Jordan "iMsoLucky0" Morgan has been a staple of both the live and online tournament poker circuits for some time, now. He started his poker career playing micro-limits at the University of Oklahoma with some friends. He had been studying to become an engineer, but after having a good amount of success in poker, he decided to put college on hold to pursue a career on the tournament circuit. After winning more than $100,000 at the 2006
World Series of Poker and $405,000 for his second-place finish in the
U.S. Poker Championship main event, it seemed pretty likely that he'd made the right decision.
Morgan has taken some time to relax, lately - he'd been relatively off the map, especially in online poker - but that didn't stop him from taking down the $500,000-guaranteed tournament on Full Tilt in late July, earning himself $121,000. He recently got on the phone with
Card Player to talk about the new breed of poker players and his strategies for poker, in general:
Shawn Patrick Green: What have you been up to, lately?
Jordan "ImsoLucky0" Morgan: I've been taking it pretty easy in Oklahoma, only playing a few days a week. Just enjoying the football season, I guess. I was down at the Bicycle Casino for the
Legends of Poker series and I played several tournaments out there. I've only been playing online about once a week when I've been home, mainly on Sundays.
SPG: What do you think of the new crop of online poker players?
JM: It's definitely a different game than it used to be. I think that they're talented and there are definitely more people that know what they're doing now than there was two years ago.
SPG: How has the overall playing-style changed?
JM: It's a lot more aggressive. It used to be that you could win a tournament without ever showing down cards, and you could just run people over. Now, it's almost like you have to go back to playing ABC poker and exploiting the mistakes they make by playing aggressively with the best hand.
SPG: Based on that, how has
your style changed in the past year?
JM: I've tightened up a lot online. It's amazing, too, because I still have the image of a crazy, reckless player. Now, I sit there for three hours and play one hand every three orbits and still nobody notices.
SPG: What visual tells are the easiest to see and the most reliable?
JM: Just how comfortable someone is. If you play with someone for a while, you get a sense of what they look like when they're calm and what they look like when they're excited.
SPG: What mistakes do you think that people who are looking for tells usually make?
JM: There are some things that people see as tells, like someone's hands shaking, and it's kind of hard to know what that means unless you know the player. So, a lot of times, people will see something specific and will interpret it to mean one thing when they really have no reason to interpret it to mean that.
SPG: At what point do you think that you can be comfortable attributing an idiosyncrasy to being an actual tell?
JM: It's really once I've seen the same player make the same movement three or four times and was actually able to see the cards to figure out what they had. I think that's what the problem is, so many people see a tell and they want to attribute it to something, but in reality, they should just be paying more attention to how their opponent is playing his hand.
SPG: What's the origin of your name, exactly?
JM: It's kind of a long story that's not very interesting, but I'll tell you if you want.
SPG: (Laughing) You can tell me the Cliff Notes, if you like.
JM: I started out playing live poker in small games around Oklahoma. After I while I'd won quite a bit, and it was kind of a saying around here that, "You're so
lucky." And they'd say it with a drawn-out Oklahoma accent. When it came time to pick my screen name, I was chatting with a friend online, and he said, "You should make it YoureSoLucky." I didn't like the way that looked, so I made it iMsoLucky. IMsoLucky was taken, so I had to throw a zero on the end.
SPG: Are you sick of people saying that you're obviously NotSoLucky0 every time you get sucked out on?
JM: (Laughing) I
hate it. That's my number one pet peeve. People will say, "Oh, your name wasn't very true there, was it?" Oh, great, you're
so clever. I've never heard that one before.
SPG: What cliché poker "rule" do you think is the most overrated? I'm talking about things like "protect your blinds," or "play your rush," and so on.
JR: I guess all poker clichés are the problem, really. Any poker cliché is a bad poker cliché. You should play the situations given to you and you should never have such a rigid strategy that you can't adjust. Poker is a game of adjustments.
SPG: What helped you most when you were getting started?
JM: Putting in hours and hours and hours, days and days and days. They say that experience is the most important part of the game and it definitely is. People think that they can just read a book, some online forums, or some magazine articles and go out and play good poker, but you can't do that. You have to play thousands and thousands of hands and really pay attention and try to learn the game.
SPG: Were you mentored at all in the beginning?
JM: Not really. I got to where I could beat the live cash games on my own. And then, playing on the Internet, I played single-table tournaments and learned about those from the forums. And then I got into multitable tournaments. I guess I had one weekend when I hung out with Gigabet,
Darrell Dicken, in Las Vegas and he kind of showed me a few things and I watched him play, and that was when tournaments really clicked. But no, I've never really had a mentor.
SPG: Do you have any leaks in your game right now?
JM: I think everyone does. I think you'd be a fool to say that you didn't. My biggest leak right now, especially in live tournaments, is that if I get to be a medium to short stack late in a tournament, and I see other players around me building stacks, I start to let it get to me. I press a bit too hard and get too aggressive when I should really be waiting for better spots.
SPG: What's the most interesting prop bet that you've made?
JM: I was golfing with
Shane Schleger and
Matt Lefkowitz at the Malibu Country Club. Shane is a beginning golfer; he took a few lessons as a kid but this was one of the first times he'd ever played. He hadn't gotten the ball off of the ground all day. We get to this par three hole - it's 160 yards, over water - and Shane thought that he could make it over. Shane was trying to bet Matt, but Matt wouldn't give him the five-to-one odds he wanted. I said, "I'll lay five-to-one," and I ended up betting both Shane and Matt that he couldn't hit it over the water. I think he ball ended up safe about 20 feet from the green.
SPG: I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me, Jordan. Thank you.
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