Generation Next -- Yuval Bronshtein

Yuval “yuvee04” Bronshtein is one of those “poker nomads” who lives and travel from city to city without really calling anywhere home. You could say his home is at the poker table, where he makes a very good living, both live and online. It wasn’t always easy for the 25-year-old however, and he almost gave up before he hit it big. Fortunately he persisted through the many extreme ups and downs, and even went on to win two Full Tilt Online Poker Series events simultaneously. He has a story to tell, and sooner or later, everyone in the poker world will surely know it.

RM: Where are you from?

YB: I was born in Israel, in a city called Cholon, near Tel-Aviv, and I lived there for five years before moving to Atlanta, GA, where I have lived the other 20 years of my life. My whole family is Israeli, and I grew up speaking both Hebrew and English. Currently I don’t live anywhere — one year ago, when I was traveling to Europe for two months and my lease ran up on my condo, I put all of my stuff in a storage unit, and have been traveling non-stop since then.

RM: How did you get into poker?

YB: In 2002, I was a freshman at the College of Charleston. Though I had no clue how to play poker, I was heavy into sports betting at the time. During my sophomore year, my friends taught me poker. We played for $20 or so, and we had a winner-take-all format. For the first few weeks, I was just learning, and I would donate my $20 to the game and go home. After about three or four weeks, I went on a two-month streak where I took home the money in every game we played. I think the winner-take-all format we had really taught me poker the right way, that it is all about winning. Pretty soon I became infatuated with the game.

RM: When did you go pro?

YB: After my sophomore year in college, I made a decision to take a year off, and to transfer to the University of Maryland after. It was during this time that I deposited money into my online poker Bodog account for the first time.
During this year off, I worked a little bit at some part time jobs, but mostly I just wanted to travel and play poker. I spent lots of time in Israel, New York City, and other places, while playing mostly online poker. I began to slowly build a bankroll, and decided that I would no longer work at sunglass hut, or any other job. This was the moment I became a professional, when poker had become my only source of income.

After this, I attended the University of Maryland for my Junior year of College. Though I held good grades, I found myself frequently bringing my laptop to lectures, so that I could play poker. I never did homework or studied, I was always just playing, and I was winning for the most part.

Then in one night I lost my entire poker bankroll. I had spent the weekend in Atlantic City with friends. I played craps and roulette for the first time and lost $1,000. I swore that I would never play those games again, because I am too profitable at poker to allow myself to gamble with such house games.

When I returned to my dorm, I was on tilt, and lost the entire $25,000 balance in my PartyPoker account within a matter of hours. I then lost everything I had in my Bodog account. I reloaded my Bodog account with the only $20,000 I had left, and lost it all. I was completely broke now. I even called up my mother crying and told her that I would consider quitting poker for good, but it didn’t feel right.

RM: What did you do then?

YB: The very next day I woke up feeling depressed and decided to skip my classes. I logged into my Bodog account, and realised that I could still use my player points to enter tournaments. So I entered a 50-player tournament, in which first place would win a seat into the World Series of Poker main event. This was a winner-take-all tournament, so second place got nothing.

I won first place and was ecstatic that I would be going to Vegas for my first WSOP, at age 22. In Vegas, I lost in cash games, and didn’t cash in the main event. I even lost the $5,000 I had borrowed from family for the trip. It was time for my brother Itai and I to fly home, now that I was in debt for $5k, and with my last $200 in my wallet.

I then did something which changed my life forever. I took the $200 and decided to play $2/5 no-limit at the Bellagio with it and take a shot. That night I won $2,800. I got us a room at the Bellagio so I could play again the next day. I won about $2,500 then, and stayed another day where I won a few hundred more. We then flew home, I immediately repaid the money I owed, and put the remaining $500 I had left into my FullTilt account.

I spent the rest of the summer grinding, and turning that $500 into a decent bankroll. I did not want to return to school but my parents heavily opposed this, so I decided I would return for my senior year of college, for them. During my first week of classes, I made $50,000 playing poker. I called my mother and told her that I would be flying home after the weekend. School was not for me, and I was quitting it in order to focus on my obsession, poker.

I then built a decent bankroll for the WSOP, and cashed third place in the $2,000 pot-limit hold’em event that summer, for approximately $110,000, which more than doubled my bankroll, and I also cashed in another event. Then in August, I won my first FTOPS event. I followed this up by winning back-to-back FTOPS events the next August. I knew that I was destined to be a poker player, and that I had made the right life decision.

RM: What kind of games do you play now?

YB: Although I originally learned no-limit holdem, and built my bankroll playing limit hold’em cash games, those are now my least frequently played games. I am a rare breed of young poker player that takes pride in playing all of the games and being one of the best at all of them.

For this reason, my games of choice these days are primarily mixed games, either H.O.R.S.E., or 7 or 8 game mixes. I also think that in these types of games I have a bigger edge than most, since I am great at all of the games, while most players have a few leaks in at least some of the games involved.

RM: What levels do you play online?

YB: Although I have played as high as $1,000-$2,000 fixed limit online, my comfort zone is generally $50-100/$200-400. When I play $1k-$2k occasionally, it’s a huge rush for me, because I know you can win or lose huge in that game. I generally don’t like to play any smaller than what I said, because I don’t feel motivated to play my best if there is not enough on the line.

RM: What was your best moment in poker?

YB: Definitely winning two FTOPS events at the same time. They both started at the same time on the same day, and I know that I made induplicable history that night, an achievement that nobody will ever repeat. Nobody can ever take that away from me, and I know I will always be an icon in online poker history and in the poker world from it. Winning third place in a WSOP event was a pretty big achievement for me too, and making it to the first ever World Series of Poker Europe final table in the H.O.R.S.E. event.

RM: What else would you like to achieve?

YB: I want to win a WSOP bracelet pretty much more than anything else in the world right now. People ask me why I don’t have a condo, a car, a girlfriend. The answer is that I need the bracelet before I can really move on with the rest of my life, and I feel that many of those things would be distractions for me from my current top life goal. I want to win a record number of bracelets during my career, and to go down as one of the best of all time.