Interview with Barewire
Charles Hawk: (Although you are quite known to the community) Please introduce yourself to those who knows you only from your two video packs on husng.com: tell briefly about yourself, your interests, your achievements in poker, in coaching, and something from your personal life –some “living the life” stuff :-)
Barewire: Well once upon a time I was pretty active in the HUSNG community and played my fair share of SNGs around 2010-11. When I started playing heads up NL in 2009 there was just one subforum on 2p2 for both cash and SNGs, so I ended up connecting with a lot of players from both formats. By late 2010 I was coaching a bit and playing full time from Las Vegas while taking some time off from school - this is when I got involved in producing 'deep stack content' for husng.com and later produced the two video packs.
Since then i've won nearly $1M from HUNL (I checked at the end of 2015, I was soooo close) and I try to take full advantage of the flexibility of the job. I moved to Toronto after black friday and took an interest in ultimate frisbee, which I still play quite often in competitive amateur leagues. I've done a lot of travel since I started playing full time - London, Australia, New Zealand and several places in Asia more recently.
Some of my best results have come while travelling and I hope to do more, but for now I'm happily settled down with a girlfriend in Toronto. I consider Toronto my new home and spend most of my time here either grinding, playing frisbee or eating and drinking my way through the city.
Please send me some poker graphs of recent results to add to the interview :-)
Barewire: I had a very disappointing 2014 (after a great 2012-13, to be fair) with some awful results at my highest games holding me back from continuing to move up, so i'm very pleased to show off my 2015 HUNL results. Please excuse my low volume, I'm bad about taking several months without good reason...
How proud are you about two video packs on husng.com? Tell me about the feedback you received
Barewire: It's been so long since I produced those packs, but I remember enjoying the work and being happy with the end result. There was almost no negative feedback on the series and I think I was most proud about the response I got from people who were playing the same games as me and also higher. I really got the impression that the content was ahead of the limits I was playing at the time. That said, if I watched the videos now I probably wouldn't even recognize my own thought process. The videos would be great for a certain demographic, especially someone unfamiliar with the game, but today's 400nl and 600nl regs are much better than I was in 2012. HUNL changes very quickly and the population is constantly evolving. I think a big part of the reason I'm still successful and also able to coach effectively is that I've been in the same game for 6 years and can quickly identify an outdated strategy and the traits of that strategy, because I probably used it at some point in my career.
Tell me about your work with a cash HU staking/coaching group: is it your stable or do you do it together with someone else? How many members do you have? How it is going, what are the moods after 2016 changes? Have your aims changed after it? How?
Barewire: I started recruiting almost two years ago with a partner, who did a lot of the leg work getting things moving. He approached me with the plan for the group and I basically just gave it the OK and put in part of the funds. Later in 2015 I took over operations of the group and I'm working essentially solo, with the help of a couple investors. It's a pretty small group as you can imagine, since I'm able to run the operations and coach everyone involved.
2015 was very good for them and I was able to keep the majority of them for a second round of contracts. I'm not doing a lot of new recruiting anymore and I'm really focusing on giving these guys a chance to maximize their earnings in today's climate. This does mean doing a bit less grinding on stars with the lower VIP rewards, but there are still games on plenty of other networks and we just need to approach the games on stars a bit differently. I had initial hopes of building a big stable at lower stakes with higher volume, but I don't think that's really an option with rake continuing to increase and a serious threat of solver-based bots on most networks destroying the format. It's more important than ever to be adaptable and theoretically strong.
You are working with Run it once. How your gig has been going, will you do a third year there?
Barewire: RIO is a great site. The guys I work with are some of the best in the industry and they've treated me well. My third year hasn't been discussed yet but I have some ideas and I hope they will want me to stay after hearing them. I think the forums and the viewer comments are at a very high level of poker theory and it feels great to be able to treat everyone as a peer rather than feeling as if you're speaking down to someone.
Tell me about your travels and send me some pictures of cities/food/drink :-) Any memorable stories to share?
Barewire: My longest and best trip was near the end of 2013, when I went overseas from October-April and had 18 straight months of warm weather. I spent most of that time in New Zealand and Australia and had a proper tour of New Zealand the month of January with a group of my close poker friends. We rented a camper van (although nobody actually slept in it) and drove the perimeter of both islands for 3 weeks. New Zealand has such a huge amount of beautiful things to see in such a small place, it's an absolutely amazing place to travel if you can afford to spend a while there.
More recently I spent about 3 weeks in Japan, which was my first trip anywhere that doesn't speak English nationally. I love Japanese food and got to try some of the best of it, which was the main goal of the trip really. I've also got a money sinking addiction to trying world class restaurants in the major cities I visit, and I had the two best (and most expensive!) dining experiences of my life on this trip. I'll attach some photos of the food, obviously.
Tell me more about cousines you enjoy most? What are the prices in those restaurants? If you would have to open a restaurant of your choice in Toronto: what would it be? Is there any room/free space for invovations/something new in such big city?
Barewire: Japanese food is definitely one of my favourites - it's basically the reason I was so excited about going there. There's a ton of variety, although once I got there I was disappointed that breakfast isn't particularly interesting. Breakfast is one of my favourite parts of American/French cuisine.
In Toronto I have many ideas for what might be successful. The city gets kind of a bad reputation for a few things, first that it just copies whatever trend popped up in NYC a year prior, and also that fine dining doesn't exist here. I think those aren't bad things, but traits of the economy to keep in mind. For example, it shows that copying a trend isn't frowned upon by customers and the culture here is willing to pay to bring whatever is happening in other innovative cities to Toronto. It also shows that the high cost of becoming a top notch chef and aiming for michelin starred quality food is not going to pay off here.
I'm guilty of paying far too much for meals like Narisawa in Tokyo - that meal cost me about $430 in total, although a big chunk of that is the expensive wine pairings. Most fine dining menus of that quality will be listed at $140-225 and you'll pay extra for any drinks and then a 20% service fee. Narisawa was my most expensive meal to date, but there was a big group of my friends who went to Le Cirque at the Bellagio the first year I went to Las Vegas and our total bill was somewhere over $3,000. There are a ton of amazing restaurants in Vegas, and that is definitely one of them, but you will pay a forture to try them all!
Now tell me about your recent poker career (as a player): about your 2015 results and are you happy with them (any goals which you didn't achieve?). What are your aims for 2016?
Barewire: I think I'm most happy with how I set myself up moving forward to stay alive in the poker economy. My HUNL results at high stakes were very good and that's going to keep me competitive in the Stars lobby for top seats. I've also started to sharpen my 6max NL game and can often get into some good 1k and 2k tables without using a script. Having those sources of action moving forward has been my primary goal for a while, and in 2016 my goal is to continue to succeed in those games while learning PLO. I'm already working on that and you'll probably see me in the 2/5 zoom pool practicing quite often in the coming months.
8) Describe in detail how your standart “busy” day looks like?
Barewire: I wake up around 7am on weekdays and try to block any coaching I have for the day to be finished by noon. Between private coaching, videos and my staking group, I've got a solid 10 hours each week of coaching work, sometimes more. In order to avoid breaking up my actual play time, I'd coach for example from 8am-11am and then make a coffee and prepare lunch before I join any tables for the day. This way I'll get started grinding by noon and be able to play until about 5pm without interruption before I have to start thinking about preparing dinner or going out with my girlfriend. Lately I take actual weekends, but in the past my "busy" day would have been a Sunday tournament grind from 10am to 10pm with no breaks and a bunch of delivery food. I like my new schedule a lot more :)
9) Tell me how much spare time do you (choose to) have, how are you balancing activities related with poker and “living-the-life”?
Barewire: I suppose I got into this a bit in the other question, but I think I devote much less of my life to poker than other professionals at my level. I find coaching and playing poker very different tasks, and enjoy doing both of them on most days of the week. I also spend a huge portion of my summer going out with my ultimate frisbee team, either on weekend trips to tournaments or on weeknights to league games and head to the pub afterwards. I've been able to take a pretty long vacation once every year since 2011.
I know it's healthy to have interests outside of poker, and it's important to me that I'm not financially driven to ignore my other interests. I spend a lot of time cooking at home and recently registered for a few classes at my local culinary school. That said, I don't spend a lot of time watching TV or movies and I don't play any games besides poker. I like that about my lifestyle because it means that in my free time I'm not doing the same thing that I do during work - sitting at a computer and being over stimulated.
10) How positive are you about online poker future? Do you think 2016 changes is just the beginning from new owners? Do you have some sort of plan B, do you see other industries/things which you would enjoy to do besides poker?
Barewire: I think I'm good at being self-employed, and if I was to leave poker I'd try to work within my interests. I'm very familiar with the food & beverage industry and have a background in finance that could help me there. With that said, I'm not too worried about poker. There are games other than HUNL and there are networks other than Pokerstars. Of course, I would have loved to never have to change my discipline or my network for 30 years. I understand that's unrealistic though and as long as I'm still driven to keep learning I think I'll continue to be successful.
11) You just became a permanent resident of Canada. Is it because of Black Friday? Tell me about the Canada: people, culture (any other important-to-you-factors) in comparison with where have you lived before.
Barewire: Yeah, I originally moved here because of BF but I had no real long term idea of what I was going to do. I'd just graduated university in March 2011 so it was pretty easy for me to pick up and move, I think I was in Toronto by late July. I stayed a year on a few visitor permits and then got a 1-year student visa because I registered for a couple classes at U of T to see how interested I was in graduate school. Turns out I wasn't interested at all, and that's around when I started thinking of PR status. I know some people had trouble trying to go down this route but I had a great lawyer working on my case and after spending a lot of time and money on the application I was approved in September 2015.
I really started to love Toronto and it kept becoming more clear to me that the USA had nothing to offer to poker players in the near future unless you lived in Vegas or Atlantic City. The culture is warm and inviting and the city is extremely safe, but you don't lose any of the perks of being in a metropolis. There's a real sense of community once you get to know the people here, despite the fact that you're living in an extremely dense city with a larger population than Chicago. It's a unique atmosphere where I can be in a quiet neighbourhood, walking distance to interesting local shops and cafes but also be within minutes of downtown by transit or car. It's close enough to home (both literally and figuratively) that I was able to transition into the lifestyle here very easily and feel comfortable.
