Online Poker: Interview With Vivek 'Psyduck' Rajkumar

Vivek “Psyduck” Rajkumar, like so many of today’s top live pros, got his start by playing with friends. Playing in those $1 buy-in cash games and watching Gus Hansen take down tournament after tournament on TV got him hooked.

He then jumped into online poker. He turned his initial deposit of $50 on PartyPoker (using his father’s credit card; his dad said it was “on him”) into hundreds of thousands of dollars in winnings. It looks like his dad’s investment was sound.

The 21-year-old Seattle, Washington, resident has since taken his game live and has done very well for himself. He tore it up in the 2007 World Series of Poker, cashing five times, including one final table. Most recently, however, he took down a $2,500 no-limit hold’em event at this year’s L.A. Poker Classic, netting himself $113,000 for his biggest cash to date.

Before taking up poker, Rajkumar graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in computer science. In fact, he was working as a software developer for Microsoft — a job that would sound cushy and stable to most — before deciding to take the plunge into the poker world.

“At the time, I just enjoyed playing poker more than I enjoyed software development,” he said. “At the time, I thought, ‘I’m young, and if this doesn’t pan out, I have a degree to fall back on; I have job experience.’”

Rajkumar now lives in Las Vegas and is doing everything that he can to become the world’s best poker player. Card Player caught up with him after his LAPC win to talk about how he won that tournament, as well as how to avoid mistakes, how to recover when you do make them, and other poker strategy topics.


Shawn Patrick Green: Congrats on your recent win in the LAPC. How did that feel?

Vivek “Psyduck” Rajkumar: Honestly, at the time, it just felt pretty mellow. I had a couple of my friends watching. At the World Series final table, I had a bunch of my friends sweating me. This event was kind of small, it only got 167 people; it was on a Wednesday night. So, I just had a couple of my friends watching, and it just felt mellow. It just felt kind of nice taking it down and having the money and the chips in front of me, and the trophy. I wasn’t super excited like when I made the final table [at the World Series], it just felt nice to get one of these accomplishments out of the way. But obviously I felt happy about it.

SPG: (Laughs) It would be pretty hard not to feel happy about $100,000, I would think. What did it take to take down that tournament?

VR: It was well-timed aggression, I think. I think I played all of my hands very standardly; I didn’t pick any spots except for one squeeze play that I made with Q-7 suited when I beat Brandon Cantu’s jacks. Besides that, I think with everything else I played the hands standardly. There weren’t any sick spots where I used very good reads to make bets or anything. I think I played very technically solid and I think I had good-timed aggression.

And I didn’t make any mistakes, that’s for sure. In other tournaments, I think I’ve made big mistakes that I shouldn’t have made. In this tournament, I think I made no mistakes, whatsoever. So, I just think I played well and it was my day.

SPG: But when you do make a mistake, how do you identify it, and how do you set yourself back on the right track?

VR: OK, well an example of a mistake might be a bluff, like an ill-timed bluff or an ill-timed squeeze play. So, for example, if I make a multi-street bluff, I have to think about what range I’m representing, what his range should be in that spot, and what portion of his range can call that bet. Because if I make a 100K bet into a 100K pot on the river, it only has to work one in two times to show a profit. So, if he just happens to have that portion of his range that can call me, it’s fine. But if I think that the bet size is such that I’m always getting called by a huge portion of his range for the hand, as played, then I should not be making that bet.

There are mistakes that are obvious, like paying off A-K preflop to a very tight guy, and then there are mistakes like bluffs that get called or call-downs that you make that are wrong. I don’t think I made any mistakes of that variety in this tournament.

SPG: But how do you bounce back from a mistake?

VR: Honestly, in the past I’d be extremely hard on myself when I made a mistake. I’d be like, “This was awful. What are you doing? You just gave off a third of your chips in that stupid play.” Sometimes, you just have to say, “OK, so I made this play; think about this hand afterwards. But from this point on, just continue with the new situation. Think about my new stack, his new stack, the new table situation, and my new table image.” If I made a bluff and got called and I had to show the bluff, my image has changed. So, just continue on from this new situational standpoint and think about the hand afterwards. Send off the hand history to somebody else and talk about it afterwards to see how big of a mistake it was or wasn’t. But for now, just put it out of your mind. I couldn’t get past that viewpoint before, but now I’ve gotten to the point that I can just put mistakes aside and worry about the tournament from this point onwards.

SPG: That was a very tough final table you were at. Who were you most afraid of?

VR: Honestly, when I go to a table, I think I’m usually the best player there, but at this final table, I thought that Toto Leonidas was the best live player there. That table had Dutch Boyd, Brandon Cantu, Ryan Hughes — who has a [WSOP] bracelet that he won last year in seven-card stud high-low — and it had Toto Leonidas. I’ve faced off with Toto a bunch of times previously; I played against him in the $15K Venetian final table, I’ve played with him in a bunch of low-key events, and I’ve played with him at the Bellagio events, and he’s a very tough, good, very aggressive player. So, I honestly thought that he would give me the most trouble, and I did want to stay out of his way a little bit, just to get a handle on the final table.

SPG: I want to go back to October 2007 now, to discuss a big hand, which I’m sure you remember, that you played against Justin Bonomo. Could you tell us about the hand?

VR: Sure. First off, this was with about 30 people left in the Caesars Palace Classic $10K main event. Twenty-seven people paid, so we were two or three people away from the bubble. I was the clear chip leader at the time, and ZeeJustin [Bonomo] was like third in chips. I had been playing extremely aggressively the whole tournament, loose-aggressive, and Justin knew this. That’s how I’d gotten my big stack. At the table I was at with Justin, I wasn’t playing that aggressively, but overall, throughout the whole tournament, I was playing extremely loose-aggressive and picking up chips. People were playing tight and passive with their chips, so I was just picking them up.

Anyway, we had about 90 big blinds each, effectively, or maybe like 80. He opened from the cutoff and I smooth-called in the small blind with J-10 suited. That is a mistake right there; if I want to play the hand, I honestly should have been reraising preflop. I can’t play profitably out of position against Justin; there are so many flops that I’m just going to check-fold, and if I flop top pair or a gutshot or an open-ender … I mean, do I check-call? Do I lead into him? There are so many things to consider.

So, the first mistake was smooth-calling from out of position preflop. So, anyway, I did that. The flop came 10-9-2, also giving me a backdoor flush draw. I checked, he made a pretty standard continuation bet, and I just called. The turn came a jack, so I have top two with jacks and tens, and it also put a backdoor flush out that I didn’t have. I checked, he bet about two-thirds of the pot. This is when I made the biggest mistake of the hand. Preflop my call was probably a mistake, but it’s not that big of a mistake, and on the flop I think I was fine, but on the turn I check-raised him. He made it 35K, we both had about 250K behind, and I made it 110K.

That was the biggest mistake of the hand. When he bets on the turn, he has a hand that he’s either stacking off with confidently — like bottom set, top set, middle set, or a straight — or he has a hand that he’s willing to throw away. There are no in-between hands — like kings, queens, aces, top pair and a flush draw, top pair and an open-ender — with which he’s going to be betting those turns on that type of board, because he know that when I check-raise, his hand is hard to play. So, in position, I thought — and this was after the fact, obviously — that all of these hands that are marginal but good, he’s checking to me on the turn. At the time, I thought, “OK, top two pair? I’m all in.”

So my check-raise on the turn has no purpose; when he’s bluffing, he just folds, and when we get it in, he usually has me drawing stone-dead. ZeeJustin’s not going to be getting it in with A-J on that board, or queens or something. So, I made the biggest mistake, and that probably cost me $100K in actual equity, and I ended up stacking off to his K-Q. It was an unfortunate turn card, it gave me two pair and gave him a straight, but I could have played the hand much better instead of check-raising him. I went from top in chips to like last in chips.

SPG: What is your favorite type of tournament, and why?

VR: For live tournaments, I like the deep-stack tournaments because of the flexibility. I like tournaments wherein you start off with like 300 times the big blind and ample space to maneuver. If it’s eighthanded and 300 big bets to start and one hour and 15 minute levels, I think that’s perfect for live tournaments, because you can get so many hands in. There’s always space to continually accumulate instead of getting to the levels in which it’s just an all-in showdown. So, for live tournaments, I like all of these tournaments with good intervals between levels.

For online tournaments, I think it’s kind of the opposite. I like the turbo tournaments online because I’m a little impatient, so they’re just more fun. Within 15 minutes you have a stack that you have to go all in with. I play online tournaments for fun, mostly, so you can get all in pretty quickly and it’s just a jovial atmosphere, I guess. So, that’s a discrepancy between my live and online tournament preferences.

SPG: What about in terms of small fields versus big fields?

VR: I think there’s nothing better than getting through a huge field and taking it down or making a deep cash. Having a final table in the World Series main event once in my life … I’d love that; not even a win, just a final table. I do enjoy playing huge fields; I think my style of continually accumulating chips and playing loose-aggressive is pretty much perfect for huge fields that have weak-tight players in them.

But, at the same time, if you play huge fields, there are going to be long periods of time when you’re not going to have big cashes, just because you have to get through so many different people. The tournament that I took down [at the LAPC] had only 167 entrants, so I’m going to win that tournament one out of 100 times, approximately. So you have to have a mixture of both small-field tournaments and large-field tournaments so that when you go cold in the big-field tournaments, you always have the cashes and the final tables from the smaller ones to accommodate that.

SPG: For the big-field tournaments, then, what kind of strategy do you use to start out?

VR: When it’s ninehanded, there’s not much that you can do. You just play a normal, full-ring, standard game, but when antes kick in and you have a medium stack, that’s when you can start putting the pressure on. When you start off, you have no reads on the table, since usually you won’t recognize anyone, so you just play standard until you can identify the weak spots. People may be limping too much, people might be weak and you can take pots from them, or people raise from the button, cutoff, or hijack no matter what their hand is. So, you spend the earlier rounds, when the blinds are small, to accumulate these reads, and you take advantage of them later on when the blinds and antes are bigger and actually matter.

So, early on I just play standard, and I don’t do anything dumb like spew off my stack on a big bluff, unless the situation is perfect for it, but most of the time it isn’t. And then, once you have those reads, you can just go with it and use them later on.

SPG: Thanks for doing this interview, Vivek.

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