Interview With Tomas "Masuronike" Kubaliak

Charles Hawk: First of all, tell us some basic info about yourself: full name, age, country, your hobbies, how long you have played poker professionally, your main strengths and weaknesses.

Tomas Kubaliak: Hey, my name is Tomas Kubaliak, I'm 24 years old and I'm from Slovakia. My hobby is my family. I have a girlfriend and a 2.5 year old son Kevin and I really love to spend time with them instead of drinking alcohol, taking drugs and paying hookers. Last few weeks I've enjoyed playing some sports (football, running). I've been playing poker from 2008, when I finished school but never really worked (if I don't count 2 days as a waiter).

CH: Why poker? Did you have any other ideas on what to do with your live before choosing that? What was your first deposit? Tell us about your journey from lowest stakes in to the high limits, especially the most interesting aspects: how you improved as a player during that and what main difficulties you faced.

TK: I started to play with no deposit bonus like most young guys. When I finished school I had $200 in my cashier after hitting some MTT from last dollars, read an SNG strategy book by Collin Moshman and won $3k in the very first month, so the decision on what to do after school was more than clear :) Poker was really easy in that time and that book was awesome so it was more than enough for a few months, maybe even years lol. I was active on some Czech/Slovak poker forums and in that time everybody was happy to analyze hands with each other. I never played seriously on Stars before my challenge from $150 to SNE started at the start of 2012, mostly on some smaller networks with high rakeback. These networks started to lose traffic and the only option was to try Stars hypers.

CH: Taking into consideration that it is natural to lose pre-rakeback, what do you consider a bad day, week or month? How many lost buy-ins is still "OK / normal" and how many is "too much"?

TK: Well, it is not natural to lose pre-rakeback, not even at the highest stakes. I think there are some players that have even +2% ev roi at the highest stakes. I have definitely above 1% with a really big sample. But it's way more swingy than HU hypers definitely. I don't really care if I won or lost in one day if it is bellow $5k with my $180 abi. Plus/minus $10k days are definitely not unusual and I had one -$15k day without spewing chips randomly.

CH: Most 6max hyper regs had deficit pre-rakeback. How could you explane Jorj95 phenomena? He has 1,200,000 millions prerakeback (6max hypers only).

TK: First, there are two types of 6max hypers: 25bb start stack like in HU sngs but with ante and last two players split prizepool 65/35, and 10bb start stack hyper satties where the last two players receive tickets to some MTT tournament. I play classic 6max hypers with 25bb stacksize and Jorj95 satties and he also play satties for FPPs (not buy-ing $1,6k bonuses at all probably) so this profit is not "pre-rakeback", but it is true that Jorj95 is a beast and like he said in his AskThePRO interview on TiltBook, he is the best because he puts the most hours in study.

CH: Tell me what is the hardest about a being 6max hyper pro?

TK: To play a lot of hours/tables, because the most money we still win from rakeback (except a few players who don't play much). It is really hard to play when you need to but have no mood to play.

CH: Some people would say that 6max hyper is a very boring game, as all decisions are made preflop. I also personally think that husngs or mtts are way more fun to play. Please prove me wrong: tell me what is the most fascinating about grinding 6max hypers day-by-day?

TK: In our 25bb game with ante it is really fun sometimes to play 6max hypers, especially at $500s when there are some good regs and some big names from HU hypers/MTTs/cash games join the game. There are a lot of postflop spots, but it is probably true that HU sngs are more funny.

CH: As I presume from your video "The Best multitabling ever" and TiltBook's communication in Facebook, you are a funny guy. Do you have any funny stories to share from your life and/or poker carrier?

TK: I have no funny stories but you find a lot of funny stuff on my TiltBook wall like that multitabling video and these images:

CH: How many hours per month do you dedicate to improving/self-coaching? Tell me in as much detail as possible your whole self-coaching process and which tools you use.

TK: I try to work on my game a lot, always trying to find where is my leak (mostly from old school Holdem Manager 1) and then fix it in ICMIZER, Holdem Resourcer or just in my brain lol.

CH: If you were coaching a winning low stakes 6max hyper player, what would be your first advice?

TK: There is allways something to improve (most of low stakes players thinks there is nothing to improve and they play great) and my first two pieces of advice would be to not be that tight and work on ICM, because if you make some stupid mistakes on bubble it affects your results a lot.

CH: What was your biggest downswing? How did it affect your game and your lifestyle? Do you have any specific methods on how to be mentally as strong and as stable as possible and how not to tilt when you get crushed by variance for a long time?

TK: After reaching SNE from $150 back in 2012 I had a 8 months long downswing when I had to move down to $30s from $500s. I was about $100k below EV with not more than $150 abi for that 8 month period and I was busto and then came a staking/coaching offer and I snap accepted it. I have one tip for how not to tilt: don't care much about actual results and always look at the hand and think, "what is the best play here", make the decision, repeat it XY times and then look at your results. Also try to look at longer graphs, for example always refresh month to date graph because daily swings looks really bad.

CH: Do you notice the player field getting better each year (fish, semiregs and regs)?

TK: Yes, definitely. It is much harder than it was 1-2 years back because a lot of HS regs coach other players on how to play perfectly and there is a ton of good regs playing each other. We have no cartels so we almost always have to play with at least 3 other good regs. Fishies are always bad :)

CH: How is your game different compared to 2012?

TK: Well, I was thinking about creating a new database with my hands from a random month in 2012 and looking at what my stats looked like. I think I would be more than happy to play with the old version of masuronike :)

CH: Send me your grinding station photo :)

TK: Is this ok? :)

CH: How many VPP's did you collect last year? How many are you going for this year?

TK: Just 1M because like I said, I was busto playing $60 and $30s in June with low volume so I was happy to even reach SNE last year. This year I had planned to go for 2M, but I have just 650k at the moment and didn't play much this month because traffic is awful.

CH: You are a founder of the poker social network TiltBook. What are the main advantages to use this social network?

TK: It is the perfect website where you can brag about your winnings, cry when you are on dowswing or just share your thoughts or something funny. There are things that are not optimal for forums. If you have nothing interesting/funny to share, there is always a lot of successful players (most of them are 6max and HU hypers players) who share their successes or cool stories. It is not objective obviously, but I think it is worth to register and become active. To motivate you even more, this month some legends joined our site (Collin Moshman, daddyrnac, sippin_criss), some legends use it for a longer time (jdawg91, bigstealer, Buschapa) and there are also some successful HU hypers players (yovengo, Habis15, razvanel, etc).