By
Adam
One online poker site that hasn't gotten a lot of press here on PocketFives is PokerRoom. It's a large and always-improving site for tournament and cash game specialists alike, and it's unique in that it has a prospering forum community directly associated with the site.
You would be hard pressed to find a member of that community (aptly entitled "Pokah") who doesn't know a thing or two about Chris Birchby, known online as MarvinGarden, who is considered to be one of the best tournament players on the site. He has won every regularly scheduled tournament they offer at some time or other.
Chris's love for games stems back to his days as a kid in New Jersey. He and his three younger brothers were all very competitive, playing games such as Monopoly, Risk, and Clue (as I'm sure many of you know, the name "MarvinGarden" stems from Monopoly). Over the summers, their grandmother would get them playing 5-card draw on vacations.
When the boys went off to college, Chris got involved in playing video games, particularly real-time strategy games on the internet, such as StarCraft and WarCraft. In these games, players have to learn how to make good decisions quickly.
After finishing college in 1997, he went out to a graduate art program in California, which is where he lives to this day. He was still playing a lot of WarCraft in his spare time, getting so good that he was actually the 3rd ranked player on the west coast at one point. After finishing grad school, however, he began to realize that he wasn't going to have the leisure time to play it as much.
Around the same time, he and a couple of his brothers started getting back into poker, and Chris realized that this may be a better use of his free time, since he could actually gain something tangible from playing. At the time, PokerRoom was the only site that was set up to allow Mac users to play, and since he only had a Mac, it was an easy choice for Chris. He slowly built up his roll on the site, playing every little game. At first he was playing their ring games, and then he got into tournaments. "I was playing every 5 and 10 dollar table they had," he told me.
Throughout the time he's been playing, Chris has also been working on a business called Coola Sunblock. His condition with his girlfriend, in order for him to play the amount of poker that he does, was that he would take all of his winnings and funnel them into the company. "It was a great way to justify playing poker," he told me, "and as it's turned out, I've been able to finance most of my company through poker winnings. I've been working as an artist, and it's been hard to make much of a profit after all the expenses that come along with it. I'm hoping that through poker, I'll be able to get this whole company up and running and use that to fund as many poker ventures as I'd like in the future." What he means is that he could make enough money through his company to fund himself playing on the World Poker Tour and other similar tournaments, after funding the company through smaller online wins—doesn't sound bad at all.
His wins haven't been that small though—in fact, he hasn't had a month where he made less than $6,000 in profit in over a year. He also picked up what he considered to be his most significant win up to this point, a seat in the 2005 World Series of Poker main event.
Because of his current situation in life, Chris prefers online play to live play. He's 30 years old, and he lives with his girlfriend, one of his brothers, a dog, and a cat. Playing online, as opposed to playing live, really makes a difference in allowing him to spend time with them. "Sometimes," he said, "I can be working on a painting or accomplishing other goals in my life while also playing poker. When you're playing live, it takes all those other aspects out of your life, and then it's just poker. Right now I'm trying to get ahead in so many things at once, and it enables me to get everything done."
The tournaments he most often plays are the guaranteed prize pool tournaments and the $50 entry, both of which are offered daily on PokerRoom. He also often plays the "Super" weekday events on Party, the rebuy tournaments on Stars, and, although he hasn't been able to play it many times, he finds the daily $50k guaranteed $30 rebuy on Paradise to be a great value.
In addition to the obvious reason of needing a Mac-friendly site, the community aspect of PokerRoom has been a big pull to keep Chris involved on that site, despite the lure of bigger prizepools on sites like Paradise, Party, and Stars. The forum community, Pokah, has given a voice to the players on that site, allowing them to talk about what's going on and to discuss changes. It's created an environment that fosters more communication between players on a personal level.
Some other excellent players have emerged from PokerRoom as well, and when I asked Chris about them, the names he mentioned included 10691069, BonesATL, Yankee47, and eat.this, all of whom have had some great success in the tournaments there. BonesATL, in fact, is the only player to make the final table in both of the first two $1000 "Grand" tournaments. (The third is coming up on the first weekend in August!)
Nowadays, Chris is an established player on several internet poker sites, having picked up some nice wins on UB, Paradise, Stars, and Party. He still uses the same name on all of these sites, with the exception of Stars, where he plays as coola. He hopes to get to the point where he can keep a relatively large bankroll in each site to play tournaments, and to eventually recycle some of that money into some big live wins.
He believes the best way for small bankroll players to get to the next level is to take on the low buy in tournaments, where a player has the potential to make 100x their buy in or even more. "If you can just take on a consistent and patient game and pick up a chip stack through other people's errors, there's a really good chance of cashing and expanding your bankroll," he said.
He went on to tell me that he looks at poker as a relaxing activity, despite the fact that it can be a game of nerves. "But playing above your bankroll, it can't be," he maintained, and that's why he recommends to the new players to be patient and stick to the small tournaments.
One other thing that has helped Chris a lot, and that he thinks will help other players as well, is having a support group online, partly for the purpose of discussing strategy but mainly to have a community behind him, a group that considers his best interest to be their own. "It makes playing more pleasurable and you can make smarter decisions based on talking about things. It gives a more comfortable feeling to online poker."
Whatever he's doing is working, and it looks like Chris is well on his way to success.