume is spread thin across everyone currently in the cartel and the daily / monthly income of each individual member in the cartel is minimally affected. There is no volume goal, or results based goal to gain your entry into the cartel. You just have to wait for them to collectively act fairly and decide to accept you as a member, which could be never.

We looked at the previous shot takes of chadders at 1k and valuelol at 500s, and considered the amount of time and money that would need to be invested on the hope that we would get a fair treatment from a handful of individuals. At the same time spiritedreal had just played over 20k games at 300s and we saw first hand what the ‘power in numbers’ can do. It seemed too easy to keep triers out. Even if we beat the cartel by a good amount, the huge amount of money they could recoup off fish might still make it their most profitable move to keep us out indefinitely and not let us have a piece of their pie. Also in my opinion it scares people when 2/3/4 people who grind together try and move up. This alone would have made it a lot tougher than previous triers to get accepted. So for these reasons, we decided to go for a different approach, thought we were most likely to get accepted by stopping people fishing behind when they played us, and when we were all online, we could get lobbies ourselves.

We were also less sure of our ability at the start of the year and thought the extra lobbies behind could be good to offset the potentially very long and potentially very expensive shot take.

Due to a combination of the cartels putting in less volume, and some people avoiding us we actually ending up with the lobbies uncontested a lot of the time. At this stage, we got a bit ahead of ourselves and decided we could probably just lock down a set time period, deter other regs from playing that slot, and we would effectively be our own group. However, things didn’t quite go as expected (they kept adding more guys and we became more and more outnumbered), and it wasn’t long after this point that our team slowly decreased and it was clear our expectations had to become more realistic.

Majcy had only recently become a 300s reg and then went straight to shooting 500s on his own money and 6 weeks later shooting 1ks on half his own money. I'm not sure he had acclimatised to the money swings with him effectively jumping from 100's to 500s in a relatively short period of time. He would often get affected by this, which had to have affected his game, and, to be honest, just generally led him to be more unhappy and less energetic outside of poker. I think also being part of a 'team' puts you under even more pressure, often playing off the back of downswings where some players like to take breaks or just generally playing more hours than you might like to, which probably didn't help. Either way, he didnt get good results and decided it wasn't for him. Personally, I think you need the right balance that works for you. He took some time off, did a little bit of travelling, then started some spins. More recently mavrickk, adamc, and I had him do some off the table work for us, but he is back on spins now.

Campbell-Gee also decided it wasn’t the best course of action for him. He was struggling to keep up with the long days and the consistent volume while keeping any sort of life balance. He's also had a couple of things to deal with outside of poker this year which has consumed some time. Him and his brother have recently done a bit of travelling and later joined us for a recent stag do in Vegas, and then he continued some travels with his older brother, during which time he has been investigating spins.

Charles Hawk: Officially you are a 300’s reg and are now trying to shot take 500s for quite a long time, as I know you played about 30k games against regs while beating the rake. Still they refuse to add you and your brother. Why is that? Is it personal? Is it because you used to war regs as a team?

1rake1: We were actually shot taking 1ks and 500s simultaneously up until recently. At the time we were a team, they were against letting any of us in because they believed if they gave shares to some of us, it would then be easier for us to all get in. They were worried if we all got in (having already added one additional member to our group for a short period of time) that we could add more and completely take over and replace the original group. They were probably a little on the paranoid side, but there's people's careers and a lot of money at stake, so I could understand their logic. So, with this in mind and without going into too lengthy detail, they just gave lots of other people's entries to 500's and incentivised them to play us... around the same time we slowly dropped members for different reasons. So this definitely put an end to us being able to hold down a specific timeslot.

Last time I counted I think they have 23 members at 500's!! and I see so many new people sat there in 500s literally off the back of our shot take. They were effectively drafted in only to shut us out, some having played very little or even no games, others having played some or lots of games with bad results and others who are just well connected I guess. Whilst initially this was frustrating, I understand this is part of the game and I have learnt to accept that at the top, there is a lot of politics and tactics that go on, and there will always be less skilled and undeserving players in spots they shouldn't be. This is also undoubtedly the case in a lot of other careers. So, whether it's wrong or right, it is something that goes on and you just have to embrace it. These days, I just treat it as one big game I’m happy to be a part of.

More recently we have changed strategy and are now first trying to gain access to 500s, so are now focusing the pressure on different people. At the moment, the only reason we are still not in is because they are scared we will reform a group after they let us in. Despite us promising that we won't, they don't trust us. Whether it’s more personal from them towards us I’m not sure, but we have no ill feelings towards them and will continue battling until we get accepted. After which we will continue to shoot for 1ks again where we already have big samples.

When you think about it, it's only natural that people are going to be disgruntled, as you only have to look at the profits of the top players this year relative to last year to see why this is the case. If someone had cost me that amount of money I too would probably be upset.

New Year in HK. Ozone tallest sky bar in the world

In Vegas

mavrickkk + 1rake1 - phi phi fire rope