WSOP: Main Event Q and A -- Bernard Lee

Harvard graduate Bernard Lee made his first appearance to the poker public when he finished deep in the 2005 World Series of Poker main event, eventually ending his run in 13th place and earning $400,000 for his efforts. Since then, he has become a regular figure on the felt, known not only for his consistent results, but also for his contributions as a poker columnist for the Boston Herald and for ESPN.com. He is also the host of “The Bernard Lee Poker Show,” and is a regular commentator for the WSOP and its circuit events. Card Player caught up with Lee the day after he busted out of the main event.

Ryan Cadrette: You mentioned that you're trying to improve your game, and specifically your post-flop play. Could you talk more about that?

Bernard Lee: Back in 2005, when I made my deep run, I came home and I wrote down all of the things that I do well. Then I wrote down all of the things that I do poorly. I definitely put heads up on that list, because I had never been in that situation. I put down post-flop play. I put down positional play. I put down gaining big chips and, honestly, playing the big stack. Those are the things that over the last three years I have had to work so hard on trying to do to round myself out as a better player. Because if I want to try to continue doing what I am doing in the world of poker, not only on the media side, but specifically on the playing side, I've got to improve.

RC: You're obviously part of this rapidly growing media sphere around poker, and have been contributing to the field of discourse surrounding the game. How have you been taking a more academic approach to looking at that aspect of poker?
BL: I think that one of the things that I was known for was writing down every hand that I play. For the four years that I've been playing, I've literally written down every single hand that I've played. And people may think that's crazy, or people may think that that's ridiculously academic, or whatever. But my father always told me that the harder you work, the better your results will be. I haven't played a hundred million hands online like some of these online kids, and I haven't played as many hands as Doyle Brunson or Daniel Negreanu or Phil Ivey. But what I have done is play in tournaments. I've played in over 50 live tournaments so far, to date, and I have a record of every single one of them. So, what I do is I go back over all of these hands, and I look over what I did wrong and what I did right. So, before the main event, I'll go back and look at every single main event, and I'll see the ones that I did poorly in, and I'll look at why I played them poorly. I'll look and I'll say, OK, you took too many chances here out of position. Then, based off of that, I'll be able to go down and develop my strategy.

For a sport like golf you would go and warm up beforehand. You would go hit a couple of balls on the range. You can't do that in poker. I guess you could go online and play a quick sit-and-go or something, but when push comes to shove, you can't warm up in poker. I can. I go pick up one of these sheets, I look through the tournament, and I'll play through the first five levels in my head. It takes about an hour, and I think about how it all played out. But when I get there and I sit down at my table, it's not the first hand of the day for me. I've gone through multiple hands in my head, and I'm warm, I'm ready; let's go. So, that first hand that I'm involved in, I'm not cold. I've stretched, I'm warmed up, and I'm ready to hit the ground running.
RC: At this year's main event, they added a few levels to the beginning of the tournament and have doubled the size of the starting stack since 2005. Have these changes to the structure had a big impact on your playing experience?

BL: I think it helps us pros a ton, because you get a ton more play. As I said, I had 26,000 chips at the end of day 1, and whereas last year it probably would have been at 400-800, this year we're at 250-500. That's fantastic. The more play I can get, the more chances I can take by playing those gapped suited connectors, and so on. In all honesty, if someone had raised in front of me in '05, and I had pocket fours, I would let it go. I wouldn't even think about calling. Because there's only a 7.5-1 chance that I hit that. Now I will take that chance as long as the person has a lot of chips to go after and I can afford it. So, it has really afforded us pros a bigger advantage because we can play more, and the amateurs are still just jamming.

The one thing about the World Series is that with a lot of the amateurs you can't get them off of hands. If you play a hand, like, if they limp in from mid-position, and you raise to six times the big blind, they're calling.

I think that a perfect example is that I had pocket tens under the gun and raised to 1,650. Then I had the big blind jam me for 22,000. So, I went through it in my mind. I had around 40,000, so I still would have had about 20,000 left. The first thing was, and no amateur should ever admit this, that this was his first World Series. Don’t ever admit that this was the only event you've played in the whole Series. That's a really dumb mistake. So, if he's not that experienced of a player, if he had aces or kings or queens, he wasn't going to jam like that, because he would want me to call. So, the hands that I put him on were jacks, which were a possibility, but also nines, eights, sevens, or sixes, and also overcards. So, just the range of hands that he held, around 40 percent of the hands I was crushing, one I would be dead against, if he had jacks, and all the other ones I'm 50-50. I'm still going to have about the 20,000 starting stack, we're at the 250-500 level, whatever, let's see if I'm right. So, I call, and he flipped over A-K, and then I flopped my set and he was gone. Those are the kinds of coin flips you're going to have to survive. So, it's such an advantage for us to have this kind of structure, because it affords us a lot of play.

RC: And doesn't this also keeps them happy because they have so many chips in front of them?

BL: Exactly. And what you also have to remember is that there are a lot of amateurs who have never had 20,000 in chips in front of them in their entire lives. I'm not even talking about in the beginning; I'm talking about in the whole tournament. A lot of these people start out with 1,000 in chips playing at these local events. So when they get 20,000 in chips, it's like they're at the final table. So, when they look down at 20,000 in chips and the blinds are 50-100, they don't know what to do with themselves. So, they're calling 1,500 and 2,000 bets in the first level when they have top pair weak-kicker. So, I think that's a good thing for us that they just love to donate chips to us. If you have a good first day and get some luck, you can have a lot of chips by the end of the day.

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