— I've got an up-and-coming influencer; he's chasing the dream. He's also played around the world, by the way, and he's got some things to say about the various poker locations and some experience for you guys. He's gone up to $20/$40 and had a bit of a downswing, but he still got grind on the mind—a real grinder, a dream chaser, Mateos Norian. How's it feel to chase a dream?
— It's very painful sometimes. I'm not going to lie, but that intro made it sound more hype than it feels. So, I appreciate it.
— Why don't you tell us a bit about the swing up and the swing down, where you're at now?
— Starting at the beginning, I started playing $1/$2 like in April 2022, so like three years ago, two and a half years ago. That's kind of when I started getting more seriously into poker. Like, I'd really never played before that essentially. Like, I during COVID summer 2020, that's the first time I ever played poker with my friends. Like, we would just go to each other's basements, kind of like essentially just like drink, and like poker was like the side activity if that makes sense. Cuz like no one had anything to do, and yeah, we just like have the hand charts on our phones, and we'd be playing. We actually didn't even play with blinds; it was kind of insane what we did. Like, essentially, we dealt everyone two cards, and then if you liked your hand, you could post like a 20-cent ante, but that's like that was the maximum raise.
So, you basically just had to limp. I don't know; there was no blind, so that's kind of how we played for a while. I would get wrecked consistently because I was by far the worst player. I just really enjoyed bluffing; I thought it was funny. I was listening to "The Little Green Book" on the way to play home games with my friends. That was kind of my equivalent of studying, essentially. It was just like that for a while where I wasn't terrible, so I started buying books. I bought an audiobook, I think, by Phil Gordon or Phil Green.
He has a book called "Little Green Book," basically. I was trying to get better at the game if that makes sense. I was just doing this very passive, fake learning thing, essentially. I basically forgot about all of it right when I sat down to play with my friends. It went on like that for a year and a half where I didn't really care about poker; it was just something I did with my friends, like when we drank.
I went on a vacation to Florida with my friends in summer 2021, and we were playing poker there. We decided to deposit Bitcoin onto ACR because we thought it'd be fun to try online poker. I'd never played online before, and I was going to be a massive dog in every single one of those games. But I ended up having a winning session at 50NL, and I was hooked from there because I literally felt like I could beat people over the internet. Obviously, I very quickly lost it all right after that, but I was hooked like right after that. That's when I started playing more seriously and buying more books.
— So, when did you decide to go pro and make content, and what was the point where it started getting more attention?
— Yeah, so after I got back from that trip to Florida, I was going back to school for my junior year. I had been playing soccer in college up until that point, and I decided I was done with it. I ended up quitting the soccer team, and I was really worried that I wouldn't have any friends when I got back to school because they were all on the sports teams, and it was going to be fall season. So, in the back of my head, I was thinking maybe poker can fill this void. That's kind of what I did. I bought a book called "Mastering the Micro Stakes" by Alton Hardin read book after book, while playing 4-5 NL2 tables. I couldn't do anything postflop, I just tried to go all in preflop with QQ+. In the end, I played 70,000 hands at like 7BB to 100.
— What is this? Why did you beat micros? When did you beat them? What year was this?
— Yeah, I mean, it's $0.01/$0.02, so like I think literally my total profit at the end of this was like maybe $50.
— I saved up $400 and I like kept hearing, like you know, I was on like poker Reddit and I was on like poker YouTube, and I just like heard, like you know, live poker is so much softer than online. Like if you can beat like one cent, two cent online, you can beat like 10 times the stakes live. And there are these 18-plus casinos in New Hampshire, because I wasn't 21 yet. New Hampshire was like a 45-minute drive from my school that was in Massachusetts, so I was like, okay, I'm gonna, I just like one day decided, okay, I'm ready, I'm gonna go play, take my one shot at Chasers in New Hampshire.
So, I withdrew $400 from like the ATM on our college campus, and that was a lot of money to me at the time, but that was basically two bullets in my head for one-two. And yeah, I go to Chasers, I sit down, I'm insanely nervous. I felt compelled for some reason to tell everyone at the table that I was playing for the first time, because I was like really worried I was going to make some like irrevocable mistake, like you know, find me out or get mad at me. But uh, literally firsthand, I play, it's actually insane; you couldn't write it better. I get Ace-Jack, and some guy opens; I flat there. Honestly, just like I, I, I don't know what the hand was, wild, but the flop comes down like I think it was like Jack-4-4 or something. The guy bets, I call, uh, the turn is like the Jack of Hearts, so it like completes a flush, and I didn't realize I had a full house. Yeah, but I didn't realize I had a full house; I just thought I had trips. So, he bets again, and I'm just like, man, this guy really had the flush, like, and that's like what's my like all I'm thinking in my head, like I'm really going to get stacked on my first hand live. And then I, I call again, and then the river, he like snaps up. The river was like a brick, and I literally sat there tanking for like 40 seconds, and I eventually, I eventually put in the chips, and the guy just throws his hand like right in the muck. And then I table my hand, and I have no idea what's happening. I'm like, what, what is going on? Like, so I clearly just like slow-rolled the guy, I have no idea what's happening.
— But where does like $20/$40 get in?
— So, basically, I kept playing $1/$2. I grew my bankroll to like $6,000, and then I just like played a lot of hours at $1/$2. And then it might have been, I might have made like $4,000 at $1/$2, but then I also like was working the job at the same time.
So, I'd save all my money from that side job, and like that was like my bankroll building in my head. I didn't want to spend money; it was just for poker, okay? So, simultaneously, I would be winning at $1/$2 live, and then I would lose all my money online. That's literally all I was doing. So, I would be playing $1/$2 live, and I'd go play $50/$100 Blitz, which is like $50 fast fold, basically like Zoom—you get moved to a new table—and I lose all my money online. And I just kept this cycle going, and I realized I wasn't very good. So, I started studying a lot more and playing a lot live, and I kind of just ended up moving up online to $200NL and then I eventually started beating $500NL. I'm kind of skipping some stuff because obviously I did a lot of studying in between then.
I graduated college, and I was like beating $500NL on Ignition. That was kind of like the game I was grinding a lot, and I moved up to $25 live and then I moved to California because I had a job after school—like I got a full-time job for a software company in California. At this point, my bankroll was $30,000, I think. I think that was like exactly $30,000, almost.
— $2/$5 and $30,000? You can move up the stakes.
— I'm super nitty, though. I was super nitty with my bankroll management; I was just like the guy who read somewhere online like arbitrarily, you need to have 100 buy-ins for a stake.
— Where did you play?
— Bay 101 casino in San Jose isn't like one of the tougher ones. San Jose has a lot of brags, but there's also people with a lot of money, so it kind of balances itself if that makes sense.
— Isn't that one of the tougher ones in San Jose?
— It's got the Silicon Valley money, so there's some of these recreational players that can afford to play pretty splashy. But then there are like lots of competent players as well, so you kind of have to balance it. Yeah, I lost like $50,000 in like four days playing $20/$40. I mean, the stakes were actually bigger than that; there were like a couple of days where it'd be like $20/$40/$80/$160, pretty consistently.
There just be guys who wanted to put on like three straddles, essentially, or like do something like that. They just like wanted to gamble. But yeah, I just lost $50,000, and I basically just like was spiraling mentally. I planned on being there for a month; for me, that was a lot. I mean, like that's not that crazy, dude; that's like kind of normal if they're straddling too. Yeah, I mean, the thing is like the biggest downswing I'd had before that was like $25,000, and it was like over a more prolonged period. So, I think it was just emotionally, uh, like very draining for me at the time. Not saying I'm not saying I'm the toughest guy or anything; I'm pretty soft when it comes to like the swings. But yeah, they just like really, uh, that like I felt pretty devastated. I was kind of like in my Airbnb alone, like laying down a lot, and then I came back to Boston and I continued to lose. So, I basically ended up going like a $65,000 downswing.
But I basically decided at that point I don't like only having poker as my only outlet, because when I lost all that money, I basically felt like I was like a failure at everything, cuz poker was like my entire like identity, essentially, like in my head. So, I decided to start creating content, essentially like I was like I want to show what it's like to be someone trying to come up. A lot of the content that people weren't making was like more of what the life outside of poker is like, rather than just like hand analysis, essentially. So, basically, like all the content that I started creating was just like the content that I wish I'd been able to watch like two years ago, essentially. And I started doing that like a month and a half ago, basically.
— The good news is everything that happened was pretty normal. The bad news is that if you continue playing poker, some more swings will happen at some point.
But why don't you go ahead and talk about the content that you're missing that you think people aren't really making?
— I'm still coming up, I mean like when I was literally like coming up from one cent, two cent till like trying to play like one-two, I was like very curious, you know, like what Jungle's life looks like off the felt, like what does he do when he like goes home at night, like who he hangs out with. I would have loved to watch your like daily vlogs type of thing, like I was super curious about the lifestyle that came with poker.
— What about what are these funny videos like, going to these various casinos? I mean, you must have some crazy casino stories at various locations—you were in Vienna, you were in London, you're in Boston, you're in Texas, here in Las Vegas.
— I feel that all the weird stuff happens in American casinos, to be honest. In Europe, at least, everyone was very tamed and relaxed at the table. In contrast, in the US, you just get some very bizarre folks showing up. Is your experience different?
— A friend of mine told me about a game in Mississippi at the Lux, where people were sitting $10,000 deep at $25, and it was incredibly soft. I'm thinking maybe there are lots of little casinos where people are just insane in America, and maybe there are cool locations that no one knows about because they always go to LA, the East Coast, the West Coast, or New York, or Boston. Do people even go to Boston?
— No, you wouldn't go to Boston. The rake is super high, and there's a decent amount of pros in the area. The rake is very high.
— I want to get the report from someone who's traveled a bit—about the variant casinos and where the best games are at. They might be in Mississippi at the Lux.
But of the places you've been, I would imagine Texas is better than Las Vegas for sure, San Francisco, or whatever. San Jose is better. It's better than Boston based on what you said. It's better than Vienna. I played in a $40,000 buying game in a random town near Vienna, where we played $100/$200 Euro or $2,040/$4,000 Euro, and this rich guy was horrible, just losing money. It was during winter time, ages ago.
— I guess I can tell about the biggest pot I ever played, which was an insane moment for me.
And this guy walks in who's extremely wealthy and sits down to my direct right. Keep in mind this was when I was still kind of getting my feet wet in the bigger games. He sits down and basically just covers me, essentially. I get Aces; he opens; I three-bet massive; I think he four-bets, and then I five-bet. Anyway, he ends up like shoving the flop on like 8-9-10 or something, and I ended up like tank-calling him, which is apparently a huge nit roll according to all the other regs at the table. But it was also like the biggest pot I had played at the time; I think it ended up being like a $24,000 pot or something.
And the guy just like snaps, reloads, like he doesn't blink—dusting off $12,000 to him is just absolutely nothing. And there are these guys that just show up and can consistently do that. I don't know; I think that just feels like a US-specific thing to me, at least in my experience. When I was in Europe traveling, there wasn't that kind of action around. Guys who are just there to literally gamble insanely large sums of money.
— But I did hear that the Euro tournaments are much tougher than the American ones, which surprises me. I thought many Europeans were more gamblers than Americans, but maybe it's just really rich Americans. I don't know what's going on here, but okay, that's interesting. Yeah, I haven't really gambled in that many casinos. I thought more about playing some real spicy games. I played like a game with a bunch of people I didn't know in Morocco, $25/$50 on a stream—that was real random. I feel like you could play a lot of random games. I just don't know one person, like in Israel and like other places, at least like $25/$50.
– How do you like get connected to these people in these countries that you've never been to? Like, how do you find yourself in a game in Hangzhou or wherever you are right now? Like, how do you find yourself in that spot?
— That's a good question. So, I can answer in a few ways, but first of all, in Hangzhou, I'm not playing here through my connection with 888Poker and through other foreigners or whatever. You find yourself in that spot however you open it; it comes from just the whole idea of beating people and trusting them to some degree. But, of course, if you trust people too much, there's a chance you get cheated. I am not being cheated in China; one time I can tell you that, but I'm a little bit fortunate. I have a name, you know, and I happen to like beat the guy that was famous in China, Tom, so like I become more famous. For most people, it does just have to be a variety of being open and checking out new places and trusting a little bit of traveling, which is what you're doing.
I can tell you Taiwan is one of the best places I've played in; there's a very good market. There are good markets in a few different Asian countries, probably Vietnam too.
— No, man, I mean, like to be honest, I don't really—I'm not like super well-connected. You know, I like started posting like a month and a half ago, so I am like a big public games guy as of now.
— Sure, well, private games have lots of complications to them. I think one of the difficulties for a lot of people moving up in stakes for private games is you don't really know who to trust. This problem is like actually easily solvable from the top up, meaning if you have enough people you can connect to each other, and you can see pretty easily which games are safe and which are not. That being said, I would just think that these private games need people to play in, man. And I don't know—it just can't be that hard to get into some soft $5/$10 private game or find some soft casino game somewhere.
– I think you can find soft games, but like when you say that the private games need people, that seems like surprising to me. Cuz I feel like you know when you talk to people in poker, they're always like looking to find the private games. But you're saying that the private games need people—apparently, like where's the gap?
— I don't know if a lot of people are looking. I think that's part of the gap; I think that's part of like they just don't know people. I'm not like sitting around playing $5/$10, $10/$20, so it's actually interesting to me like how this happens. All I know is like I've randomly ended up at $5/$10 games and $10/$20 games that have been incredibly soft. That's one thing I've done; I'm not like trying, but I'm just kind of around a lot. I like talk to enough people and say yes a fair amount out of curiosity. So maybe things are different for me also because I'm famous, but like it's not like the games are full a lot of the time. I'll just go to some connected game in LA, and I'll just ask somebody who knows lots of games, and they'll just tell me like why wouldn't they be like, "Hey, let's invite this content creator guy who just grinds like the $5/$10 or whatever and loses online?" Why not?
— I have a couple questions; I think I could ask you that some people ask me that they might find interesting if that makes sense to like hear your take on it. Sure. If you had, I mean, a lot of people are really interested in like your approach to bankroll management. It sounds like you have a fairly aggressive approach. So for me, like my bankroll is around $90,000—what would be like your thinking on the types of stakes you can be playing? What's your risk tolerance? How would you approach it if your goal is to make the most money playing poker?
— We're talking the most money possible. Or you got to be playing $10/$20 at least. I would have probably played $10/$20; playing $20/$40 is going to be closer to Kelly. No one follows Kelly with no one, but you could if you're crazy enough. The problem is you can't really follow it because there are many inefficiencies of real life that occur that you need money for, such as expenses or just random things going wrong. Or potentially, I guess, the games don't really die, but you need to be cleaning $10/$20 at $90,000 for sure. Like, you're actually over-rolled for $10/$20. I don't know how tough these live games are, but man, there's no way that you can't play $90,000. I would be taking some shots in some tournaments, taking shots in soft games; I would be doing stuff like that. I would like being a little $20/$40 curious, okay.
If we're really aggressive, we're moving up 20 buy-ins at the lower stakes. You got to get out of the lower stakes; that's really the biggest thing.
— What do you call what you call lower stakes? What's your definition? I feel like your definition of lower stakes might be different than some people's.
— Yeah, lower than $100,000 a year. $10/$20 is more than $100,000 a year, yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, like, your life is not going to be that great with less than $100,000 a year in the US.
— That's true, depending on where you live.
What about buying in deep versus buying in for 100 big blinds when you're shot-taking? What's your thoughts on like what's your approach? So, like say you're taking a shot at $2,550 or you're buying in for 100 big blinds, 200 big blinds—always like what's your approach?
— Depends on your seat, depends on how good the game is, depends on if you're playing PLO. PLO, you play short a lot of the time because you can't really go wrong with that, and it's just better overall. And be a bunch of those things—a lot of people play short at PLO; it is kind of annoying to be honest. But uh, if you're if you're really honest, that's the way to play. If I was structuring the PLO games, I'd make people buy in 50 big blinds, men. But that's how you do it. Probably buy in deep for NL; it's less likely to get run over or something. It's just, man, unless you're playing really tough stakes, they're really tough games, which is the whole point. You're not going to run over most of the time, even if like if you have some kind of experience.
— So, I talked to someone else who said, uh, like an $80,000 roll is like $5/$10—biggest you should be playing if you're playing for a living. So, there are some pretty varying opinions on this.
— Well, wait, this is if you have like responsibilities, okay, I get it. But if you have nothing, if you're going to like retreat to your parents' basement, no, we're playing. Okay, if you got nothing in your life, you're going for it, or well, not nothing in life, but like you know, you don't have to pay your rent like that's that's like on the fence. If you don't have to take care of kids, that kind of thing, we're playing $10/$20.
— Yeah, I mean, luckily I am currently a basement dweller at my parents' home, so I don't have like the responsibilities you're talking about. Maybe I can't afford to be much more aggressive than I've been.
— It's much more exciting, also like that's the stuff people watch. I'm curious; I want to see how you get out of it. Maybe take a trip to Asia or something, some random ass place that you heard is good. Go to Morocco! Maybe it's just better making content that way.
— You got to start a vlog; your vlog would be so sick if you just had like a GoPro on you at all times. I would watch that for sure.
— Oh, I have one in China; it'll be interesting.
— I don't know if you struggle with this, but I'm like not a math guy; I'm like not a strategy guy. I'm not naturally good at games at all. One thing that I really struggled with when I was traveling and playing a lot was the conversion of currencies to try and like figure out how many big blinds I had and like kind of recalibrate to how much a bet is worth to them. For example, when I was playing in Budapest, their currency is called the Forint, just trying to figure out how many big blinds I had was like making the game much harder. Usually, you just count chip stacks, the stack that you have, and I don't know; I don't think I really have this problem.
— You're telling me that the games in Hungary are tougher than the games in like San Jose?
— No, no, I mean, dude, Hungary—the biggest stake that was running was like the equivalent of like $1/$1, and the rake was like capped at some insane amount. I'm skeptical whether or not like the rake was insane; I can't remember what it was, but um, it was crazy.
— Could you beat The Hungary games? Is that possible?
— I don't know; I have to do the math for rake, but I think someone told me like someone who was a pro went there and said that like at micros, it was just like ridiculously high. I would not recommend trying to play there for a living, though; it sounds insane to me. Budapest is sick, yeah, but the poker scene is not it, from what I could tell.
— Did you ever have trouble like moving down stakes when you need to?
— A little bit, not so much to be honest. It was more annoying when there were not many good opportunities to play; that was much more annoying than having to move down.
— In terms of time management, I'm like really curious—how are you a scheduled guy?
— I don't really schedule them; I have more like a loose organization, especially these days. So, what I do is this is actually a good thing you should make content on—like I often go to the gym before I work out or before I start playing, or else it might not happen. I am pretty privileged; I would say because I'll play games that are a bit more flexible with when I do things. Like play in Macau, that's a goodish location for a few years, but it's not like luxurious by any means. I would like play on my off days or go to the gym on my off days, and I have to like organize things like that on my off days, just organize things in general on the off days. And I kind of alternate between the days because you couldn't play all the days. I was never super structured; I don't think most pros are super structured if I had to guess.
What about you? How did you handle stuff like this? And by the way, I'm curious also—what do your parents think of all this, the poker stuff, and your friends?
— My parents are definitely very supportive; I've had like conversations with them and showed them like variance calculations and things like this to try and prove to them that like sometimes swinging the amount of money is normal. I think my mom struggles with like absolute dollars if that makes sense—like when I come home and I tell her like, oh, I lost $5,000 today, but whatever, it's like normal. She's like, what do you mean you lost like $5,000? Type of thing, and I mean, I understand like it's not like a normal thing.
In general, super supportive. I think my friends, for the most part, think it's cool, but I don't think they like quite get it. They think it's just like go sit down in the chair, print your money, come home, and that's it—it's like a very stress-free, use here to play a game all day lifestyle. I don't think poker really feels like that at all to me, in the sense that like, I mean, at least when you're trying to move up a lot, there's just like a lot of stress all the time. At least to me, there was like every day is kind of like I'm going there to try and like play very well, and they know if the shot doesn't go well, then I'm going to move back down. It's not necessary that it's like scary, but it's just like it's kind of a grind—just this process that you keep repeating over and over again, and like kind of swinging new dollar amounts that just is pretty stressful over time.
And then in terms of scheduling, it's just something I struggle with. I get like pretty inconsistent; I'll just like randomly put in volume, and then randomly take a lot of time off. I'm trying to get better at it, but I think I do have a problem of like when I go on heaters, I spend a lot of money and I travel a lot, and then when I go on downswings, I kind of like really hunker down and don't really do anything. And I think that kind of has like a compounding effect eventually, because like my lifestyle just becomes worse, and I probably play worse as well if that makes sense.
— I'd say I had a bit more of the opposite tendency—sometimes I spend on heaters, but if I lose, I'll like really put in volume. For me, it's more like I can't stand to lose, so I'll be like really determined in my mind, thinking like I'm not losing. It's like almost delusional in a sense of like thinking like I'm just going to do whatever it takes to win, which I think eventually does help me play better when I'm losing. Actually, when I'm losing, I'm much more cautious about every single decision, whereas when I'm winning, it can like be a little bit easier to be complacent. When I'm losing, I'm like really checking things, set everything's looking good, plays are all right, that sort of thing.
— One of my leaks that I had or I definitely still have is when I'm on heaters, I'm like I send it a lot more—I'm like much more comfortable like putting in stacks without thinking too much if that makes sense. Like, I would definitely like bluff off in a bunch of pretty huge spots like when I was up. And then like, it did this weird thing where I would start bluffing a lot more when I won a lot, if that makes sense. I know it sounds like super oversimplified, but I would have this like weird form of winner's tilt where I felt like when I was on heaters, having a lot of value, I felt compelled to like start running it more.
— It's overconfidence; you feel like it's just working more, that sort of thing. I mean, it's like not that crazy; I have winner's tilt sometimes too. It's pretty normal; it's one of the more common leaks I would say for regulars. I even made a video on this; it's more common with a lot of regulars. Certain people have it harder to get over; a different thing is monkey tilt. Monkey tilt is like what the donks may have; rarely do regulars have monkey tilt. Regulars have winner's tilt or they have like the other kind of tilt that's quite common—is if they're losing, they're less likely to bluff by a decent margin. That's another common one that I personally see. If their bluffs aren't working temporarily, they may think it's not always true; it depends on how committed to GTO they are, for example, or just how crazy they are.
— Have you ever like had a monkey tilt episode or no?
— Maybe just first, like very briefly, like within 15 minutes, not really going crazy pre-flop or anything. Actually, if I lose my cool, it's for like less than a minute; it's like maybe I just get super angry at somebody. I definitely had more monkey tilt from like people acting like scumbags; that kind of thing might put me on monkey tilt, but not really from poker by itself. Live poker is a little bit too slow.
— Have you been making any money with your content? What does that process look like, especially if someone who doesn't have a huge following but a decent following on Instagram? Have you partnered with casinos or done anything like that?
— No, like yeah, people think that like the money just starts flowing in once you have like 10,000 followers, and it's just not like that. Yeah, like I have not made any money from it; I've like been afforded some cool opportunities, like where it's like people have offered for me to play in games if that makes sense, that I wouldn't have been able to play in before. But it's not like directly; it's not like I'm directly monetizing the content in any way, and I don't really plan to.
— That's still good. I mean, probably safe because you can at least like spread the word really fast if they're not safe. Yeah, so that's one way of opening doors, at least.
— Yeah, 100%—I mean, like I would like to stay a poker player first, content creator second. If that makes sense, that is kind of like I don't want to go down the route of like content becoming my main source of income because I think that kind of takes away from the content that I'm creating. Like, I would—I want to show what it's like to come up playing poker as your way of coming up, not as me creating content to come up and play poker.
— So, you're not focusing so much on like the storytelling or anything like that?
— I've like read a lot about content; I've spent a lot of time like learning how to edit and stuff like that. I try to like incorporate storytelling; I try to make good content, but I don't want the content to become my job if that makes sense. Like, I want poker to stay my job; that's what I enjoy doing.
— So, what's the hardest part about putting in the highs and lows of all this? And do people have like specifically what they're looking for when they watch? What is it that lands really hard with your audience?
— I think people like transparency. There are not many people who post what their bankroll is online and their monthly results every month and what their daily results are if that makes sense. I think people like seeing like exactly where you're at financially, dude. I have people who DM me like basically asking for like my income statements; they just like want to know everything about me. They're like, "How much did you make this year? What's like your best month this year?" It's a little weird; people just want to know what it's like and like they want to know like the exact details of it. So, I try and share as much as I'm comfortable with.
— I had a few interesting sessions; one funny thing is there's a game in China that's a little bit like Bullshit, but it's more like Capitalism in my opinion, and like it reminds you of what you're supposed to do to be good at this game is similar to Bullshit, structuring your bluffs and where you put certain kinds of hands in certain places. But it's called Guan Dao. I've been playing that a little bit lately, not too much, like for very small stakes, and I don't know what kind of edge is possible. But I was playing poker on the side yesterday; I played a soft game and lost like $200 at the game. I played this game that straddled $25/$50 multiple tables PLO. I like finally won a session on this other app, uh, for $10,000 or so, and then I played heads-up against this guy. In my opinion, he played like complete trash. Is this interesting for you? I played Double Draw Double Pot PLO heads-up against this guy because like I tell this guy he sucked at $100/$200, and I'm sitting there thinking, "Man, this guy blows at Double Pot."
— Are you playing on your phone? Is this on your phone or like an iPad?
— Yeah, on my phone. I played a little bit, and I realized very fast that this guy's not very good, okay. But the problem was that probably I wasn't very good either, so I ended up like breaking even. Realizing, you know what, I think I'm still a favorite, but I'm making too many careless mistakes, and I made a few plays that seem suspect. But yeah, I like broke even against that guy, like ended up losing $200,000 on the day. Okay, I was playing while we're eating, you know, chicken feet and all this weird stuff, and just like grinding poker—chicken liver or whatever they've got, like chicken intestine.
— And I've always wondered this about the guys playing like you, who have been around for like a super long time and play like the biggest possible stakes. Do you still sweat like set days?
— Man, if I was like $200,000, that definitely makes me sweat a little bit. But I'm kind of extreme in that; most situations are not going to screw my life, even if I've had a lot of bad things happen. So, I'm more of an extreme case; I've had situations where I've had plenty of situations where like I was kind of like out of money, even if I lost, it just barely affected me.
— Recently, you've had that, like in the last five years, you've had those situations?
— Yes, but not like bust exactly, just more like out of action for a moment. Do you know what I mean? I had like beat, not B, but I had I couldn't reload on the table. Okay, oh wow, dude, you're still in there, like really annoying situations where like basically I'd have to wire again or I had to like scramble money around, where it's not BOT, but it wouldn't be like whatever had like liquid on the table, kind of thing.
Jungleman's podcast was posted in early February. On the 12th, Mateos reported on his telegram channel about the results of January in Dallas. He played 21 sessions, an average of 5.5 hours, which came out to almost $100 per hour:
Then he went to his beloved San Jose, where he farmed $10$/$20 for the entire month — and more than made up for the downswing he mentioned at the beginning of the interview. Mateos played exactly 200 hours and, apparently, doubled his bankroll:
He already has almost 30 thousand subscribers on Instagram. The latest reel (with a detailed financial report on the results of February – including expenses on food, hotels, educational software and taxis) has already gained more than 1.6 million views. You can find Mateos there under the nickname 2cardtito.
Well, Bay 101, where Hero mostly plays, is a legendary Californian casino that hosted the WPT Championship series 15 times. In 2004, Chris Moneymaker took 2nd place in the Main Event there — it was his first cash as a world champion in poker. The last hand, where he was knocked out by Phil Gordon (the author of the book that opened the way for Mateos to become a poker player), was colorful — Moneymaker talked about it in the Triton podcast, which we recently posted.
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