The Scoop -- Eric Baldwin

Eric Baldwin has had a hot year so far, and currently is leading the Card Player 2009 Player of the Year race. He’s won more than $1 million so far in 2009, and also captured his first World Series of Poker bracelet this summer. He started his career online, where he’s better known as “basebaldy,” but has successfully made the transition to major live tournaments.

Diego Cordovez: We meet a lot of players who have had enormous success online, as you have, and you’ve taken it to the live-game arena, as well. Typically, they saw poker on TV, started playing, and then started winning. Besides the experience of playing a lot, which I assume you did, what were the other influences in becoming a super successful player?

Eric Baldwin: I was kind of a book guy. You run into guys who say they never read a poker book in their life; I was the opposite. I got to college and didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I had a psychology degree and realized I’d need more school to make anything of that, so I decided to take poker pretty seriously. I just started studying it like I would a college course. I got into some books and took that route.

DC: What books were influential when you first started to play?

EB: I’d say the major ones were the Harrington on Hold’em series. I think that series was a big one for a lot of people. Then, as that evolved and all of the concepts got out there, it became a matter of playing off of those concepts and exploiting people who were making those plays.

Adam Schoenfeld: How do you describe your style? Are you a LAG [loose-aggressive]? Are you a TAG [tight-aggressive]?

EB: I do a lot of messing around in small pots with hands that people normally wouldn’t play, but then when it comes to my tournament life, I’m a little bit on the tighter side, for the most part.

AS: That’s the hallmark of a lot of successful tournament players, because they are picking up a lot of small pots or getting away if necessary.

EB: Especially in a tournament like the $1,500 event at the Series, where there are so many players in it who are just going to hand you their stack. There’s no reason to take a small edge. If you lose, you’re not in the tournament for that guy to double you up later.

DC: It’s interesting that you mention the Harrington books, because they were really written for live tournaments — at least that was mostly his background. A lot of situations that he covers are relatively deep-stacked, where you can make certain moves. Online, in the vast majority of tournaments, you might not have the time to put into play a lot of the strategies, so adopting them takes some thought besides just following the plan.

EB: That’s true. You can get away with just being good with less than 30 to 40 big blinds and be a very successful online player. In order to make the transition to the bigger live tournaments, you definitely need to work on your deep-stack game. I really started trying to learn cash games and deep-stack play. I won a preliminary event at Bellagio, and part of the deal was that you had to take a $25,000 seat in the WPT Championship. I went into it without any cash-game or deep-stack knowledge. With that many big blinds, I just felt lost, and there were great players like Carlos Mortensen, who was on my right and putting on a show. After that, it motivated me to get more into talking to my cash-game buddies and reading some cash-game books, even though I’m not playing cash games, just to incorporate some of that stuff.