Look Out: Jared Jaffee

Jared Jaffee passed the bar exam in New York after completing law school, and then promptly started a job in the industry. He even more promptly left that job to pursue a career in poker. “I got swarmed the morning of my third day at work, and when I came back from lunch that afternoon, that was it. It was when the economy was bad, and it definitely wasn’t the job I was looking for at the time. I could tell right away that it wasn’t a place I wanted to be long term,” said Jaffee. “A lot of people might have waited a little longer, but I had poker. I was doing pretty well online at that point, so I put law on the back burner.”

He went with his gut instinct, and that decision has proven to be a good one for the 29-year-old poker player from Brooklyn Heights, New York. “I’m having a great time. It’s a fickle industry and things can swing on you quickly, but for now, I have no complaints,” he stated.

The law degree has been a big help to him in his poker career thus far. “The analytical thinking helps; it enables you to look at situations in a different way. You see a lot more angles when you’re playing hands. Listen, any education you have across the board is going to make you sharper; it fine-tunes your skills in ways in which you can’t even notice a direct correlation,” said Jaffee. “Those long sessions studying for the bar also prepared me for long poker sessions.”

Jaffee has played poker for a number of years, learning first by playing seven-card stud, which is a rarity these days. He first realized that he could make good money playing the game when he played online sit-and-gos intermittently to break up the monotony of 14-hour study sessions for the bar exam.

He played a few live tournaments in 2009, but has truly found his stride on the tournament trail in 2010. He has cashed nine times this year, and now has $1,016,117 in career tournament earnings. He said that everything clicked once he found a backer and could commit to the financial investment of playing full time.

He has racked up 3,478 Card Player 2010 Player of the Year (POY) points, and currently sits in fourth place in the standings. He has made six final tables this year, and the bulk of his points were won at World Poker Tour main-event final tables. He finished fourth in the Southern Poker Championship (630 points) in January, and followed that up with a fifth-place cash at the Legends of Poker (800 points).
For now, Jaffee is happy to see where poker takes him, and he says that he will keep playing for as long as it remains fun and profitable. And if it doesn’t work out, he always has a law degree to fall back on. “I have no idea where I will be 20 years from now. If I make a lot of money in the next couple of years, it would put me in a good position to set up my own practice. Instead of starting at the bottom, I can skip the first couple of levels. I will put some money away as I continue to make money from poker,” said Jaffee.

In the immediate future, he is going to focus on broadening his poker repertoire in order to play in as many tournaments as possible. “I’ve been trying to play a lot of eight-game lately. My first live eight-game mixed tournament was at the World Series this year, and I got seventh. I definitely have a lot to learn. There is a lot of value in those games, so I want to play in as many live eight-game tournaments as possible, because I feel that the skill level is so much higher there,” he said.
If Jaffee can maximize his opportunities to score cashes down the stretch this year, he will be a threat to win the POY race. ♠