Sam Stein: Meet the Current Card Player Player of the Year Leader

You’re forgiven if you didn’t immediately recognize the face on the cover. It’s not your fault, it’s ours. After all, the $3.9 million that Sam Stein has racked up in tournament earnings over the last two years probably deserved a few more mentions than we gave out during that stretch.

Perhaps we’re not entirely to blame, though. Stein himself has admitted to being a very low-key, quiet guy, especially at the poker table. While others talk a big game, Stein sits back and lets his results speak for him.

At this summer’s World Series of Poker, Stein’s results spoke loud and clear. This time, we listened. Stein started his Series off with a bang, taking third in the $10,000 pot-limit hold’em championship, and he then topped it off with a win in the $3,000 pot-limit Omaha event, putting him atop the Card Player Player of the Year race.

A Head Start

At just 23 years old, Sam Stein is still in the infancy stages of his poker career, but the kid from Hidden Hills, California, has been taking the game seriously for the better part of six years. Stein caught the poker bug in high school while attending a home game with some friends, but he quickly realized that he had a natural gift for the game.

“We really didn’t know what we were doing,” he recalled. “I remember that our game didn’t even have blinds. You were just dealt two cards, and it was on you to decide whether or not you wanted to play them. It didn’t take very long before I learned that I could simply wait around for premium hands, especially because it wasn’t costing me anything to fold.”

Stein graduated from high school and enrolled in nearby California State University in Los Angeles. Some may say that he was unmotivated, but it would be fairer to say that Stein took a great deal of interest in poker, and college took a back seat as a result. After one semester, Stein did what so many successful players in his position have done and dropped out.

Without classes to attend, Stein turned his full attention to poker. His first objective was to build a proper bankroll, and for that, he went online for the 2008 PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker main event.

“I took a decent-sized shot in that tournament and went really deep, finishing in 13th place for $65,550. That was really the start of my bankroll. Until that point, I was profitable, but I hadn’t really had any major scores. I was ecstatic at the time. It wasn’t until a few months later that I realized how much money I had left on the table, especially considering the fact that the top five players all cashed for about a million dollars.”

Near-misses aside, Stein got right back to work and even moved across the desert to Las Vegas to begin playing live poker. The only problem was that he was still only 20 years old.

“I was a pretty quiet kid, I guess I still am, so nobody questioned how old I was,” he admitted. “I started grinding $5-$10 no-limit hold’em cash games, and my bankroll kind of took off from there. It wasn’t until after I had finished second to Tom Marchese a couple years later at the North American Poker Tour Venetian main event that the floormen finally realized how old I was. I guess they couldn’t do much about it at that point.”

In addition to drastically increasing his net worth, Stein credits those long cash sessions for his development as a player. The time spent at the tables also helped him to better understand his opponents and make a smooth transition from online play to the live arena.

“My game really went to the next level with those cash games,” he said. “I was able to see a lot of the same faces day in and day out, and I made the proper adjustments on a case-by-case basis. It was a really wide range of playing styles and types. Even now, I can sit down at the table, and within a few minutes, I can put someone in a certain category, relating them to an opponent I had in the past. Then I spend the next few hours fine-tuning that read, getting a better sense of their habits and tendencies.”

That being said, Stein isn’t one to lock onto a general assessment and fully realizes that first impressions can change. “I try to stay open-minded, because you never really know what someone is going to do once they get cards in front of them.”

Tearing Up the Live Circuit

Cash games are one thing, and online tournaments are another, but big-buy-in live events are a completely different animal. Soon after his 21st birthday, Stein set out on the tournament circuit — with mixed results. Not happy with his play, the young gun made some adjustments, including one major tweak to his game concerning river play.

“I definitely had one of those moments where everything just clicked,” he said. “I don’t want to get into too much detail, but I wound up making a change that really allowed my game to take off. I can say that it generally has to do with balancing my bets on the river, feeling out those who I think will call when I’m betting for value and those who will fold when I’m betting as a bluff.”

Stein’s modification had an immediate impact on his bottom line. In the summer of 2009, he was actually able to final-table back-to-back World Poker Tour events, finishing ninth in the $15,000 Bellagio Cup for $61,980 and then fifth in the $10,000 Legends of Poker for $116,225.

“That felt good,” he said. “After making those two final tables, even though I had fallen a bit short of both wins, I honestly thought I had figured this whole thing out. Keep in mind that I was still relatively new to the poker world at this time and hadn’t really been put in my place yet. It was a huge boost to my confidence that I was able to hold my own with the best players around, but I still had to learn how to close it out.”

Closing it out was something Stein only managed to do recently with his WSOP win. Bridging the gap between his WPT final-table appearances and his summer success was a series of close calls with lucrative paydays.

At the 2010 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, Stein placed second in a $5,000 side-event for $168,390. A month later, he took second once again, earning $522,306 in the aforementioned NAPT main event at Venetian. He continued to make smaller final tables and do well online until he scored the biggest payday of his short career, picking up a cool $1 million for his fourth-place finish at the 2011 PCA main event.

Stein’s elimination hand was disappointing, running A 9 into the A Q of the ultra-aggressive Chris Oliver. His friends assured him that he made the right play — especially against Oliver, who was known for playing any two cards and just happened to have the top of his range — but that didn’t make Stein feel any better about it.

“I don’t feel like I made too many mistakes in that tournament. My elimination hand was close, but overall I was happy with how I played. It was just a brutal way to bust, especially since I left so much money out there. The next place paid an additional $350,000, and first place was $2.3 million. I was getting tired of falling short.”

Putting It All Together

Shortly before Black Friday, Stein scored with a nice win in a Full Tilt Online Poker Series (FTOPS) event for $182,447, giving him some nice momentum heading into the WSOP.

In event No. 7, the $10,000 pot-limit hold’em championship, Stein picked up his first final-table appearance of the summer series, finishing third for $264,651. Then, in event No. 31, a $3,000 pot-limit Omaha event, Stein finally broke through for his first major live-tournament victory, defeating good friend and WSOP POY front-runner Ben Lamb heads up for the bracelet and the $420,802 first-place prize.

“It felt great to get that monkey off my back,” he admitted. “I know I’m still young and I’ll have many more opportunities for tournament wins, but I’m glad it happened in that event. Closing out a win is a feeling I never will get tired of.”

With his two summer final-table appearances, Stein now sits in the lead for Card Player Player of the Year honors. When asked what winning POY would mean to him, Stein revealed that it would be the driving force behind his remaining 2011 schedule.

“If I’m in the running, you can be sure that I’ll be playing the majority of the big events on the tournament circuit. No matter how bad you run in the future, winning the Card Player Player of the Year award is something they never can take away from you. I’ll definitely be playing a high volume of tournaments, especially if it comes down to the wire like it has in recent years.”

As for his long-term plans post Black Friday, Stein admitted that perhaps an online hiatus is good for him, especially now that he’s locked in. “Everything is clicking for me right now,” he said. “I’m in that zone that poker players always talk about. It really feels like I’m always making the best decision and always going to win that crucial flip, so I obviously want to put in as much volume as possible. I’ve honestly never been more confident about my game.”

Considering the fact that he’s already found his way to the top of the poker world, Stein’s opponents are now officially on notice that he’s just getting started. ♠