Online Zone

Online Pro and World Poker Tour Winner Eugene Katchalov Talks Strategy
By Shawn Patrick Green

The screen name "MyRabbiFoo," derived from "my rabbit foot," has certainly lived up to its lucky connotations for the name's owner. Eugene "MyRabbiFoo" Katchalov had a killer month in online poker last year that culminated in a win in a Full Tilt $750,000-guaranteed event, worth $133,000. While that win was certainly impressive, it was put to shame when he went on to win the main event of the Five-Diamond World Poker Classic (called the Doyle Brunson Classic) less than one month later, which was worth $2.5 million.

The Ukrainian-born 26-year-old came to America when he was 10 years old. He's called New York home ever since. He went to New York University and got a degree in finance, a common first step for professional poker players. He also harbored, and still harbors, an interest in the stock market, another common trait of budding poker pros. After all of that buildup, it was his senior year in college that truly got him started on his path to poker success.

Katchalov played in penny games with his college buddies to start off, and he then graduated to online poker, which he used to support himself while he learned how to trade stocks effectively. As his poker knowledge grew, and as he became more successful at the game, he started to take the prospect of playing for a living more seriously. And, at this point, it seems like a good idea that he did.

Card Player recently did an interview with Katchalov that generated some invaluable poker strategy:

Shawn Patrick Green: How did you hone your poker skills?

Eugene Katchalov: In the first two years, the main thing that really helped me was that I used to just sit at home and watch high-stakes cash games online. And basically, let's say I saw 60 to 100 hands and one or two of them went to showdown, I was just looking through the hand histories to see how people played them. I remember that I learned a lot from that; I remember that I learned many interesting things about how people played the hands. I would think about the hands and ask myself, "Why would he play them like that?" I think I learned a lot.

SPG: How would you describe your playing style?

EK: My playing style has actually been changing a lot over the past four years. I went from being very tight to very aggressive, and then very quickly to being very tight, again. And now, I've learned to be a lot more aggressive. It's aggression at the right times and the right spots; it's really player-dependant and table-dependant. You want to play the opposite of what your table is playing - and this is quite well-known - so if the table is playing very aggressively, and everyone is playing wild, you want to sit and play tight. If everyone is playing tight, you want to take advantage and steal as much as you can.

At the same time, I like to keep a sort of aggressive image. By aggressive, I don't mean that I'm necessarily raising a lot and trying to steal the blinds a lot; I mean that I'm trying to play a lot of pots. So, I do try to keep the pots small, and I do try to win a lot of small pots. It's much more about just playing a lot more hands, especially in live tournaments, where the blinds are so small compared to the stack sizes.

SPG: You told me before that just before your two-month hot streak, you had started looking at tournaments a little bit differently. What did you mean by that?

EK: For six months before that, I wasn't playing in that many tournaments. I played them once in a while, but I didn't really have that much success in them. I think that it was, in part, due to a psychological problem. I thought that if I did something that I would do in a live game, like limp in, people would always take advantage of me; or, if I raised from late position, people would always assume that I was stealing, so they would reraise me. So, basically, I started changing the strategy that used to work for me into a playing-scared strategy, in which I would always be scared that if I raised, somebody would reraise me.

So, I was just very confused. I don't remember what it was, but at some point it just became clear in my mind at the beginning of those two months that I shouldn't be like that, and that it was all in my mind. Especially after the summer, I had some confidence from that win [at the Bellagio Cup III]. So, I just became more confident in my plays, and I wasn't as scared anymore, and it started working for me.

Chatbox Cunning
Card Player Pro trainers Chris Justin "WPTHero" Rollo and Evan "_fisherman" Roberts (part of the PokerSavvy Plus stable of poker pros) give us some insight into the games they specialize in.

Justin "WPTHero" Rollo (multitable tournament specialist)

On what advice he'd give beginning players with dreams of going pro:
"The one thing I would say to a beginning player who has dreams of going pro is that you have to take every step in the process. You have to start with the small buy-in tournaments, and it might seem like a grind, but you have to work your way up through the levels, because you learn invaluable things as you're moving up. It's a neat process as it goes along, because things you learn playing in $5 tournaments you build on when playing $10 tournaments. Things you learn in $10 tournaments you build on in $20 tournaments. So, I would say, don't go for just the big buy-in tournaments right away; work your way up from the smaller buy-in tournaments.

"We can think of it as a house, almost. The $5 tournaments are your foundation; it's how you play against poor players, because you're going to have really bad players at every level. You need to have that basic knowledge of, 'OK, this is how I play a bad player,' so that you can label somebody a bad player and have that knowledge of how to play him. When you move up a little bit, 'This is how I play a little bit better player.' That builds on the house; that's kind of the frame. When you go to a $200 tournament, that's your finishing touches, where you learn how to play good players. But it all interconnects, because you're not going to have a table with all good players; you need to be able to play against all of them."

Evan "_fisherman" Roberts (heads-up no-limit hold'em specialist)

On when to end a cash-game session:
"Ideally, you should always be able to realize how you're playing, and I would say, don't quit if you think you're still playing well and have an edge on the game or the opponent you're playing, and quit when you think you don't. But that's sort of ambiguous, and a lot of times after you lose a couple of buy-ins or you're having a losing day, you think you're still playing well, but there are some subtle changes in your game that you're just not realizing, and you're just subtly tilting and not playing well. So, I think for a beginning player, it's not bad to have a stop-loss. That is, if I lose X number of buy-ins, whether it be three or five, I'm just going to quit for the rest of the day and not play again until tomorrow.

"Something sort of specific to heads up is that if your opponent is winning and beating you by a significant margin, even if you're still playing your best game, a lot of times that can cause your opponent to play better. It's sort of difficult to explain exactly how, but part of it is that they become more fearless, to an extent, so they may be bluffing more often with the proper frequency or just playing better in general. Another part of it is that even though momentum in a heads-up game shouldn't be a legitimate thing - like, there's no reason why the fact that you've won the last few pots should really change anything - it sort of has a psychological impact on both players, and it can actually make beating whoever it is who's beating you a lot tougher."