My Story

My WSOP Story: Seven Cashes in 2005 With One Rule

Before poker I cut hair. I spent years working with Aldo Coppola in Milan and Rome, doing fashion and television, and I came to Las Vegas with no plan to play cards for a living. I was the guy on the rail asking questions.

"Why don't you just play yourself?"

My friend Daniel Negreanu got tired of the questions. He told me they were always good questions, so why was I not playing? So I decided to enter the 2005 World Series of Poker. I asked him for one piece of advice before I did. He gave me exactly one.

"Don't play stupid."

That was my whole strategy. I had no system, no coach, no hundreds of hours of study. I had one rule, and I followed it in every hand of every event that summer.

What "don't play stupid" meant in practice

It meant I did not bluff people who were never folding. It meant I did not call off my stack with a hand that was only good if the other guy was crazy. It meant I waited. And the thing I learned that summer, which nobody had told me, was that in a big tournament field the money is given to you if you are patient enough to wait for it. Players blessed me with their chips. They made the plays I refused to make, and I was there to collect.

That is how I learned to get into the money first. And once you are in the money with chips, the final table is the same discipline applied for a few more hours.

Seven cashes, seven different events

I cashed seven times in that first World Series, tied for the most cashes of any player in 2005, and each one came in a different event. The games I liked best were pot-limit hold'em, where I made the final table of the $2,000 event, and deuce-to-seven. But the cashes also came in games I had no business cashing in. The $10,000 Pot-Limit Omaha is honestly my worst game, and I cashed in that too.

That is the proof that the rule works. Strategy is game-specific. Not playing stupid travels to every table.

What came after

That summer changed my life. It put me on television, it put me in the biggest cash game at the Bellagio, and it opened doors to private games I never would have found on my own. I became a sponsored pro at Full Tilt Poker. Twenty years later I have more than fifty live cashes and five WSOP final tables, and I still have not won a bracelet, which is the one thing I would trade a few of those cashes for.

The lesson for you

Every new player is looking for the system, the trick, the thing the pros know. I found the real one on my first day and it fit in three words. Most of the money you lose at poker, you lose by doing something you already knew was stupid. The whole game is in the gap between knowing and doing. Close that gap and you will cash. Keep it closed for twenty years and you will still be playing.

More hands and stories from those years are at pokerstories.com.