Winner's Circle -- Vivek Rajkumar

The Winner’s Circle takes a look at the biggest wins from the tournament trail through the eyes of the players who made it happen. This series will look at the big hands, toughest opponents, and paths to victory each player took in their most recent tournament win in their own words. If you ever wanted to know what it takes to win a major poker tournament, this is a good place to start.

This week features Vivek Rajkumar, who just defeated 110 opponents to win the $10,000 heads-up no-limit hold’em championship at the L.A. Poker Classic. Rajkumar went about it the hard way, losing his first match against James Mackey, and then winning out the rest of the way to win the losers bracket and challenge the winners-bracket champion, Chris Moore, in the final match. Rajkumar pulled off the 2-0 sweep in the final and took home $350,000 in prize money for his tough accomplishment.


Ryan Lucchesi: How much of a factor did momentum play in your final match against Chris Moore?

Vivek Rajkumar: I had to win two matches in a row, which means I’m a coin flip to win the first match and a coin flip to win the second match, so I’m one-in-four to win the whole championship at that point. I came in thinking I had a slight edge on him, but both of us were exhausted from a full day of playing heads-up poker. You have to contest every single pot when it’s heads up, so both of us were exhausted, and I think he was just more tired than I was, so I think I gained an edge over time.

RL: Did you think you came into the final playing with house money after completing an impressive win-streak to fight your way out of the losers bracket? Do you feel like Moore had everything to lose because he had two chances to win?

VR: Both of us were playing to get the other person to lose. I wasn’t playing a more loose-aggressive strategy. I was just playing my normal game, and he was playing his normal game.

RL: What did you think of the double-elimination structure for the heads-up event?

VR: I think it places too much luck on the first match, because if you get placed in the losers bracket right off the bat, you have to play that many more matches. It’s still very fair, because everybody has to go through the same exact format.

RL: The matches during this heads-up tournament tended to be really short or very long. How important is it to dictate the pace to your opponent in the first few hands of heads-up play?

VR: I think it depends on the opponent. If the opponent is weak heads up, he’s going to let you dictate the pace of the match and control the tempo. A lot of the people in this event are professional heads-up players who play online, and a lot of them are people who play live tournaments full time. Neither one of the people could dictate the tempo in a lot of these matches. Against one specific opponent, I thought I had complete control over him when I won four out of five pots, but besides him, the other matches were between tough and very tough.

RL: I’ll give you two examples toward the extremes. How differently would you approach a match against John Phan, wherein you know it might last for a while, and Scott Seiver, where you know he is going to come out of the gates firing?

VR: Scott Seiver is very good heads up, his edge increases with the number of streets played. His edge before the flop is about the same as mine. His edge on the river is way larger against me than it is on the flop. Against him, I’m going to be gambling a lot preflop, and on the flop, as well. Against somebody like John Phan, both of us are about the same preflop, but I think he makes mistakes as the hand progresses, so I’m looking to play small pots against him…because he plays tournaments all the time, he doesn’t have the same experience with deep, deep no-limit hold’em, so I think he would make mistakes against me on the later streets than the early streets.

RL: Would you like to see other major preliminary heads-up tournaments on the tournament trail?

VR: Yeah, for sure. It’s very specific in that casinos don’t have an incentive to run them besides publicity motives. I think they’re fun…if the format is good, wherein you can play lots of matches and it’s not just a best two-out-of-three, I think it’s a very good idea.

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