Eugene Katchalov:

When Eugene Katchalov graduated from New York University in 2003 with degrees in both international business and finance, he lived in Brooklyn and had never played a hand of poker in his life. Just eight years later, Katchalov is respected as one of the best young tournament professionals in the game. He is everywhere these days; whether it’s booking a tournament win worth $1.5 million in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure $100,000 super high-roller event or playing in the biggest buy-in tournament of all time (the $250,000 super high-roller event at the Aussie Millions), he has developed a taste for big action. The poker world has taken note, and Katchalov will be featured on a Russian version of PokerStars.net’s The Big Game, and he will play in the NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship.

Katchalov came to poker late by today’s standards, but his interesting path through life has given him the perfect foundation for learning the game quickly. His $6.6 million in career tournament earnings is a testament to the fast learning curve of his career.

Advantageous Background for a Risk-Taker

Katchalov is a long way from where he began his poker career, but he is even farther away from where he grew up. When he was 10 years old, he fled his home in Kiev, Ukraine, with his mother just before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. They were set to meet his father in Brooklyn, who had made the move two years earlier, but the timing of their trip made it a perilous task. “We actually left on the day that the Soviet Union came apart. I wasn’t really aware of it, but I remember my mom telling me when we were leaving Kiev that there were tanks surrounding the city. My mom kept saying that she was really nervous, and she wasn’t sure if we were going to be able to fly out. Even when we had gotten to the airport and were on our plane, there were certain planes that were allowed to take off and others that weren’t,” said Katchalov.

He credits his upbringing in Eastern Europe and the culture that exists there for his interest in game strategy. “I think a lot of people from that part of the world just like to play games, whether it is chess or different types of card games or board games. When you grow up playing so many different types of games, I think they just come to you naturally, because it is in your culture. Poker just comes naturally to you, and you’re a little bit more competitive in general,” said Katchalov.

“I remember that when growing up, I would play card games with friends on the street. I don’t remember the games, but poker wasn’t one of them. We played different card games for pennies and nickels, anything we had.” The quality of player this culture has produced is evidenced by the strong performances of Eastern European and Russian poker players in recent years. “The fact that I’m going to play in the Russian version of The Big Game means that poker must be very popular in the region. I think it is cool to see it growing so fast,” said Katchalov. Leaving his home was hard enough in the short run, but the long-term adjustment that he faced in a new country wasn’t going to be easy, either. He traveled a path to success in America’s most iconic city of opportunity, and the transition for him was eased by attending a Jewish, Russian-speaking school before he transferred to the public schools in Brooklyn. He excelled in academics and was accepted at NYU, but he still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life. However, in college, it became clear that he would be a risk-taker.

“I realized that I wanted to do something with business, so I chose finance, and international business was an easy double major. I wasn’t looking forward to becoming an analyst or a banker, which is what most people did upon coming out of school. But at some point early in my college career, I was introduced to trading, and I liked it, and that’s when I started pursuing it,” said Katchalov.

He tried his hand as a day trader after college, but poker would soon replace that profession as his means of employment just a few months after school ended. “I didn’t know what to do after I graduated. I knew that I wanted to be a trader, but I also knew that I really couldn’t make money in it for the first couple of years,” said Katchalov. “It is kind of like poker, where you have to pay your dues to learn in order to get to the high stakes. You have to be prepared to build your bankroll and then lose for a while; it’s kind of the same thing. I worked as a trader for a while, and I made money, but poker was always much more profitable.” Katchalov still dabbles in trading, but the most important thing he took from that work can be applied to poker. “The biggest similarity is the money-management aspect. There is a direct correlation between the two. Besides money management, trading is a form of gambling with varying amounts of information. Sometimes you’ll have a lot of information, and sometimes you won’t. You have to really know how to apply your knowledge in order to know how much to bet in each trade or poker hand. In one poker hand, you will have a little information and will have to make a decision, and in another poker hand, you will have a lot of information with which to make a decision,” said Katchalov.

He learned to make the best educated guess in each situation, and each time, he was better prepared than the last, based on his previous experience. “In some trades, you’re not a favorite at all, and in other trades, you feel like you’re a huge favorite. It’s kind of hard to really know for sure. It’s all based on your experience and the feel that you develop for it,” said Katchalov.

A Poker Education From $6 to $6.6 Million

Katchalov first played poker with friends in weekly home games in Brooklyn. The first time he played, he lost $6, which was a lot of money to him at the time. “It was the summer after I graduated that I first learned. I didn’t even know the rules. I remember watching the World Poker Tour every once in a while on TV, and it was all totally new to me,” said Katchalov with a laugh. The weekly game turned into a semiweekly event, and then they were playing almost every day. He then saw a friend’s brother playing online, and jumped into that. “When I first learned the game, it was limit, but when I really got going, I was playing no-limit. I played a lot of sit-and-gos to start, online, and then some small-stakes cash games. I didn’t do too well in cash games at the beginning.”

After a year of playing in home games and $5 sit-and-gos online, with mixed cash-game success online, Katchalov decided to follow a friend [Ilya Trincher] to Vegas for his first live cash-game experience in late 2004. He also played in his first major tournament, a $3,000 no-limit hold’em event at Bellagio, and finished fifth in a 420-player field, for $47,868. He then decided to play in the $15,000 WPT main event. He cashed again, this time finishing 35th, which was good for $27,277. “When I cashed in that second tournament, that was when I was hooked,” he said.

This experience gave him confidence, and he returned home encouraged to keep learning and playing more. He started to add playing in the underground card games in New York to his learning process. “The first few times that I played for lower stakes, it was in the big clubs in New York. They weren’t raked games; they just charged time, like a casino. They were very well-run. You didn’t play on credit; you would buy chips from the cashier, and then cash out at the end, like a casino. They were really safe for a long time, but then a couple of things happened. Some people got robbed, and a few people actually got killed. That is when they closed them down, for the most part. Now, there’s a lot of private games,” said Katchalov.

It was at those clubs that he met a young New York poker professional, Nick Schulman. “We met in New York in an underground card club through a mutual friend; they were playing heads up. We then became friends. We would go to Foxwoods and Vegas together, and the friendship just kind of grew from there,” said Katchalov. The two began traveling to many of the same tournaments on the live-tournament circuit, and Katchalov saw that anything was possible when Schulman won more than $2.1 million at the WPT World Poker Finals in November 2005.

His own WPT triumph came two years later, after his poker education created a strategy change as he learned the intricacies of the game. Katchalov’s style swung from tight to aggressive before he found the versatility that would win him millions. He topped his friend Schulman by winning $2,482,605 at the 2007 WPT Five-Diamond World Poker Classic. It is still the marquee win of his short yet impressive career. “That was my life-changing win. It was nice to win a tournament, because I had been trying for so long, and it was a big one, so it felt prestigious at the time. It gave me a lot of confidence and a lot of opportunities. It enabled me to play in bigger buy-in tournaments and cash games with better players, and just really challenge myself,” said Katchalov.

Of his $6.6 million in career tournament earnings, Katchalov said, “I feel like that number is showing me that I am improving in my game. I feel like I have something to show for it. There is much more room to grow, and I would definitely like to see where I can go. What’s possible? It depends on what I can do in the really big tournaments, like the World Series of Poker main event.”

The 30-year-old poker pro started 2011 with two huge scores. First, he won the prestigious $100,000 super high-roller event at the PCA, for $1.5 million. Then, a few days after that, he finished second in the $10,000 turbo high-roller event, for $131,920, to become one of the leading money winners in early 2011. “These wins give me a lot of confidence, but make me greedy, as well. Now, I want to win every time. It’s all relative. You need a little time to get over a big win and get back to reality,” said Katchalov.

His strong early run in 2011 has confirmed what many people already knew, that he has just begun to hit his stride, even though he is already one of the best young tournament players in the world. In conclusion, he stated, “Now I’m motivated to play more and see how big a year I can have.” ♠

Eugene Katchalov Discusses What it Takes to Stay in the Winner’s Circle

The most impressive aspect of Eugene Katchalov’s $6.6 million in career tournament winnings isn’t the amount of money that he’s put away; it’s the fact that he’s been able to do it against varied competition, year after year, in different tournament arenas around the world.

Since June of 2007, Katchalov has managed to cash for six figures or more 12 different times. During that time, the longest he ever had to endure a dry spell of no six-figure scores was nine months, making him one of the most consistent players on the tournament circuit.

So, what is it about Katchalov’s game that makes him so consistently successful? “Because the game has changed so much over the last few years, I think the most important thing to realize is that certain winning styles that worked a few years ago won’t work today,” he said. “You have to be able to evolve with the game, and I feel like I certainly try to evolve with the game the best that I can.”

Even the best players in the world are somewhat exploitable. Players can’t help but have tendencies, if not bad habits, but Katchalov’s game is a riddle that hasn’t yet been solved by his peers. “I have certainly gone through a lot of different styles. Some of the things that made me a winner five years ago wouldn’t make me a winner today. I think some people have had trouble adjusting to this world. You just can’t settle. You have to always be willing and able to improve your game to stay ahead of the field.”

The process of developing a winning playing style wasn’t an immediate home run for Katchalov, who admitted that trial and error played a big part in determining who he is as a poker pro. “When I started playing poker, I was very, very tight. But that style wasn’t necessarily successful, because people like Gus Hansen at the time were winning with a lot of aggression. I started experimenting with that, but quickly realized that didn’t work for me, either. It took a lot of going back and forth with various successes and failures before I realized what it takes to be a consistent winner.”

What Katchalov realized was that it wasn’t enough to vary his playing style month to month, or even week to week. He needed to be able to shift gears on the fly, table by table, opponent by opponent. “I realized that playing generally one way or the other was incorrect,” he explained. “You need to be able to adjust to your table and counter what each player is doing.”

Although he admitted that his all-or-nothing approach to tight and aggressive play was flawed, he’s happy that he went through the growing pains associated with them, and credits that education for his ability to put himself in his opponents’ shoes. “I’m happy that I have had the experience of playing extremely tight and extremely aggressive, and even neutral, because I can put myself in a lot of people’s places at the table. Because I now have experience with virtually all playing styles, I can take advantage of players who I sense are being one-dimensional.”

He took it one step further, explaining that regardless of playing styles, people get too caught up in playing a hand the same way every time, not realizing that they could be maximizing their expected value in each situation with just a few simple tweaks.

“The first couple of years that I played poker, I always tried to find the best average way to play a hand,” he said. “Poker is played against other human beings, so just because you’ve done the same thing before and it worked, you can’t do it all the time. People will just adjust to it, so you have to get into your opponent’s head and figure out what he thinks you’re thinking, and try to counter it, and try to make the best decision based on that. In each situation, I would try to figure out what was the best play based on the cards, but you have to move beyond that and figure out what is the best play for that specific situation. You have to consider the history, things that have been going on at the table, and most importantly, your own image. Once you combine all of those variables, you are ready to make the best possible decision on each street.”

Of course, depending on your stack size, there could be limitations to what you can get away with. That’s why Katchalov loves to compete in big buy-in, deep-stack events. “When you’re playing deep-stacked, a lot more creativity comes into play. You can play your hands in so many different ways. It opens up the number of ways that you can play your hands exponentially. I think a lot of people are too set in their ways, and they play like they are short-stacked. They always play the way that they are used to, when they need to open up and explore the game.”

There have been many flash-in-the-pan success stories in poker and players you never hear from again, but Katchalov is determined to stay relevant for the long haul. By keeping his game fresh and his opponents guessing, he already has positioned himself among the true elite in the poker world, despite his limited number of years of experience. ♠