The Scoop -- Chris Ferguson

Not only does Chris "Jesus" Ferguson have five World Series of Poker bracelets, including one for the 2000 main event, but his mathematical approach to poker has led him to obtain the most impressive record in the four years of the NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship. He finished second in the 2005 and 2006 events, and finally claimed the title in 2008.

Diego Cordovez: You've had many, many accomplishments, but most impressively, you've just dominated the Heads-Up Championship. They've had it four times and you've been runner-up, runner-up, and champion - and have a 16-3 overall record. So is this just a fantastic run of landing on heads or are you the master of heads up?

Chris Ferguson: Obviously, I've been very lucky. I mean, no one can have that kind of record without getting extremely lucky. That being said, heads up is a game that I've really spent a lot of time studying. I've worked hard at my heads-up game. When I first started working on it, it was actually back in 1989. I was playing on the Internet on something called IRC Poker. It was, in my opinion, the very first online cardroom.

DC: These guys now don't even realize what it was like. There was IRC Poker, which was a very early version of Internet poker.

CF: Absolutely; it was all play money. You couldn't play for money, but some people would play for real money by cross-booking. You would say, OK, we'll sit with play money on the table and you send me 40 bucks for every dollar I win, or whatever.

DC: Adam still owes me hundreds from that! [laughing]

CF: Did either of you guys play there?

DC: No, no. I blew it, though, because I could be a heads-up champion, because literally years ago, I don't know if you remember [pointing at Ferguson], over at Phil Hellmuth's house once, you said that you played heads up on the Internet, and you said, "Yeah, give me a call, we'll play heads up." I said, "Sure," but I never did it. I could have learned a lot, and instead, here I am. [laughing]

CF: The thing was, you could play like 300 or 600 hands per hour, just like you can now. Actually, I think back then, it was even faster. It was all text-based.

Adam Schoenfeld: Right, no graphics.

CF: It was absolutely great training. That, and I do a lot of mathematical analysis of the game, and most of that applies most strongly to heads up.

AS: Heads up can be studied much more rigorously.

CF: From a game-theory standpoint, game theory has a really hard time dealing with three-player games or anything more than two-player games, but two-player games, it has a decent handle on.

AS: I wanted to ask you about the NBC Heads-Up in particular, because we hear a lot of people complaining that the structure is too fast, and perhaps there's some truth to that, but your success is sort of my counterargument to that, because when someone can dominate this format, there must be a way to do it. So, it is skill-based.

CF: In a sense. Yeah, you can say the structure is fast; in a very real sense, the structure is fast. You play a match, I don't know if they average two hours, maybe not quite two hours; I think my matches average about two hours, but think about that. For the entire tournament, that means I've played 12 hours. If I played three games in the last match, that means I've played like 16 hours. And 16 hours of heads up is hugely different than 16 hours of play nine-handed; 16 hours of heads up, I'm literally playing hands for 16 straight hours. As soon as I fold, I get another hand; as soon as my opponent folds, I get another hand.

DC: A lot of hands really matter, as opposed to a full table, where most hands are raise, take it, and no action.

CF: Right. First off, you're dealing twice as many hands or more, and secondly, I'm involved in every single hand and not just like 15 percent of them. So, 16 hours of heads up to me is like 32 hours of hands; plus, you are really involved in every single hand, so it's a lot more than 30; it's probably like 100 hours.