Poker Pro Robert Mizrachi On Latest WSOP Win: 'We Look At It Like Family Bracelets'No Sibling Rivalry Between The Mizrachi Brothers |
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When poker pro Robert Mizrachi captured his fourth career bracelet earlier this month it put him one ahead of younger brother Michael. One might think there’s a sibling rivalry, that they keep each other’s bracelet count at the forefront of their minds for motivation to continue the long summer grind.
It’s nothing like that, the elder Mizrachi said. “We look at it like family bracelets,” he told Card Player. “We are very supportive of each other.”
In addition to Michael and Robert’s WSOP success, Eric Mizrachi, who is Michael’s twin, and youngest brother Donny Mizrachi have 17 WSOP cashes between the two of them, but no bracelets yet. If you include scores outside the WSOP, the Florida-based poker family has more than $20 million in lifetime tournament earnings.
For Robert, there’s little to no excitement that comes from now having one more than Michael. In a sense, bracelets are strange things. You want to capture as many as possible because that’s why you enter tournaments, and they help determine your legacy in the game, but you can’t count on winning them and you can’t, despite the rankings, focus too much on how you compare to others. Competing for bracelets is, among other things, a psychological battle with yourself, and so the Mizrachi brothers have found an edge in their support for one another.
“I am older, so I guess one more than Michael isn’t too bad,” Robert did admit nonchalantly. The 37-year-old’s first bracelet came in 2007, and he had to wait seven years before capturing his second. Now he has won bracelets in three straight summers, a feat rarely done. Michael won his last bracelet in 2012. Like Robert, he had three straight years of winning a bracelet, but then came a cold streak (just one WSOP final table since 2012) that has persisted to this day. That’s the nature of the tournament game.
In the years after his first WSOP win, Robert played a lot of cash games and continued to have leaks in his tournament game, but he eventually was able to plug them. “It was very hard,” he said of the seven-year-long drought at the world’s richest and most prestigious annual poker festival. During that span, he was able to record nearly two dozen cashes and a handful of final tables, but he wasn’t able to finish out any events.
The tournaments “get tougher and tougher every year,” said Mizrachi, who thinks he could end his career with a dozen bracelets. “You’re pretty much never going to be happy until you catch Phil [Hellmuth]. It seems impossible, though. I can’t imagine getting 14.”
Before approaching Hellmuth, Mizrachi would have to pass through a lot of the game’s legends, including Doyle Brunson, who has 10. The Brunson family has 11 to its name, and Mizrachi also said there’s no bracelet competition whatsoever between the two families. It’s because Doyle doesn’t play at the WSOP anymore and Todd Brunson is a good friend. Poker can be a tight-knit community, but it’s especially true in Robert’s case because stats, and the rivalries you can sometimes manufacture from them, don’t mean much to him.
Robert has also learned to not think too far into the future with regards to his poker career. “I like to keep my goals small. If you have really big goals you get distracted. It’s one bracelet at a time. There’s only so much you can control in poker.”
The one part of his poker playing future that has leaked into his mind is the Poker Hall of Fame. At 37, he isn’t yet eligible for induction, and there are a lot of deserving people in front of him, but he’s on track to one day get in.
“I’m definitely still young,” Mizrachi, a former casino dealer, said. “The Poker Hall of Fame would make me very happy. That could be one of the goals.”
For more coverage from the summer series, visit the 2016 WSOP landing page complete with a full schedule, news, player interviews and event recaps.
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