Real Earnings

I recently played in a tournament at the Commerce and did fairly well. I started the final day 41st out of 56 players with 45 making the money and a nice $120,000 for first. I always know what first place is, and it’s always my goal to maximize my profit potential. The most profit is in first place, so I’m trying to shoot for it when I can, but coming into the day, making the money was a priority with my 20 big blind stack.

We were shortly on the bubble and I doubled up with A-K suited vs 10-8 after limping from the small blind and calling a shove. I won that hand and a bunch of others and came into the final table with the chip lead. I felt like I was playing well and could really set my sights on first-place money, but I had to continue to play well and run well to make that happen. I won a really big pot three-handed when I made a flush and overbet the river and that’s where my momentum really stopped.

I doubled the villain from the previous hand with J-J to his Q-J, then lost another big pot to him calling all three streets with ace-high when I thought he was pretty unlikely to be ahead of me with the action. I finally busted to the same guy, the eventual champion, in third place. It was a great result for where I was at to begin the day and I’m happy with my play throughout the tournament. I cashed for $54,760, and that put my lifetime earnings across a threshold I’ve been eyeing for a while now.

If you look at my Card Player profile, you’ll see that I now have (just barely) more than $5 million in live tournament earnings. Online tournament winning databases are an incredibly useful informational tool that I use all the time. I check out the people at my day 2 or 3 starting tables so that I can get an idea of how much they play, how much they’ve cashed for, and what size buy-ins they usually play. It makes a big difference to know if the person you’re playing against usually plays $200 buy-in tournaments or $2,000 buy-in tournaments, especially when facing five-figure or higher money jumps. It also helps to know if they’re experienced playing in certain environments. If someone at my day 2 table in a WSOP event has never cashed in one, you can be certain that I’ll be looking to take advantage of that fact. Every piece of information is useful and each one can be the thing that makes a particular play profitable.

The thing that these sites are not good for is to know exactly how much money a person has made in their career. It doesn’t take buy-ins into account, so there is no net-value. You don’t know if someone had backers, so even if it did have a net-money-won feature, you couldn’t know if that was a real number. Last I checked, they didn’t include deals unless the tournament reports it as such, and not all tournaments do.

I had someone ask me not too long ago, if you’ve made $5 million playing tournaments, why aren’t you playing in the biggest games? There are lots of reasons for that. First of all, I’ve profited considerably less than that number just due to buy-ins. At last check, I have played almost exactly $1.5 million in live buy-ins in my career. That’s with only ever having played one tournament with a buy-in of more than $25,000. You can imagine what someone like Jason Mercier or Daniel Negreanu has paid in buy-ins in their career.

Secondly, for most of my tournament career, I’ve had a backer. That means that even of the roughly $3.5 million that I’ve profited in tournaments, just more than half of that has gone directly to me. I know there are some poker players who are proud about cheating Uncle Sam, but I’m not one of them. I’ve been on the bad side of the IRS and I don’t plan to get there again. Therefore, I pay all of my taxes. Of course, I take every legal deduction I can, but I hire an honest accountant and pay my share. Add in a down payment on a house and some other investments and my bankroll isn’t as flush as one might think. Not to mention the fact that even though I “won” $54,000 this past weekend, exactly $0 of it belongs to me. Makeup is a difficult burden and will continue to be so for the rest of poker eternity. I’m sure I have another column in me about the good and bad parts of having a long-term backer, but that will have to wait.

Just remember that knowing someone’s lifetime earnings based on internet search can be a useful tool when playing poker against them, but it’s not really a good measuring stick to let you know where they are in life. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG