Capture the Flag: Alec Torelli

Alec Torelli received most of his poker upbringing online, where he plays under the name “traheho” and regularly cuts up no-limit hold’em cash games at stakes anywhere from $5-$10 to $300-$600. He’s also proven his tournament prowess, having won the Full Tilt Online Poker Series III main event and accumulated $750,000 in live-tournament winnings. He is an all-around player who preaches the importance of maintaining a balanced life in order to achieve true poker success.

Kristy Arnett: When did you first start playing cash games?

Alec Torelli: I first started playing about five years ago. I played $5 buy-ins with my friends after school. We played 10¢-20¢ or 25¢-50¢ blinds. I eventually worked my way up and deposited money online a year or two after that. I won a $30 tournament for like $2,000. I was 16, and was thinking I was a huge baller [laughing]. I went out and bought my friends Jamba Juice after school, and thought it was so cool. That’s pretty insignificant now, but at the time, it was huge. Then I played $1-$2 for a long time, then $5-$10 for a long time, and moved up from there.

KA: Do you do anything in particular to mentally or physically prepare for playing a cash-game session?

AT: The first thing that comes to mind is working out, which I do pretty regularly. I do an hour of cardio and lift usually five times a week. I do that a lot right before playing, because I find that it makes me happier and makes it easier to focus for long periods of time. Also, working out regularly keeps my stamina up so that I have more energy during the day and I’m more alert. I think that’s my crutch that keeps me going.

Eating habits are also important to me. I find that if I eat junk food or foods that aren’t high in nutritional value, I generally have less energy. Instead of pizza, I’ll eat whole-wheat pasta. Especially when I was training a lot for a triathlon that I did, it was a requirement, but now it’s just a lifestyle and habit that I think is pretty good for staying healthy and mentally focused.

KA: When you are looking for a cash game to play in, what factors are you seeking that make a game good?

AT: The first thing I look at is the players, for soft spots in the game. Game selection is very important, especially in the high-stakes games, because all of the players are good. Almost all of the players are going to be at your level — maybe slightly worse or slightly better — and are going to be very hard to make money against. You want to find at least a couple of soft spots.

The other thing to look for is position on the players who are inferior to you and better than you. If there is a good player to your left, behind you, that’s going to pose a lot of problems, because he’s going to punish you every time you play a pot. It’s not a winning proposition to be playing good players out of position, because they know that you are going to have to fold a lot. You also want to do this against weaker players, by playing a lot of pots in position to maximize profit. Definitely, position and the players in the game are the two most important things.

KA: What is your favorite type of cash game to play, and why?

AT: I like heads-up no-limit [hold’em]. I just think it’s more fun. You are always in action and making decisions. The better decisions lead to profit. So, it’s fun to challenge yourself. A lot more patience and different types of skills are required in six-max games. Heads-up play involves a lot more hand-reading and is a lot more player-dependent. You have to figure out what your opponent’s strategy is and adjust to it faster, so it’s somewhat more of a thinking match. There are a lot more subtleties that you have to take into account if you want to be a winning player at the highest levels.

KA: How should a player determine when he is ready to move up in stakes?

AT: Let’s say you are playing $5-$10 and you want to move up to $10-$20. The first thing you need to consider is if you have enough money to move up in stakes. That’s not the only measurement. So, if you do, you need to ask yourself a few more questions to determine if you are really ready, such as: How many hands did I play at the $5-$10 level? Was my success at that level because I was running well, or did I beat the game because I am better than the other players? If you played only 5,000 hands and won $50,000, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are better than your opponents. It might just mean that you ran well for a period of 5,000 hands and may be at the top of the bell curve. You really have to take a step back and separate your results from your decisions. Your results can be very misleading. We call this being results-oriented. That’s something to take into account. Be really strict on yourself, and if anything, be overly strict. It’s easy to get an ego if you’ve been winning. You’re always the first one to point out your opponents’ mistakes and the last one to point out your own. People say this all the time in poker, but you’re going to attribute your success to skill and your losses to misfortune. So, be overly strict when taking that into account. To prevent this, you can set a specific hand level. For example, in order to move up, you must play 50,000 hands at one level, because if you are a winning player after that many hands — which is a much bigger sample size — it ensures that your success is due to skill. Also, ask yourself if you are confident, and mentally prepared to move up.

KA: What advice would you give to players who have made the decision to play professionally but are having a hard time dealing with the downswings?

AT: Having balance in your life is really important. I talked about this before, but I like to do other things to keep me engaged in life. It’s so easy to be swept away in poker. You play more than 12 hours a day and completely lose your social skills. You stop making friends and having other hobbies. Go do something you like, such as canoeing [laughing], or whatever you like to do. Take a break from poker. If you lose five buy-ins or 20 buy-ins and have to move down, who cares? You are still playing poker and doing something you got into because you thought it was fun. When your whole life is poker, it’s so easy to get caught up in worrying about what people think of you, because money is such a measurement of success. What matters is that you are doing what you love doing.

When you are running bad or going through a downswing, it’s important to continue the good habits you have when you are winning, even though you are losing. Small things like eating healthy and working out might not seem important when you just lost $50,000, but they are. You will eventually bounce back, and it will happen more quickly if you maintain the same good habits.

I also read something that was really interesting in Tommy Angelo’s book, Elements of Poker. On the back cover, he talks about how streaks are made up in your mind. His general point is that you create these streaks from an arbitrary amount of time that is rather irrelevant to the overall scheme of things. So, if you asked me if I was in a downswing, I could say that I was in a downswing today, or the last hour, or the last hand — or the last week, month, or year. The streaks in my mind are just arbitrary fabrications of what I think. So, you aren’t necessarily in a downswing. You could look at it like this: “Oh, I’m in a downswing for September.” That’s often a measurement of how people are doing, but if you look at September and August, you may have won more money in August than you lost in September, so suddenly you’re in an upswing. It’s just that you are letting yourself be fooled by your most recent results. You’re letting your mind overrun you, and you need to be smarter than that. You need to realize that it’s not necessarily a downswing. It’s a way of thinking, to understand what you are going through.