– There he is, cash game champ Owen "PR0DIGY" Messere, congratulations! Great performance; you guys put on a great show.
– Yeah, I mean, uh, good to win but also good to put on a good show as well, you know? I’d like to think I won with some style.
– I recall you actually, in our last conversation, you talked about how you thought the sport element of poker was often underrated and like the gamble side came out, right? You recalled Hustler Casino was a bit guilty of that. You liked it actually way more like the way they cover chess.
Do you think CoinPoker, in general, did a good job of trying to make it more a bit more like chess, where you saw high-level poker and people competing against each other?
– Yeah, 100%. I think this was really a spectacle for the poker purist. Having an appreciation of just how high-level poker can be, getting regs to come on stream and show off a bit and show just how much is going on under the hood in some of these hands… Honestly, this is what I would dream of in a poker event. If everything was like this, then this is perfect for me, honestly.
Since it’s ended, I’ve been playing especially some heads-up battles, but it’s been weirdly low intensity. This was so much fun for me, the thrilling competition playing against all the best guys.
– A little spoiler alert for the audience. In two weeks from now, when you’re watching this, we will release a podcast with Arman. He said the same thing: after this challenge, you fall into this black hole where the normal grind is a bit boring. Your open system is stimulated at such a high level, so you guys should all meet up again and just continue play for the sake of it. What do you say?
– It’s like, I say that after having a couple weeks’ break. If we got back into it, I’m sure it’d just be like, "Okay, we should have taken a little bit more time off before hitting a grind intense again." For some of the guys who finished a bit on the middle of the pack, maybe they’re probably a bit more rusted. They didn’t have that right up until the wire playing, but it did leave me pretty shattered. I barely played poker for a week after the challenge ended, which is so weird for me. That probably doesn’t sound like a lot to most people, but I usually take a day or two off, and after the challenge, I was just like, "Oh my God, I can barely even look at poker; I just need to collapse."
– Is the itch back?
– Yeah, kind of, but I found I wasn’t playing that well. I was playing heads-up, so it made sense for me to be rusty. I got killed by Ja.sam.gale. I was winding him up in the challenge in good fun, and he was doing a countdown until the challenge ended. He was just like, "I'm waiting for you in seven days," and I was like, "Okay, cool." We played, and he murdered me. He had almost a thousand big blind stack on one table, and I was like, "Okay, okay." He's running well, but the intensity wasn’t really there, which I need to be competing at the highest level. It's just after such a big high, there's a bit of a rebound, which I'm not trying to be too hard on myself in that respect.
One thing Yuri said was that after an upswing, people will play their worst poker because you’re so used to everything working that you feel like you don’t even need to try for all the money to gravitate towards you. I’ve seen that to so many people who have come through Gorilla over the years.
– You put it out there, so now you had to become the best. That episode was titled "The Next Best Poker Player?". Fast forward one of these years now, can we remove the question mark?
– Yeah, I remember being like tentative about that; I was just like, "Oh, is this too cocky?" I think you were just like, "No, no, it's fine, you know, we're just putting the question out there, maybe you will be, maybe you won't." I was like, "Okay, let's go with it."
Now, I'm feeling a lot better about that; I think the next best poker player definitively might be a bit much. I feel like I’ve played amazingly throughout the challenge, but there were elements of run good over a 40k hand sample. If I were to stick that up on the wall and say, "I am the best, no doubt," that would probably be jumping the gun. There's some battles to be had with Linus and DavyJones first before I can lay that one down.
– How representative do you think this Championship is for measuring who is currently the best? That would mean that you’re the G.O.A.T. and on the opposite of the spectrum, we have SeaLlama, who’s officially the worst. The fated sandwich where we would go top and bottom of the leaderboard.
– Yeah, I think it's definitely correlating quite strongly. SeaLlama was taking things a bit cocky. I was living with him during the time and going over hands with him, and because he’d been playing so many free-handed battles with Davy and Linus and Barak, he just expected chips to come to him.
I had that intensity right from the start. He gave 100k Head Start and then was suddenly like, "Oh no, I need to stop playing," and then he ran a bit bad and was like, "Okay, well alright, I'll go." He's in Vegas; there are plenty of big live games that are much bigger than 5/100.
I wouldn’t say it’s definitive, but the way I played in The Challenge would say that I played the best over those 40k hands. For some people, it wasn't as serious to them. Linus, at one point, was roughly 15 bins off the pace. You look at how Kevin was taking the challenge; if Kevin was 15 buy-ins off the pace, he would just be like, "Okay, that means I need to play 16 hours tomorrow," and that's what he was trying to do. Davy had scheduled some time off at the start of the challenge so he missed that.
If I was trying to rank myself, I'd need to definitively say I'm better than Llama, Dave, and Linus. It's a bit blurry around the edges, but everyone else, I'm comfortable saying that there's a decent gap. Maybe we’d stick Kevin on the edges. That top five, at least in my mind, is quite separated from everyone else. Then there’s a tier below of people who are still very good players, but I wouldn't be uncomfortable saying that this group is clearly stronger from the outside looking in. I haven’t battled any high stakes in recent years, but before that, I was very active doing that as well.
– How close do you feel like it is? You already kind of pointed out, like, sort of top five. What are we talking about in win rate? I think you ended up with 10bb/100; do you think this is representative?
– Actually, I had almost 14bb. I mean, you can just look at Davey's graph realistically, and Davey's had, like, I think seven to nine BB/r battling for years. Obviously, there are some fish in there, but it's not like it's not the Championship where it’s essentially just all regs. Davey’s been winning at that kind of rate in the toughest games.
The guy doesn’t game select, but I think he just prioritized showing up and playing his best and then whatever the game is, the game is. You can see that in the games he ends up in and he’s been crushing at an insane win rate for so long. Obviously, he does play down to 5K and sometimes down to 2K, so some of the games might be easier than the challenge. I think when people say that you can only ever really hit a 2bb win rate in a reg battle, that’s them telling on themselves because it's them saying that they don’t understand how deep poker goes.
Sure, there’ll be a bunch of them where you just have to play kind of standardly and the guy doesn’t give anything away, but you don’t need to find one of those often to add 5bb to your win rate, which is what I think people don’t appreciate. Because they’re so used to this idea of, "I will just play good poker and the other person will fall apart." Maybe we need to set some challenges for them and see where they trip up and be willing to go out on a limb.
Edges get even higher when people are playing like that, because if you're willing to get really out of line, then it also means the counter-exploit is always even bigger than the exploit. If you’re going to range call someone for a stack, then it gets brutal for you if the person starts going thinner. Suddenly, your range corr is losing tons of money.
Think about a bunch of players who are prepared to make those decisions all the time—not all of them are going to go your way, but it adds up, and the edges can get quite big. If someone wants to play a really defensive play style, the maximum amount of edge you can push against these guys is just not that big, but they’re also not causing anyone any problems. Most people came in with the attitude that they were going to go out there and get their EV. That makes them vulnerable to counter-punches, but that's why the edges can actually get somewhere. No one comes into a reg battle just to lose slowly.
That is I think there's plenty of room. Everyone says it's like a 2bb cap, but Davey's an outlier and has run well his whole career. Davey is just Davey, and no one can aim to be that; it's clearly more than that.
– I don’t know exactly where to draw the line, but saying that someone can beat a red battle for 5bb would not be controversial to me at all. It's important to have your perspective because there are people at 500NL that are saying that you cannot win in red battles. Why?
– Oh my God, the Saulo tweet, where he’s just like, "We put a 500 NL reg in these 20k battles and they would lose it like 3bb Max," and then we were just like, "Wow, where is this 500 NL reg that we can spot 3bb to come punt to us?" I'm sorry to 500 NL. You're probably in the top 0-point-something percent of poker players everywhere, but there's just such a massive difference.
We took all the 10K regs in the world, and there's still edges between people. Some people you could just tell that they were getting hunted by other regs as well. You could see that dynamic happens. At the start, everyone’s just thinking like, "Oh, it’s a reg battle; I just take any tables," but there were certain people who were only playing when someone else was there. It's like, "Yeah, you know," when regs start looking at other regs like they’re fish. That’s that Hunter's mentality.
– In terms of game selection-wise, did you have... For example, you pointed out Linus and Davy. Were you also making a conscious decision in terms of time zone-wise?
– I was mostly just playing when I felt sharp to do it. That was the priority to me; I felt like when I was playing sharp, I was playing so well that it didn’t matter what the table lineup was. Sure, the win rate on some tables will be lower than others, but it’s not a highest win rate challenge; it's a most dollars challenge. If I’m feeling good, I’ll just get up and play whatever is there.
It came in more at the end of sessions. If I’ve been playing for six hours and the tables weren’t that good, then I was more likely to just call it a day. If the tables are softer, Linus has gone to bed, and Kevin is somehow not at the tables by some miracle and there aren't those guys who are fighting quite so hard, then I may play an extra hour or two. I wasn’t really thinking about game selection beyond that.
– Did you notice that some guys started to give you less action? Was it hard to get action?
– Yeah, it was a bit harder to get action towards the end, like not impossible by any means, but it’s hard to say whether it was a me-specifically thing or it was just the challenge was out of reach for a lot of people. When me and Riggedeck were like 30 blinds ahead, other than Kevin, you can see why people are like, "We'll play a little bit, but they're not trying to grind like super heavy volume at that point."
It makes sense; you can't really hold that against people. I think it was probably a little bit of both. There were plenty of games. Kevin was still to the wire, and Barak had set himself a mission to dig himself out of the hole he was in. That was still going down to the wire.
– I saw Enlight and Ignacio popping in. Zaz couldn’t play the first month, but he came back, and it was kind of fun.
– Zaz was a lot of fun at the tables; he’d 3-bet you with Ace-Deuce suited on the show table.
– I definitely saw some entertainment. I remember a hand where Kevin fake missclicked. He limped the small blind, and he made it 3K instead of three big blinds. Then Kevin jammed six and he had Ace-King, and then said, "Haha, nice trick!" There were a bunch of stuff going on like that, which was actually quite funny.
We actually are already quite deep into the championship, but I wanted to start the conversation of bridging the gap between when we last spoke and now. What’s been happening in the 12 to 15 months leading up to the challenge? Any noticeable improvements or changes you’ve made in your approach to playing poker compared to when we last spoke in 2023?
– A lot of things have technically been refined since then. Quite recently, I got to a level of fluency where I swore off solvers for a bit, just because I felt like they were getting in my way of making the play which is making the most money. I was going through the motions of, "In this spot, we're supposed to, this is how it's supposed to play," too much rather than actually thinking about what this line means when a human does it rather than what it means when a solver does it.
I've been feeling so much more confident recently. I've been playing a lot of heads-up in that time, which helped me going into the challenge because a lot of the heads-up mindset is about killing the exact guy across from you. You're not just playing your game and hoping that they're not reacting to it and hoping that everything you're doing at the start will work 5,000 hands later. You're constantly trying to be sharp and thinking about what they're showing you and what they know about your game, and also what they’re giving away about theirs.
I had a lot of experience with that over the past year or so because I've been obsessed with heads-up whenever I could get action I would play. I went into the challenge thinking about it like 20 heads-up battles. There's like 45 old players and I had this different approach where I wasn’t trying to play a very tailored game plan to everyone. I really hope that there are people having very strong disagreements about what my tendencies and leaks are after The Challenge because I assume my game's getting dissected at least somewhat.
– Can you give an example of how players would use show tables? In our last conversation, you mentioned something about streaming and showing your hole cards. I can’t do that because these top guys do a lot with the information, and suddenly we have show tables where they get all the information. I’m curious how that element played into your decision-making and how you saw some players use that information properly while others may have ignored it.
– Honestly, the guy who used it the best was MunEZ. I swear, so many bluffs which I used to be sure would get through against him stopped getting through. I wouldn’t say he was necessarily range-calling me, but there were a lot of spots where I was just so used to MunEZ tank folding to me, and he realized he couldn’t get away with that anymore. He was making some catches in spots that he definitely wasn’t before the challenge.
I was trying to bully him, ripping 4x pots into him at every opportunity, but he adjusted, and I noticed that a bit of a shift happened. MunEZ's default is to play on the tighter side, but he realized early on in the challenge that he couldn’t let me run him over. I was like, "Okay," and he was just doing what he needed to do to compete.
By the end of the challenge, there was a spot where I tried to bully him super hard, and he just flicked in the call with probably what was his entire range. MunEZ definitely stood out as someone who was using that information effectively. A lot of others didn’t realize the value of that available data, and some were very casual about it.
– It demonstrates a bit of their mentality, where they were more focused on just trying to win by playing an overall better game plan and keeping adjustments to a minimum. I really liked your approach. Whenever I would go into a battle, I had my game plan laid out and I would identify weaknesses.
Even if the results weren’t going my way, I could see that the plan I set out worked. If I identified, say, five weaknesses and saw those weaknesses in game, it gave me confidence regardless of the results. I’m sure you felt confident that with the preparation you did, you could see your plan was working because they were doing what you predicted. Does that give you a lot of confidence, regardless of the results?
– When your instincts are misfiring and you have a session where your confidence is a bit low, it’s nice to be able to fall back on a game plan and know that if you just sit there and play your fairly defensive game, then you’re not bleeding too much. You have these specific areas where you’re going to be pushing enough edge that it's fine. If you want to go for stuff other than that, you can, but there’s no pressure.
That’s the ideal place for me to be, where all of the more extreme exploits are very optional because I have this other game plan which I have confidence in. You can take the big win rate swings when you're feeling better about them. Some calls with bluffs or whatever which I’m only going to make if they're out of line enough, I’m only making them when I'm high confidence.
Then there’s the lower-level adjustments, where you’ve confirmed them, you spent your time off table like you’re mostly only taking them with reasonable hands. I need to be feeling particularly good on any given day to run that stuff. That is the basis of the win rate. The highlight reel plays are the ones where people end up on two plus two, or there’s a YouTube video or whatever, they’re the cherry on top of your win rate.
– That bleeding also made it easier for you because a lot of the guys hopped on the CoinPoker YouTube channel, and they were reviewing hands, talking about strategy at a very high level. It was a great time for people who were interested in cash games to hear the best of the best discussing.
You just came back from your heads-up battle against Doug Polk. In there, you also mentioned that you had a spreadsheet on your laptop tracking every single mistake you expected him to make. That process seemed very similar. Without going into specifics, what are the types of tendencies that people can look for in opponents to form or to gather weaknesses that they can take advantage of?
– I've gotten a lot less systematic about it now. My notes used to be very much like I'd have a spreadsheet of someone's frequency by node or something. Versus Doug, I had to infer it from showdowns, but I used to do all of that stuff. I've realized more so that I much prefer just getting a feel for certain puzzle pieces, just being like, "Well, in this specific line when this happened, I kind of felt like I was being messed with."
I'm generally a suspicious guy, so I don't have the hand; I'll fold, but I’ll make a note that it was like. I felt like he was up to something here, also trying to make a hand less specific and more down to a bunch of vibes. You could say like, "I was capped here, and the guy check-raised me huge on the river, and I felt like he might have been going after me," so it's kind of the size.
I’ll note that down, and then the next time I get to session, I just read over a few. There’ll be the core notes which I know to be true, and then a few things where us just like, "This is what I thought might have some basis to it." Then, you get into another session, and it’s like, "You’re right, he’s gone for that spot a few more times."
Knowing how someone likes to come after you, I would be scared to bet draws against some guys because they do so much raising. It’s like, “Am I getting raised? Am I just feeling like I’m getting run over because it’s one session and sometimes someone hits that?” Am I getting the same feeling over multiple sessions to the point where I have confidence in it? The problem with using stats in a 6-max scenario is that I want to know how they’re playing against me. Even now, if I look at MunEZ's stats, it will say that he’s significantly over-folded to river bets (sorry, MunEZ, your leaks are out). If I think about what he was doing against me specifically, I thought that one’s kind of out the window.
I can’t be reliant on that.
– In terms of looking at your own game and your own strengths and weaknesses, all of the guys were doing something similar to you leading up to the challenge. They were thinking, "This Owen guy is going to compete; let's look at how he approaches poker." What were the signs that they're going after you? You were reflecting on your own game, and thinking where can I expect guys to come after me and be prepared?
– I know the places where it's like, "Okay, these are the places where I would go after myself." I’m aware of what it would look like if someone noticed that. It’s fine to have a macro leak or something as part of your game, especially if you want to adjust in some way. If you want to be stronger in one area, then you’re going to be weaker in another. You still get dealt the same hands.
It comes back to if the things you’re doing are good against 80% of players and they’re not good against 20%, you need to find the 20% it’s not good against and flip the script on them.
– That’s what MunEZ did on you, right?
– MunEZ knows that people are going to try to run him over, and he was able to just flip it around and make me look silly a few times.
– It’s funny, analyzing people’s stats and data and drawing the conclusion of, “This is your game, you're bad or good.” There’s definitely outliers out there, especially in the high stakes. If you just look at their game roughly just the numbers, you would say, "Huh, I would have expected this guy with this success to look a little bit more GTO, or a little bit more fierce, in their overall game plan."
– Are you talking about Barak? Yeah, I mean, this is the classic Barack thing. I’ve heard this so many times—nuts only. His stats are so miles off of what they should be, and the guy's the biggest online winner of the past few years. It's like, "What the f*** is going on there?
– What's the secret?
– I think he’d be very frustrated if I gave away his secret sauce. I'm fine to give away mine, but definitely, Barack has some stuff going on; I've learned a lot from him. He’s going to get you, and it’s not because he’s more accurate. I feel like Barack is probably the high-stakes player who gets accused the most of being a sunrunner because his stats are the most visibly out of line. But as much as I can give away, there's more going on than people initially realize.
– I remember in our last conversation, you pointed out that was actually a leak of yours when you played against stronger opponents; you felt like you had to over-adjust or show off and become a little bit too fancy. How do you not become paranoid with the show element and the level of scrutiny?
– I decided early on that I was just going to make the highest dollar EV on the show tables. If people adjust to the information, they adjust, and I’ll notice that they’ve adjusted. I was confident that if people were going to change something up, I would see it. I was playing mostly show tables the entire time, so probably about a third of my volume was on the non-show tables. If they want to adjust explicitly on those and keep leaking the same way on the show ones, that’s fine; I’ll just take the money.
I think also having the confidence that I wasn’t stuck with any of these plays—I wasn’t married to any of the strategies I was using. I was happy to ditch it. Being aware that I could be exploited in different ways made me less worried about giving away one method because if the guy was good enough to play perfectly GTO, you know, no one is that good. If they patch up one wound, something else will open elsewhere for me to exploit, and it’s up to me to notice it and stay ahead of the matter.
There were a lot of people who weren’t paying enough attention. Some were, some weren’t, but there were definitely spots where, by the end of the challenge, I was surprised that it was still working the same way it did at the start. I was like, "Wow, people are still folding here." Yep, they are! So, I thought, "Okay, I guess I don’t need to change anything up against all of these guys who’ve had this mountain of showdowns to go through."
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