A Poker Life - Galen Hall

Not many in the poker world could have predicted that Galen Hall, a part-time poker player and student, would win the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure main event, the largest tournament outside of the World Series of Poker. Hall himself was probably just as doubtful, considering that the 24-year-old had recorded only one live-tournament cash, for $3,460, leading up to his $2.3 million score in the Bahamas.

Even after six days of play and outlasting 1,558 players, Hall was still a long shot to overcome the massive chip lead of Chris Oliver, the online pro seated across the table from him, who held nearly 80 percent of the chips in play. During heads-up play, the river, in a seemingly innocuous hand, gave Hall a wheel straight and Oliver a full house, and the tournament appeared to be over, but Hall found a fold, prolonging his tournament life, which led to a heroic comeback.

Three hours and a few double-ups later, Hall had claimed one of poker’s biggest tournament scores and the 2011 PCA main-event title. This is his story.

Poker Beginnings

Hall was born and raised in Pasadena, California, as the only child in a family focused on education. His father, John, is a professor of civil engineering at Cal Tech, and he just finished a five-year stint as the dean of students. Hall’s mother, Nancy, was the vice president of a pharmaceutical company for years before recently retiring.

With both of his parents earning a Ph.D., Hall grew up in an academically driven household, and was expected to follow in their footsteps. That being said, it was clear early on that he would be a winner regardless of where his interests took him.

“While growing up, I was frequently described as hyper-competitive, especially in sports and games,” said Hall. “I did OK in school, a mix of mostly As and Bs, but was never that focused on my grades. Testing always came easily to me, and as a result, I naturally gravitated toward competitive strategy games, such as poker.”

Hall played the game casually in high school and then began to take it more seriously while enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. Although he was winning, he never saw it as more than a leisure pursuit, choosing to focus on earning his degree in political science.

It wasn’t until January of 2010 that Hall began to compete more online, playing as “GasparLeMarc” and turning his attention to multitable tournaments. “It’s never been my goal to make a living playing poker,” he said. “I just really enjoy playing the game, and as I became better at multitable tournaments and started to win, I really got plugged into the community and got hooked. I enjoy competing against the other regulars and trying to establish myself as one of the best online players. My will to improve and win was driven mostly by my competitiveness, and I guess the money just came with it.”

Hall had a natural ability to play the game, but still had a few early hurdles to overcome in his development. “I used to struggle a lot with ego,” he admitted. “At a table with a couple of good players and lots of donks, I always seemed to get involved in pot after pot of trying to outplay the good players and control the table, instead of just letting the good spots come to me and isolating the bad players. I also had a habit of trying to play too many tables at once, or registering in really difficult small fields when playing a lot of tables. Obviously, these were bad leaks that I had to eliminate, but I also think that aggressive mentality helped me to improve more quickly as a player.”

The Bahamas

Hall headed down to the Bahamas, determined to put in quite a bit of time at the tables. Although he bought in directly to the $10,000 PCA main event, he was prepared to register for up to five more tournaments if things had not gone as planned.

“During the first two days of the tournament, I was able to chip up relatively easily at almost every table I played, and didn’t have any big all-in confrontations,” Hall recalled. “I went from 30,000 to 300,000 just by playing super aggressively and really hammering all of the weak players. During the money bubble, I won a coin flip to knock out Viktor “Isildur1” Blom, and cruised the rest of the day.”

It wasn’t all smooth sailing for him, however. Hall had to dig deep to pull out of a miserable start to his third day. “I lost a couple of big pots and found myself with just 10 big blinds to work with. I vowed not to panic, and after a 45-minute heater, I all of a sudden was sitting with 1.7 million, which I comfortably rode for two days going into the penultimate day.”

Although Hall was certainly making waves in the tournament, all eyes were glued to Chris Moneymaker and his run through the field. That quickly changed when Hall’s set of tens sent the Team PokerStars pro spiraling. A couple of hours later, Hall knocked out Moneymaker and went to the final table with the second-largest stack.

The Final Table

Although he was second in chips, Hall was somewhat forgotten at a final table that included online pros such as Mike Sowers, Sam Stein, and Oliver. To add to the pressure, ESPN had sequestered the table in order to broadcast it unedited with a one-hour delay both online and on television.

Hall formulated a game plan during his day off, but wasn’t ready to stick to anything concrete. “I had some idea of how things were going to play out, but you always want to be able to adapt to changing dynamics, and you don’t want to just have a strategy that you’re afraid to deviate from. I knew that with a couple of short stacks and Oliver to my left, I was probably going to have to start out very tight and wait for a couple of eliminations. I wanted to pick a couple of good spots here and there to three-bet and four-bet against light bets, to maintain my stack, and then really open it up when we got four-handed. As luck would have it, that’s pretty much how it played out.”

The Laydown

Tournament champions can often look back and pick out the hand that propelled them to victory, but it is rare for it to be a hand that they wound up losing. Hall entered heads-up play as the proverbial underdog, and at one point was down 5-1 in chips before the hand of the tournament played out.

The action is well-documented. He raised from the button with the 8♣ 4♥ and Oliver called with the A♦ 2♠. The flop came 5♦ 3♦ 2♣, and Oliver checked and called a continuation-bet of 575,000. The turn was the 2♥, and both players checked. The river was the A♠, completing Hall’s straight. Oliver checked, and Hall fired in a value-bet of 2 million. Oliver then moved all in with his full house, but Hall stunned the viewers watching at home by folding and preserving his tournament life.

Hall further elaborated, explaining that even though he didn’t know if he had made the right decision at the time, he was able to move on without much trouble. “The absolute strength of the hand, a straight against a full house heads up, probably made it more epic, but that’s not really a big deal to me. I thought about how often he was bluffing, which was infrequently, and how I was doing against his value range, which wasn’t good. Once I sorted all of that out, it seemed pretty easy to fold and move on to the next hand. I do a pretty good job of not dwelling on things, so I got over it pretty quickly.”

Plans for the Future

Despite becoming an overnight millionaire, Hall still has his job doing data analysis and strategy for a startup called Identified.com. It doesn’t pay much, but he still enjoys it because it gives him a whole new set of puzzles and problems to work on.

After spending some of his prize money for a big celebration in San Francisco with his friends, Hall took the rest and put it aside for school and future investments, hoping to make good use of his newfound fortune.

“I have a really strong passion for entrepreneurship, and that’s the main reason why I will be attending Stanford. I’ve started several of my own small companies in high school and college, which ranged from spectacular successes to stunning failures. Entrepreneurship has a lot in common with poker. You are your own boss, you are accountable for your own results, you have to be strong-willed and optimistic in order to withstand the uncertainty and swings, and you have a lot of freedom for creative thinking and problem-solving.”

Because he chooses to avoid labels and won’t allow poker to define him as a person, Hall struggles with classifying himself as either a professional poker player or a student who has a profitable hobby.

“I don’t really feel the need to define myself as entirely A or entirely B. I enjoy poker, I play it well, and I put in volume when I can. Like a lot of players, I also have other goals in my life that are more important than poker, and I have a lot of other things that occupy my time. I feel like there is this distinction that casual viewers make of ‘pros are good, and people who aren’t are bad.’ That assumption is pretty far from the truth on both ends.”

Although he wants to play a few more live tournaments before school starts in the fall, Hall is uninterested in the life of a professional poker player. “To me, poker is the purest competitive game ever created, and compared to other games, it’s really in its early stages of understanding. There is still so much to be learned and discovered. I imagine that I will play poker and be involved in the scene for a long time to come, but I can pretty confidently say that poker will not be my primary focus after I graduate.”

Whatever he decides, Hall already has proven to be a winner, both on and off the felt. In a world where so many have decided to forego an education in favor of a fast-moving, big-spending, high-profile lifestyle, it’s refreshing to see a player who realizes that you can always have both. ♠