Capture the Flag -- Matt Hawrilenko

Matt “Hoss_TBF” Hawrilenko is known as one of the best limit hold’em players in the world, and he has crushed the highest-stakes online games. He decorated his wrist with a World Series of Poker bracelet this summer by winning the $5,000 no-limit hold’em six-handed event. His mathematical background in poker made him a winning player, but his instincts and natural affinity for the game have put him among the cash-game elite.

Kristy Arnett: How did you get your start in cash games?

Matt Hawrilenko: The summer before my senior year of college, I got an internship in Washington, DC, and my friend and I waited until literally the last couple of hours before we headed down there to find a place to live. We just called the first place we found on the Internet that was cheap, and locked it up. It turned out that we were in the middle of gangland. One week, there were five shootings. There was a bum who liked to drink in our yard, so at least maybe he’d protect us from bad guys [laughing]. We were afraid to go out after dark, so we stayed in the house and played online. I deposited $100, rolled it up, and haven’t looked back since.

KA: Where did you study, and did you finish?

MH: I went to Princeton and studied public policy. I finished, and worked for two years at Susquehanna International Group, an options trading firm. That’s actually another funny story. After I had the interview, accepted the job, and was finishing up my senior year, I played a satellite for the World Series of Poker main event, and I won. It got back to the company that I was going to play in the main event, and at Susquehanna, poker is actually really big. They teach you to play poker to train you how to trade well, because there is a lot of overlap. I ended up getting a call from the COO, who said that Jeff Yass, one of the founding partners, was taking his plane to Vegas and he wanted to know if I wanted to tag along. So, as a college senior, I flew out to Vegas on a private jet; the biggest tournament I had played before that was $200. That’s also where I met Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenman, who taught me everything I know about poker and the right way to think about the game. They also worked for the company. It was a pretty cool start.

KA: Tell me a little bit about your rise up the ranks in limit hold’em.

MH: I started playing $5-$10 limit hold’em and moved up from there pretty quickly. I think I went from $30-$60 to $1,000-$2,000 in a little over a year. I’m not one of those guys who likes to play on a short roll [bankroll]. I was very adequately bankrolled at every level. It was a crazy rush. The games were good then.

KA: What is a good bankroll rule for limit hold’em cash-game players?

MH: It depends almost entirely on the amount of variance you are willing to subject yourself to. I would say anywhere from 300 big bets if you want to be risky to 600 or 700 big bets.

KA: What do you think players who are having a hard time moving up in stakes need to start focusing on?

MH: I’d say the most important thing is not learning to read your opponent’s hand, but learning to read your own hand. I think Chris Ferguson talked about it, and Bill and Jerrod talk about it in The Mathematics of Poker. If you learn to read your own hand well, you can win at the highest stakes of poker. How you do that is by looking at your actions, and given your sequence of actions, what is the range of hands that you can hold? This is one of the biggest mistakes of amateurs or beginners in both no-limit and limit hold’em. There are some sequences in which guys are so totally unbalanced.

KA: Can you talk about a specific example?

MH: Sure. Let’s suppose that someone raises, the big blind defends, and the board comes J-6-5 with two hearts. Some guys in the big blind will never check-raise a 6. All they will check-raise is a jack or any sort of straight draw or flush draw. So, when he check-raises, the bulk of his distribution will be flush draws and straight draws. If the board runs out Q-J, there are lots of guys I’m calling down here with king high, because their hand distribution is just so heavily weighted toward drawing hands that have missed. This is where good players just eat people up. It’s very important to have the appropriate mix of different types of hands in every situation. When I was really improving, that is the thing I focused on the most. I would go through my sessions, and I’d cover up my holecards and watch the replay. I’d ask myself, what is my range here? A lot of times, I’d find really exploitable spots in my game. If you fix that and toughen that up, I think you can win in every game.

KA: What advice would you give to beginning cash-game players?

MH: First, you can learn from every hand that you play and every hand that you don’t play. Pay attention to everything that happens and review it afterward when you are out of the heat of the moment. And second, give the other players a lot of credit. I hear a lot of poker players talk about what a donkey some player is, and then I hear the hand, and oftentimes, the way the “donkey” played the hand is kind of reasonable. It’s just not reasonable under their conception of how poker should be played. I think that to win at poker and to improve, you have to have a lot of humility. You have to consider the fact that the other guy is probably not a complete idiot. Try to figure out what he was trying to do, or even ways to defend his play. If you can open up, maybe you can say, “Actually, he did make a mistake there, but if he had made that play in a different situation or in some slightly different way, it actually could have been a reasonable play.” When you start thinking about every decision like that, and when you start giving people more credit, all it can do is make you a better player. All it can do is help you. I think having a bit too much pride or whatever is kind of a big sin in poker.

KA: What games and stakes are you playing these days?

MH: I like to play mixed games a lot. I love limit hold’em, and I certainly built my bankroll playing heads-up limit hold’em up to $1,000-$2,000 and then $2,000-$4,000, but those games don’t go as much anymore. They are actually getting tougher and tougher, sadly, but I love playing mixed games. Playing the H.O.R.S.E. mix is always great, and you can add in no-limit hold’em, pot-limit Omaha, and triple draw. It’s a lot of fun. The games change quickly, and it’s really interesting. I feel like I’m always learning something. I’d say, without a doubt, that triple draw is my worst game, but the most interesting to me. It’s nice to play the mixed games, because I was playing strictly limit hold’em for so long. I still love it, but it got to be more of the same. I started to feel like I was kind of a bot [robot], and that’s one of my big things in poker. If you are starting out, don’t let yourself get in situations where you go on auto-pilot. If you are doing that, you aren’t learning, and you may as well be working a mindless desk job or tightening bolts on an assembly line. One of the really cool things about poker is that it can and should be really interesting. If it’s not, you are probably doing something wrong, and you need to take a step back and re-evaluate.

KA: How do you balance playing poker for a living and the rest of your life?

MH: That’s actually a really big thing for me. It’s important not to get caught up in the grind. You need to have a life outside of poker. For me, it’s having goals outside of poker. That way, if I’m having a bad week of poker, I have something else that is going well. Right now, I’m training for the Chicago marathon. My wife is an amazing runner. She was an all-American runner in college. And Terrance Chan and I have been taking jiujitsu lessons here in Vegas. I always feel more mentally sharp if I’ve worked out, too, and I feel better about myself. There is nothing worse than feeling lazy and losing a bunch of money in the same day. It’s nice to have a lot of things going for you, so that if one is going poorly, the others can take up the slack.