– The first question is about the hand against Wesley on the Hustler stream, in which you gave away over $3 million.
On the river, Tom thought for a long time and made a call with QQ
In the Wesley queens hand, Doug and Wesley both had the view that they never give away live reads. Maybe they still believe that. But the reality is that sometimes, in massive pots, live factors matter. The solver gives you a baseline. But if the actual distribution of bluffs is lower than theory because of the person, the moment, or the stakes, then the correct adjustment can be to fold.And in that game, Wesley was constantly chatting and getting distracted.
When two strong players are playing each other, like me and Phil, sometimes you notice something, and then the other guy notices that you noticed it, and now there’s leveling. It becomes a leveling war.
But in that game, they were being a little sloppy. They were giving away a bit too much.
In the queens hand versus Wesley, I was very confident that he didn’t have aces. Early in the hand maybe I discounted aces 70–80%, maybe 85%. By the end, I probably discounted them 90–95%. Kings I discounted less early, but as the hand developed, I discounted those a lot too.
At that point, if you remove aces and heavily discount kings, then queens become a hand you want to get all in with. I was more worried about some weird hand like or than about aces.
If you look at the GTO solution and discount aces from his range, it’s not even close. It becomes an instant call every street.
When I called flop and turn, if he could have read my mind, he should have just gotten up and left the casino. I was not folding. I was re-evaluating in theory, but in reality, I was very locked in on the read.
Same thing in the 1.1M hand versus Doug. I had sevens on .
Ed. – Durrrr continued betting on the flop, and on the turn he bet $30,000 to $61,000. Polk reraised to $150,000. Dwan thought for a long time and only called after his opponent clocked him for a minute. On the river, Doug overbet $420,000 into a $291,000 pot. Tom thought for a long time and called. In the end, Dwan explained that he had been thinking about shoving.
In a vacuum, especially against someone like Phil, I’m almost always reraising the turn. It’s a pretty clear spot to apply pressure.
But because of the live dynamic and some of the things that were said, I heavily discounted twos and sixes. I still gave some weight to kings, maybe even slightly more than normal, but I really discounted the lower sets.
So instead of reraising the turn, which is standard, I just called. That allowed him to fire the river and I picked up an extra 400 big blinds.
– I want to ask you about cheating in poker. You’ve played every stake, every variant, live and online, in the U.S. and in dozens of countries. Talk about the differences in high-stakes live games, especially in places like Vegas and L.A. versus Asian games.
One thing is that a lot of poker players are nowhere near concerned enough about security. The money sitting on the table, represented by a few pieces of plastic, can be worth thousands, tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. It’s really not that hard for people to cheat if they want to.
There’s a lot of stuff I’ve known about my whole life. I think I was pretty good at avoiding most of it. One time I got hit pretty hard, but I can’t reasonably share the details. Still, I know many stories, and usually that kind of thing gets swept under the rug.
This is mostly in live games.
Sometimes it even happens in casinos. There have been incidents in European casinos and even recent issues in Vegas. In one case, some people I know actually did the right thing, which was surprising. Normally casinos would try to bury the situation. In Vegas, it was easier for the truth to come out, probably because Nevada Gaming is one of the strongest regulatory bodies in the world. But even there, issues still happen.
A lot of people prefer to ignore these possibilities.
– When you played in Asian games, how was it being an outsider? Did you eventually fit in?
I was in some unique situations. I had connections with certain Chinese players and their families, including people involved in Paul’s case and the aftermath. I had to balance different relationships. Some of the Chinese businessmen I knew didn’t care much about American institutions, but I did. I thought the U.S. government was completely wrong in that case, especially regarding Fourth Amendment issues, but it was still a complicated situation.
I even told one FBI agent they should go after Paul for something else because their case was misguided. That didn’t mean I would help them, but it showed how complex the situation was.
Because of that, some of the Chinese backers and organizers trusted me to different degrees. A lot of Western players assume they can show up, make money, and not care who they affect. Some American businessmen would approach me asking for inside information about Chinese players, assuming we should cooperate just because we were both Americans. I would tell them that’s not how it works. Relationships matter more than nationality.
I had some great experiences. There was one game that ran for about a year and a half in places like Macau and Hong Kong that had no serious issues for me. But other games were much more complicated.
– Were there any really crazy stories?
There was a game in Macau about ten years ago. A guy walked in and started playing. In one hand, he bet, I called, and then he tried to pull his chips back. Another player at the table, someone very influential who didn’t speak much English, tapped me and told me to let it go. He basically said, “Trust me.”
I didn’t understand why, but I let it go. I wondered if the guy was some government figure or a huge whale. I didn’t ask until later.
That player ended up losing either seven or nine million dollars in one session, just walking in cold. I only had a small piece of myself in the game, but a couple days later I asked what had happened. The explanation was simple: the other player had read him as an enormous fish.
He didn’t know for sure, but he had a strong instinct. If I had caused a scene, it might have scared the guy away from the game. The player who told me to let it go had done me many favors over the years, so when he said it, I trusted him.
– There are also a couple of prop bets I want to ask you about. One of them was the limit hold’em machine prop bet that my colleague reminded me about yesterday.
– When that machine first came out, it was the talk of the town. People were saying it could beat you at limit hold’em. My understanding was that the highest stakes were $20/$40, maybe $40/$80 at some point, but $20/$40 was the main top stake.
There was a group of people who thought the machine was unbeatable. And then there was me.
For context, I wasn’t the best limit hold’em player in the world, but I was good. I had battled at $2K/$4K online, which was the highest at the time. I was probably top 100 in the world in limit. The people betting against me probably thought I wasn’t very good, which worked in my favor.
I’m telling you, that machine must have been losing something like five big bets per hundred. That’s catastrophic in limit hold’em. If you’re even slightly competent, losing one or two big bets per hundred is hard. Five is insane.
You could even click “show cards.” It was that bad. One of the guys betting against me came to watch, and I literally tried to block the screen so he wouldn’t see how terrible it was. If he had understood what he was looking at, he would have quit immediately.
There were specific massive leaks, especially on ace-high and king-high boards, which come up constantly. It was bleeding money.
(Ed. – According to rumors, Tom won 400 big bets from the machine. A couple of months later, these machines were removed from the casino)
Rapid Fire Questions
– Phil Ivey.
Eyes.
– David Benjamin.
I’ve got a good one, but I’ll text it to you.
– Full Tilt Poker.
Chaos.
– Gus Hansen.
Crazy.
– Howard Lederer.
Complicated.
I always got along with him, but what happened in London was wildly out of line. I don’t think he has a bad heart, but that situation was serious.
Ed. – Last May, as a result of a nervous breakdown, Tom ended up in a London psychiatric hospital and claimed that he was being held there against his will.
Chill
– Ziigmund.
He's a lunatic, but I like him.
– Chinese poker.
I never liked it.
– Guy Laliberte.
Pass.
– Phil Galfond.
Friend.
Audience Questions
– Let's move on to questions from the audience. What was the most profitable exploit during the Rail Heaven era?
There wasn’t one single trick, but the biggest edge was psychological and strategic adaptation. A lot of those guys were extremely strong technically, but they were also very ego-driven. They hated adjusting in ways that felt like conceding ground.
One exploit was pushing edges in spots where they theoretically knew the adjustment but didn’t want to make it because it felt weak.
Another was adjusting preflop frequencies against specific regulars who were playing near-GTO but had slight imbalances in 3-bet or 4-bet pots.
But honestly, the biggest exploit was understanding who was willing to suffer. Heads-up at those stakes is about resilience. Some players were incredible for two hours and then fell apart. If you could outlast them mentally, the edge ballooned.
– Is it possible for somebody to have a rise like you, like Phil Galfond, where you deposit, you're playing $50 No Limit Texas Holdem, and over time you make it?
Unless it's either manufactured or involves a lot of luck, I think our edges back then were so big, right? You can't find those in the games now. So, you'd need to either be manufacturing it—like you're playing games no one else can access—that kind of thing. Then that would probably be some site trying to build someone up to be famous, which I think has happened a lot. Or, like, you won a few tournaments or whatever.
But you know, it used to be we would grind it out. You try to be the best at $2/$4, then you go up to $5/$10, and you're playing all people that already did what you just did, and a lot of them are good, and they're taxing you. You're learning from them. Now it's way different because everyone can just go and get something like a GTO Wizard.
– When we announced that we would be interviewing you, we were literally bombarded with questions about the famous hand against Ivey.
I'm always amazed that so many people praise Phil and seem to underestimate what you did. Yes, he thought about the call, he felt something. But in the end, he still folded.
I think it's right that sometimes Ivey would have reads on me. Sometimes I'd have them on him. A lot of times, especially live, I think he was getting more than I was off him, but it was like maybe 60/40, not 70/30. There were definitely times I was taxing him and stuff. And he... I still think he, in his prime, was the best at live reads I've ever seen—at least in poker. And so I think he probably had something on me that hand, but also he didn't pull the trigger.
– There are many questions about the future of online poker.
I think it's pretty bad unless the organizations step up. You know, there's not that much individual players can do. And I think that the long-term interests of companies that run tournaments—especially online sites—would be to try to solve for the aspects of poker that I find the most interesting, that I'm guessing you do, and I'm guessing Phil does. Meaning, not trying to make it more like chess, but trying to make it more like a dynamic, competitive game where you tweak the rules some so it's not very easy to just go have something solved.
Make it so that there’s actually something humans are better at, or at least make it harder for solvers to be so good. And there are easy things you could do. I told a bunch of the poker bosses this—a bunch of them I told years ago. You could do stuff like burning a few cards before the turn, and that wouldn’t make a giant difference, but it would make enough, right?
If tomorrow I played GTO Wizard, barring some huge exploit I find, I’m pretty sure I’m close to drawing dead, right? If it had no new programming and you burn three or four cards, I’m pretty sure I’m betting on me.
– At the end, we need to give away Run it Once subscriptions for the best questions. Maybe you see something in the chat?
"That's a good question. They're asking about my hand against Greenstein and Eastgate. How did I know Peter had the better hand? I didn't know that, but I fully expected him to have a deuce."
– So, I think Greenstein raised under the gun. I think I called next to act. I think we’re playing eight-handed and I’m pretty sure everyone called. There’s like $20,000 in there plus probably a few hundred bucks of antes. I have .
The flop comes and it checks to Greenstein. He bets $10,000 and I thought he might continuation-bet here too much. So I make a really weird play and make it like $37,300, which is terrible on paper. It’s terrible if you go put it into a solver, I’m sure. I mean, I never did, but I’m guessing. But I had some reasons I thought it might work out. And Eastgate called and I was like, "Fuck, my money’s gone. Bye." Like, I’m ready to leave the casino. I give up the hand. And Greenstein calls, too. And I’m like, "What is this? Makes no sense." When Eastgate calls, he almost for sure has a deuce.
And so then I’m like, "Oh, I might have a spot." When I was looking, I was like, "All right, if it seems close, I’m going to go for it." In hindsight, I don’t know that this was plus-EV even if all my reads were dialed. Obviously, there's some chance my reads wouldn’t have been, or whatever. But I had basically decided like, "If there’s a spot I can do something really degen-looking where everyone thinks I’m losing $50,000 and I think I’m losing $2,000, I’m going to just go for it and hope I’m actually right."
One thing I think a lot of people were missing is Eastgate, in my opinion, was really good, but we had played a lot at $25/$50 online. These stakes were big for him. And I think even he would have probably agreed I was probably slightly better than him at the time, but I literally might have been expected to make a quarter of a big blind per 100 or half a big blind per 100. He knows I’ve been crushing everyone in all the big games online and live lately. He doesn't play live that much. I was just like, "I think he’s just going to be like 'Fuck you, Tom' and fold."
And that’s basically what happened. Then he folded and I was like, "I win," and then Greenstein was thinking and I’m like, "No dude, he just folded the deuce. What the fuck are you thinking about, man? Don’t ruin this for me." I kind of forgot to consider that part because I was like, "Once Eastgate folds, I’m good. I just gotta hope." And then when Greenstein starts thinking, I’m like, "I made it worse." I’m pretty sure he’s still going to fold, but I’m like, even if he was 10% or 20% to call, what a torch. I thought I was giving up $5,000 or $2,000 looking degen. I was giving up like $20,000, you know.
But yeah, then Greenstein folded. I remember everyone was betting about it and I was basically 90% sure that Eastgate had the best hand, right? It was like Greenstein has an overpair and Eastgate has a deuce, almost for sure. And I think if Eastgate had like or suited, he would have probably been like, "Fuck you. You get my money," and looked me up.
