Rep Porter Is Assembling A Talented Team of Poker Players To Teach Students How To Make Better Decisions At the Poker Table

In the corner of the world’s busiest poker room at the Commerce Casino in Los Angeles, Rep Porter sits quietly behind a mountain of white, hundred-dollar chips. He’s playing the $200-$400 mixed game, a game in which he travels to LA frequently to take a seat. Rep’s normal routine involves playing far more cash games than tournaments, but with more than $3 million dollars in tournament earnings, including three WSOP bracelets, it’s fair to say he’s just as competent on the tournament scene as he is at the cash games.

“Tournaments are fun to play, and definitely fun to win,” Porter says. “But variance is high. Cash games have a lot less variance, and your earnings can be much more consistent throughout the year.”

Consistent earnings are important for the father of two teenage girls. “Playing tournaments professionally involves a lot of travel and can be demanding and punishing. I enjoy the WSOP, but aside from that and maybe a few other tournaments throughout the year, I mostly stick to cash games.”

Over the years, Porter has spent thousands of hours battling on the felt and talking poker with both recreational players and fellow poker pros. Those conversations, and the realization that much of the poker instruction currently available was extremely lacking, led to the seeds of an idea. Those seeds soon grew into a unique poker training company called The Poker Academy. Porter’s goal with The Poker Academy is to assemble a team of the best players and instructors in the business to teach each of the games normally found in a poker room.

“We started with our flagship program, our No-Limit Hold’em Tournament Course,” Porter says. “That’s obviously the game that most people out there play, but we wanted to expand on that quite a bit. We wanted to be a company where, if you want to expand your poker knowledge, you can come to our site and you can learn from the best in the world in each of the disciplines.”

For the no-limit tournament course, Porter teamed up with Rick Fuller. “Rick is a great no-limit player, but even more important than that, he has a very thorough resume as an instructor in the poker world. He’s taught poker to thousands of players, and his knowledge on that front helped us create a product that really makes the course user-friendly. He knew how to put together a course that was very advanced, but also easy to follow.”

After the no-limit course was finished, Porter approached Ian Johns to create the Limit Hold’em Course. “Ian is quite possibly the best limit hold’em player out there. He has three WSOP bracelets, two of them in limit hold’em, including the $10,000 buy-in world championship just last year. And his third bracelet is in H.O.R.S.E which limit hold’em is a part of. Not only that, he plays limit hold’em cash games for a living and he’s been a consistent winner for a decade or more.”

Ian’s accomplishments in limit hold’em are second to none and Rep feels that the course they created on the game contains some incredibly advanced and complex concepts.

“It’s the best course of instruction ever created for limit hold’em, of that I have no doubt,” Rep says. “Ian was an incredible instructor and his knowledge and the ability to convey it was amazing.”

The next course on the list was stud, and for that, Rep turned to Jason Somerville.

“Jason is probably one of the best-known players out there because of his Twitch stream. He plays and instructs nearly every day on Twitch and has hundreds of thousands of followers.”

Not only that, he also has quite a poker resume, with more than $6 million in online and live tournament earnings, including a WSOP bracelet.

Together, Rep and Jason created the Seven-Card Stud Course at The Poker Academy, and Rep couldn’t have been happier with the result.

“It was an incredible experience, getting to teach with someone like Jason. He’s an amazing instructor, and his love for the game really comes out in the course. He knows how to convey complex instruction in a way that makes it really easy for the student to understand. As Jason might say, this course contains a lifetime of pork chops for the seven-card stud student,” Porter says with a laugh.

Porter says the goal of The Poker Academy is different from most of the other instruction sites out there today.

“Our goal is to teach the student how to make better decisions at the poker table. That’s our tagline, Better Results Through Better Decisions. Poker is a game of decision making. You can’t effectively take the teaching approach that if your opponent does X, you should do Y. It doesn’t convey very well, and that’s what makes other training sites tough places to learn. They tend to drop you into a sea of videos where you watch someone play while they try to describe what they’re doing. It’s confusing, and one decision point doesn’t always translate well into decision points in similar spots. Instead, if you teach people how to think about situations, what are the important concepts in every situation, they can take that knowledge and apply it to every situation they’ll face at the table.”

Not only that, but they also took a completely different approach to the way they filmed the course.

“After a lot of discussion, we decided to shoot it like a TV show – similar to P.T.I. or Sports Center. We used multiple cameras and a professional set. We’re really the only poker educational site that does it that way that I’ve seen. And I think it makes a huge difference. It’s one of the things that sets us apart and makes our courses so incredible.

The Poker Academy’s courses take a comprehensive approach, taking the student through a game from A to Z, an approach that Rep says makes for a much better learning environment.
So, what’s next for The Poker Academy? Rep says the next course they’ll be producing will be no-limit hold’em cash games.

“It’s the other game that everybody is clamoring for, and I think we’ve found a way to create a course that will be like nothing else out there on the market. There are a lot of different scenarios for no-limit cash games involving things like max buy-in games and no max buy-ins, and the strategies are often completely different for those games.”

Rep says they’re going to be creating two separate courses to solve this problem, and for the first course, they’ve just brought in Susie Zhao to teach no-limit hold’em capped buy-in games.

“Susie is a fantastic no-limit hold’em player, and an expert at playing in capped buy-in structures. She’s going to be a great addition to our team.”

Porter’s excitement about The Poker Academy’s new approach to teaching is evident when he talks about it, and the line-up of instructors, both the ones they’ve already acquired, and the ones Rep hopes to get in the future for the other games, is exciting for anybody who’s looking to get better at poker and wants to learn from the best. Rep is also excited about some of the success stories that have already been achieved by some of their students.

“We’ve had a number of students who have taken the information we’ve taught, and have gone on to have great success in the poker world. It’s encouraging and it feels good when someone writes to us with a success story. We literally have scores of emails from students talking about the successes they’ve had.”

Rep certainly doesn’t need to teach poker to make a living at it; his results and the respect he gets from his peers speaks volumes about his abilities.

“I’ve had success in poker, and I enjoy teaching. Of course, I also hope to make money doing it,” he says with a laugh. “But really, creating the courses requires me to spend a lot of time thinking about the games, and that helps me make better decisions when I play them. And making better decisions gives me better results. It’s a profitable circle.”

Better Results through Better Decisions. That’s ThePokerAcademy.com’s tagline and they believe their courses can help any student achieve success.

You can check out The Poker Academy’s courses, including a ton of free material to help your game, by going to ThePokerAcademy.com and by following them on Twitter @thepokeracad. ♠