Jason Koon: Hard Work Pays Off

Not everyone thinks poker is a sport, but the argument does gain some traction when you consider poker pro Jason Koon. The 31-year-old not only looks the part of an athlete, but he trains like one both on and off the felt.

Koon has more than a decade in the game under his belt, but it took him awhile to find his place in the poker world. After revamping his approach in 2012, Koon has strung together his best years on the tournament circuit.

In the last 18 months alone, the West Virginia native has racked up more than $2.7 million in live tournament earnings, including his first major main event win when he took down the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open in August.

As a regular face in high roller tournaments and high-stakes cash games, Koon has essentially reached the top of the poker world. In total, he has won more than $5.5 million in live tournaments, along with millions more online.

Despite the fact that he’s always sporting a smile and ready with a compliment, there’s no denying Koon’s physically imposing presence at the table. But although he currently stands at 5’11’’ with 180 pounds of mostly muscle, Koon wasn’t always so well put together.

Card Player caught up with Koon, shortly before he chopped a $25,000 high roller event at Aria in October for a $273,000 payday, to talk about his career and the lessons he’s learned along the way.

Card Player: Can you talk about your time as an athlete and how that led to poker?

Jason Koon: I was a small kid, tiny. I guess I just hit puberty later than everyone else. I was 120 pounds as a sophomore in high school, so I didn’t really get into sports until after a growth spurt. I ended up getting a scholarship to run track at Wesleyan College. After a pretty bad injury where I tore the flexor almost completely off my hip, I found myself with a lot of free time.

Up until that point, I had never played a hand of poker in my life. I started playing at the local Elk’s and grinded up a modest bankroll. Then I won the $11 Sunday Storm on PokerStars for $26,000. I went from having $100 to my name to having a $30,000 bankroll.
CP: But how does one get an MBA in finance and philosophy while also putting in the necessary hours to grind up a bankroll?

JK: It was insane. I would sit in class and play heads-up sit-n-go’s. I would study all night and barely get by. I needed a 3.0 GPA to graduate with an MBA, and I did just enough to make it happen.

CP: What have you learned about yourself in the decade plus since you’ve taken up poker?

JK: I’ve experienced a lot of personal growth in the last few years. My entire life I’ve managed to keep myself busy enough to not have to think about a lot of things, a lot of negative experiences I had as a child. My dad was an extreme guy who went to jail for domestic abuse, so I developed this defense mechanism where I would get big, mean and strong so nobody could hurt me. That rage, was a very powerful motivator in a lot of ways. But in the intellectual and emotional game of poker, when I would go through the inevitable downswing or even just a bad session, I would notice my past start to bubble up.

On good days, I was probably an above-average reg online. But on my bad days, I would play terrible. I would go from a B+ one day to three straight days of F-grade poker, just because I couldn’t handle any sort of adversity in my game. I had to learn to remove that side of me from poker.

CP: How did you handle your initial success?

JK: I grew up poor. So poor that the other kids would make fun of me. The first few times I hit a big score, I would go and do something reckless with the money like buy a Porsche. I wanted to live that flashy lifestyle, but I had no idea what I was doing. The next thing I knew, I was surrounded by some people I really didn’t like. I realized that I was projecting an image of something that wasn’t me.

I think the younger players in the game don’t realize that the people they are looking up to aren’t necessarily the best role models for their career. I’ve spent a lot of time with poker pros and I’ve seen firsthand just how empty their lives can be. There’s a lot of loneliness being hidden by the lifestyle. These are the struggles that nobody sees.

CP: You’ve always had good results, but it seems like the last few years have been especially lucrative for you. What do you attribute that success to?

JK: Since 2012, I’ve been really motivated to put in the work. I work until my eyes bleed. I have an awesome girlfriend, but sometimes she has to deal with me putting in 12-hour days of studying, even when I’m not actually playing. It’s obviously had a great impact on my career, but I have to be able to hit the brakes and find a balance.

CP: When you say ‘put in the work,’ what do you mean?

JK: I moved in with Ben Tollerene, who is one of the best online cash game players in the world. I started to see how he approached the game and I realized that if I wanted to be around in five years, I needed to sit down and learn this stuff. Back then I was a winning tourney pro, but who knows how good I really was? Maybe I just managed to bink a few tournaments early on and it was throwing off my results. But after observing Ben, I knew I had a lot of room for improvement.

There’s a lot of software available to the public to help your game these days. You can use these tools to understand how each bet size should be balanced with a specific amount of bluffs and value bets. Learning how to approach different situations with different ranges, that takes a ton of work, but you can do it through toy gaming without even playing poker. Then there are tools that allow you to apply it to actual poker. You can give a program a set of ranges that can teach you how many bluff combinations you have compared to how many value combinations you have. You can actually see how people play in an exploitable way.

CP: I imagine that those numbers make it much easier to play optimal poker online, but in a live arena, you don’t have that data in front of you and you have to make a lot of estimations. Also, I would think that you can throw balance out the window against certain players.

JK: If you look at poker strategy from a theoretical sense, you are going to use a specific hand X percent of the time for one thing, and X percent for something else. So let’s say in a pot, with this hand, I bet 50 percent of the time and I check 50 percent of the time. If you’re sitting in a live arena, those mixed strategies become pure strategies, because you can use other information to determine which action is best.

The thing that blew my mind the most was the change in my mindset. I thought, ‘I’ll do this, so my opponent will do this.’ But I should have been thinking, ‘this is my hand in this spot, and its function is to do X.’ That’s how you play GTO (game theory optimal). If you are playing to exploit your opponents, you can print money if you are always right. If you know with 100 percent certainty that your opponent has you beat, you can fold on the river even if you are getting 10:1 on your money. You are exploiting your opponent’s unbalanced range. But as soon as he gets a bluff through in that spot, now you are the one being exploited. The beauty of understanding things from a game theory sense, is that you have this unexploitable, balanced, baseline strategy and you can always deviate from it if you get a concrete reason to do so.

CP: I’m guessing you deviate more against weaker players than against tougher players.

JK: Correct. When you play at the highest levels, you learn very quickly that trying to exploit the best players in the world is kind of silly. Whenever I’m playing those guys, my goal is to play at an equilibrium strategy. It may cost end up costing me in one tournament, or several, but eventually that strategy will succeed simply because you are unexploitable and making less mistakes than your opponents.

CP: Does playing a GTO style of poker take all of the emotion out of the game?

JK: It definitely makes you feel a lot better about calling and losing. That’s a weird concept for most poker players to understand. There are times in poker, when you are supposed to call and lose. Everyone wants to be right 100 percent of the time, but when you play for that, you end up costing yourself money. Limit players are much better at this concept, because they call and lose a lot. You don’t have to be right that often to make a river call profitable when you’re getting 10:1, but in no-limit, that decision could cost you an entire stack. You might be calling a 400-big blind shove on the river where your win-rate is five big blinds per 100 hands, and it will take you months to make back what was in that pot. It’s just really hard to train yourself to think like that.

CP: In all of the years I’ve seen you on the circuit, you’ve always come across as a pretty stoic guy at the table.

JK: People see me and they think I’m an emotionally solid guy. I guess I do a good job of holding it all in, and I can control myself long enough to shake some hands and say ‘good game’ as I leave the table. But it is still hard for me to lose. I had two buy-ins in the Big One For One Drop this summer, and yes, it’s very hard to deal with losing $222,000. Three times at the WSOP, I was in first place with nine players remaining, and all three times I finished ninth. Those are the spots where you can lose your composure.

CP: I’ve never understood why there is so much criticism for poker pros and how they react when so much money is on the line.

JK: I was playing in a very big game in Manila and I wound up in this monster pot worth about $870,000. I had four-bet preflop with kings against one of the non-pros at the table. Then on a 10-8-7 flop with two diamonds where I also had the Kd, I check-shoved and he called with 10-8 for top two pair. The turn was the 9d, so basically I could hit any diamond, make two pair or a set, or even chop if a straight came on board. I was something like 43 percent to win.

For three days Phil Ivey was sitting in the game and hadn’t said a word. For the most part, he had just been watching sports whenever he wasn’t in a hand. But on this hand, even he perked up and took off his headphones to see what was going to happen.

Once the money went in, I was already trying to mentally prepare for losing the pot. I told myself, ‘You’re going to have to tap the table here, look at all of these guys and say good game. Then you’re going to have to walk out and reevaluate some things. Is this game too big for me? Is the variance too high?’

All of these emotions are racing through me, but on the outside, I’m trying to act as calm as humanly possible. Then Paul Phua asked me if I wanted to sweat the river card. Of course I said yes, even though my head was spinning and I felt like I was about to pass out.

Fortunately for me, it was the 3d and I made my flush. On the turn, I was already bracing myself as best as I could for the loss. But after the river, I somehow had to drag this pot without doing a victory dance. I had to act like it was just another hand. As a professional, you want to think of yourself in the moment, but you also have to think about the greater good of the game. You don’t want to be that guy, you want to keep it classy, win or lose.

CP: There were a lot of close calls in the early part of your career with a bunch of second, third, and fourth-place finishes, but in the last 18 months you’ve chopped or won outright five events. Is this the result of a change in your approach at the final table?

JK: You see these guys win four tournaments in a row, and they get labeled as a closer. No, they are a good player who is also running hot. The best heads-up players in the world, given even stacks, are still only going to beat average regs something like 53 percent of the time.

CP: But winning a tournament has to feel a lot better than bubbling a high roller event?

JK: The Hard Rock win was special for a few reasons. Not only was it a major tournament, but Seth Davies, who was one of my students and also won a WPT earlier this year, finished second. That was very satisfying, to not only see success for myself, but also for him.

That being said, just like I’m trying to take the negative emotion out of bad results, I also want to take the positive emotion out of good results. If I look at that Hard Rock tournament a little closer, I can see that with 18 left, I won a flip with A-K against queens. I also had a guy run queens into my kings for a pile.

My mood when I leave work each day shouldn’t be tied to my results. I’ve come to realize that if I put in the work, the results will take care of itself. I can’t get stuck thinking about exactly what happened, I need to focus on making the best decisions possible regardless of the outcome. It’s also the best way to maintain your sanity. If you feel like every time you don’t win, you played poorly, then that’s bad. But if you feel like every time you win, you are the greatest player in the world, then that can be just as bad.

Here’s the crazy thing. There are plenty of people who could be me, or Jason Mercier, or Fedor Holz for that matter. There are plenty of players, who ran like absolute shit for 10, 20, or even 50 tournaments and it finally broke them. In 2009, I quit a job with an insurance company, and for four months I didn’t win at poker. I was just about to get another real job, but I managed to win three tournaments in a month to kind of jumpstart my career. I mean, let’s be honest, if I don’t win that flip with 18 left, then we’re probably not even having this interview.

CP: Maybe, maybe not. But like you said, we shouldn’t be results oriented. What’s next for you?

JK: My project right now is to work on myself. There’s a constant struggle in the poker world to not only find a balance between the game and your regular life, but also a struggle to find fulfillment. There’s a dollar amount in your head that you think will make you happy, but then you get there and it’s not what you expected. It’s nice that I’ve reached a point in my poker career where I can take a step back and focus on myself and my relationships outside of the game. ♠