Online Poker: Interview with Alex 'AJKHoosiers1' Kamberis

The big buy-in rebuy tournaments online always feature a veritable who’s who of Internet poker talent, and the winners of those events get a massive amount of credit from the online poker community for outlasting such tough fields. Alex “AJKHoosiers1” Kamberis is a rebuy tournament master, so it’s no surprise that he is one of the most well-respected players online today.

A quick peek at his Online Player of the Year (OPOY) results shows just how much of his success has come from that no-limit hold’em variation, and he has made almost $150,000 already in 2008, largely due to his rebuy scores. Kamberis has nearly $500,000 in lifetime OPOY-qualified scores, and he has already broken into the top 50 in this year’s race. All said, he has more than $1 million in online tournament winnings.

The 21-year-old Indiana University student has also landed final tables in two preliminary events in major series in the past six months, one at the 2007 World Poker Finals and one at the 2008 Wynn Classic. He has been ramping up his live-tournament play in anticipation of the 2008 World Series of Poker, and he’s looking to do well in the currently running Foxwoods Poker Classic to ride the wave to the Series.

Card Player caught up with Kamberis barely an hour before he was set to hit the live felts in the Foxwoods Poker Classic main event.


Shawn Patrick Green: How did you get your start in poker?

Alex “AJKHoosiers1” Kamberis: I guess it was just in high school. A couple of my friends started getting into it at my high school; poker was getting kind of big. Once my friends all get good at something, I usually just want to get better than them at it (laughs). It kind of just caught up from there. I watched a friend of mine play online poker in, I think, freshman year of college, when I was 18. I made my first $50 deposit, and I guess after that it just kind of escalated from there.

SPG: How did you go about improving your game since that start?

AK: A lot of it was practice, trial-and-error kind of stuff, and figuring out what worked. I was also watching a lot of the kids I knew, like I said. I had a lot of friends who knew poker, and we’d talk about hands over time, and it just added up. I never really read any books or anything, and by the time I actually found poker websites, I was already pretty decent. So, I guess most of it was just playing and learning from my mistakes.

SPG: So, how do you go about learning from your mistakes? How do you separate the mistakes from the results-based losses?

AK: Well, I guess most of the time when I found out that I had made a mistake, it was from someone I had asked about the hand, because there’s a lot of that going on between my group of friends. So, I would ask them about the hand and they would tell me that I made a mistake. Also, if something doesn’t work a certain amount of the time, you can start to figure out that it’s probably not a good play. So, it was really talking through things with other poker players that helped me realize what was good and what wasn’t.

SPG: Most of your biggest scores have come in the Sunday $200 rebuy tournament on PokerStars. What do you like about the tournament, and how tough is the field?

AK: It’s really tough. I don’t know why, but for some reason my bigger scores come in tournaments that are supposed to have tougher fields, and I think they do, and I think it’s just a coincidence. But I know the structure is really solid in that tournament; there’s a lot of room for play, and the couple times that I did well, or at least the first time that I won, I came out of the rebuy hour with a ton of chips. If you can go into that structure starting out with a lot of chips, then you’re going to have a pretty big advantage. I’m not really sure, honestly, why that tournament, and the $100 rebuy, too, have been my best tournaments.

SPG: I’ve heard the argument before from some people that they simply can’t play against bad poker players, and they think they play better against good poker players. Do you think there’s any merit to that argument, and do you think that might apply to you?

AK: I think that it seems like I do, for some reason, but there’s no way that’s true. I refuse to believe that I’m the one exception to that rule. I always want to play against bad players; I know it’s easier, and I know I’m going to do better. I would never say that that’s true. I think it’s just variance or a coincidence or whatever. It’s just basic poker that that can’t possibly be true, so …

SPG: Do you think that maybe your success in rebuy tournaments has something to do with how you accumulate chips in the rebuy stage, or do you think it has more to do with the later stages, just because you have more chips?

AK: Yeah, that’s what it is [the latter]. I’ve done well in rebuys without playing like a maniac in the rebuy hour or even coming out of the rebuy hour with a lot of chips. The play is, in general, a little bit deeper than most freezeouts, just because there are more chips on the table, and I think that definitely benefits me. I play them mostly like freezeouts, anyway, so I don’t think it’s the early stages, it’s the later stages and endgame that help me chip up, I guess.

SPG: Do you play any differently in a tournament like that as opposed to a tournament like the Sunday Million?

AK: Yeah, there’s definitely a difference from the $200 rebuy and $100 rebuy and the Sunday Million. I play the Sunday Million … well, it’s not like I do well in it, or anything, so I wouldn’t start writing this down. I play it pretty straight-forwardly. I assume that anyone who I don’t know in that tournament is going to be pretty bad or a satellite player. So, I play ABC poker and hope the cards go my way for a while, and once it gets deep I can take advantage of people on the bubble situations.

But in the $200 rebuy, first of all, no one is afraid to bubble, and second of all, I definitely play a little more fancy, or whatever you want to call it, in that tournament, just because people are capable of folding. In the Sunday Million, I don’t really try to push people off of hands, just because I always assume that everyone is terrible.

SPG: I’ve heard a lot of people say that if you don’t know someone at your table, you should always treat them like they’re good players until proven otherwise. But you think that you should default thinking players are bad until proven otherwise?

AK: In the Sunday Million you should think that. You shouldn’t think that in the $200 rebuy. In the $200 rebuy I would assume that someone who I didn’t know was still pretty good. In the Super Tuesday or the bigger buy-in tournaments, I usually assume that people are at least decent. The Sunday Million, though, has so many satellite players and all of that that it’s just considered a minefield. The average player in that is pretty bad, so if I don’t know them, they’re probably not great. That’s obviously not always true, but that’s my base assumption, yeah.

SPG: You also frequent the $100K Pro Bounty on Absolute. Are there any big differences in the way you play in bounty tournaments, or are the differences relatively minute?

AK: Well, the only bounty in that tournament is usually Mark Seif, so unless you knock him out … . The one time that I played in a bounty tournament when it really would have made an impact was the [Bay 101] Shooting Star tournament in San Jose about a month ago. There’s a pro with a $5,000 bounty starting at every table, so people are definitely gunning for the bounties there, because obviously $5K for knocking out a bounty is not a bad bonus. Online when I play knockout tournaments like The Sunday Brawl [on Full Tilt], I don’t really treat the bounties special, I just try to play well, and if there is an opportunity for a knockout, then I’ll lean in favor of it if it’s a close spot, like a really close spot, and let that be the tie-breaker. But, yeah, definitely not in that Absolute tournament; I think there’s only one bounty, so …

SPG: So, basically, almost every single time that you’re in a situation where it may come into play, like in The Sunday Brawl, your strategy is weighted a lot more heavily toward simply winning the tournament than just getting that bounty?

AK: I would never do something like make a call to try to get a bounty where it would decrease my overall equity in the tournament. It doesn’t really change strategy that much, but I sometimes assume that people who I don’t know might be gunning for bounties, so I might think about their play a little bit differently, but it really doesn’t come into play too much, I think.

SPG: Now let’s jump to the live poker world. You’re going to be playing in the Foxwoods Poker Classic in just a matter of minutes, here. How differently do you play live tournaments compared to online tournaments?

AK: It’s sort of like how I treat the Sunday Million; I go in and if I don’t know someone, I kind of assume that they’re pretty bad. And usually that ends up being true for most of the prelims and even most of the $10K events that I play in. Early on, you’re so massively deep-stacked compared to online tournaments that I see a lot of flops but I play really tight. I don’t really dance too far with hands without monsters. I play pretty straight-forwardly, and that seems to work pretty well. Or, pretty well when people are playing pretty loose-passive in the early stages. So, I play pretty ABC, and that’s probably a pretty basic formula, but it seems to work against the average live field.

SPG: How do you prepare for the grueling hours of a live tournament, aside from, of course, doing an interview right beforehand to warm up your brain?

AK: (Laughs) I didn’t get a great night’s sleep last night, I don’t know why, but I am eating a full breakfast. The night before, I don’t go out drinking or whatever, and I try to take it easy and keep my mind sharp. I played a couple of tournaments online last night just to keep my edge. I played the prelims, and I bubbled the $2K and the $5K, so I’m already kind of in the zone. I’m kind of a man on a mission in the first place, so I feel pretty prepared.

SPG: I’ve actually heard from a lot of people lately that they’re trying to cut out a lot of the prelims to focus on the main event. So, you don’t think that playing in a lot of the prelims detracts from your main-event play at all?

AK: Oh, no; I definitely think it helps, if anything. It gets you a little comfortable with the venue, wherever it is. A lot of times you run into the same players in the prelims that you run into in the main event, or from prelim to prelim, so that can give you a little bit of an advantage, as well, you go in knowing some of the players. I can’t imagine why playing poker would make me play worse poker in a different tournament; if anything, it makes you sharper.

SPG: I think it has more to do with …

AK: Stamina?

SPG: Yeah, stamina, and being too busy, because every live tournament that you play in is going to have such long hours that you can get into both a mental rut and a physical rut.

AK: Yeah, but I’m used to the long-hours part of it. I think today [day 1 of the main event], we’re only going like eight hours with 10 minute breaks every couple of levels. It doesn’t really bother me; once I get into it, time just goes by. I don’t really think about it.

SPG: Are live tells overrated?

AK: You know, I’m just starting to think that they aren’t. I think there’s definitely a lot of times … there are a few specific tells that I don’t know if I want to give away. If I ask someone for a count and they strongly show me their chips, like they’ll instantly put their chips out so that I can see them, it makes me think that they want me to think that they’re not folding. They don’t care if I know how many chips they have, they’re going to go with it, whatever. So, that’s a tell. I think there are a lot of different ways to tell if someone is good, simply based on physical things.

It’s definitely not overrated, I think it’s huge. I’m just now starting to try to get all of that information in. I used to just look at the stuff I looked at online, like betting patterns, but I think it’s huge.

SPG: How many times have you qualified for the World Series main event, so far?

AK: How many times have I qualified so far? Uhh … zero (laughs). I haven’t been playing satellites. They have the Monte Carlo [EPT Grand Final satellites] and the World Series [satellites] running, and I’m just going to buy into Monte Carlo. And I think for the World Series, I’m not sure if I might start trying to qualify, but I might just buy into that, too.

SPG: So, you’re not one of those pros who goes out of his way to get like five to 10 qualifications for the same event (laughs)?

AK: Nah, not really. I kind of hate satellites. I hate bubbling satellites and I hate the whole atmosphere around the bubble of a satellite. It’s just not fun for me, at all, so I try to avoid them.

SPG: Well, thank you very much for doing this interview, especially right before the Foxwoods Poker Classic main event. Good luck!

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