This show has been all Phil Ivey. He's up over $330,000.
All in - WHAT? Phil Ivey is arguably the greatest of all time.
Just a very intense and aggressive player. He's always a threat in tournament poker.
I wanted to win so bad, I paid attention to every single detail.
And Phil Ivey joins the likes of Stu Ungar, Ted Forrest and Chris
Ferguson with five world series bracelets. I went through a phase where
I wasn't trying very hard. I didn't realize how hard I tried. Phil Ivey's intimidating.
Watching him on TV, as a fan, getting to play against him online
and play with him in person and even after getting to know
him personally a little bit. Still sitting across the table
from him... It's intimidating and I think it's a lot of elements
that add up to his greatness but everybody agrees that he's
just excellent at reading people. Million dollars first place money.
The most iconic Ivey hand to me of all time is that hand from Monte Carlo
where he just doesn't believe Paul Jackson Pair of Jacks and a 7.
80,000 is the bet and look at this. Re-raise by Jackson!
Wow! So, what the heck is he doing?
Questions - overthinking - a re-raise Well, there you are re-raises to 320,000.
It's right back in the face of Paul Jackson. Raise!
Oh my goodness, Jackson is re-raising! I don't see how he can
possibly continue in this hand. I'm all in!
WHAT!? That's why we're here and they're there.
Phil Ivey is the guy who did not blink. Watching this hand was like witnessing great art.
It's absurd and wonderful at the same time. The first time I heard of Phil Ivey
was when I saw him play in the main event in 2003 when Chris Moneymaker won
and the Poker boom started. At this point I was a fan, I didn't play poker.
I didn't really know what I was doing but still watching him play,
hearing the commentators talk about the way that he played.
He seemed impressive. And it's Phil Ivey, one of the
great young superstars of Poker. Just a very intense and aggressive player,
who knows how to read other players and he's equally difficult to
read for the other players. So he's always a threat in tournament poker. The most impressive to me what really stood out and burned into my memory was
when very deep in the tournament, he... I believe final table
bubbled on a really bad beat. [Cheering / Screaming] An incredible knockout blow for probably the best player
left in the tournament. So he got his money in great.
It didn't work out, he lost. And I had seen other people
throughout the main event broadcast, celebrate when they won, I'd see people get upset when they lost
and this was a massive massive spot where he lost and he just said: "Good game"
and walked away. That absolutely was
etched into my mind. In my eyes and the eyes of all my peers,
there were really only two guys that were playing online
and also playing in the big televised cash games who were really really good.
And that was Patrik Antonius and Phil Ivey. But Patrik started online,
whereas Phil Ivey was really the only true live first crusher online
and he actually, he didn't just crush online, he was the biggest winner online
for years and years and years. I was playing my low stakes
and I watched him on High Stakes Poker. I watched him on TV poker
and he was just this Enigma that was so calm and quiet at the tables
but played a really aggressive, really tough style and it was very clear,
so obvious that he had the respect of everybody at the table.
Phil Ivey is definitely the best all around poker player in the world.
He's the most feared player pretty much in any game.
And Phil Ivey joins the likes of Stu Ungar, Ted Forrest and Chris
Ferguson with five world series bracelets. I think you see a lot of great players at
the table like Patrik Antonius and Tom Dwan. But until Phil Ivey's knocked off that pedestal,
I don't see anyone else challenging him yet. My most memorable hand against Phil Ivey is
definitely the first time that we played. $300/$600, it's the first time I ever
played $300/$600 No Limit online. I sat down with him, heads up.
And it's about three hands into the heads up match.
I was dealt pocket 4's in the big blind, he raised the small blind, I called.
Flop was 10-9-4 two-tone. And I check-raise.
He puts in the 3-bet. I shoved my $60k in happily.
And he snap called with top set. Which sent me packing back to
$100/$200, $200/$400 for a while before I tried those stakes again.
Back in 2013 or so we were playing online $200/$400 PLO heads up
and at this point at PLO specifically I did feel like I was stronger than him as a player
and we've been playing for a little bit and I returned the favor of the
$300/$600 game all those years ago and I set over set him for a $80k pot or so
and I immediately get a phone call from Phil Ivey and so I look and I'm like I don't...
I don't know, we're playing heads up online
the decisions come fast, I don't really want to answer the phone.
I don't like talking on the phone in general, but it's Phil Ivey...
So I answer the phone... You know: "Hello" and he just says:
"That easy huh?" I just, you know, awkwardly laugh
and I'm like: "Yeah, I mean it is... it is that easy".
I didn't know how to hang up. And he just kept talking
and we're still playing $200/$400. These are very high stakes,
you know there's $120,000 on the table at least. I'm thinking to myself...
He's probably going to get reads on me through the phone.
I really don't want to be on the call, but I was also too I guess
nervous to hang up on him. So we just sat and played there for a while,
talking about, I don't know what, I don't really remember.
Looking back on that, I just think that the combination of the
fear that Phil Ivey strikes in his opponents that intimidation factor that he has
going on combined with his fearlessness really creates a disparity in focus.
Because he has his opponents uncomfortable, uneasy.
Whereas he appears to be completely fearless at the table
and just make whatever play he thinks his best. He's also intimidating off the poker table
and it happens to be his sense of humor as well. So, we're filming Poker After Dark at the Aria.
And we had a dinner break and went to get sushi. It was Phil a couple other players and myself.
And we place our orders the waiter comes out after a little while and says:
"Hey I'm sorry, your food's not ready yet, the sushi cart is backed up".
And Phil without missing a beat just says: "The sushi cart's backed up?"
"I lose $3 million here this week and the sushi cart's backed up
Okay." And I'm sitting there and I
don't know if he's serious, maybe he was playing craps
earlier and he lost $3 million, I don't know.
The waiter is uncomfortable, nobody saying anything
and then he smiles and we realize that he's joking. He probably enjoys intimidating
people at the poker table and I think he seems to enjoy
it off the table as well. There was a site,
high stakes DB that tracked the results in all the online high stakes games
and they would have a leaderboard every year of the biggest winners and biggest losers.
And an over time leaderboard. And in 2008,
I had my best year ever online, I won about $8 million
and I remember it being December of that year and I was second on the leaderboard to Phil Ivey
and I really wanted to beat him and I put in extra hours just trying to...
Essentially get lucky to have a big heater at the end.
He was maybe a million ahead of me or less. It didn't happen,
I finished in second and I talked to him about it later,
referencing the leaderboard race and he had no idea what I was talking about.
He never heard of the site, he didn't know that he was
the biggest winner that year. He didn't care.
So after playing a lot with Ivey at the high stakes online,
it was really interesting, because he had the highest continuation
bet percentage of everybody that we played. And normally when somebody
has an extreme stat like that, it means that they're making a mistake
and in theory he was making a mistake but it just worked for him.
He just crushed. There was nobody else that I played against, that would bet the flop so
often and bet the turn so often and it's funny that one random
hand is stuck in my mind, where I check-called twice with bottom pair
in a spot where he c-bet twice with an under pair to top pair
and then checked back the river and won. His style really frustrated me and
I had a hard time adjusting to it. People think about how Phil's a good hand reader, they think about how he's fearless.
Nobody talks or thinks about how smart he is. And you kind of have to be extremely intelligent
to play at the level that he plays at but because he doesn't talk about poker.
He's never really talking strategy and actually the few times that he does
he doesn't speak in the way that my generation of online
people speak about hand analysis. I think people don't realize just
how incredibly intelligent he is. If you're going to be one
of the best in the world. You just have to be extremely smart.
There's no way around it. Staying interested,
and wanting to educate yourself and learn new things is really...
has really been a big part of my life but the problem is that once I get into something
I really get into it. You know like,
if I start like a video game, I have to set a timer because
I'll play the video game all day. Whenever I played against Ivey,
he's one of only two people, the other one being Viktor Blom,
who I felt like were a step ahead of me in the leveling war.
Yes, that requires EQ (Emotional Intelligence). You need to understand how people think
and how people tick but it requires a lot of IQ as well.
You need to think about what the implications of how
people might adjust would be. You have to think about all the things
that have happened in recent history at the table. Or, long-standing history at the table.
How your opponent might react to that and what you should do about it.
And I mean, Ivey, he's just...
a killer at that. It's there's no other way to put it.
I wanted to win so bad, like I paid attention to every single detail
of everything that was going on in the game. And being focused in like,
you know trying really hard, you know like I didn't realize until
I went through a phase where I wasn't trying very hard,
I didn't realize how hard I tried. You don't see many people with that.
A lot of things like I took for granted like being able to like
understand people's energies and like body language stuff
and like you know, I just...
I just knew intuitively. One thing I noticed about Phil and his
game after the advent of Poker solvers is that he started taking more unorthodox lines.
You know he wasn't the studious type in the same way that a lot of my generation were.
He wasn't studying the solvers. He wasn't analyzing stats.
I don't think he had a database of stats like the rest of us did when he played online.
But he noticed that other players were and he saw them getting better
and more comfortable in all of these normal lines. And so it was kind of like
he's taking them out of the boxing ring, where there is like technicalities
and just into a street fight, where he knew that he could one up them.
If everybody had to think on the fly and I love seeing that from him
because I agree with him that in the posts solver era,
a lot of people feel there's only one way to play but you can absolutely get people
outside of their comfort zones and outside of the lines they've
studied backwards and forwards into spots where you're
playing poker like we used to. You know, a decade and a half, two decades ago.
That's the kind of Poker that I think is the most fun.
It's clearly the kind of Poker that Phil Ivey thinks is the most fun
and it's also where his strengths lie. And what a fold there by Ivey.
Checks back the flop and just folds to the overbet on the turn
and he is correct. I would bet a lot of money
that pre 2018/2019 maybe 2020, Phil Ivey wasn't studying with any of
the tools that the online guys were to see him continue to compete
in the High Roller tournaments against players who are so technically
sound at a game that is so technical, like when you're playing 300
big blinds deep in a cash game, you can take people to the streets.
But when you're playing 15 big blinds deep in a high roller tournament,
you need to understand the technicalities. So, I don't know if he's
started studying with solvers but he's still managing to compete with everybody
and so it would definitely not surprise me, if he's been looking at some charts finally. Phil Ivey is a bit of an enigma.
I think to many his personality is not well known. To the public he's mostly
just stoic at the poker table. But I have hung out with him a couple
of times and gotten to know him. So, I was living in New York
and Phil Ivey was in town, as was "LarsLuzak" (aka) Sami Kelopuro.
So my friend and I met up with Lars and his friend for drinks.
Around the corner from my condo. We started drinking our drinks
and Lars or his friend had already gone back to the bar
and gotten the next round and had somehow finished theirs in the meantime.
So, I was trying really hard to keep up. I'm not a very big guy.
I don't drink that much and it was hitting me pretty hard.
By the time we met with Phil Ivey at dinner. I was pretty drunk and obviously
at dinner there were more drinks and after dinner was the club.
The cocktail waitress would bring a round of shots and everybody would grab one
my friend knew we had already had too much. So he was,
before taking the shots, he just dumped it on the ground
and then we would all take the shot. He was just pretending
but the second time that he did it, when he looked up after the shot,
he's locked eyes with Phil Ivey who is looking right back at him,
no expression but he noticed. I was not dumping my shots
and long story short is I actually don't remember a lot of the rest of night.
What I do remember, Phil Ivey had a driver and a car for the day
and I was sitting in the front seat of that car and just like barely awake.
Some time passed probably and I found myself throwing up all
over the front seat of this car. We pulled over,
all got out, I saw Phil just throwing,
I don't know how many, hundreds at the driver saying:
"I'm sorry, you know this to clean the car." We all got in cabs and made our way home. The interesting part of the story to me
about Phil is that next morning he called me. He asked how I was doing.
He asked if I was okay and I mean I think 20%-30%
was he thought it was funny and he was kind of laughing at me
but I do think 70%-80% of that was that he was making sure that I was okay. He was checking up on me.
You know, nobody else there that night
called me to see how I was doing. So I thought that was thoughtful of him.
Plus he got to laugh at me. Phil Ivey's arguably the greatest of all time.
I still felt as though I held my own against him. I don't know if at times I felt like I
was better than him or worse than him but I usually was intimidated
by him at the tables. I definitely feel as though he had my number,
when it comes to results. There are just some people
that you play against online that the big pots tend to go their
way over a long period of time. I think it's mostly variance,
but it certainly gets in your head and Phil Ivey was one of the few who
seem to beat me far more often than not. I mean, how did he do it?
He's extremely innately talented and even if he wasn't studying
in the same way that we did. I can tell that he's driven and I'm sure
that he worked hard in whatever way that was. I don't know what way that was honestly.
It's still a mystery to me. 90% of the reason that he
crushed is just pure talent.
