Capture the Flag: Ben Tollerene

Poker professional Ben Tollerene is one of online poker’s best players, winning millions on the virtual felt over his career. The 26-year-old hails from Texas, but has had to log on from Vancouver, Canada to continue playing the nosebleed stakes on Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars.

Card Player caught up with him to talk strategy as well as his epic $500-$1,000 pot-limit Omaha matches against Viktor Blom, which saw Tollerene recently lose $1.7 million in a single night, only to win it all back in about the next 24 hours. According to tracking data from HighstakesDB, Tollerene is one of this year’s biggest winners so far, bringing his lifetime profits on Full Tilt and PokerStars to about $5 million.

BP: Can you describe your progression up in stakes, the downswings and upswings along the way?

BT: $25 [buy-in] no-limit to $100 no-limit was very smooth for me. I was using something like 30-40 buy-ins to take a shot, and I’d move down if I lost five buy-ins. $200 no-limit was the first limit that challenged me. I was there for about six months before breaking into $400 no-limit. My game really started to develop at this point in time, and I didn’t have serious downswings until $2,000 no-limit. Those guys were a level above anything I had experienced at the time. I got bounced down to $1,000 no-limit several times before sticking at $2,000.

Poker was my number one priority by far. I spent a lot of days at school locked in my room by myself studying and playing. The $2,000 to $5,000 no-limit transition was tough as well and right around my settling in at $5,000 no-limit I began to learn pot-limit Omaha.

BP: Did you have poker friends at the time to talk strategy with? Is discussing hands with people generally a good way to learn?

BT: Absolutely. At the time the [poker forums] were full of great information and regulars sharing their thoughts. I also was very good about pursuing coaching. I would pick the guy who was the boss of the limit that I wanted to be at and then pay them whatever they wanted to teach me. That’s definitely one of my strengths. I was very resourceful.

Discussing hands with others is great as long as you respect them. I’m not involved in the broad scale information sharing these days like training sites, forums and so on, but it does look like there is a lot of bad information out there.

BP: Can you go into what specific incorrect thoughts, tendencies, mindsets and so on that are widespread these days? To say simply, what are people still doing wrong, in your opinion? Not necessarily at the highest stakes, but just in even the average mid-stakes cash game.

BT: Sure, there are so many of them.. I would say the number one thing I notice when I talk to mid-to-small stakes players is that they put far too much emphasis on playing hero’s hand in a vacuum. They are approaching each hand as a sort of guessing game that they’re trying to win. There are many problems with this approach. We are biased. Unless you’re Phil Galfond, you very likely believe you are a better guesser than you are relative to your opposition. Also, it’s very easy to lose indirectly in the guessing game. I think instead the emphasis should be placed on having a theoretically sound strategy and only altering this strategy when we are very confident that we can shift our strategy to exploit our opponent.

BP: Could you translate this into a concrete example or scenario?

BT: Yes, I actually read a good example in this book I picked up recently. It’s from Will Tipton’s Expert Heads-Up No-Limit, a book I’m really enjoying. We have 30 big blinds, and villain is unknown. Villain raises to 2.5 big blinds, and hero calls. The flop comes K 7 3, and action is check-check. The K falls on the turn. So, the first conflicting part of the guessing game is “he does not have an especially strong hand because he didn’t bet the flop,” but “on the other hand, he likely has at least something or else he would have taken the opportunity to bluff on this board” — perhaps ace-high or bottom pair. So, a value bet is in order for hero with any hand that beats bottom pair, but what about the vast majority of our range that is no pair?

We can go for the semibluff; villain might fold bottom pair or ace-high, and most of our hands have a decent chance to improve and value-bet the river. So we can win the hand if he folds immediately, and we might improve and win if he doesn’t fold. This makes some sense when we consider only our weak hands, but what would your entire strategy look like if we took this approach? We would be betting almost our entire range. Some opponents know they have a weak range when they check back and don’t believe that we often have much either and frequently decide to call down on a lot of turns and rivers with weak hands that can only beat a bluff. Against this type of player our turn bluff would be terrible. On the other hand, some players are prone to give up when they don’t have anything and we should always bluff versus this player. If he calls the turn, he probably has something, and we should give up on the river. Other guys might like to get to the river with every ace-high, but fold to two bets. Now against this player betting only the turn is terrible, but betting the turn and river is terrific.

The point is we don’t know, so without strong reads a fundamentally sound ratio of bluffs to value bets is best. We lead some bluffs and some good hands on the turn, we follow through with some and give up some on the river, we check/call and check/fold other hands, and so on. Even if we assume the opponent is a poor player we do not know which way he will choose to play poorly and we are equally likely to hurt ourselves as to help ourselves until we have developed reliable reads.

BP: This makes me wonder if you think that poker players tend to pigeonhole their opponents too quickly, perhaps subconsciously as well.

BT: That’s nearly a certainty. It doesn’t mean that it’s wrong, though. Bayes’ theorem; I’m not an expert, but my basic understanding is that we assign probabilities to what we see. So if you’re at the WSOP, and a gentleman in his late 60s three-bets your under-the-gun open, you should probably make an inference that he’s got queens or better instead of acting as if you have no information, because most gentlemen in their late 60s do not three-bet under-the-gun openers with less than queens or better.

BP: Let’s move away from theory right now. Could we talk about the high-stakes games you play in? What has it been like to play these volatile sessions lately with Viktor?

BT: Viktor is Viktor. What can I say about him that hasn’t already been said? He wants to play as big as possible and run it once and put it all on the line. I absolutely love his persona. Like everyone else, I’m a huge fan of his. I take less pleasure in beating Viktor than probably anyone else.

These $500-$1,000 sessions have helped me reach another level of mental stamina and emotional control. The night I lost $1.7 million I was playing very well. I had a few moments of intense stress but they faded quickly, and I continued to execute and play my best. My self-worth as a poker player is not dictated by how much money I win or lose because that is often out of my control. I put, to the best of my ability, all of the emphasis on the things that are within my control — my strategy, execution, mental control, and so on. Because I was content with my performance I was able to come back the next day and execute my strategy again and succeed.

I was fine, though. I did my daily routine. I worked out, had dinner with Phil [Galfond], studied my game plan, and so on. I’m very proud of myself for how I handled that loss. ♠