Capture The Flag -- Andrew Brokos

Andrew “Foucault” Brokos is well known being one of the best $5-$10 to $25-$50 no-limit hold’em cash games grinders around, but is quickly making a huge splash in the tournament arena. The University of Chicago graduate finished in 53rd place in this summer’s World Series of Poker main event for $160,000. What is remarkable about the deep run is that it was his fifth cash in the event over the past six years.

Brokos has been dangerously close to a final table before, finishing 35th in 2008 and 87th in 2010. Along with a victory in a 2010 Full Tilt Online Poker Series event for $450,000 and a third place in a 2010 PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker event for $117,000, the Maryland native has accumulated more than $1.2 million in career tournament earnings to go along with his massive profits in the cash games.

Card Player caught up with the cash game pro, blogger, and member of Team PokerStars online to talk about his incredible streak at the WSOP and his recent move to Canada to resume playing on the Internet.

Brian Pempus: Can you give a brief synopsis of how you got started in poker? How were you able to climb the ranks?

Andrew Brokos: I graduated college with a philosophy degree, which means I was unemployed. I was looking for entry-level jobs in the nonprofit sector, but the stuff I was applying for sounded terrible and paid even worse, and on top of that I wasn’t even getting callbacks. I was making ends meet with $5 and $10 sit-and-goes, but the more I learned about the online poker world, the more I learned that there was serious money to be made there, enough that I could maybe make enough playing part-time to start the non-profit I was interested in rather than doing grunt work for someone else. So that’s what I did.

BP: Can you talk about your accomplishment of cashing in the WSOP main event five out of the past six years? What strengths in your poker game apply so well to this tournament?

AB: The first thing to acknowledge is that there’s obviously a lot of luck involved. Change a few river cards and I could be in the red on the main event. Then again, change just one river card in my favor and it’s very possible that I could have been in the November Nine.

That said, I do take the main event very seriously and value my survival in it highly. I think I’m generally good at avoiding spots where I’d end up gambling for large numbers of chips with a thin edge. I also consider myself good at adapting and coming up with strategies for taking advantage of different types of players, and at the main event you really do get people from all over the map who play lots of crazy styles, so that’s valuable.

BP: You recently relocated to Canada. Could you talk briefly about the process and what went into your decision?

AB: I’d actually been living nomadically in the US for the 18 months prior to Black Friday, just traveling around the country playing online poker, so packing up and leaving the country was less disruptive for me than it would be for a lot of people. PokerStars invited me to remain on Team Online if I relocated, so that was a factor. And I’m trying to have fun with it. Right now my girlfriend and I are living in the Canadian Rockies, where there is great hiking and beautiful scenery everywhere. I really am not feeling too sorry for myself.

BP: How have the cash games been so far without Americans in the mix? It appears that many of your cash game peers are also trying to move to Canada. What do you think the games will be like on PokerStars as more experienced/winning players make the move (and with Full Tilt out of the equation)?

AB: It’s really hard to say. I’m actually still in the process of getting my account reloaded, so I’ve been playing much smaller stakes than usual in the meantime and haven’t had a chance to check out the higher stakes games. I coach a number of non-US players, and they tell me that generally the games have been better. I don’t know what to predict for the future though.

BP: Can you give our readers a sense of why cash games are a great tool for becoming a better tournament player?

AB: If you only play tournaments, odds are that you don’t have a lot of experience handling turn and river decisions or playing 100 or more big blinds deep. Those situations just don’t come up that much in tournaments. You may not have a lot of heads up or short-handed experience either. So when tournaments like the WSOP main event, which have a really deep structure, roll around, you aren’t going to be as experienced as a cash game player. And if you’re fortunate enough to make a final table, you’ll benefit from the experience of having played short-handed and heads up cash games.

BP: You’ve had a ton of success in both tournaments and cash games. Are any special bankroll considerations necessary when you play both? Should players have separate bankrolls?

AB: Separate bankrolls are definitely not required. In fact I’d say it would be a big mistake. In fact tournaments are a great way for cash game grinders to take shots when they have “excess” bankroll. In other words, let’s say you play $5-$10 no-limit hold’em and like to have a $50,000 bankroll for that. If you run your bankroll up to $75,000, you might consider taking $10,000 to play the WSOP main event. If you lose, you can still afford your regular game, but if you do well, suddenly you’re bankrolled for $10-$20 or maybe even bigger. And of course you’ll never have a shot at winning $8 million dollars playing $5-$10 exclusively.

BP: You post a lot of hands and do a great deal of reflection and analysis. How important is it for players to review a session? What advice would you give for those players, in this post-Black Friday world, who are grinding in a live setting and want to do some post-session study?

AB: Reflection and analysis are essential if you want to get better and move into bigger games. If you’re happy where you are now, it’s less important as long as things are going well. But I believe that if you aren’t actively thinking both during and after your sessions, rather than just going through the motions robotically, then it’s impossible to improve. Why would you? You aren’t introducing anything new to your game.

People just moving into live poker need to find someone more experienced in that realm to bounce ideas off of. Even if you reflect on some big pots and decide that you played them exactly the way you should have if you were online, that doesn’t mean you played them as well as you could have in a live setting.

BP: A lot has been written about the importance of a table draw in tournaments. How important is table/seat selection in live cash games? From an ethical perspective, what is your opinion on moving seats in order to have position on the aggressive/big-stacked players?

AB: Table and seat selection matter when there’s a lot of variation among potential opponents. In the WSOP main event, you’ll see the best players in the world and also some of the worst, and of course your odds of doing well greatly improve if you sit with the latter. How much that applies to a live cash game probably depends a lot on where you’re playing.

I don’t see anything unethical about changing seats as long as you aren’t doing it in an underhanded way. Like if you are bribing the floor person to get you into a good game ahead of others on the waiting list, I’d say that’s unethical, but you definitely should aggressively pursue better seats through the proper channels.

BP: Similar to the question above: In your opinion, at what point does bum-hunting stop becoming sound strategy and start hurting the atmosphere of the cash games?

AB: The problem is that it’s both. It’s often in at least the short-term interest of the individual but bad for other players and for the games in the long run. The worst is when it’s flagrant. When people are so obvious about what they are doing and why, i.e. sitting out as soon as a weaker player leaves the game, when that player can easily see what’s happening, then they are doing the most harm. Nobody wants to feel like a mark. We as a community need to find better ways to stigmatize people who do this so that it is less in their self-interest.

BP: You seem to have a well-rounded life and strong interests outside of poker. What advice would you give to cash game pros who struggle with balance in their lives? How important is it to take breaks from the game and have ways to clear your mind, even in the midst of an upswing?

AB: For me it’s very important. I know that there are others who just want to be immersed in poker and seem happy with that. That’s hard for me to imagine, but if it works for them, then live and let live.

I’d say that tournament players have a much greater struggle than cash game players. At least in theory cash players have the freedom to come and go as they please, play whatever hours they want, et cetera. Tournament players have to commit to playing for potentially 10 or more hours every time they start a session. That’s a big part of the reason I wanted to get more into cash games. If you play mostly cash games and aren’t taking advantage of the freedom that that offers, well, I’d say that you need to re-evaluate your priorities.