Interview With a Champ: A Silicon Valley (and Poker) Whiz Who Owns a Coveted WSP Bracelet

It was midnight at the Reno Hilton's busy World Poker Challenge before I tracked down my nocturnal prey, a young man who made a big splash in the turbulent waters of tournament poker at the 2000 World Series of Poker when he caught the "Devil Fish" in an undertow to win the $2,000 no-limit hold'em event. My patience paid off in spades, as my "catch of the day" turned out to have an extraordinary blend of insight, expertise, intelligence, and impeccable decorum. Unlike many of today's young players who have chosen poker rather than business as a career path, at age 35, Diego Cordovez is the chief operating officer of Aveo, a computer software company in the Silicon Valley with about 100 employees that offers Internet-based services that provide pre-emptive technical support to end users. In plain English, his company licenses its software to companies such as Dell Computers, IBM, and Hewlett Packard, and they include that software with their products to help people like you and me avoid snafus.

Given his family heritage, Cordovez could easily have become a professional poker player rather than a business entrepreneur – "My father wears a ring with our family's 400-year-old crest on it. One of its elements is a pair of dice, which tells me that even four centuries ago when my family moved from Spain to Ecuador, they already were gamblers. My grandfather loved gambling. One time in the mid-1920s when he was playing blackjack, he was up $32,000 and decided to go for double or nothing. He lost."

Cordovez's father, however, never has shown an interest in gambling. A diplomat and politician, Diego Cordovez Sr. was undersecretary general of the United Nations for many years and negotiated the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, for which he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. "He has been foreign minister of Ecuador and ran for the vice presidency in 1996 before retiring from politics and becoming a businessman," Cordovez added. "And my mother is a successful artist." His parents split their time between their native Ecuador and New York, where Cordovez attended high school. "I would have had no success at all had it not been for my parents. They are incredibly supportive of everything that I do, as long as I do my best. It is important to me that we always have had a great relationship, and I am very proud of my parents for all that they have accomplished." Moving on to his own accomplishments, we began with his first business move.

Diego Cordovez: I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I moved to California in the early '80s when Silicon Valley was just starting to boom, and obtained a B.A. degree in economics and an M.S. in industrial engineering from Stanford University.

Dana Smith: So, you're a businessman first and a poker player second.

DC: Yes. I played poker once in a while in college, but never in a cardroom. In 1991 I read a book on poker by Oswald Jacoby that covered lowball and five-card draw. Coincidentally, I lived a short distance from the Cameo Club in Palo Alto, so I hopped on my motorcycle and headed for it. When I showed up, the floorman asked whether I wanted to play hold'em or lowball. I chose lowball, figuring that since I had read the book, I was an expert at the game. What I didn't realize was that the older lowball players there probably were the tightest rocks in the history of poker. I lost all of my money in about five minutes. When I returned the next day, the same thing happened. On the third day, the lowball game was full, so the floorman asked if I wanted to play hold'em. I didn't know the game, but I said, "Sure, I'll play." It was a typical, loose $2-$4 game, and I won some money, probably because the deck ran over me, so I stayed with it. It was a combination of luck and applying a certain amount of logic and mathematics, I guess. Then I discovered that the real games at the Cameo Club were no-limit hold'em; it was one of the only places in the country that had a legal, daily no-limit game in 1991-92.

DS: Was no-limit like a duck to water for you?

DC: Yes, I really took to the game and enjoyed it. Obviously, there was a lot more to it – psychology, people skills, and perception. Some of the great no-limit poker players were playing there every day – Erik Seidel, Barry Greenstein, Carl McKelvey, Bobby Hoff, and Sailor Roberts – but not knowing anything about the poker world, I thought that they were just typical local players who liked no-limit. The club had a really big game that most of these guys played in, but it also had smaller games, and sometimes the higher-limit players would play in one of them, so I got to play with them occasionally. It was a tremendous learning experience that built a solid foundation for me, one that not too many people have been lucky enough to have.

After a while, one of the professional players at the club very graciously told me, "I think that you should stick with this game. You have a lot of talent and I like your style of play. You remind me of Erik Seidel." That was an enormous compliment, I thought, because Erik had been runner-up to Johnny Chan at the World Series of Poker. Then he added, "Obviously, you have a long way to go to achieve that skill level." So, I started to watch Erik as often as I could, trying to pick up on what he was doing right and apply it to my own game.

DS: Is the key observing the way that the top players work?

DC: Not only the best players, but others as well. I think that it's a mistake to think that you can learn only from experienced, successful players. I believe that some players have defects that prevent them from becoming highly successful, yet they still have some skills worth emulating.

DS: You told me earlier that you can watch a player win, win, win, and you might think that he's a great player when, actually, he isn't all that great. How do you learn to make the distinction between what he's doing right and what his flaws are?

DC: I think that the first step is separating short-term results from skill level. It's easy to believe that a guy with a mountain of chips in front of him is doing something well when it turns out that he simply was lucky that night, while somebody who is losing actually may be a far better player. Instead of focusing on the final results, I try to make sense of what took place before the flop through the river card. If you play with someone for an entire session and focus strictly on that one player, you can get a feel for how he plays and how his early hands influence his play of later hands. By watching him play a succession of hands against an opponent, what happens in the last hand begins to make sense in the context of an earlier hand.

DS: You were able to develop a rapport with the regulars at the Cameo Club and build your skills. What happened next?

DC: Unfortunately, the club closed in 1993, an event that thrust me back into business. After I finished college, I worked at Logitech, which manufactures computer peripherals. Because the company went public while I was there, I had a pretty good run there. After a couple of years, I took off to spend some time traveling and thinking about what I wanted to do next. It was during that hiatus from business that I played a lot of poker at the Cameo Club. Its closure was the break that made me think about whether poker was something that I wanted to do full time. Deciding against that route, I went to the other extreme for a while, spending about three years in the late '90s not playing much poker, because I thought that it might be too much of a distraction. Instead, I focused on business almost exclusively, believing that was the way to become very successful at it. Then one day, I realized that going to either extreme was unwise. Playing poker provides balance to my life and relieves some of the stress that's related to business, plus it gives me a complete change of atmosphere – different people, different worlds.

DS: Although you aren't making your primary living at poker, last year you won enough money for most people to live on.

DC: Yes, 2000 was a big year for me. I had played the Reno Peppermill in 1995 and won the best all-around player award there, and I had gone to the World Series for a couple of days just to soak in the atmosphere, but I really didn't play a lot of tournaments, just cash games. In 1999, I decided to start playing poker seriously by putting in a certain number of hours every week and playing some tournaments. I won a couple of small events and played in the World Series for the first time. I didn't cash there, but I did win a few small tournaments later that year. Then in January 2000, I played the Carnivale of Poker and cashed in one of the no-limit hold'em events. The next tournament that I played was the World Series, where I won the $2,000 no-limit hold'em event.

DS: That was when you did battle for three hours at the final table with David "Devil Fish" Ulliott?

DC: Yes. Dave had suggested a deal earlier that I had turned down. Then about five minutes before the final hand, when we were almost exactly even in chips, he suggested that we chop it down the middle, which we did. But it wasn't the money that motivated me to take it – I wanted to win the bracelet, and I thought that maybe by making a deal, I would have a better shot at winning it because Dave would be more relaxed. As it turned out, that wasn't the case at all.

Playing $10,000-$20,000 blinds with a $5,000 ante, Dave began to play more aggressively. Whenever I limped in, he raised, so I adjusted by starting to limp in with some of my stronger hands and reraising him all in. It seemed that every time I limped in for $20,000, he raised another $40,000 – every single time. In the final hand, I picked up pocket sixes. "This is a strong hand heads up," I thought. "I'm going to limp in again and if he raises, I'm going to come over the top." But this time he raised only $20,000.

DS: That rang a few bells?

DC: It set off a loud alarm in my head, one that caused me to pause. Raising a $50,000 pot by $20,000 didn't make sense to me, and it deviated from the pattern that we both had established. I thought that he might have a big hand (he had pocket aces), so I decided to proceed more cautiously. I just called the $20,000. The flop came ragged, but with a 6. When Dave led into me on the flop with a big bet, we got all the money in and I won the hand. I got lucky, not in the sense of drawing out, but in the way that the hand developed.

DS: Your victory was hailed by the tournament reporter as "a major upset." Had you detected a tell on Ulliott?

DC: When we were at two tables the evening before, he and I were playing at the same table. He had a lot of chips and I sensed that if I was going to win the tournament or finish in one of the top spots, I would have to play the Devil Fish. So, I started focusing on him, trying to pick up as much information as I could. Actually, I hoped that he wouldn't get knocked out, because I invested a lot of effort in studying him. When I read the sheet that listed the seat positions for the final table, I saw that I had been assigned to seat No. 4 and he had seat No. 8. Realizing that we probably were not going to be in a lot of hands together, I decided to try to avoid playing with him until we got down to threehanded. I didn't want to give him any information about me by playing a lot of hands with him until it really counted for something. I would spend my time observing him, letting him beat up on the other players. That way, I could surprise him.

DS: Some people may have thought that your World Series victory was a flash in the pan, but you followed that win with other credentials.

DC: I certainly was conscious of people thinking that my win was just a fluke, since I play almost exclusively in the Bay area (mostly $60-$120) and don't play many tournaments, so after I had taken a deep breath, I decided to try to make another tournament showing quickly to validate my win at the Series. I played the final event at the Orleans Open in July and cashed in it, and the next day I played the Tournament of Champions and finished 20th. Then I played four tournaments at the Legends of Poker at the Bike. I won the $300 limit hold'em event, the one with all the rebuys and 239 players, and placed third to Scotty Nguyen and Barbara Enright in the $1,000 limit hold'em event. Then came the $5,000 no-limit championship event, which turned out to be the toughest tournament that I had ever played by far – much tougher than the one that I had won at the World Series.

DS: How could that be?

DC: It was expensive to enter and there were few satellites for it; consequently, only 55 people played it, and all of them were top players. Looking at the list on the sign-up board – David Chiu, Johnny Chan, Phil Hellmuth, Tony Ma, T.J. Cloutier – I wasn't even sure that I wanted to play. But then I realized that it might be the greatest learning experience that I'd ever had, my opportunity to play for meaningful stakes against some great players. Fortunately, I got some good hands and finished third to Layne Flack and Jeff Shulman. I was almost as proud of that as I was of winning at the World Series, because the competition was so strong.

DS: Studying the game and observing your opponents has become somewhat of a science with you, it seems.

DC: Yes, and I think that reading poker books can be a catalyst for thinking about the game. Some people believe that a book is a manual that you memorize, and then you play the way that it dictates, but that doesn't work, because poker is so dynamic – every game is different, depending on the players in the game. What works best is thinking about every situation described in a book and analyzing how it applies to your own game. I might disagree with 80 percent of what's in a book, but I try to think through critically why my approach calls for a different strategy.

DS: You carry on a mental repartee with the author?

DC: Yes. But I don't read only the advanced books; I also read the "beginner" columns to get insights into how other people play. Sometimes you may get caught up in thinking at one level, and then someone who thinks at a different level does things that you can't figure out because their play doesn't fit into your own frame of reference.

DS: You talk a lot about mental shape – do you also do things to improve your physical condition?

DC: No. I'm not a long-distance runner or anything like that, but I think that I am blessed with natural stamina and the ability to concentrate and stay focused for long periods of time, which is helpful in tournaments. And I absolutely will not eat until I am knocked out of a tournament, because I believe that when your body is digesting food, it dulls your thinking. Also, I'm a natural night owl, and that fits perfectly into poker.

DS: But does it fit in with your day job?

DC: No, it's almost as though you're an immoral person if you like to start late in the business world. I come into my office at around 10 o'clock in the morning and then stay as late as I need to.

DS: Do you have hobbies other than poker?

DC: Like most poker players, I've always been very competitive and played sports in high school. I'm a big Stanford fan; my dream was to play football for the Cardinal, but I wasn't good enough. Once you stop playing team sports, poker helps fill the void. It's hard to get 22 guys together to play football, you know.

DS: Are most of your poker friends 30-something?

DC: No. In business, you tend to cultivate a homogeneous group of friends, but in poker, you get to know a wide variety of people. And after winning a World Series tournament, which draws so much attention, you suddenly start to meet even more new people. They recognize you, and congratulate you. It surprised me. Randy Holland, Tony Ma, and Vince Burgio were all very nice to me, as was David Chiu, who tapped me on my shoulder at the Series and said, "I watched the final table and I think that you played like a champion. I want to congratulate you and I hope that we play together someday." That meant a lot to me.