For the last seven weeks Team PokerStars Pro Jake Cody has been giving fans a chance to get to know him better through his vlog (PokerStars photo)

When the PokerStars Championship Bahamas gets underway later this week you might see Jake Cody walking the hallways of the Atlantis Resort, talking to himself. While plenty of poker players walk away from a tournament muttering under their breath or yammering on to the poker gods about how a hand played out, Cody’s modus operandi is a little different.

The 28 year old is doing it to share his story with a fast-growing audience through the vlog he started in late 2016. Each episode, posted on YouTube, runs between 10 and 20 minutes and is built around the Team PokerStars Pro taking viewers inside his life as a poker pro including tournament recaps, hand reviews and some of the fun stuff that happens on the road.

“One day I just woke up and was like ‘Okay, I’m going to go buy a camera’. So I bought a camera, didn’t really know that much about it. I did study photography in college but that was quite a long time ago now,” said Cody, who says he spends a lot of time on YouTube watching all kinds of videos. “So I started just watching loads of training videos, and just different techniques about the whole thing; vlogging, editing, and using the camera.”

“Basically for just two or three weeks I was pretty obsessed with it. I started practicing doing the vlog, then eventually I was like ‘Okay, this is going to be day one’ and that was the first one,” said Cody, who was inspired after finding fellow poker pro Andrew Neeme’s vlog one day. “It was really quite random. (Neeme) literally uploaded his first video four days before and so I got there real early, I was one of his first viewers. Obviously he’s had loads of success since, and I am just trying to do my own thing.”

Over the last seven weeks of 2016 Cody released nine vlogs and the self-taught videographer-slash-editor-slash-writer admitted it’s been a process to not only learn how to do it all, but fit it into the busy schedule of a globetrotting poker pro.

“For example in Prague, it took me so long to get that one out not only because there was stuff going on, but just playing in the tournaments and being at the event and trying to do all the editing at the same time was quite a lot,” said Cody. “I like to think I’m getting better at it. I’m mostly focused on the editing side of it at the moment. I’m constantly watching other people for inspiration and see what other people are doing to do my own take on them. But I do think I’m getting better, and hopefully I’ll be getting quicker so I’ll be able to get videos out quicker because I that’s the thing at the moment, I feel like I need to be uploading more.”

The desire to produce more content is mainly driven by the response Cody has received to his venture into this new project. Friends, family, other poker players and poker fans on YouTube have all given plenty of love and support. Still, putting more of the personal parts of his life into his vlogs isn’t easy for Cody. The Triple Crown winner doesn’t fit the bill as one of those poker players who seeks the spotlight and media attention, but he does get recognize there is some real value in letting the world get to see more than just how he plays pocket jacks from under the gun.

“I’m not really one for talking about feelings and stuff, but it does feel like a bit of self-therapy, even just talking to the camera with nobody there even if I’m not uploading it,” said Cody. “I actually found it easier to talk to the camera than I would to people, which might be weird but I guess it’s because you don’t feel like you’re being instantly judged and you can just delete it. But there’s quite a big difference to just actually putting it online when you know people are going to see it. Who knows what people are going to think?”

The PokerStars Championship Bahamas will provide Cody with plenty of opportunities to showcase more than just the poker. The event, formerly known as the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, has always been the first big tournament on the calendar each year, but it’s also at a world-class resort with lots of other activities going on. That’s a big part of what Cody, who is headed ot the Bahamas for he seventh straight year, likes about the event.

“I have good memories of PCA because it’s the first trip where I ever saw some of the American pros who like, in my head, they were people i couldn’t even imagine being real. I’d only ever seen them on High Stakes Poker or World Series coverage,” said Cody. “I remember seeing Mike Matusow, he flew past me on a scooter, and I was completely star struck. So that was my first experience with the American pros.”

Along with finding himself rubbing elbows and seeing flops with the players he admired from TV coverage, Cody also looks back at his early years at the PCA and sees a player and a person who is quite different from the one he is now.

“My very first trip I actually didn’t play the Main Event. I was the plus one of my friend who won a package and i just came over to play side events. I was one of those young kids on my laptop in the lobby,” said Cody. “That very first year we were just so anti-social, we didn’t even see sunlight we just was there playing online poker and a few side events. We were completely obsessed.”

From that obsession to over $4 million in lifetime earnings, a World Series of Poker bracelet, a European Poker Tour title and a World Poker Tour title, on top of the vlog and a spot on Team PokerStars, Cody fits the bill of a poker superstar, but he doesn’t see it that way at all, and that might just be what makes his vlogs so popular with poker fans.

“It’s definitely hard to put it in your head and quantify that. Especially since sometimes on the vlog they’ll say ‘oh I followed you from your PKR days’ or back in the World Series in 2011 or the EPT in England,” said Cody. ”I guess you think you don’t think you have an impression on that much until people actually say it to you. It’s kind of nice, but a bit weird too. I don’t really see myself as famous really, but it’s nice when people say they want to see you do well.”