Word: hawrilenko
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It’s an uncomfortable truth: in any one game, the worst player can beat the best player in the world. “That’s certainly one thing that makes poker sexy to the average guy,” says Matt Hawrilenko, a 27-year-old professional poker player who graduated from Princeton in 2004, where he worked in the dining halls for financial aid. “In any given day, you can beat the best. Or, certainly, in any given day, you can compete with the best. The average guy is never going...
...situation, or did I just lose money?’ ‘Okay, I won money—did I put myself in a good situation, or did I just get lucky?’ These are questions I ask myself everyday,” says Hawrilenko, one of the world’s best heads-up limit hold’em players. “People don’t do a very good job of being honest or applying any sort of intellectual rigor to try to figure out if I’m doing good...
...Hawrilenko, who now lives in Back Bay, describes his overarching perspective on poker as a “game tree.” Every time he or one of his poker friends chooses an action—whether to raise, fold, or call—he’s taking a different branch of the tree, which is composed of all the possible moves and all the possible ends. As you move up the tree, it narrows down to what is called your distribution, or the hands you can possibly hold. Professionals, Hawrilenko says, try to maximize the value...
...Hawrilenko doesn’t make as clear a distinction between gambling and professional poker playing, but he says that he has greatly diminished the risk factor associated with compulsive gambling. “A lot of times, when people think ‘gambling,’ they think ‘gambling your savings away,’ or playing with money you can’t afford to lose. My cousin asked me the other day, ‘So, can you sit down at the table and lose your house?’ It?...
...kinds of win-rate analyses and determined that his chance of going bust was “pretty much zero,” which meant that he would win in the long run. And it’s safe to say that he has: at the 2009 World Series, Hawrilenko won more than a million dollars when he came in first place at an event. He took $100,688 at yet another one. But these are just incidental wins in a longer stream of acquisitions...