Rep Porter Talks About The Poker Academy

Rep Porter is a two-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner with more than $2.4 million in career live tournament earnings. His first bracelet came in 2008 after taking down a $1,500 six-max no-limit hold’em event. He won his second in 2011 after coming out on top of the $2,500 razz event. He also went deep in the 2013 main event, banking $573,204 for his 12th-place finish.

The University of Washington graduate and former equity options trader also plays high-stakes mixed games and is a lead content creator and instructor at ThePokerAcademy.com, a site dedicated to helping players achieve better results through better decisions.

Card Player caught up with Porter to discuss his new poker training site and what made him want to educate other players.

Card Player: How did you first get into poker?

Rep Porter: When I was growing up, my mom’s family got together for every imaginable occasion and after dinner, there would always be a card game that started up around the dining room table. It wasn’t very long before all of the cousins would get out the pennies from their allowance and start a game of their own in the next room.

Of course there were other games being played. I realized that you could really learn through literature and educate yourself about games when I discovered bridge. I was about 13 or 14 when I first started. I would ask my parents how to play and they would just hand me books on the subject. The idea that you could learn strategy from another player by reading it got presented to me early on and stuck with me.

CP: So when you began to play poker, you must have read anything you could get your hands on.

RP: When I got into poker, it was the same thing. I remember in the early ‘90s subscribing to Mike Caro’s newsletter and I was reading all of the literature I could find in order to improve my game. I believed that if I wanted to win, I had to see the game from these other perspectives. I still remember one of Caro’s lessons. He said that you might notice a terrible player at the table who is there every night of the week but never seems to run out of money. Well, that guy is clearly doing something right that you are missing. It’s not just about attacking a player’s weaknesses, it’s also about learning something from their strengths to incorporate into your own game.

CP: In the late ’90s you decided to take on Wall Street, leaving poker behind. What brought you back?

RP: I spent two years in New York working on the floor of the American Stock Exchange trading stock options, then I spent one year on the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco, then I spent another three years at my company’s corporate headquarters just outside of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. My family began to grow and both my wife and I wanted to move back to Washington.

When I left Wall Street I assumed that I’d find a job in finance in Seattle, but I wasn’t in a rush to lock down something right away. So I started playing poker again in 2004 as a hobby and discovered that the game was a lot different than how I had left it. Online poker sites had sprung up and they were showing hole cards on TV. Poker was booming and everyone wanted to talk about it, which wasn’t the case when I was playing before. My poker career took off, so finance was put on hold and it’s still on hold today.

CP: You’ve been successfully beating the high-stakes mixed games for years. What makes you want to share that knowledge with the rest of the poker world on ThePokerAcademy.com?

RP: My cousin Rick has been teaching poker for the better part of a decade and he’s been trying to talk me into teaching as well. I had done some teaching on Wall Street, teaching the young traders about option theory, and I enjoyed it. So I was attracted to it from that perspective. I also like the idea of being able to travel a little less so I can stay with my family in Seattle and being a poker educator will allow me to do that.

I also get something out of teaching in my own game. Teaching poker forces you to organize your own thoughts. When we built this course, I wanted to create a comprehensive, balanced plan that all fit together. Obviously in the games I’m playing in, I’m varying from the baseline play frequently because I have prior knowledge of my opponents and the game is being played at a higher level. But when I’m competing at the WSOP, I might not know any of my opponents and that’s where it’s super helpful to have that baseline play ready to go, refreshed in my mind. When you have to articulate an idea to teach it to someone else, it actually helps you understand it better and apply it to your own game.

CP: What differentiates your course from all of the other poker training sites out there?

RP: The biggest thing that our course has that differentiates it from other courses and training sites out there is that our course is sequential. You sit down and with an academic approach, get building blocks a, then b, then c and then string them together in order. You aren’t bombarded with a bunch of different concepts and expected to piece it together yourself. There are sites out there who like to through out videos, which is great for a concept or two, but it’s difficult to incorporate them into a successful tournament strategy. With our approach, you build up your fundamentals and then build on top of those fundamentals.

CP: Can a beginning player expect to be successful these days without the help of a training site?

RP: I think its very difficult to jump into the poker world these days and figure it out through trial and error. When I first started to play in the 90s, the amount of knowledge that existed was very low. The average player in 2015 would’ve been a world-class player back then. Players today already have a huge amount of information at their disposal. They think about hand ranges instead of putting people on single hands. These once difficult concepts have been fine tuned over the years and are now standard issue for most players. A beginning player just can’t jump in and expect to compete without any training. You’ll be at too big of a disadvantage. The good news is that there is information out there, specifically with our course, that brings you up to speed fairly quickly.

The Poker Academy’s mission is to help poker players achieve better results through better decisions and that is done by teaching poker in a way that makes learning easy and enjoyable with high quality courses taught by professional players.

Sign up for The Poker Academy today to take your game to the next level.

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