On the Tom Dwan Debt Scandal
Phil Galfond – Every month, there's a new drama bomb in poker.
Sean Kelly – I was upset with the Tom Dwan one because I grew up in Jersey where he grew up, and he was one of my favorite players.
– Tom was one of my best friends in poker early on. He taught me a lot, especially when I moved from No-Limit Hold'em to PLO. He had been playing it for a few years, and I didn't know anything.
He is a very generous person. I remember I had known him for about six months because we ran in the same circle of poker friends, but I didn't really know him that well. He was telling me I should get into PLO. I said, "I don't know the first thing about it", and he was just like, "Oh. Watch me play." I sat down next to him as he played for six hours. That's something that someone of that stature wouldn't typically do – to just give that away without thinking about it is really kind.
– Were you shocked when all that stuff came out?
– You hear things when you're part of the poker circles. There were a few different things, but I think two people involved in the drama were Peter Jetten and Haralabos Voulgaris, and I'm friends with both of them too. I was sad to see it.
– Yeah. Your own friends fighting.
– I don't hang out with Tom as much as we used to, but I got to know him so well back then. I'm confident that he's a good person who means well. What it sounded like happened is.. he can be aloof and lose track of things. He can also think that some things are going to come together, and he's going to be able to... I think that it's accidental.
If we take Peter's story at face value, which I have no reason to distrust, it's still not fair to Peter. But I don't think Tom does these things intentionally, if that's what he did, which I don't know.
Cheating in the Poker World
– And a lot of cheating!
– Any activity where there's a lot of money to be made will bring some cheaters and scammers.
– Have you run into any in your games?
– You usually don't know when you get cheated.
I've been not paid many times, but as far as actual cheating, other than going way back to the Ultimate Bet superuser scandal about 18 years ago, where there was cheating and people got refunds, so I know that I was cheated, other than that, no. I don't know of times I've been cheated. But I probably have been.
– There was a site recently that got exposed right? Doug Polk exposed a site?
– There was a vulnerability that was exploited in GGPoker's software recently. GGPoker is the biggest site, and apparently, (I want to be careful, this is my hazy recollection of what was said by all parties) they pushed an update to the software it opened a vulnerability. Somebody who was a hacker or developer figured out how to exploit it. Because of this vulnerability, he could see cards that were going to come before they came, giving him a huge edge.
It's unclear how long he exploited that for, at least to me. But they did figure it out and close it. The Ultimate Bet scandal was actually an inside job – somebody at the company who could see everybody's cards. Whereas this more recent GGPoker scandal was just an oversight, an accident by the developers that somebody with the right skills noticed it, yeah.
Does Galfond Prefer Online or Live Poker?
– Do you prefer playing online or in person?
– I prefer playing online. Part of it is that I'm introverted, and I get burnt out just being at a live poker table for 12 hours, even just from the social element. There's also something about poker where I absolutely love it and I love diving into the problem-solving aspect of it. When I'm playing online and thinking through each and every decision, I get into this flow state that is just so fun.
When I'm playing live, I don't get into that flow state because I'm constantly interrupted. I have to think about my posture, what my face looks like, if I'm moving correctly. Then I have to talk to this person, now I have to talk to that person. It just breaks the flow. There are a lot of things that distract from the purity of the game.
– I never saw that point of view, but that makes sense. There are a lot of factors in person right? People are so good at reading tells at your level.
– It's funny, after a day of live poker, my body hurts. I'm just sitting stiff like this. You know, I didn't even realize they were looking at your posture.
Here's the thing: I think a lot of people are terrified that players are going to pick up tells. This includes amateurs and even people who play a decent amount. I'm making up a number, but you know, 95% of people out there who think they're picking up tells are not. They're just seeing noise. There's confirmation bias.
For example, they say, "Oh, he moved his chips this way, I think he's weak," and then he shows down a weak hand. They're like, "Yes, I knew it! I was right!" And then the next time it happens, they show down a strong hand, and they ignore that. So they think they have these tells that they don't.
But there are some people who are very elite at reading tells, and those people can be dangerous.
– Phil Ivey, right? That dude is a machine.
– We all just have to guess who's great at tells by the way that they play. Some people talk about how they're good at tells and how it's a big part of their game, others don't.
I think Phil Hellmuth is another one, just based on the way I see him play. There's some way or another he's guessing pretty well what other people have.
– There's no arguing with his results. He might be the GOAT of tournaments.
– Nobody's close to him in World Series of Poker bracelets. It's impressive for many reasons, but especially because he was somebody who did it kind of before my generation and continues to win another bracelet every year or two.
Where Are Phil Galfond's Generation of Poker Players Now?
– How many people are still around from your generation?
– My generation was like, the online boom generation. So when 2003 Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker, that coincided with a lot of online poker sites popping up within a year or two of that. It was a TV poker boom that led to the online poker boom.
There are a ton of players still around from my generation, a lot of them. Most top players these days, I would say – at least I think half came from my generation more or less.
– So they're still around. Because I look at the old TV shows and I'm like, which one of these guys are still around and making money? Because poker is a really tough game to be profitable in.
– Yeah, so I can – if you watch TV back then, poker on TV back then like the High Stakes Poker, which was my favorite, which was just the best – a lot of those guys are not around anymore. And that was a generation before mine who kind of started – basically, the way I split the generations is who started playing online by playing online and who started by playing live before online happened.
And so a lot of people from that generation aren't around anymore. Partially, I mean, some did very well and retired and moved on to other things. But for others, it got too tough because all players came up online. They had so many more tools to learn with, and the natural selection process was just so much more powerful because there were so many more people playing online. So the ones that rose to the top had to rise to the top in a much tougher environment. So they just, you know, got sharpened along the way. And when you're pulling from that large of a base of people who try, you're going to find more elite people.
The Rising Skill Gap
– Absolutely. Have you seen the skill level go up every year?
– There was a big gap, honestly. So in 2011, we call it Black Friday in the poker world, where online poker shut down in the US.
And at that point, there stopped being – I mean, basically, that was kind of marked the end of the poker boom back then. The poker shows on TV were largely funded by the online poker sites. So in some cases, they actually just paid for the production. They paid agame show network to put the show on. In other cases, they were the commercials. So therefore, the networks could make money from the commercials and then put the shows on.
So when online poker sites got shut down in the US, which was far and away their biggest market, about half of the revenue from global online poker sites came from the US. Wow. So when that was shut down, they got crushed, and the poker boom kind of stopped. There was a long lull in new players coming up, and only in the last several years has it picked up again. It's because of YouTube.
At first, it was TV, but then the money was gone, so the networks were not producing more shows. But then on YouTube, you don't need a network to put your show on. A lot of people kind of started – well, there were two: there were Twitch streamers and then there were vloggers that kind of started it. Now there are a whole bunch of different kinds of poker YouTube channels. I have one that's more educational than vloggy.
– I feel like guys like Brad Owen really revitalized poker, right?
– Absolutely. And now, when you – like, anybody – so my wife plays a lot of tournaments, she's a poker player too, and I don't get out there as much, but she says anytime she sees somebody who's like under 24, she gets curious. They are playing out reasonably high buy-in tournaments. She's like, "How did you find poker? How did you start out?" And then it's almost always YouTube.
– Wow. Yeah, and now there's like these lodges, right? [editors note: The Lodge]
– There are tons of streaming games. That's become really big. Yeah, so first it was vloggers, now – I mean people still do those vlogs, but I do think streaming is now getting massive.
– There are million-dollar games being streamed now, it's insane.
– Yeah, it's right. And these are the types of games that used to be on, you know, cable, right? Back when I was younger. And now, you know, they just stream them for free.
– What's the highest buy-in game you've played?
– I played in a game where the blinds were $2,000/$4,000. So it was a $400,000 minimum. Oh my God.
– Gosh, were you freaking out a little bit?
– So it was like – so the – I had regularly played in $500/$1,000, which is a $100,000 buy-in. That was normal for me. But I'd never played even double that, and this was quadruple that. And it was a private game, which I never get into, but there was just this – like, I had a friend reach out, and he's like, "Okay, this huge game was running, but people are leaving, and they're actually open seats."
Sometimes they run private games in casinos, and they block people until there are just no more people to fill the seats, and then it's kind of open. And sometimes what happens is then pros fill the seats and the game breaks – people leave. But sometimes they continue for a while. And so friends were like, "Hey, there's a seat," and I was like, "Okay, I don't have $400K on me right now."
And I'm like, you need a few buy-ins, so like, I had – I don't know, I probably had like $300K in my account there. And so I had to contact like six friends. I was like, "Okay, do you want a piece? I need some money right now." And it was like a huge hassle to get all of it together and get there. And then, um, you know, I lost a couple small pots. I lost like $150,000, and the game broke in like 20 minutes.
– 20 minutes? Damn and that was just at a casino casually?
– Yeah, it was Aria. Oh my gosh, I didn't know the games got that big over there.
Yeah, they – they don't these days. So there was – they used to have a private game that ran there – I mean, semi-private game that ran there all the time. It's usually like $100,000 buy-in, but sometimes got bigger. But these days, I don't know of any that run in casinos in like the public poker rooms. A lot of them have gone into, you know, apartments or homes.
– Why did the casinos kind of get away from that, you think?
– I think it's more that the people who ran them, to avoid things like what happened – like, people, you know, seats would open and people get in – whereas if you can go in somebody's home, you know, they control the environment. Pros can't show up and knock on their door and get into the game. The benefit of having it at a casino, in addition to the amenities, is that you can have more confidence that the game is safe. There are a lot of stories of home games being cheated. And certainly not all of them are, but it happens a lot more often in home games. Whereas in a casino, they have all these security measures, and it's not that it can't happen, but it happens much, much more rarely, especially with that much money involved.
– Especially with that much money involved, I mean hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions. I've heard of home games getting in the millions, which is nuts.
– Yeah, no, they get huge. The biggest games are in, you know, run out of casinos in people's homes.
– Do you still play a lot right now?
– Right now, no, because I kind of have nothing to play. So, um, but before we hopped on, I was saying I don't really play tournaments. Tournaments are not my thing. I play cash games, and cash games have all gone private. So the only thing, is if I wanted to play high stakes now in a public game, it's basically just tournaments. They're my only option.
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