Our latest interview subject is Olivier "Torg0th" R. Here's a little about him:

I'm a 23 years old French Canadian from Quebec, Canada. Growing up, I was very interested in science and math, so I ended up going to university in physics engineering for a year. I decided I didn't like physics enough to dedicate my life to this field, as it's pretty hard to find jobs / make easy money, so I dropped out. During my high school and university education, I was playing video games a lot, particularly StarCraft, and found out a bunch of ex-pro gamers switched over to poker after ending their careers. Only the very very top players (like top 5-10) in StarCraft made some serious money playing for a living, whereas it seemed much more achievable to make some decent money playing poker where the equivalent top players were making millions. So I tried poker starting with www.pokerstrategy.com free $50 and haven't looked back since. The road was actually quite bumpy, but I never went broke. I started out playing FR sngs and made a few hundred playing those as I dedicated a decent amount of time learning ICM. Then I switched to 6-max cash. I didn't do so good in cash and mostly broke even but my understanding of ranges and postflop play improved a lot. Eventually, I moved on to husngs because of a few blogs on pokerstrategy where some guys were doing pretty good. I liked the format a lot; it seemed more like playing 1v1 in a video game where you are actively trying to outplay your opponent.

I'm a pretty passionate guy in whatever i'm interested in so I can become very obsessed with my interests (movies, tv series, anime, video games, poker, books, etc). Lately I've been focusing mostly on poker and plan to continue doing so for a while. Also started adopting a more balanced lifestyle, as my obsessive nature was interfering with my health and social life, so I started working out regularly and going out way more. I've been travelling with my friend and poker player currrr14 for half a year now. We stayed in Romania for 3 months (I think serkules mentioned this before, but if you think you know where the most beautiful girls are and the answer is not Romania, you're wrong :)) and have been in Bangkok since. I'm loving Thailand; the combination of low cost of living, all kinds of delicious Asian food everywhere, good weather (god it's hot sometimes for a Canadian like me though) and entertainment makes for the perfect grinding place. Thai people have a very laid back attitude in general as well, which is very refreshing from Canada where people seem overly concerned with anything and everything. Fun fact: I'm a pretty big nit with money compared to most poker players. I believe given the instability of the game we should be very careful with how we manage our money.

From left to right: opexcz, TheNr23, currrr14, Torg0th

Charles Hawk: What does your standard grinding day look like?

Olivier ‘Torg0th‘ R.: My sleep schedule has been all over the place for a few years now so I can't really say what time I start my day (I'm trying to maintain a good one but given the nature of poker combined with going out fairly often it's very easy to mess it up again). I usually eat breakfast while checking emails/watching some tv show, then I usually deal with stuff related to my stable. This is where I usually "drift off" and waste a decent amount of time which is something I need to work on. Afterwards, I do some studying in order to warm up for 30 minutes to an hour then I start playing. My sessions can vary a lot for the duration; I sometimes play 1-2 hours and sometimes I can play up to like 3-4 hours without stopping. I have a personal rule never to decline when I sit regs as I can maintain a very high level of play over very very long sessions so it really depends on that. I take a "lunch" break then play for the rest of the day until about an hour before I plan to go to sleep. If it's a day I plan to go to the gym, I usually go either before or after eating lunch. Before I go to sleep, I eat again while relaxing (watching a tv series or something). It's not an optimal schedule but that's what I'm doing. There's definitely a lot of room for improvement.

CH: Describe your main strengths and weaknesses.

OR: I'm gonna brag a little but I feel like all aspects related to actual play are at a very high level. I can maintain my A, B game for a very long time and my level of play rarely drops below especially when i'm playing regs. My theoretical knowledge is also top notch. Outside of the game, I always study over 10 hours a week on weeks where I focus a lot on poker and I've been doing that for probably about two years now. My main weakness is my work ethic but it's been getting better and better. Living with currrr14 helped a lot with that.

CH: Any interesting or funny stories related to poker?

OR: Hanging out with our group of about 10 poker players in Bangkok has been a blast but I won't bore you with the standard degen stories of players living here. There's plenty of that already on forums :). One interesting thing that I can think of is that I recently won 18k in a day playing 25/50 cap and 2.5k turbos on FTP which is objectively a lot relative to my past results, but I ended up not doing anything to celebrate and just calmly went to sleep afterwards. I guess that's pretty odd for a poker player in Bangkok, but it does show that I have developed a complete disregard for poker money/results, which is (can be?) a good thing!

CH: What, at the very beginning, was the hardest thing to learn to be able to climb the limits in HUSNGs?

OR: I won't bother with a standard boring long answer for this one as it's very simple: THROW AWAY THE EGO!

CH: Did you have problems with tilt, discipline and motivation? How did you solve these problems (maybe there are some problems even now)?

OR: As I mentioned earlier, I don't really have any problems with tilt as even when I "tilt" my level of play barely drops, and I don't really tilt often in the first place. That might be confusing but I sort of have a "focused anger" when I tilt; it's the best way I've found to describe it. I still play pretty good because I still think clearly and instinctively know that playing well will punish that stupid donk taking all my EV money more than monkey tilting would. I have a lot of problems with discipline and motivation, which is the thing i'm trying to fix the most right now. I've always been a big procrastinator all my life and it used to be something that was holding me back a lot. It's way more important to have a solid work ethic than being naturally blessed with talent; work ethic will always take you further and is more rewarding on a personal level.

CH: Do you have a plan B for what you would do after ending poker? Maybe its related to your studies?

OR: I'm still registered at university in software engineering (I've done one semester so far), but I put it on hold for two semesters now as I had a good opportunity to make some good money playing poker. I'm not sure how long I will end up playing poker as I definitely don't plan on doing this my whole life. I'm hoping to make enough money from poker in the near future to be able to invest and significantly improve my income for many years. I don't really know what I would do after ending poker after having a few successful years, but if it turns out that poker is not going so well I would definitely finish a uni degree. I like software engineering so far but I chose it mostly as backup for poker and my interests are constantly evolving, so who knows what the future holds. Gotta say, the freedom poker gives you is what is the most amazing about it. Life is good!

CH: What are your current achievements?

OR: I went from playing 30s hypers to 200s hypers in a little more than a year. It took me about about 2/3 of a year more to enter the 200s division as I ran extremely bad during my first shot at 200s before the divisions were created (last I checked I was close to 300 BI under EV at 200s lifetime). I entered the 200s division with something like 2.5% EV ROI over 4.5k games. I think my reg game is a pretty big step above most of my peers but my results vs recreationals have not been very good for a long time as I've been spending so much time improving my reg game.

CH: What are your goals for the future?

OR: My immediate plans are to focus hard on entering the 300s division and then possibly move on to 500s almost right away. My work ethic has always been my weakness and I also plan to fix that. currrr14 is helping me a lot with this as he is a total workaholic.