Ryan gutshtallin Welch is a professional poker player based out of Tennessee who has had a great 2009 so far. With wins in the PokerStars Nightly $65K, $50K, runner up finishes in the $85k, Cake Sunday $50k, the Full Tilt Poker $1k Monday, and third place finishes in both the $50 cubed and the $100 rebuy... you could say that the man is on a roll. However, that would be an understatement because all of those were just in the month of February. Add a win in the UBOC for $65K in January, two more wins in the $34k nightly and the $50 1r+1a, another second place finish in the FTP Monday $1k and $100 rebuy among other final tables in March to those finishes, and his total online tournament cashes tracked by PocketFives so far this year add up to around $350,000.

Following is an interview with the #21 ranked online poker tournament player in the world:

Hi Ryan, thanks for taking a few minutes to chat. It’s probably been a crazy couple of months for you, what has it been like?

I took a LOT of time off during December and played live for about two weeks in January for the WPT Biloxi. I played sparingly online on Sundays and was able to hit a big score winning the UltimateBet Online Championship six max event for about $66k. I told myself once February started I was going to grind all month so that meant basically 5-6 days a week. I was in a horrible downswing after my UBOC win; I was getting deep over and over and losing 80/20s and all my important flips.

I was getting very frustrated with poker and I’m sure all my poker friends could tell; most of them were running bad as well. I finally had some small success in a tourney on Cake two Sundays ago; getting 2nd in the $50k Guaranteed for about $9,000. The very next day I finished 2nd in the $1k Monday on Full Tilt Poker for $57,000. I could feel the momentum shift and was really getting a lot of confidence back after the $1k tourney, which I felt hand for hand was one of the best tourneys I have ever played.


The $1k Monday is a tough tournament; second place there is a great accomplishment, two in less than a month is sick… What was your approach to playing in one of the toughest regular tournament fields online?

Unlike most MTTs online, the $1k Monday is packed with good thinking players and it has had a great structure ever since FTP changed the amount of chips each player begins with to 5,000 starting stack. Early on I was pretty much just playing ABC poker and looking to get that big hand to crack someone. I didn’t mind seeing a lot of flops early on, specifically when I had position.

Another thing I noticed was that a lot more cash game guys that play the $1k Monday more than they play some other high limit MTTs. The relative unknowns to many MTT regulars are cash game guys and they tend to play a much different style in certain situations. They will definitely tend to open pretty light in different positions and really look to out play people post-flop. That’s why I love playing deep stack poker; it opens up so many more possibilities and the Monday $1k is structured to allow a lot of post flop-play, even when you get deep.

Interesting, do you think the cash game regulars have any advantage in tournaments with stacks that deep?

Maybe to a certain extent, I have always continued to play cash games online. Which I think is pretty unusual for a lot of MTT regulars. I definitely think I’m a better tourney player though and I still spend about 85% of my time in tournaments. I do think that some cash game guys can definitely have an advantage once the hand goes to the flop. However its a two-way street and many of them spew off chips trying to make elaborate plays post-flop. The really good players are just solid all around; their games are just as good short stacked as they are deep stacked and they know when to adjust their opening ranges and pick up the aggression pre-flop.

Tell me about how you got started in poker…

My best friend from high school played on PartyPoker, and got me into playing small $10 SNGs. I didn’t play much in college until I had surgery on my throwing shoulder and was unable to play baseball for about eight months. All I was able to do was rehab, work out, and play cards on side. I started to dabble in cash games and began to make decent money playing $1/$2 on Party and Paradise Poker. Once I was into my senior year at Southern Illinois, I was making good money for a college kid playing $1/$2 NL Hold’em and $22 180-man SNGs on Stars. I didn’t take MTTs seriously until at least a year after I graduated.

I had taken a job out of school and was making good money there as an account sales executive for a large corporation in Nashville. I was able to afford to take some shots at buying into MTTs and won my first big one on Stars for like $7k. From there I found that I enjoyed MTTs a lot more than cash. I had ideas of becoming a poker pro but didn’t want to take that jump until I had a serious bankroll behind me. Luckily I won the Sunday Brawl for $68k in January of 2008. That gave me the scratch to quit my job and make poker my full time job.

Were you doing anything to work on your game just before the big win?

PokerXFactor really opened my eyes to how tourneys were supposed to be played. In my opinion, I wasn’t really that good of a player when I won the Sunday Brawl. I also started reading PocketFives about three months before the win. Watching the pros talk about different lines and situations helped me a lot, especially learning HAND RANGES... that was huge.

If you could give one piece of advice to Joe poker player what would it be?

POSITION, POSITION, POSITION; if a beginning player wants to make his life easier he should stop making calls out of position.


You’re a regular poster on the PocketFives forums and you're ranked 11th in the PLB and 32nd in the Pro Poll, what does that mean to you?

Leaderboard rankings are fun and all but they really don’t mean a whole lot to me. I think earning the respect of your peers is much more important. I have been able to meet a lot of great guys through poker and have some great friendships that I hope to have for a long time. When someone genuinely says to you that they respect your game, that’s all you can ask for.


You mentioned being in Tunica at the beginning of the year, should we expect to see you taking the live poker world by storm soon?

I was in Biloxi in January and then went to Tunica for WSOP Circuit Main Event in February. I plan on playing a lot live this year. I’m playing the Wynn series next month as well as WSOP Circuit in New Orleans, then the WSOP all summer. A few buddies of mine and I rented a house for a month during June, It’s definitely my goal to hit a big live score this year.


So you’ll be in Vegas for the WSOP, will you be taking advantage of the bottle service and crazy nightlife during the WSOP?

Actually probably not, my girlfriend will be there with me so I’m sure we will have fun but its still business time, and a bracelet is always the main goal. I’m slightly older than a lot of internet pros at 25. I have partied my fair share, and I would rather make money at this point. However, if one of us wins a bracelet…you bet your ass we will be partying hard.

Any shout-outs before we go?

The guys I discuss poker with on a daily basis… highlite11, thechemist83, Patrolman35, comandr_cool, croll103, I Spew Chips, jbt449, lockdownpokah, ostatepoke45, doubledave22, stankee1 and many more… and all the guys that have helped my game so tremendously.

Recent Scores for gutshtallin
<table width="90%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td><table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td valign="bottom"></td><td>$98,956.00 </td><td valign="bottom"></td></tr></tbody></table> </td></tr><tr><td>$215 buy-in, Sunday Warm-Up [$750,000 guaranteed] on PokerStars. 10/26/2008, 1 place for 98,956.00 </td></tr></tbody></table> <table width="90%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td><table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td valign="bottom"></td><td>$66,000.00 </td><td valign="bottom"></td></tr></tbody></table> </td></tr><tr><td>$300 buy-in, UBOC 5 $300K GTD 6 Handed on UltimateBet. 01/11/2009, 1 place for 66,000.00 </td></tr></tbody></table> <table width="90%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td><table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td valign="bottom"></td><td>$59,520.00 </td><td valign="bottom"></td></tr></tbody></table> </td></tr><tr><td>$1000 buy-in, $1K Monday on FullTiltPoker. 03/09/2009, 2 place for 59,520.00 </td></tr></tbody></table> <table width="90%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td align="left">See All Scores </td></tr></tbody></table> <span id="ctl00_ctl00_bcr_bcr_ctl25_plbScore">Current Sliding PLB Score: 7,004.29</span>
<span id="ctl00_ctl00_bcr_bcr_ctl25_plbPercentile">(99.9 7th percentile)</span>

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Ryan gutshtallin Welch is currently ranked #21 in the world at online poker tournament play. To find out more about how the PocketFives Rankings are calculated, visit our <span id="ctl00_ctl00_bcr_bcr_lblTitleDescription">Rankings FAQ</span> page. Special thanks to Ryan for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer questions for this interview.

This interview was conducted by PocketFiver dgillis (pictured).

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