David Lappin – Huge congratulations, what an amazing result.
Jonathan Tamayo – I can't complain.
Lappin – Certainly not, not for a few years anyway.
So Jonathan, there is always a temptation when interviewing players who have just had big results, to frame the conversation in such a way as to make it seem like it was an inevitability that they were going to have their monster score.
The truth though, is that there's nothing inevitable about it as you quite rightly said in your winner's speech, "We all take our shot in the WSOP Main, it's just a numbers game. We never ever think it could be a reality" That was very philosophical and wise from you in the moment and I suspect that was borne out of a deep understanding of what it's like to be a tournament poker player.
You're still a fairly young man, is it hard to see this as part of the journey and not the end of it?
Tamayo – Something I never really thought about, my motivation is just playing cash games, grinding cash games, never for the glory, just trying to maintain my lifestyle. And then, I get upon this and you're never really ready for it.
You go into the summer, all I do is play mid-stakes / low-stakes big-field tournaments. You're like, "Okay, I'm sacrificing hourly to take my shot," basically. Tournaments, as far as an hourly is concerned, aren't the most efficient use of time, most of the time. You're just never ready to get a windfall of cash like that, really.
The way I have to live my life, I want to try to live my life as normal as possible, but I know that's not going to be possible for a while now. And when you just get a windfall of cash in a two-week period, you're never really prepared.
Lappin – Now that you're world champion, do you really feel the itch to go and take a kind of lap of honor?
Tamayo – Traveling is stressful for me. I just don't like being in the air, I don't like the risk of being stuck at airports, layovers, baggage being lost. You can be in a foreign country in an unfamiliar setting and be lost. I could probably make my way through London, Germany, Italy, and a lot of European countries. Do I want to go somewhere more exotic? Probably not. I'm kind of a low-key, not a kind of go out and explore type. The farthest I've been out of the country is the Bahamas, because I'd won seats to the PCA prior to Black Friday, so I went. That's not really out of the country but it's the furthest I've been out. A few years ago I was in Toronto, so I've not really left North America.
And I don't know if I will. If I do, I'll probably bring someone who's more experienced at the ins and outs of going through customs, every country's laws are different. You can't bring the American attitude to Greece or Italy, for example, or France. It doesn't work that way.
Lappin – Let's flashback to about 14 years ago to the beginning of a beautiful friendship. You were at an event at Turningstone and you met Joe Mckeehen for the first time. What was that encounter like and how quickly did you figure out you'd found a kindred spirit?
Tamayo – The first time I met him was through a friend I had, DJ Craig. Met him on 2+2, so we DM'd each other and they came to Turningstone. So I had dinner with him and it was at an Italian place. I forgot what I ate, but I remember that the only thing Joe would eat on that menu was a pizza. He has very simple food tastes. Still does.
He didn't say much, it was pretty awkward. For his first full summer at the series, we roomed with each other. I want to say.. in 2013? When you do a lot of summers at the World Series, it starts running together. So, it was me and him in a 6-person house at the time. After that, we kind of just roomed with each other every year.
He rubbed some roommates the wrong way because he's a little brash. But somehow, he didn't really rub me the wrong way. He's a little in your face and his humor can be a little tilting to hear. There's one of those YouTube shorts and Twitter videos where he's talking about me and going to the strip club. People who know him know he's not serious, but there are people on the internet who thought he was dead serious.
We're kind of the same way. We don't go out, we don't do that stuff. Our idea of a good time is going to an escape room. During the aftermath, after I won, Caesars gave us a suite in the Horseshoe. So, they ended up having a 30-person Werewolf game in the suite.
Lappin – Nice.
Tamayo – I didn't play, I was dealing with stuff. Trying to get my money and all that. I could see some of my friends looking at it from the outside thinking, "What in the world is going on?" It's not what everybody thinks a post-celebration time consists of.
Lappin – What are Joe's best qualities as a friend?
Tamayo – If you get to know him and you're in his circle, he's not the type of person he is in public. He's very to himself, I'm kind of the same way. He kind of understands what makes people tick. He understands the personalities. Me and Joe are also business partners.
He's a pretty generous person, I'll put it that way.
Lappin – It was that Main Event deep run in 2009 that got your first bit of media attention actually, you finished 21st out of 6,494 entrants and played the late stages with players like Phil Ivey, Ben Lamb, Antonio Estfandiari – what was that experience like?
Tamayo – It was an experience I wasn't ready for. At that time, I played No-Limit Holdem tournaments, but I didn't play No-Limit Holdem Cash. I was a Limit Holdem grinder, which was a dying game at the time. I was kind of holding on. All I did was play the SNGs and Limit Holdem, so I didn't know how to adapt my ranges, I didn't know exploits like I do now. I didn't even have a good base strategy – I kind of just made it up as I went.
To show you how absurd it was, I took some of the Limit Holdem and brought it to the tournament. It's funny to think about how bad it is now, but it was the best thing I had then. If I was more than 60bb deep, I had no 3-bet range. If I was playing a hand, I was flatting everything. I would open and have a cold 4-bet range, but never had a 3-bet range.
Dara O'Kearney – In 2015, you had another remarkable Main Event experience, but it wasn't one on the felt. Rather, it was on the rail, where you bore witness to the wrecking ball procedures of your friend Joe. I think it's fair to say that his final table performance was the most dominant in WSOP Main Event history.
What was Joe's demeanor like off the felt those days and what was it like being an integral part of his support network?
Tamayo – He was kind of zoned in, so the car rides were oddly quiet, which I was fine with. I was driving the car that summer. I know he never got much sleep, so I don't know if that's because he was spacing out or more in the moment. Leading up to it, before the final table, I'd basically told him, "This is how it goes, this is what happens."
He was just playing poker, that kind of thing. And then, in between that November Nine, we just chatted but I left him alone for the most part. The primary coach at the time was Calvin Anderson and I was just kind of there for the support. I wasn't really there advising him on strategy. I was kind of there more as the eyes and ears, watching the table. In a very crude way, I was also the note-taker. I was hand-logging every hand at that final table. There were two notebooks; the Day 1 final table, which my friend has, and I still have the Day 2 notebook.
He was still good at live reads, tendencies, and exploits on the fly, so he didn't really need much help on that front. There were very frequent commercial breaks because it's ESPN, so you'd play 20 minutes, and here's a 5-minute commercial break. The delay was only 15 minutes at the time, not an hour like it is now. So when the commercial break comes, thumb through the notebook. We had the laptop, we had the stream on. We have backup things for the stream too, two streams were playing. And, he didn't really need much help because everything kind of went to plan.
Some stuff went on, but not as much as people thought. One of my friends told me it was the easiest final table win he's ever watched.
Lappin – Are you someone who's prone to overthinking and how successful was Joe in helping you de-stress?
Tamayo – He was pretty essential because he's known my game for a long time. He knows, sometimes the emotional aspect of how I will get when things aren't going right. There was a time, during that heads up, where he could see me acting a little quicker. One thing that we discussed on Day 7 of the Main was that zero decisions are fast at this point. You gotta make sure you are doing what you want to do at that point.
So, during that heads up he could see me acting fast, so I looked over and he's just giving me the "slow down" sign. Fortunately, it was 5 minutes before blinds went up at the break. So I actually took a little more time on a couple decisions, to get myself together and on the break, he kind of gave me a talk.
Joe basically told Dom not to overload me, because he knows if I get overloaded, bad things start happening mentally. I'll start thinking quicker. I'll start thinking of things at the table that aren't there, for example. Joe is pretty essential in that part.
O'Kearney – We have to talk a bit about the controversy that has come out of the fact that Dominik had his laptop open on the rail. While there was nothing to suggest that any sims were being run or real-time assistance being offered to you, the presence of grids and other solver training material in your coaching corner has upset a lot of people.
What would you say to those people about what you saw?
Tamayo – So, the laptop wasn't running sims and I wasn't really concerned with what was going on because Dom basically told me, "We'll go handle it, just play. If there's something we need to talk to you about, we'll talk to you about it." So, I was just compartmentalizing what I was going to do. He said, "Feel free to make any in-game adjustments on the fly and if we think they're incorrect or we see something, we'll let you know."
That's basically how it was. My job was to play. His job was to coach. Him and Joe's job was to, if the see something, say something to me. If they saw something I was doing that they think wasn't correct, they would address it with me. That's kind of how that went.
Lappin – This leads to my final question; Is the first step of that maybe being open and transparent about how you guys probably did get right up the line of an interpretation of the rules? And also, perhaps, maybe you would get behind the prevailing view that the rules should change.
I kind of talked about it with a couple of people. I'm not going to be able to change 90 to 95% of people's opinions. A lot of people that are saying stuff, their opinions are made. There's some debate about how we go about coaching now and I don't know the answer to that. Dom did say, "If you wanted to be pure, you could turn it into chess where you put everyone in a glass box," but then, that doesn't get anyone excited. So what's the balance? That's unfortunately a question I don't have the answer to because I'm not an operator and I don't know the answer.
I would be good with sequestering everybody. In 2007, they actually did live hole cards for final tables. They sequestered everybody, you had your own bathroom, your cell phone was locked up. What they did in 2007, we could go back to that, but what happens to TV production at that point? I feel like it would be kind of bland, so I don't know what the answer is. Everybody has cellphones and they have a lot more computing power than my laptop did 15 years ago as well.
So, what's the answer? I don't know. One of my friends joked, "You might have a rule named after you."
I haven't studied solvers, I don't know how they work.
