Steve O’Dwyer –- Smiling In The Face Of Adversity

“I was broke and penniless on Black Friday. It’s crazy how quickly things can change if you have the right people behind you who help to keep your confidence up,” says a humble Steve O’Dwyer who just cannot speak highly enough of his peers; players he has known through numerous highs and lows… good friends. It’s clear he isn’t the kind of young man to give up easily, but rather than put his recent success all down to self belief and determination, he is grateful for those around him who told him to keep going.

“I went on an unimaginably large downswing that began in February 2010 through the end of WSOP post-Black Friday,” he says. When asked what changed after that, he answers “I don’t think much changed. It’s hard to not believe in yourself when you have the people I do behind me telling me to keep doing what I’m doing. I owe everything to my friends in the game, Ike Haxton and Scott Seiver pushed me to keep working hard and gave me all the advice and motivation I needed to not give up and be one of the victims of Black Friday.

“I saw so many people ready to quit the game after their bankrolls were wiped out post-Black Friday; I didn’t want to give up, I wasn’t going to be one of those guys, I worked way too hard to get to where I was, even though “where I was” was in an enormous makeup black hole. But I know Ike and Scott are two of the best in the world and their belief in me was all I needed to keep grinding until I turned things around.”

Uphill Battle

And that’s exactly what the 30-year-old American pro did. You can’t hear about an event these days without the mention of his name. He has become a force to be reckoned with and can be found at most major tournaments across the globe accumulating a hefty stack. But it hasn’t been an easy road.

“I don’t know what to think about the downswing,” he contemplates. It’s hard to look back and judge what my mental state was at the time, everything pre-Black Friday seems like an eternity ago but I’ve always known that you’re never immune to going on a downswing that is so much worse than you could ever imagine; it’s just something that happens to everyone.”

He’s brutally honest when asked if he had learned ways to prevent such a downswing from happening again. “I’m sure at some point in the future I’ll have a downswing that will make the last one look like a joke,” he answers. But what about dropping down stakes, bankroll management, preventative steps to stop this from happening again? Well, bankroll is something the almost $3 million man doesn’t have to deal with. O’Dwyer has been staked for tournaments for quite some time now and his backers continue to encourage him.

“They have always had tremendous confidence in me,” he says. “They pushed me to play much, much higher stakes than I would have ever been able to play on my own.” This is still the case to this day and O’Dwyer is happy to be in that position. “The high stakes MTT [multitable tournament] world is crazy now, there’s no way I could safely afford to play in the tournaments that I’ve been playing,” he adds. “I’m happy that my friends are willing to take the risk for me and things are only getting more insane.”

For The Love Of The Game

From there O’Dwyer excitedly talks about the change in the schedule for the next season of the European Poker Tour. There may be less stops but each location will be filled with a wide array of events, plus plenty for the high stakes world to choose from. When he talks about poker, it’s as if he is speaking of art. He oozes an honest passion for the game and obviously adores the multiple challenges it gives him. It’s nothing to do with being on top again either, the man just simply loves the game, and sees it the way true poker crusaders attempt to make the whole world see it.

“Have you seen the schedule for Barcelona?” he asks like a child who just saw an advertisement for Mr. Fun’s Empire of Fun. “It’s very exciting to see more high stakes action. The tour operators have finally started making buy-ins big enough in the side events where good players can almost always justify the time and travel expenses that come with going to play in live tournaments… It’s going to be wall-to-wall MTT action in the fall, I can’t wait!” he exclaims joyfully.

In an instant it’s like he realises he’s gushing. “I just love the game whether I’m winning or losing,” he continues. “It’s the most beautiful game I’ve ever played and I’ve loved each session as much as the previous one since I first began playing in late 2003. There’s something new to be learned every day, and something new to be learned about the regulars in your games each hand you are dealt into with them.”

You would almost think listening to him that he was a player who just struck it lucky and has been on the poker circuit a year or less, not someone who has been around through some of poker’s brightest and darkest moments and has lived to tell the tale… with a smile to boot. The only negative thing O’Dwyer has to say about the game comes when asked what he would most like to change about it.

He says, “I’d like to see all the shady and corrupt businesses/businessmen, outted, shamed, and banished from the game. The game itself is so pure and beautiful that it is such a shame that the game’s reputation has been tarnished by all the greedy scumbags who have their hands in the cookie jar.”

Poker’s High Society

When I caught up with Steve O’Dwyer he had been playing online poker almost every day for more or less four months, he had just played various time-consuming SCOOPs (with some good results) and was heading off again to another live tournament, stopping to see his family in Philadelphia along the way, but, as he says, with “grind on his mind” he is obviously in his element and riding the wave for as long as it will go.

The high stakes circuit is definitely something that gets the American’s blood pumping; the familiar faces, the history, the complexity, the challenge. I took the opportunity to ask him if it would be possible to label types of players from the high stakes regulars he plays with and if knowing each other’s game so well meant he had to keep evolving in order to maintain an edge?

“Some people have particularly unique styles but you could definitely stereotype people and drop people into a few different boxes,” he answers. “It’s pretty common for one of us to ask the other ‘Hey, how does player A play?’ and the answer will be ‘Oh, player A plays a lot like player E, they have a really similar preflop game’… that’s rather simplified, but yeah, you can definitely label people in that fashion.” In regards to maintaining an edge, he responds, “You always have to evolve and try to understand your own image and how others will perceive you and how they will react to what you are doing. Your image with all the other regulars is always evolving and morphing. You have to be self-aware and take advantage of people who have you mis-categorised.”

What about sitting down with these people time and time again — surely a certain few might begin to appear to know what to expect from each other’s game after a period of time? According to O’Dwyer this indeed happens but it happens to everyone and the best players are “the ones that are always a step ahead in the psychological game”. “You have to have a sound technical base to your poker game but what sets the best apart from the rest are the ones that have a strong understanding of the psychological game,” he explains.

Scratching The Surface

What makes Steve O’Dwyer so well equipped for this wonderful game of ours then? It is clear he thinks about the game on many levels and has a good understanding of what motivates people to do what they do but where does this come from? And what is it about the game, and indeed the life, that appear to suit him so well? It all makes sense when I delve a little deeper into O’Dwyer’s past. With his father in the U.S. army, the family moved around a lot, from Colorado to Philadelphia, Germany to New York. O’Dwyer himself moved from Philadelphia to go to East Carolina university, moved to Vegas and back, and now talking to me from his new home in Ireland, it’s clear wherever O’Dwyer lays his hat is his home. Used to the upheaval of moving around frequently from a young age, the poker life is one which seems to fit perfectly with what the friendly gent is already used to, and he appears to succeed in both the life and the game because he can easily adapt.

Moneymaker Baby

O’Dwyer began studying broadcasting in August 2000 and was interning at several local radio stations doing production work; all set up for employment post-graduation. However in his final year he saw the 2003 World Series of Poker main event on TV and thought the same as many others at the time ‘I could do that’.

“They didn’t look that scary. With the exception of a few people on that broadcast like Ivey,” he laughs. “The rest looked like a bunch of schmucks!” O’Dwyer then began playing $5 home games but poker was seeping into his veins and he sought to play more often. After seeing an ad on the Internet for a new poker website which was beta testing, O’Dwyer signed up and soon found himself playing against the likes of Chris Ferguson, Phil Gordon, and Erik Seidel. That ad was for Full Tilt, and O’Dwyer was about to set off on an adventure, which would change the course of his life.

“It was so exciting even though it was play money,” he recalls. “Playing all those play money hands in Beta got me some entries into some freerolls and I cashed for $7.50 in one of them. When the real money games went live in mid-July 2004 I immediately sat down at the lowest limit game, $.05/.10 no-limit and lost my $7.50 in the first orbit, so I deposited some money I got from the local burrito shop I was working at during my days off from the radio internships, repeated that process a few times, and eventually ran up a small bankroll.”

Bright Lights Beckon

O’Dwyer went on to continue his studies, all the time playing poker, and in late 2005/early 2006 it was time to decide on his next step. The online up-and-comer began to run extremely well online and so decided to move to Vegas.

He says, “It was probably a very poor decision looking back on it. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into and I went broke or near broke many times but I’ve always been lucky to be surrounded by so many brilliant poker players who helped me learn and get the confidence I needed to pick myself up and keep working… I owe an enormous debt to my friends who helped me along the way, going all the way back to the days when I was making the transition from play money online to real money. The people who I was talking to back in the summer of 2004 is remarkable — Jason Somerville, Leo Wolpert, Vivek Rajkumar, Alex Venovski, and then moving to Vegas at Panorama Towers meeting Aaron Been, JC Alvarado, Adam Levy, Ike Haxton, Scott Seiver, Justin Bonomo, Dan Smith, Mike Watson, Andrew Lichtenberger, Jon Aguiar, Shaun Deeb, and also Randal Flowers, who was perpetually sleeping on my couch in Vegas for years.”

Time For Change

In late 2010, fed up with Vegas, O’Dwyer moved back to North Carolina and got himself sorted with a nice set up for grinding. It was all going well when the proverbial hit the fan on Black Friday and once again O’Dwyer’s life was in a state of flux. He describes the time… “I was dead broke so I went out to Vegas for the summer to grind tournaments and slept on an air mattress in a windowless spare ‘bedroom’ in Scott’s apartment at Panorama. Morale stayed high within our group; it helped that Scott immediately won the WPT Championship in May (and bubbled me in the process).” Ironically it was Black Friday that made O’Dwyer and co. stronger than ever as they had to decide whether or not they were going to take it lying down.

“We all knew that we would recover just fine if we looked out for each other and kept up the work ethic that got us there. If you look at that list of names I gave credit to for my poker development, you’ll see that almost all of us have had tremendous success post-Black Friday,” he exclaims with pride. “None of us have quit, the games are as good as they’ve ever been, and we’re getting better and better each day. It’s sad and unfortunate that so many people were hurt by what happened but it definitely presented an opportunity to those that were prepared to keep fighting.”

Positive Outcome

Black Friday also nudged those who hadn’t yet hit the live international circuit in that direction and sent professionals to all corners of the globe in search of a new home/grinding station. “Live poker is so much fun and so much more interesting than online and the live grind in Europe is infinitely better than it is in the States,” adds O’Dwyer. “In Europe you get to travel to so many wonderful cities, in the US you get to travel to casinos hidden in the worst neighborhoods in the worst places in the country. I don’t know why I didn’t come over here years ago; one of my biggest mistakes for sure.”

Bringing me up to speed with his back story he wraps up by smiling and saying “That’s the gist of my poker story — Full Tilt beta tester to having my bankroll stolen by Full Tilt… in the span of eight years.” Yes, O’Dwyer was another casualty of the Full Tilt catastrophe, but as has been his attitude so far the poker-player slayer insists there were many others more worse off than himself.

People Watching

It is O’Dwyer’s ability to see outside of himself and his deep understanding of others that appears to help give him an edge at the felt. You never know what the American will come out with next and it’s usually something that immediately grabs your interest. When asked what makes him a good player, he describes how he spent many moments of his youth people-watching with his family, or as he puts it “watching people behaving poorly in public, and judging them”.

He jokingly points to the idea that this is an Irish attribute and explains how his family are “shit talkers” before returning to his reminiscence, “I just remember being in restaurants or public buildings and watching people do things and wondering why they would behave in that way, while quietly making fun of them with my family. I’m very observant, I think I catch things that others don’t at the table. I can see when something happens in a hand that will change the table dynamic going forward and adjust to that before others can, like when someone does something that puts them on subtle tilt, it is very important to catch those moments and know how to be able to get their chips while their mind is reeling from the tilt and they are off their game.”

Pure Focus

“I feel like I’m finally learning all of the important “live pro” things that I didn’t understand and didn’t even know existed from when I first started playing big live tournaments in 2007,” he explains. “My fundamentals were strong from playing so much online in previous years but online and live are vastly different games. Experience is everything in live poker, there is infinitely more information available for you to work with in live poker. If you’re not taking advantage of as much of it as you can you’re selling yourself short.”

When he says this he means business. In November last year, O’Dwyer lost his phone and has not got a new one since. He says, “I felt like it was too much of a distraction for me while playing live poker so it wasn’t worth it. I’m
constantly amazed at what people manage to miss because they are lost in their phones at the table.”

When looking back to his Beta-testing days, his time at the Panorama Towers, or his change of luck in recent times, there is one pivotal point in his poker life O’Dwyer points out as his favourite. After min-cashing the WSOP main event last year and busting out a few minutes after the bubble broke, the fearless pro crossed the street to the Bellagio to late register for the Bellagio Cup main event. He busted out in the third hand and was not feeling the best about himself, but then he played the $5,000 re-entry and won it for his first ever live victory, ending the summer on a nice note. He hit London for the EPT soon after and finished in second place in the main event for a whopping $717,728.

It’s Now Or Never

If ever there was proof that persistence pays off O’Dwyer is it. Yet he remains down to earth, noble, and humble in his battle to better his game. “Right now I’m just enjoying the ride. I’m gonna keep playing as much as I can until I stop running so hot and then I’ll think about taking some time off to enjoy things in life outside of poker, but this is too big of an opportunity for me right now to not take advantage of it.” There seems to be nothing O’Dwyer doesn’t analyse and take apart, breaking everything down into its components. Even when asked if he had a goal in poker, he didn’t simply answer “to be the best” or “to win a bracelet” but instead he took a philosophical yet rational approach and said, “To make the best decision possible in every hand and live with the variance that comes with the game.”

Following this up with, “You can’t just have a goal for winning X amount of money, you can’t control the variance, only the decisions you make, so your goal should always be to make the best decision, and hope that positive variance is on your side.”

O’Dwyer has been through it all and come out the other end smiling. It’s therefore easy to want him to take full advantage of the heater he’s experiencing and show the world just how well-rounded his style is. He may have had a little help from his friends but speaking one-on-one it’s clear to see that with all the courage in his heart and fire in his belly, O’Dwyer is a true pro and a good ambassador for poker set to do even more great things in the years to come. ♠