A Poker Life: Raj Vohra

Raj Vohra is a winner; he always has been. While growing up in India, he was among the top tennis players in the country. After completing school, he turned pro and began competing on the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) Tour.
He was living his dream, competing against the best players in the world as the pride of his nation, but disaster struck and an injury forced him into early retirement. Not one to be down for long, Vohra picked himself up and started from scratch, learning poker through trial and error after catching an episode of the World Series of Poker on ESPN.
Five years of intense study later, the 36-year-old has become one of the best players you’ve never heard of. This is his story.
Volleying for a Career in Tennis
Vohra was born in India in 1974. His family managed various clothing factories. His mother and father were a hard-working couple who pressed to instill that same work ethic in Raj and his two siblings. Although he had many interests as a child, it wasn’t until he was 8 years old that he discovered his passion for the game of tennis.
“I was always very competitive,” Vohra recalled. “Even as a beginner, I was challenging myself to play kids who had been playing for three or four years. Within a few months, it was clear that I had found something special. The game came very naturally to me, not only athletically, but also the mental side of the game, which takes other players years to develop.”
Sensing the opportunity for a free education, Vohra’s parents encouraged him to keep at it, and before long he was one of the top junior players in the country. “I’ve always had this drive to be a winner, to be the best. I started off trying to be the best in my town, and once I accomplished that, I tried to be the best in my state. Once I succeeded at that, my goal was to be the best in my nation. For many years, I was ranked in the top five players in my age group in all of India.”
Part of what made Vohra so successful was his relentless ability to attack, no matter what the game situation. Whether he was serving 40-love or was down a break point, he always went for the kill. He would rather go down in flames than ever play it conservatively.
“My game was all about aggression,” he said. “I was more of a net player, not a baseline player. I never wanted to sit back and wait for things to come to me. I made sure that every day, I went out and got it for myself.”
With his school expenses taken care of, Vohra worked to get a bachelor’s degree in accounting, just in case his pro career didn’t pan out. Little did he know how quickly he would need it.
A Bad Beat on the Court
Vohra left school and immediately joined the ATP Tour, competing at European stops and other events all over the globe. “I spent about three years traveling the tour before I decided to move to the United States. It was there that I broke my wrist on the court.”
Although his hopes were high to return, it became apparent that his dream was over. To add insult to injury, all of his supporters moved on, leaving him alone to fend for himself. “The first three months after my injury was one of the hardest times in my life,” he remembered. “Not only could I not play any tennis, but my sponsors started dropping out one by one. My whole life, tennis had provided for me, but now that it was over, I realized that I needed to find something else.”
While finishing his recovery, Vohra took a job as an accountant, but his love for tennis was too strong to stay away from the game entirely. “My short-lived career as a professional tennis player was over, but I figured that if I couldn’t hit for power, I could certainly teach others how to do it. That’s when I became a tennis instructor. I did that for about four or five years, but I couldn’t sit still. I started day-trading, and then I opened my own real-estate company. I had found financial success, but I was missing the competition that I loved so much.”
Rallying for a Career in Poker
Vohra was yearning for some competition, and he found it in an unlikely game of cards while channel-surfing for some tennis updates on TV. “Poker might as well not even exist in India. Nobody I knew had played the game, and I had no idea what it was about. Being the sports junkie that I was, I always had ESPN on in the background. One day, I noticed that they were showing the World Series of Poker, and that Joe Hachem was winning millions of dollars. Of course, I was intrigued, and started watching more and more of the reruns. It occurred to me that this could be a competitive outlet for me.”
Although he had found a new hobby, Vohra was about as green as you could get during his first experience with the game. “I remember my first trip to a casino,” he said. “I had to print out the hand rankings just so that I knew what hand beat what. I studied on the drive over, and even some at the table, but I still lost $100 playing $1-$2 limit hold’em. It didn’t matter, I was hooked. It took many trips, but I eventually started to win, especially when I switched to the single-table sit-and-gos.
“Within six months, I was one of the regulars, and had done pretty well, winning a few thousand here and there in some of the multitable tournaments they offered. Then, I overheard some guy talking about winning $50,000 on PartyPoker. I had no idea what PartyPoker was, but I searched for it that night when I got home, and soon discovered online poker.”
Just like tennis did all those years ago, poker came very naturally to Vohra. With a couple of hundred dollars invested online, he quickly worked his bankroll up to $40,000 by playing a mixture of limit hold’em and tournaments. When PartyPoker shut its doors to the U.S. market, Vohra moved to PokerStars and Full Tilt. Within weeks, he chopped up the Sunday Million tournament to go along with various other tournament scores. With a growing bankroll, he headed to Las Vegas for his first attempt at the WSOP.
“I played four or five events in the summer of 2008. I cashed in a couple of them, but nothing too big. I was about to go home when I decided to try to win a satellite into a $5,000 event. I won, and extended my trip, which proved to be very profitable when I made the final table and finished fifth, for almost $200,000.”
Vohra Serves Up an Ace for Big Online Tournaments
Vohra has more than $2.5 million in tournament earnings, nearly half of which came in 2010 online. Amazingly, his biggest score, a $430,000 win in a two-day $2,500 Full Tilt Online Poker Series XV (FTOPS) event, almost didn’t happen. “I was all set to fly to Las Vegas for the North American Poker Tour main event at The Venetian, but at the last second, my family decided to come to visit, and I was forced to cancel my trip. I was upset at the time, but all of that changed the next day after I had locked up the win and $430,000. More importantly, I really started to believe in myself. It was a big confidence builder.”
That confidence led to more and more victories. Vohra’s online-tournament resume is practically a list of prestigious-tournament wins, including a Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) title, the Sunday 500, the Nightly Hundred Grand, and the Super Tuesday. In September, he narrowly missed adding a World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) bracelet to his list of accomplishments when he fell in second place to two-time winner Jamie “Xaston” Kaplan. Nonetheless, it was his fourth six-figure score of the year.
When asked to pinpoint the reason for his success, Vohra thought back to his own personal “aha” moment. “The major turning point for me was when I learned more about pot control and position,” he explained. “I’ve always been aggressive, four-betting and five-betting with nothing, but now I’m much more in control and think that I have a great feel for my opponents and when they will fold to pressure. My motto when I play cards is to always be aggressive. Just like in tennis, there are a lot of unforced errors in poker. But that was never my style, to sit back and wait for chips to fall in my lap. I make sure that I go out there and force my opponents into making mistakes.”
Vohra’s beginning-of-the-year success put him in contention for the Card Player Online Player of the Year (OPOY) award, but when the laws changed in Florida, allowing big-bet no-limit hold’em, he quickly shifted his focus away from online play to the live arena, and its ever-growing cash-game scene.
From Tournaments to Cash Games
“For a while, the games were great,” Vohra said. “When the law changed in July, it was like Christmas had come early. We were playing $50-$100 no-limit with a $200 straddle with all of these rich businessmen who had no idea what they were doing. It wasn’t uncommon for me to cash out five-figure scores on a regular basis. It definitely hurt my chances to win the OPOY award, but I couldn’t pass up all of that action. The games have slowed down a bit, but I think they’ll pick up again once the big tournaments come to town.”
The big tournaments Vohra refers to include World Poker Tour and World Series of Poker Circuit stops. For the time being, he’s happy that he has the flexibility and skill to compete wherever the action is.
That being said, at the time of this writing, he intended to use the holiday season to improve upon his 11th-place OPOY ranking. “I’m going to need to win something big, but I think I can make that final push toward the top,” he said. With his intense drive to succeed and a passion for winning, who would bet against him? ♠