Online Poker: Interview with Mike 'SirWatts' Watson

Waterloo, Canada, is claiming more and more poker success these days, as the city is, apparently, a breeding ground for online poker phenoms. The latest Waterloo resident to make a splash (no pun intended) is Mike “SirWatts” Watson. Watson had an incredible run online in 2007, and he has already pulled into the top 20 in the Online Player of the Year race for 2008, earning almost $300,000 in qualified cashes.

But, up until July, Watson had never made a six-figure score. Well, July came and went, and he still can’t put a six-figure score on his résumé — because $1,673,770 has seven figures in it. He won that sum when he took down the Bellagio Cup IV main event, which took place right after the World Series of Poker.

Card Player got in touch with Watson shortly after the Bellagio Cup main event to talk to the math whiz about that big win, how to play effective deep-stacked and short-stacked poker, and what to expect in $10,000 buy-in live events compared to online tournaments.


Shawn Patrick Green: So, how does it feel to have a $1.7 million score?

Mike “SirWatts” Watson: It’s amazing. It is every tournament poker player’s goal. I always kind of believed I’d get there, that if I kept playing these tournaments, I’d eventually get lucky and be able to win one. But this happened so quickly, and with the way it happened, with a bunch of huge hands … I won a huge coin flip on the river against [David] Benyamine. It was really unbelievable, the way that it actually happened.

Obviously I’ve been doing really well online, and I’ve played cash games and done well, too. I actually had a pretty big year in 2007 — nothing compared to this year, obviously. My goal this year was to get that first big six-figure tournament score; I’d never had one. I’d never won any of the really, really big online tournaments. So, that was sort of my goal, but I guess I overshot that a little bit [laughs].

SPG: [Laughs] Just a little bit. Well, Bellagio recently instituted triple starting stacks, which meant that you had 45,000 in chips to start. What’s your plan of attack with that kind of stack?

MW: When you get into the deep-stack situations at the beginning of the tournament, that’s when having played a lot of cash games online really starts to come in handy. I think a lot of tournament players who are purely tournament players are really uncomfortable playing that deep; they don’t know how to play with so many chips in front of them relative to the size of the blinds. They make some mistakes over-valuing hands and not realizing the importance of position when they’re that deep. So, my cash-game background helped me out a lot, and, at that point, you’re definitely really looking to get involved in a lot of pots with the weak players to try to make the nuts against them and get paid off or just out-play them post-flop and take pots away when they’re out of position and not willing to defend their hands.

SPG: What other kinds of mistakes are you seeing people make during the deep-stacked portions of the tournaments? In what ways can you exploit them?

MW: A lot of the mistakes involve the fact that they’re not really controlling the size of the pots as well as they should be with their marginal hands. They’re getting too much money in with one-pair types of hands against opponents who are pretty tight players. Or sometimes it’s the complete opposite and people are afraid to get the full value out of their hands. They think, “But what if he check-raises me here? What would I do? There is so much money behind.” So, it really comes down to not being afraid and getting a little bit of extra value when you have a marginal but best hand. And it is also important to be able to make big folds to get away from hands when you have to.

SPG: You’ve had a lot of success online, and those scores are by no means small, but they must feel that way compared to this. Has it been harder to stay focused playing online after winning so much?

MW: We’ll see. I haven’t actually played that much at all since. I played yesterday for the first time, I played about 125 hands or so of pot-limit Omaha, and I still felt fine; I think it’ll be OK. I guess at first it is going to be a little bit weird getting myself to care about the money again. But I don’t know, I feel like I’ll still be able to jump back in and go right from the start.

SPG: Did you learn any hard lessons after you’d played your first few $10K events, or was it not much different from playing online tournaments?

MW: I went on a terrible run when I started playing big live events. I think I was 0-17 for cashing in my first $5K-plus buy-in live events, I didn’t cash in a single one of them. I had had a little success in the prelim events, like the $2Ks and $1Ks; I made a couple of final tables and had a few $20K or $30K scores. Finally, I finished 10th in the L.A. Poker Classic main event, which was still only like $60K, but at least it got the monkey off of my back. I had never gotten anywhere close to that deep in a main event before, but I did make it that far, so it wasn’t like the Bellagio win came out of nowhere. I was confident in my game, and I knew that if I could eventually start catching some breaks that I could do it, but compared to my results beforehand, the Bellagio win was, well, pretty excellent.

SPG: Was playing in the $10K live events much different than playing online, though?

MW: Yeah, there’s definitely an adjustment. At first I thought, “It’s still poker, it’s going to be the same. There are a few extra live things because you can actually see people, but it’s not going to be that big of an adjustment.” But it definitely is, because the style of play, the typical style of play that you’re running into, is a lot different than online. People generally play a lot more passively live, especially in tournaments in the U.S.; in Europe, there are a few more crazy people. But in these WPTs in the U.S., especially in the early stages, you’re generally going to find a lot more conservative play. People aren’t going to automatically give you their stacks when they flop top pair when you’re really deep, or anything like that. So, it definitely took a bit of adjusting to get used to, to understand, that in some spots you’ve got to let go of a hand when you wouldn’t want to online because online somebody may be doing something completely ridiculous.

SPG: You’re having a very successful year online, as well. You’re in the top 20 in the Online Player of the Year race. What advice can you give for playing in online tournaments, which, in general, have much shorter starting stacks than big live events?

MW: Online there are a few levels when you’re playing deep in the beginning, and most people just play really tight during those levels and don’t play any hands unless they have monsters. You have to be a much more technical short-stacked player to do well in the online tournaments. When you get down to those 20-big-blinds-or-less stacks, you’ve really got to know when to shove, when you should be taking a shot at the blinds, and all of those things. You sort of work it down to a science based on the players who you are playing against.

SPG: Is there just as much skill involved in short-stacked play as deep-stacked play?

MW: No, I wouldn’t think so. With deep-stacked play, there are a lot more intricate things that can be going on. It opens up the game for a lot more complicated, creative play. But, at the same time, a lot of people underestimate how difficult short-stacked play is. A lot of people think of playing with 20 big blinds as pretty easy, but people still make a lot of mistakes all of the time.

I buy in for 20 big blinds in some big cash games, and there are some cash-game pros who are generally considered to be the best players in the world who have no idea what to do playing against a short-stack like me.

So, it’s a lot more mathematical, and it is a lot more technical play; you can sort of figure out basically an optimal strategy and vary it a little bit based on the actual players who you are playing against. But it is still something that you have to learn. It’s not like it’s all obvious; there is a lot to know about it.

SPG: Do you think that your background in math helped that much, or do you think that there is a plateau to how much math skills can help in poker?

MW: The math definitely helps out a lot. Obviously there is a very mathematical aspect of poker; it is inherently a mathematical game. Bust most of the math involved in poker is high-school-level stuff. Understanding math helped me pick up the more technical aspects of the game fairly quickly. But when you’re playing at the higher levels, there are a lot of other things that are more important; it is not purely a mathematical game.

SPG: What other things are you talking about? And what other life-skills can help you in poker beyond the math?

MW: Understanding people is a big thing. There is also pattern recognition and trying to pick up on people’s tendencies, and so on. But especially live, a lot of the time you can build up a profile of someone. You can start to figure out where they’re coming from and get inside their heads to figure out how they’re thinking about the game and how they’re approaching the tournament. Are they going to be scared when the big money is on the line, or is it no big deal to them? The psychology and a lot of other things definitely come into play.

SPG: What was the biggest ah-ha moment you’ve ever had in poker?

MW: I think one of the biggest moments for me was when I was starting to become a moderately successful tournament player, and I think when I started thinking more about deep-stacked poker was really a key moment in my game when my game started to improve dramatically. When I started thinking about playing cash games and about how sometimes it is good to control the size of the pot and how you can get value later in the hand. I also started to understand that people aren’t going to just always pay you off when you bet, bet, bet. So, that was probably the key, when I started to figure out a lot more of the principles of deep-stacked play.

SPG: How are you continuing to improve your game?

MW: It’s all the same things, really. I’m still talking to my friends about hands. I’ve met all of these guys from Waterloo who are good players and great to bounce hands off of here and there, people like “Timex” [Mike McDonald] and Steve Paul Ambrose. So, a lot of it’s talking to them, and I still post on forums. Also, a lot of it is just thinking things through myself. I’ve gotten to the point where I have all of the fundamentals; I understand enough about the general poker principles that if I sit down and really think about a hand, I should be able to come to a conclusion that is probably going to be correct most of the time. But it’s not always automatic; you’ve got to sit down, think it through, and do the work.

You’re always improving, and you’re always growing, but there are some fundamentals, I guess. I think that if you understand poker on a theoretical level, you’re going to be able to think through situations theoretically and more technically and figure out the correct play. But, at the same time, situations do come up where you’re just like, “Wow, I really don’t know what to do here,” and you’ve got to try to get a second opinion. That’s where talking to friends comes into play to get a different perspective on it, a different angle that you may not have necessarily considered as much.

SPG: Thanks for doing this interview, Mike.

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