A Poker Life: Amir Lehavot

At 38, Amir Lehavot was the oldest player seated at the 2013 World Series of Poker main event final table, but that doesn’t mean he was the most experienced. In fact, the Israel-born poker pro, who now lives in Weston, Florida, has only been playing poker for the past seven years.

So how does a relative newcomer to the game ascend to poker’s biggest stage? After a decade working in Silicon Valley as an electrical engineer, Lehavot made the switch to online poker and subsequently, live tournament poker. In his brief poker career, he has already earned more than $6 million in combined live and online winnings.

This is his story.

A Move To The States

Lehavot was the oldest of three children, growing up near Tel Aviv, Israel. His mother was a chemist and his father worked in the Israeli military. When his father turned 40, he had finished his assignment and was cleared to take an engineering job in the United States. Lehavot, a teenager at the time, was not very excited about the prospect of uprooting his life to Texas.

“I was very happy in Israel with a nice social circle,” he recalled. “I remember those times very fondly and I remember being very upset when we had to move. It was definitely tough on me, but I think if you remove most 16-year-olds from their current environment, they’ll be upset.”

In Israel, Lehavot started playing chess at just five years old and was even on the Israeli youth chess team, but due to the popularity of the game, he was never ranked above the top 50 or so players in his age group. After moving to Texas, however, he found himself excelling at the game.

“I’ve always enjoyed strategy games, so it was fun to compete. I played until I finished high school, but I realized that if I wanted to be serious about chess, I’d need to devote a lot more time to it. I decided I wasn’t interested in doing that, so I basically quit playing for the most part.”

With his chess days behind him, Lehavot moved forward to the University of Texas in Austin, studying electrical engineering. After graduating in 1996, he immediately found work in Silicon Valley.

“I was always very good with math and sciences, so it seemed like a pretty practical profession for finding a well-paying job,” he said. “I always enjoyed problem solving and it came naturally to me, so after graduation I jumped right in and moved to San Jose. My first job was with Hewlett Packard doing chipset design for high-end servers.”

Poker Comes Calling

Lehavot was barely aware that poker existed, but after ten years of working in the same field, he decided he needed a break. Unhappy with his job at the time, he took his savings and left the company, figuring he could find another job after a year off. It was during this time that he found the world of online poker.

“Someone pointed me in the direction of the online poker forum twoplustwo,” he said. “I started reading posts about poker hands and I realized that despite how many users the site had and how active they were, the format was very dated. People would post hands and get feedback, but I didn’t think they were doing it in the most optimal way. So as a side project during my time off, I decided to create something that incorporated hand discussion and social networking. The end result was pokerwit.com, which kind of forces other users to play the hand with you, rather than be results oriented. It’s an interactive process that leads to more in-depth discussion.”

Of course, if Lehavot was going to design a poker strategy site, he’d need to know how to play. Without much experience at all, he made a deposit on PokerStars.

“When I first started, I was quite skeptical of online poker and really had no idea what I was doing,” he admitted. “My approach was to deposit $50 and see how it went. I didn’t know any poker players. I was playing only one table at a time, just because I didn’t know you were allowed to play more. It took me two months to figure that out.”

Luckily for Lehavot, he ran well at the beginning of his online poker career. Though he initially started playing for research purposes, he found himself turning a steady profit and never had to make another deposit again.

“In my first three months, I won $40,000. Then I broke even for the next six months or so, but in the last three months, I won another $60,000. This was mostly playing 180-man sit-n-gos, but as the year went on, I mixed in some multitable tournaments. The $100,000 wasn’t as much as I had made in my previous job, but I did make some money and I did have fun doing it, so I figured, why not take another year off and see how it goes.”

Turning Pro

In March of 2009, Lehavot chopped the PokerStars Sunday Million for $144,000. It was exactly the confidence booster he needed to cement his decision to turn pro. He now knew that if he worked hard on his game, he could make a comparable income playing online poker that he did while working as an electrical engineer. Live poker, however, was a different story.

“I wasn’t playing very much live poker back then, just two $10,000 tournaments a year. I played the Bay 101 Shooting Star and the WSOP main event. My experience online showed me that there was so much variance in tournament poker and that the only way to overcome that was with volume. Since I couldn’t possibly put in the same volume live as I was doing online, I didn’t think anyone could count on winning consistently as a live player. At the time, I viewed live poker as a lottery. To some extent, I still view it that way. Obviously, I’ve been very fortunate in my live poker career and I discovered that there is a much bigger skill advantage in live poker than in online poker, but variance is still a big part of the game.”

Despite his reluctance to invest his bankroll in live poker tournaments, Black Friday kind of forced his hand.

“Right before Black Friday, an investor convinced me to go out and play in the WPT L.A. Poker Classic. I was able to sell some action and ended up finishing in fourth place for $420,000. Then Black Friday took away online poker, so I was forced to play more live poker. A few months later at the WSOP, I won the $10,000 Pot-Limit Hold’em Championship for another $573,000.

Lehavot had won his first bracelet, but he wasn’t about to let the accomplishment go to his head.

“For me, it’s all a numbers game,” he said. “The prestige of winning a bracelet isn’t that important for me. In my mind, when you win a tournament, it doesn’t really say a lot about what kind of player you are. I don’t think that any experienced players believe that just because you win a tournament, you are the best player in that tournament. Media attention is nice, but I’m focused on the prize money.”

WSOP Main Event Final Table

In 2013, Lehavot navigated his way through a field of 6,352 to make the WSOP main event final table, becoming an official member of the November Nine. Despite entering the final table in second place overall, Lehavot did not allow himself to start mentally spending the $8.35 million first-place prize.

“I felt that I was very fortunate to be in that situation, so I came in with no expectations on how I would finish,” he explained. “I think over the last few years that I’ve developed an emotional maturity that allows me to handle any sort of variance that comes with the game. It’s impossible to control the outcome of these things, so I’d rather be happy with any outcome and appreciate how much ‘luck’ I already had in getting that far. Things could have gone better for me, but they also could’ve gone much worse.”

Lehavot lost a big chunk of his stack early on at the final table, running trips into an opponent’s rivered full house, but he was able to fight on from the short stack, using patience and well-timed all-ins to keep himself off the rail. Though he was the shortest stack with six players remaining, he managed to survive all the way to third place, banking $3,727,023. It was nearly $2.1 million more than if he had busted in sixth.

“I’m very happy with third place. I think I played very well short stacked, but I also got very lucky. I shoved a bunch of times and no one ever really had a hand to call me with until the end. Then some other players went out for a variety of reasons, so I was able to move up and make some more money.”

Moving Forward

Lehavot earned life-changing money during his run in Las Vegas, but doesn’t have any plans to drastically alter his lifestyle. Lehavot plans on playing more poker, but is also excited about being able to spend more time with his 14-month-old son.

“The money significantly adds to my family’s financial security. We don’t have any huge plans to spend any of it, but we will manage it wisely. For the time being, I really like poker and will keep my eyes open for other opportunities.” ♠