By
Adam
Years ago, a young man from Rhode Island moved out to Las Vegas to be card dealer. The young man, Brian King, had come from a family that ran a pest control business, and while he planned on going back and working in that business, he had taken an interest in poker and wanted to learn more about the game.
After receiving a dealer’s certification, he began dealing poker games at Nevada Palace. He dealt for 6 months as a prop dealer, which allowed him to switch off between dealing and playing in the games. “In those six months, I fell in love with the game, ” he told me. He would play after work, before work, and during work.
Despite his new-found love for poker, he moved back to Rhode Island after those six months in Vegas and began working for his family business. For the next 25 years, that was what he did. He would travel to Las Vegas once or twice a year and play low limit card games, but other than the occasional small home game, that was all the poker he played.
In 1993, he moved to Florida, where there were several Indian reservation casinos nearby, as well as casino boats. He would play the 4/8 and 5/10 games on somewhat sporadic basis, and, as he put it, “always made a buck” when he played. He felt like he was a pretty good player and wanted to start playing on a more regular basis.
Years later, he heard some of the regulars on one of the boats talking about playing online. “I didn’t know what they were talking about,” he confessed, “and I’ve always been pretty computer illiterate.” He eventually downloaded Ultimatebet.com (with help) and began playing the playchip games in late 2002.
He played those for a month or so and eventually hit a high-hand jackpot of $4.80. With that small amount of money, he started playing $1 tournaments, and from his $4.80, he built his account up to $50. He then hit another high-hand jackpot in a small ring game and got $296, and at this point, he started putting more time into the game.
Brian, who used (and still uses) the nickname, “bbkings,” was skeptical at first of UltimateBet, and skeptical of playing poker when he couldn’t see the dealer and couldn’t see all that was going on. He was uneasy about the idea of putting his own money into it, and was certainly not prepared to type in his credit card number online or anything of that sort. Because of this, he didn’t deposit for the first 7 months that he played. In that time though, he built his account up to $1,600, without having ever put anything in.
In 2003, he had won 15-20 tournaments on UB, with buy-ins ranging from $1 to $20, and he had won every kind of tournament UB had to offer at the time—Omaha, Omaha 8/b, LHE, and NLHE. The first big win he had, however, that he felt put him in a different class, was winning the Aruba trip in 2003.
After the trip, he came back and continued to show strong results, winning or splitting 5 Aruba packages in 2004 and coming in 2nd to brsavage in the $500 tournament one week, winning about $13k. He also won 3 tournaments in the Stone Cold Nuts, which was UB’s own “World Series” in early 2004. He still continues to produce results such as these, and can be frequently found at final tables of tournaments with medium and high buy-ins on UB.
In 2005, he hopes to get to play more WPT tournaments and the World Series of Poker. He hopes to have more opportunities to travel to tournaments with players such as P0ker H0, legggggggggy, fatcats, and KNUCKLE HEAD, all of whom he has become close with since meeting them in Aruba and playing online with them so often over the last couple of years.
Brian has always taken most of his winnings off his account and used them to help support his household, so he hasn’t be able to play as many of the bigger satellites as he would like to, but in 2005, he hopes to leave more of his winnings in. With a bigger bankroll, he will be able to play more satellites and hopefully end up at more of the WPT events. He has only played in Aruba so far, but he would like to do a larger portion of the tour.
Bbkings plays a solid and aggressive style of play in his online tournaments. He trusts his reads on his opponents and has an excellent grasp of the patterns of play that they can fall into. He often compares himself to a lot of the “kids” coming up, such as jsup, Denny Lemieux, and Lucky Egg, who are all “very good, very intelligent, and very well-educated,” as he put it. “I don’t have the education they all have, but I have been around other areas of life, and I have street smarts. I have a good read on what people’s next move will be.”
He can’t say enough about how important it is to pay attention to what’s going on at the table and be intuitive about what you think your opponents are going to do. “You have to change your style depending on the opponent, after seeing how they respond to what you do. Sometimes I bet strong with the nuts, if I know a person will think that’s a bluff, and sometimes I bet small, trying to look like I don’t have much. I think about how they’ve reacted to my move or another player’s move in previous hands.”
Brian has been putting a decent amount of time in at the tables lately, playing about 6 tournaments a day. He’ll get up in the morning and start out playing sit-n-go’s, and he likes to try and use these to win his money for the day to support his tournaments. There was a time when he was playing 10 a day, but it started to seem too much like work, so 6 ended up being a good number for him.
While Brian enjoys playing with the better players on UB, there are some he avoids. Mainly, he will avoid playing anyone in a game that is their specialty and not his. For instance, he will not play heads up against KrazyKanuck, because that is “what he does.” He told me, “I can’t figure out why I’d want to do it when someone else will be sitting there in 5 minutes for me to play.” He also said he avoids getting involved in big pots with P0ker H0 in a tournament, because he always seems to lose big pots against him, and he knows there will be easier spots.
Some of the toughest players on UB, in his opinion, are SailorLobell, fatcats, KrazyKanuck, yngmanN4quiki, and shattus. Out of all of them, though, the player he has the most respect for is P0ker H0. He likes H0’s game, and can identify with him, because he considers himself and H0 to both be very street savvy players. “He’s a better player than a lot of the more educated players,” he says, “because he has the street smarts that these other guys just can never learn. Education is only gonna get you so far, which is a long way, as tons of players never put pot odds into play. Someone like P0ker H0 is above, though, because he has abilities beyond that.” Another player on UB he finds to be particularly tough is Captn1, who helped him elevate his game years ago when he was in Vegas.
Speaking of years ago, bbkings appreciates the increased number of opportunities to play today, ever since the explosion of online poker. He says when he first got online, there were very few opportunities for things like sit-n-go’s, compared to now. There weren’t games starting up 24 hours a day. A lot more people now opt to put in their time. “Everyone sees it all on TV, and now they have to go through putting in time,” he says of new players trying to win in poker. “Fortunately when I was learning, I got to do it for free.”
For all the guys just now coming in, he thinks it’d be a good idea to read a couple of books, but mostly just to practice. “It’s all about practice, and it’s all about learning,” he told me. “People should start out small, whether it’s small money or small play chips or points, whatever their level may be. I think they should progress through the levels, just like anything else. Once you get a level down, don’t be afraid to move up, but make sure you put in your time and have a good feel for the level you’re at, and once you get that confidence, move upt. Keep yourself in check, though.”
One quick story bbkings would like to share with PocketFives.com readers is the story of how 7 4 became P0ker H0’s hand. In 2003, the night before everyone was scheduled to leave, a bunch of players decided to get together and play some freeze out sit-n-go’s. We ended up playing 2 10 person freezeouts, each with a $200 buy-in. In the first one, P0kerH0 got involved in a hand with my nephew, who plays as smk2774, and after my nephew raised, P0ker H0 reraised all in. My nephew had a pair of jacks, thought for a few minutes, and reluctantly called the bet. P0ker H0 turned over 4 7 off. The flop came 4 4 7, and that was all she wrote.
That was the first time that 4 7 came into play for him, although the next time wouldn’t be long after. In the second tournament, bbkings, fatcats, P0ker H0, yngmanN4quiki, pete-za-man, and some others were into a hand, and I’d lost about half my stack. I got AA and just called, and fatcats raised the pot. YngmanN4quiki reraised all in. Everybody folded around to H0, and he thought for a minute and decided to call for all his chips. I, having aces, quickly pushed my chips in. I showed AA, fatcats had JJ, yngman had KK, and H0 had 4 7. By the turn, H0 had a full house. At that point, that hand became famous.
Bbkings is a big part of the UB “crew,” so to speak, and as he continues his success, I hope all our readers will remember how he got started and recognize how so much can come from so little. Bbkings is an inspiration to everyone who has to start small and build their way up, and he is now playing some of the biggest tournaments online with great success.