The age-old questions: How did you get involved with poker? Where did you pick it up?
I started playing poker the summer before I went to college. My friend taught me how to play and we played just for fun. Like most young guys, we would drink a beer and play some cards. When I got into college, I started playing at a small Indian casino and I also developed my game a little bit online. I started playing Limit Hold’em and quickly moved up into a $2/$5 No Limit Hold’em game. That soon became my main game, although I did start to mix in a lot of tournaments as well.
There are a lot of rumors floating around about how you raised the cash to play in this year’s WSOP; we heard you threw your entire bankroll into the Omaha 8/b tournament, in which you finished third.
Can you give us the skinny?
Well, to start, I didn’t really have a bankroll. I had borrowed money from my parents to enable myself to play in six WSOP events. My initial goal was to make the money back and cash in two events. Five of the events I had picked were Hold’em tournaments and the sixth was the $1,500 Omaha 8/b. I had played a fair amount of Omaha and thought that I was a pretty skilled player and that I would have a decent shot at cashing in this event if things fell into place right.
You did a bit better than just cashing, young man; you made your first World Series final table and came in third place.
Tell us about your early life, Phil. You were born in Ireland; what kind of child were you?
Our family moved to Massachusetts when I was 4… I remember my introduction to capitalism. It was around third or fourth grade, when I found out that you could buy one pack of firecrackers for 25 cents, but if you bought five packs, they’d be 20 cents each. When I saw that, I wasn’t thinking I could buy five packs, sell them for 25 cents and make a 25 cent profit; I was thinking: Where do you get the firecrackers? What if you could buy these things in volume? Anyway, some kid in the schoolyard was the source of the firecrackers. I’m like, “Dude, tell me where you get them from.” He said, “No way, this is my business.”
So I made my first-ever business deal. I said, “You tell me where the firecrackers are and I’ll give you five bucks.” And he was cool, but I said, “Look, I need some insurance. If I’m going to go to this place where I can supposedly buy firecrackers and the guy doesn’t show up, I want my five bucks back.” He agreed.
I had to sneak out of the house because my parents would never let me go into the city alone. I had to go into Boston and hang out at a basketball court near Marconi’s restaurant. I’d never taken the subway into the city in my life before. I was waiting on this bench and the longer I waited, the more and more foolish I started to feel — talk about being hustled as a 10-year-old kid! I was feeling like the lowest, dumbest 10-year-old in the whole Boston area. As I was thinking about what a dummy I was, this kid, who must have been about 20, came and sat next to me. He said, “Watcha doing?” I said, “I’m waiting to buy a brick.” A brick is what they would call an 80-pack of firecrackers, and I didn’t want to mention firecrackers in case he was a cop. He said, “Do you want any buzz rockets, too?”
I was like “Oh my god, this is actually happening!” I had $17… and I negotiated a good deal. Back in the schoolyard, I used the powers of my personality, and the fact that I had diversified… I became the firecracker king. I was always like a little mini-capitalist guy, always looking for the next thing.
I remember thinking my brother was insane one day. I don’t know what possessed him to do this, but… he decided that firecrackers were bad and that he was going to throw his in the stream. I thought he was crazy. I think that was the start of me thinking for myself, because I loved and respected my brother, but I couldn’t understand why anyone could be so crazy that they would destroy such a valuable commodity. That’s when I realized for the first time that even the smartest, sharpest, most lovable and intense people can have faulty thinking. I remember thinking, “From now on, I’m going to make all my own decisions.”
Discover what made Phil an independent thinker…
So you’ve always been an independent thinker?
Absolutely. In college I was taking Introduction to Logic… there were 150 people in the room and the professor was rambling on and on, and he said something that was so wrong. He said that, although there are a lot of uncertainties in the world, there are certain inalienable truths; things that were true, regardless of whether you could prove them or not. I thought that was absolutely wrong. There’s nothing that can actually be proved.
So I spoke up and tried to explain this basically simple philosophical concept to him. He told me I was wrong in front of the whole class, even though I’ve later found that many philosophers share my views.
I went up to him after class, and I said, “So, you’re saying there are such things as inalienable truths?” He said, “Yes, it’s true.” I said, “No, it’s not true. And I can’t imagine learning anything from someone who can’t understand this super-basic tenet, which is so self-evident to me it’s not even funny.” I asked him to sign a slip withdrawing me from his class. He was furious... but I’m not going to take classes from some guy who’s completely missing something when he’s supposed to be teaching me about the greater truths of the universe.
That’s what I was like. If I thought something was right, it didn’t matter if everyone in the world thought differently. I was just like, “Oh, the whole world’s wrong again.”
We guess it’s been that way ever since…
(Laughs) Kinda. This is going to sound counterintuitive, but as you get older, there are times where it’s correct to not open your mind to a new line of thought, because there’s so much stuff coming at us every day; you have to be selective. For instance, without knowing the complete philosophies of the Ku Klux Klan, it’s very easy to see they’re retarded. You don’t have to drink the whole quart of milk to find out it’s spoiled. You can take little dribs and drabs and move on.
The way that relates to poker is that when I started reading poker books, I’d be doing it because I’d think, “Well, this guy’s an author; he’s smart and he knows what he’s talking about.” But in every book I’ve ever read, I’ve found a couple of things that aren’t true; not key points, but subtler things. I may not have known it at the time, but when I got better at poker, I’d reread books and spot them. The point is that the more you get into something, the more comfortable you should be in making your own decisions. You stick to your guns because, after all, it’s your money, not the author’s.
But I wouldn’t be anywhere near the poker player I am today had I not read those books. Some guys play cards and they never pick up books. Like Antonio. But I’m like a nut ball. I’ll read everything. You can make a better grilled cheese sandwich if you understand how the best cooks in the world make grilled cheese sandwiches.
We’ve wandered off the topic slightly. You were telling us your life story…
OK, so I left school, and I wanted to go live in San Diego… there were no winters! I wanted to have a little drift about before joining the real world and finding a job in my field, which was engineering. So my buddy and I got on our motorcycles and zigzagged the U.S., “backroading” it the whole way. Seventeen thousand miles later, the party was over and I had to get a job. So I was in San Diego, making hermetically sealed packaging for silicon chips. The job had its perks, like having access to liquid nitrogen… but, ultimately, I got bored and went off traveling again through Europe and Turkey. I remember thinking that when I got back to the States, I wanted a fun job.
How did Phil get serious about games?
My pursuit of the perfect job took me all over the place. But then one day, although I never eat burgers, for some reason I got the urge to eat a burger. I went into this old restaurant with a low-slung roof and ordered a burger from the steakhouse… But then I heard this clattering noise. It sounded like dice; but 40 dice? Was it craps? I couldn’t figure it out. I turned the corner, and there were 40 people playing backgammon.
In college, I used to play backgammon, as well as chess, hearts, spades, poker — everything — and so one thing led to another, and I started playing this guy. I was petrified, because he was over 60. I thought that anyone over a certain age would have been playing for, like, 20 years and would be great at the game. I’d only ever played for 10 cents or 20 cents a point, and this guy was used to playing $5 or $10 a point. I guess he felt sorry for me, and so just to humor me, he played me for 50 cents a point. Just three or four moves into the game, I remember thinking, “Oh my God. I’m better than him. Maybe I should play him for more.” It didn’t take me long to realize that there were people in that place who were hopeless at backgammon — and they were playing for $5, $10, $20 a point!
I returned the following week and started playing anyone for $10 or $20 a point. I soon found that in the whole restaurant there were only two guys who were better than me. By the end of the month… my pockets were brimming with cash. I was like, “Wow! There’s money in playing games.” My career guidance counselor had never told me this.
So you moved to New York to take it seriously…
Yeah. There were two or three clubs in New York, and you could wake up whenever you wanted and just drift in. The great thing was that the weak players — the lawyers and Wall Street guys who played recreationally — turned up between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. So you could wake up anytime after midday, get a little sushi, wander in, and you’d be early for work. I was the happiest guy alive.
But then one day, it dried up… So I decided to give poker a shot. I’d give it one year to see what this whole poker world was about, and review the situation after six months. Then I’d decide to either stay in poker or find a job on Wall Street. Things started picking up really quickly. … It was like my backgammon world was shrinking and my poker world was expanding.
At the end of the year, I decided that… I could make a living playing poker, but… it wasn’t profitable enough that I could essentially get rich. Remember: I wanted to have fun and get rich.
Towards the end of ’99, I got a call from Antonio. He said, “Phil, you gotta get out here.” He told me how much money he was making at Bay 101. I couldn’t believe it. I shot off to Bay 101 and I was just pounding on the game. I was like, “Wow!” I wasn’t even a phenomenal poker player then, but there were hardly any pros there and the players were just sick. I said, “Antonio, why don’t we get an apartment here?” He reached over to the classifieds, and the next day we had an apartment. We were there for two years until the action dried up; I guess those guys either went broke or got tired of losing $10,000 or $20,000 a day.
Then I started playing twice a week at Lucky Chances, and Antonio and I soon realized we had to move to Vegas or LA. I went to LA, where I found the Commerce Casino… I got real lucky, because poker just got more and more explosive and No Limit Hold’em was what people wanted to play. And by the time it got big, I’d already built up two years of playing it twice a week with some of the toughest players in the world.
When did the hoodie first make an appearance?
It was back in New York. In New York, the most effective way to get from A to B was on a mountain bike. You don’t want a long jacket when you’re riding a bike, so the optimal thing was to have a jacket that went right to your waist… Also, when I first started playing cards, there was an intense intimidation factor. But mainly, it was because I’m a very forthcoming, emotionally open fella, and I figured I was rife with tells. The hood was initially about trying to operate from the ivory tower without being observed. The more I wore the hood, the more it became like Linus’ blanket. I put it on and I would be in the zone. It was in 2002 or 2003 when the media came along that the “Unabomber” nickname spread. I’d had the name for a while, but the media really loved it for some reason.
What was your pickup line when you met Jennifer Tilly?
There was no particular pickup line. The first time we hung out, at the Commerce Invitational, we had a lot of fun, and I felt it would be too forward to ask her for her phone number, so I didn’t. We were hanging out, and she was like, “I wish I knew how to play poker like you and your fellow pros.”
I noticed that she was highly accessorized, with the belt, the boots; the whole works. I said, “Well, if you teach me how to accessorize, I will teach you how to play poker.”
It was just fun social banter that maybe could be termed as a pickup line. But I was really happy, because she asked for my number at the end of day one, and that was great. But then, of course, you realize that girls never call. Even if they want to call, then they’re still less than 3%. The next time we met, I hoped she might ask for my number again, but I thought I’d make a gambit play. I said, “Nice hanging out… Gotta catch my plane…” She said, “Oh, you should give me your number so I can give you a call.” I said — and this was rehearsed in my mind should the situation arise — “Well, what’s the point? Last time I gave you my number and you didn’t call.” She looked at me with consternation and confusion. But I didn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable, so right in that two-second window when she was speechless, I said, “How about this: Instead of me giving you my number and it being 3% you call me, why don’t I get your number, and then it will be 100% that I call you?”
And with such clean and irrefutable logic, she, in a moment of pure abandon — she never gives her number out — said, “Yeah, OK.” And she gave me her number. And that was the end of that
I started playing poker the summer before I went to college. My friend taught me how to play and we played just for fun. Like most young guys, we would drink a beer and play some cards. When I got into college, I started playing at a small Indian casino and I also developed my game a little bit online. I started playing Limit Hold’em and quickly moved up into a $2/$5 No Limit Hold’em game. That soon became my main game, although I did start to mix in a lot of tournaments as well.
There are a lot of rumors floating around about how you raised the cash to play in this year’s WSOP; we heard you threw your entire bankroll into the Omaha 8/b tournament, in which you finished third.
Can you give us the skinny?
Well, to start, I didn’t really have a bankroll. I had borrowed money from my parents to enable myself to play in six WSOP events. My initial goal was to make the money back and cash in two events. Five of the events I had picked were Hold’em tournaments and the sixth was the $1,500 Omaha 8/b. I had played a fair amount of Omaha and thought that I was a pretty skilled player and that I would have a decent shot at cashing in this event if things fell into place right.
You did a bit better than just cashing, young man; you made your first World Series final table and came in third place.
Tell us about your early life, Phil. You were born in Ireland; what kind of child were you?
Our family moved to Massachusetts when I was 4… I remember my introduction to capitalism. It was around third or fourth grade, when I found out that you could buy one pack of firecrackers for 25 cents, but if you bought five packs, they’d be 20 cents each. When I saw that, I wasn’t thinking I could buy five packs, sell them for 25 cents and make a 25 cent profit; I was thinking: Where do you get the firecrackers? What if you could buy these things in volume? Anyway, some kid in the schoolyard was the source of the firecrackers. I’m like, “Dude, tell me where you get them from.” He said, “No way, this is my business.”
So I made my first-ever business deal. I said, “You tell me where the firecrackers are and I’ll give you five bucks.” And he was cool, but I said, “Look, I need some insurance. If I’m going to go to this place where I can supposedly buy firecrackers and the guy doesn’t show up, I want my five bucks back.” He agreed.
I had to sneak out of the house because my parents would never let me go into the city alone. I had to go into Boston and hang out at a basketball court near Marconi’s restaurant. I’d never taken the subway into the city in my life before. I was waiting on this bench and the longer I waited, the more and more foolish I started to feel — talk about being hustled as a 10-year-old kid! I was feeling like the lowest, dumbest 10-year-old in the whole Boston area. As I was thinking about what a dummy I was, this kid, who must have been about 20, came and sat next to me. He said, “Watcha doing?” I said, “I’m waiting to buy a brick.” A brick is what they would call an 80-pack of firecrackers, and I didn’t want to mention firecrackers in case he was a cop. He said, “Do you want any buzz rockets, too?”
I was like “Oh my god, this is actually happening!” I had $17… and I negotiated a good deal. Back in the schoolyard, I used the powers of my personality, and the fact that I had diversified… I became the firecracker king. I was always like a little mini-capitalist guy, always looking for the next thing.
I remember thinking my brother was insane one day. I don’t know what possessed him to do this, but… he decided that firecrackers were bad and that he was going to throw his in the stream. I thought he was crazy. I think that was the start of me thinking for myself, because I loved and respected my brother, but I couldn’t understand why anyone could be so crazy that they would destroy such a valuable commodity. That’s when I realized for the first time that even the smartest, sharpest, most lovable and intense people can have faulty thinking. I remember thinking, “From now on, I’m going to make all my own decisions.”
Discover what made Phil an independent thinker…
So you’ve always been an independent thinker?
Absolutely. In college I was taking Introduction to Logic… there were 150 people in the room and the professor was rambling on and on, and he said something that was so wrong. He said that, although there are a lot of uncertainties in the world, there are certain inalienable truths; things that were true, regardless of whether you could prove them or not. I thought that was absolutely wrong. There’s nothing that can actually be proved.
So I spoke up and tried to explain this basically simple philosophical concept to him. He told me I was wrong in front of the whole class, even though I’ve later found that many philosophers share my views.
I went up to him after class, and I said, “So, you’re saying there are such things as inalienable truths?” He said, “Yes, it’s true.” I said, “No, it’s not true. And I can’t imagine learning anything from someone who can’t understand this super-basic tenet, which is so self-evident to me it’s not even funny.” I asked him to sign a slip withdrawing me from his class. He was furious... but I’m not going to take classes from some guy who’s completely missing something when he’s supposed to be teaching me about the greater truths of the universe.
That’s what I was like. If I thought something was right, it didn’t matter if everyone in the world thought differently. I was just like, “Oh, the whole world’s wrong again.”
We guess it’s been that way ever since…
(Laughs) Kinda. This is going to sound counterintuitive, but as you get older, there are times where it’s correct to not open your mind to a new line of thought, because there’s so much stuff coming at us every day; you have to be selective. For instance, without knowing the complete philosophies of the Ku Klux Klan, it’s very easy to see they’re retarded. You don’t have to drink the whole quart of milk to find out it’s spoiled. You can take little dribs and drabs and move on.
The way that relates to poker is that when I started reading poker books, I’d be doing it because I’d think, “Well, this guy’s an author; he’s smart and he knows what he’s talking about.” But in every book I’ve ever read, I’ve found a couple of things that aren’t true; not key points, but subtler things. I may not have known it at the time, but when I got better at poker, I’d reread books and spot them. The point is that the more you get into something, the more comfortable you should be in making your own decisions. You stick to your guns because, after all, it’s your money, not the author’s.
But I wouldn’t be anywhere near the poker player I am today had I not read those books. Some guys play cards and they never pick up books. Like Antonio. But I’m like a nut ball. I’ll read everything. You can make a better grilled cheese sandwich if you understand how the best cooks in the world make grilled cheese sandwiches.
We’ve wandered off the topic slightly. You were telling us your life story…
OK, so I left school, and I wanted to go live in San Diego… there were no winters! I wanted to have a little drift about before joining the real world and finding a job in my field, which was engineering. So my buddy and I got on our motorcycles and zigzagged the U.S., “backroading” it the whole way. Seventeen thousand miles later, the party was over and I had to get a job. So I was in San Diego, making hermetically sealed packaging for silicon chips. The job had its perks, like having access to liquid nitrogen… but, ultimately, I got bored and went off traveling again through Europe and Turkey. I remember thinking that when I got back to the States, I wanted a fun job.
How did Phil get serious about games?
My pursuit of the perfect job took me all over the place. But then one day, although I never eat burgers, for some reason I got the urge to eat a burger. I went into this old restaurant with a low-slung roof and ordered a burger from the steakhouse… But then I heard this clattering noise. It sounded like dice; but 40 dice? Was it craps? I couldn’t figure it out. I turned the corner, and there were 40 people playing backgammon.
In college, I used to play backgammon, as well as chess, hearts, spades, poker — everything — and so one thing led to another, and I started playing this guy. I was petrified, because he was over 60. I thought that anyone over a certain age would have been playing for, like, 20 years and would be great at the game. I’d only ever played for 10 cents or 20 cents a point, and this guy was used to playing $5 or $10 a point. I guess he felt sorry for me, and so just to humor me, he played me for 50 cents a point. Just three or four moves into the game, I remember thinking, “Oh my God. I’m better than him. Maybe I should play him for more.” It didn’t take me long to realize that there were people in that place who were hopeless at backgammon — and they were playing for $5, $10, $20 a point!
I returned the following week and started playing anyone for $10 or $20 a point. I soon found that in the whole restaurant there were only two guys who were better than me. By the end of the month… my pockets were brimming with cash. I was like, “Wow! There’s money in playing games.” My career guidance counselor had never told me this.
So you moved to New York to take it seriously…
Yeah. There were two or three clubs in New York, and you could wake up whenever you wanted and just drift in. The great thing was that the weak players — the lawyers and Wall Street guys who played recreationally — turned up between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. So you could wake up anytime after midday, get a little sushi, wander in, and you’d be early for work. I was the happiest guy alive.
But then one day, it dried up… So I decided to give poker a shot. I’d give it one year to see what this whole poker world was about, and review the situation after six months. Then I’d decide to either stay in poker or find a job on Wall Street. Things started picking up really quickly. … It was like my backgammon world was shrinking and my poker world was expanding.
At the end of the year, I decided that… I could make a living playing poker, but… it wasn’t profitable enough that I could essentially get rich. Remember: I wanted to have fun and get rich.
Towards the end of ’99, I got a call from Antonio. He said, “Phil, you gotta get out here.” He told me how much money he was making at Bay 101. I couldn’t believe it. I shot off to Bay 101 and I was just pounding on the game. I was like, “Wow!” I wasn’t even a phenomenal poker player then, but there were hardly any pros there and the players were just sick. I said, “Antonio, why don’t we get an apartment here?” He reached over to the classifieds, and the next day we had an apartment. We were there for two years until the action dried up; I guess those guys either went broke or got tired of losing $10,000 or $20,000 a day.
Then I started playing twice a week at Lucky Chances, and Antonio and I soon realized we had to move to Vegas or LA. I went to LA, where I found the Commerce Casino… I got real lucky, because poker just got more and more explosive and No Limit Hold’em was what people wanted to play. And by the time it got big, I’d already built up two years of playing it twice a week with some of the toughest players in the world.
When did the hoodie first make an appearance?
It was back in New York. In New York, the most effective way to get from A to B was on a mountain bike. You don’t want a long jacket when you’re riding a bike, so the optimal thing was to have a jacket that went right to your waist… Also, when I first started playing cards, there was an intense intimidation factor. But mainly, it was because I’m a very forthcoming, emotionally open fella, and I figured I was rife with tells. The hood was initially about trying to operate from the ivory tower without being observed. The more I wore the hood, the more it became like Linus’ blanket. I put it on and I would be in the zone. It was in 2002 or 2003 when the media came along that the “Unabomber” nickname spread. I’d had the name for a while, but the media really loved it for some reason.
What was your pickup line when you met Jennifer Tilly?
There was no particular pickup line. The first time we hung out, at the Commerce Invitational, we had a lot of fun, and I felt it would be too forward to ask her for her phone number, so I didn’t. We were hanging out, and she was like, “I wish I knew how to play poker like you and your fellow pros.”
I noticed that she was highly accessorized, with the belt, the boots; the whole works. I said, “Well, if you teach me how to accessorize, I will teach you how to play poker.”
It was just fun social banter that maybe could be termed as a pickup line. But I was really happy, because she asked for my number at the end of day one, and that was great. But then, of course, you realize that girls never call. Even if they want to call, then they’re still less than 3%. The next time we met, I hoped she might ask for my number again, but I thought I’d make a gambit play. I said, “Nice hanging out… Gotta catch my plane…” She said, “Oh, you should give me your number so I can give you a call.” I said — and this was rehearsed in my mind should the situation arise — “Well, what’s the point? Last time I gave you my number and you didn’t call.” She looked at me with consternation and confusion. But I didn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable, so right in that two-second window when she was speechless, I said, “How about this: Instead of me giving you my number and it being 3% you call me, why don’t I get your number, and then it will be 100% that I call you?”
And with such clean and irrefutable logic, she, in a moment of pure abandon — she never gives her number out — said, “Yeah, OK.” And she gave me her number. And that was the end of that
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