A Poker Life - Olivier Busquet

Widely regarded by his peers as the best online heads-up sit-and-go player in the world, Olivier Busquet has made the transition to live-tournament poker and has earned more than $2.3 million.

The man known as “livb112” and “Adonis112” has captured a World Poker Tour title and finished runner-up in a European Poker Tour high-roller event. Most recently, he made the “Elite Eight” at the NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship, and he has made appearances on the television show Poker After Dark.

The 29-year-old has come a long way in his five-year poker career. What started out as an unhealthy obsession that nearly ruined his life has blossomed into a lifestyle that has been just as rewarding as it has been profitable. This is his story.

An Unhealthy Obsession

Busquet was born and raised in Manhattan, one of two sons of French immigrants. His mother went to Cornell University and Columbia University, and spent her career as a corporate executive. His father went to the Wharton School of Business and worked in banking. As a child, Busquet attended the most prestigious schools and worked hard, hoping to follow in his parents’ footsteps to success.

“There was definitely a big emphasis on education and working hard while growing up,” he recalled. “It was instilled in me early on that I needed to take whatever I was doing very seriously and strive to do my absolute best at all times. I wound up going to Cornell, and graduated with a degree in philosophy. After college, I immediately returned to Manhattan and took a job in a support function at a prominent trading firm.”

It wasn’t quite an entry-level job, but Busquet was clearly unhappy doing grunt work for the other traders. So, he decided that while he was learning one job, he could use his spare time to learn another. A friend took him to a home game, and some players there explained that poker and trading weren’t all that different.

“When I first took up poker, it was with the idea that there was essentially a lot of skill-set overlap between what a Wall Street trader and a poker professional were doing,” he explained. “I figured that while learning to do one, I could teach myself the other and get the best of both worlds. Another friend of mine at work told me about online poker, and I got right into it. I started out in low-stakes, six-max cash games. I splashed around for a while at a bunch of different levels, not really knowing what I was doing or taking it too seriously. It was more for enjoyment than anything. Eventually, I built up a bankroll of a few thousand dollars, and jumped into $5-$10. That’s when I got really hooked, and in the span of a month, I earned about $100,000 and moved into the $25-$50 games.”

The euphoria of making six figures playing a game lasted just a few hours. The morning after reaching that mark, Busquet discovered the harsh reality of the game.

“The night that I crossed the six-figure mark in my cashier, I went out to celebrate, and ended up getting really drunk,” he said. “The next morning, I opened up the site and found that I had lost about $20,000. I had no idea how or when I lost it, but a couple of friends online confirmed that I was up late playing like a crazy person. Over the next two or three days, I proceeded to tilt off every cent that I had made during that run. Needless to say, I did not handle it well.”

Busquet shook off his depression and got a stake from fellow high-stakes pro Kyle “Krisqueen” Wilson. After losing about half of the money, he switched sites and went on a bit of a run. He decided to send Wilson back his stake and his share of the profits, and he began playing on his own again.

“It was around this time that I got really obsessed with poker, and not in a healthy way,” Busquet said. “Part of it was my desire to really become disciplined and profitable in a game that I knew could be beat, but looking back, I know that there was a good dose of degeneracy in there, as well. I was addicted to the thrill of gambling.”

Things got worse before they got better. “Before long, I was so consumed with the game that I let it take over my life. I started reading the forums at work and getting distracted. One day, I found out that Prahlad Friedman was playing $50-$100, which, I believe, were the biggest stakes at the time. I wanted to watch it so badly that I actually downloaded the software and started railing from work, which is an obvious problem. Eventually, I just started playing there, too. A short while later, I was fired. I really didn’t enjoy my job, for a number of reasons, but it wasn’t a situation where I was doing well in poker and could afford to take a shot. I still lived in Manhattan, and my expenses were high, so it really wasn’t the best timing. Looking back, I realize now that I was self-sabotaging and looking for an excuse to make the jump.”

That’s One Hell of a Sick Graph

Now pushed with the need to make money and no fallback plan, Busquet struggled under the pressure to win. Looking to change things up, he switched to multitable tournaments and found some immediate success.

“One day, a guy and I got into it in the chat box, and he brought up the fact that I was a losing player, saying that I was down $4,320 in sit-and-gos. I had no idea what he was talking about, or how he knew that information. He explained that he had looked me up on SharkScope, and I immediately went there to check it out. Sure enough, I was down the exact amount that he had quoted, and I sort of made it my mission to get myself back to break-even so that nobody else could trash-talk me while I was playing.”

Busquet quickly erased his losses in the span of just a couple of weeks. “That’s when I realized that I could really win at them, and because I could start and stop them whenever I wanted, it enabled me to look after my dog responsibly, as well. For the first two years, I was playing between 70 and 80 hours a week. I was dedicated to not only making money, which I did, but to also getting my name to the top of the various leader boards.”

Busquet went from being slightly profitable to an absolute monster. On Full Tilt, he became the first player to win seven figures playing heads-up sit-and-gos. To date, he has earned more than $2.5 million in the discipline, and has played more than 52,000 games. Yet, despite his overwhelming success, he wasn’t getting the respect that he deserved.

“For a long time, I didn’t really get any respect from the poker community, because I was playing sit-and-gos. The online community tends to really respect the high-stakes cash-game players or even the consistent multitable-tournament pros. To them, I was just some monkey who pushed random buttons and managed to win. It didn’t matter that I was a seven-figure winner, because in their eyes, a sit-and-go isn’t real poker.”

Although he acknowledges that it takes something special to compete at the highest stakes around, Busquet was quick to point out the advantage that sit-and-gos have over cash games.

“The biggest advantage I had over the high-stakes heads-up cash-game players was that I could get action. In cash games, if you don’t want to play somebody, you can just sit out. In a sit-and-go, if I register, you are going to have to play me. It’s that simple. Furthermore, I kind of made it my mission to keep the rest of the good players from moving up and entering the higher stakes that I was playing. The common practice is to avoid the better players and wait for a better spot, but I would automatically go after anyone decent who tried to play at my level. Win or lose, they would get frustrated, realize that there were better opportunities lower, and eventually leave. That pretty much gave me the freedom to pick on all of the soft spots without much competition from the other sharks, and that went on for quite a while.”

Online Pro Finds Live Success

Busquet soaked up as much televised poker as he could. After a while, he decided to try it himself, hoping that his skills would carry over to the live arena.

“I used to obsess over live tournaments, specifically televised tournaments. Even though I had made more than seven figures online, I still felt a little bit of apprehension about playing with all of those live professionals. It took me a few tournaments to realize that my heads-up sit-and-go skills could translate to live play, and that I wasn’t at some major disadvantage. I made some small scores at the World Series of Poker, and combining that with the fact that I was starting to get recognized, I all of a sudden had a lot of confidence upon entering the WPT Borgata Poker Open.”

At the time, it was the largest WPT tournament in the tour’s history. Busquet topped a field of 1,018 players en route to a $925,514 payday. Although he went to the final table as the chip leader, he ran into some trouble early on and was forced to overcome a 20-1 chip deficit to steal the title away from Jeremy Brown.

A few months later, Busquet picked up the second-biggest score of his career, banking €597,000 for finishing second to Tobias Reinkemeier in the EPT Grand Final high-roller event.

A Healthy Balance

Despite his success, Busquet’s parents still weren’t ready to approve of his chosen career. “My parents really didn’t care about the money,” he explained. “You have to understand, in my immediate family of four, I was still fourth in income that year. They are very successful people, so I couldn’t wave a WPT win in their faces to let them know that I was all right. To them, the most important thing was that I was happy and healthy, and had found the right balance in my life.”

Now living with his fiancé Lorelei and serving as the stepfather to her two children, Busquet feels that he has found that balance. “I can credit the fact that I was maturing, and wasn’t playing 80 hours a week online anymore, but the biggest reason I have found some stability is that I have fallen in love with my fiancé, who has been the single most positive influence that I’ve ever had in my life. All of those factors together really made poker more of a palatable profession in the eyes of my family.”

Busquet has very quickly gone from being a one-dimensional, obsessed poker addict to a mature, responsible, all-around human being who can now claim many different hobbies and interests. He recently served as a celebrity poker host alongside Justin Tuck of the New York Giants at a charity event to benefit The Children’s Storefront Organization, and he hopes to get more involved politically, especially when it comes to continuing adult education.

“To be quite honest, if poker is my main focus five years from now, I’ll be genuinely disappointed. I hope that I can make enough money to provide for my kids and get them the best possible education, but I’ve come to realize that there is more to life than making money. As long as my family and I are happy, that’s all I can really ask for.” ♠