By
Adam
Before most of the top ranked players ever came anywhere near achieving greatness in online poker, Jim "KrazyKanuck" Worth (left, taken by Image Masters Photography & Digital Imaging) was already making a sizeable living on sites such as UltimateBet, PokerStars, and Paradise. He was doing so well that many players would follow him around and watch him play, and not just random people. Future online greats, including P0ker H0, were trying to pick this guy’s brain by watching him play.
Before his ascent to fame and popularity in the poker world, Jim owned a business and was a recreational gambler. In the early 90’s, he would play craps and the like in casinos, and in 1992, he saw a stud game and took a shot. "I got my ass kicked royally," he said of his first attempt to play poker.
3 years later, he moved to Calgary, where they had hold em in the casinos, and he started getting into the low limit games there. Over the next several years, Jim improved his game enough to move up to the 30-60 level, while going through the normal routine of winning, losing, up, down, etc. He was still running his company and playing poker on the side.
In 2000, Jim walked into a friend’s home and saw him playing online poker. He went home that night and bought in for $500. He turned that into $2,500, and he cashed out $2,000 that night. Despite the great start, he went on to lose about $10k in the next two months. He discovered, over the next year or so, that he wasn’t anywhere near as good of a poker player as he had thought he was. "If you’re a break even player or even a little bit of a losing player in live games, it can be multiplied tenfold online because of the speed of the hands," he told me. "If you have leaks in your game, it’s going to show dramatically."
After a while, he was playing mostly online, only going to the casino for tournaments, and then he discovered that PokerStars had tournaments. "I was like a kid in a candy store," he said. He started playing there, having moderate success, and then, 8 or 9 months later, a friend referred him to UltimateBet. He continued to work on his game there, getting better and better, thinking about what he did wrong each time he’d take a beat or bust out of a game.
He’d been in Calgary for 8 years, running his business, and then he moved out to Toronto in late 2002, planning to move on to something new. At the time he got there, he didn’t feel like starting a new business, so he just started playing a lot more poker. For 3 or 4 months, that was all he was doing, and then, as he put it, "...it started to happen; I started to get pretty good at it."
It turns out "pretty good" doesn’t really give enough credit to the guy’s accomplishments; he is kind of the Tiger Woods of online poker, in that he has not had a losing month online since October 2002. He’s also won many of the largest tournaments on several different sites, with his biggest cash being $26k, and a number of satellites into larger live events.
The most significant of these big wins, to him, was the first, a satellite into the main event of the 2003 World Series of Poker. "I was running so horribly bad," he told me. "I took every bad beat on the planet, and it was the most sickening, demoralizing, frustrating thing I’ve ever been through in my life. I was losing with aces to queen nine after getting all in before the flop, things like that. I was almost broke in my PokerStars account when I won a satellite into their $615 WSOP satellite. I got into that and I won the sucker and got into the world series. That was probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever won online."
It’s playing online, precisely, that has allotted Jim the skill set to be as successful as he is. The immense variety of opportunities cannot be equaled by any casino anywhere. "What I can say about online poker is that it affords you the opportunity to play so many hands in so many situations. Someone asks me a question about a hand, and I always ask them 40 questions about the situation. Online poker gives you the practice to know what to do in these situations." He went on to tell me that he believes many of the top online players such as P0ker H0 have had as much tournament experience in the last 2 and a half years as a lot of the top circuit players, and those guys have been playing for 20 years or so.
Jim has been able to practice virtually every facet of his game on a regular basis, thanks to the many opportunities online. He has used sit-n-go’s, particularly, to give himself situational experience. "The way I got all that final table experience wasn’t from tournaments; it was from playing hundreds if not thousands of sit-n-go’s," he explained. As an example of how he used sit-n-go’s to work on situational play, he told me, "Sometimes I’ll play a $5 heads up and dump all but 300 chips to my opponent, and then I’ll practice my short stacked play." One aspect of many people’s game that he thinks could use improvement is the ability to not give up or lose patience after losing most of their chips. It’s just another hole in his own game that he’s been able to work through, thanks to the accessibility of so many online games.
On why online play, specifically, has worked out so well for him in terms of success, he told me, "if anyone asks me what would separate me from the vast majority of players, the only thing I can really say is that my instincts are extremely sharp for situational awareness. Everyone’s big on trying to pick up tells in a live game; that’s my weakest point. I think tells are extremely overrated. Look at the top players, and you’re not going to be able to pick up tells. You gotta get down to your card sense, your situational awareness, and your instincts."
Jim has learned not to tilt after the bad beats, and to instead try and figure out what set him up to the point where that hand could bust him. Looking at these smaller intricacies of the game and taking on poker from every angle has helped him come out a winner.
One aspect of his game that he is particularly well known for is his strength in heads up matches. "When I’m playing a heads up match," he said, "I take it very personally. I don’t want to lose it. Most of the time I lose a match, I’ve made a mistake, and I’ve learned from that and tried not to let it happen again. Bad beats are going to happen, and that is inevitable, but if someone gets a read on you, you need to get past that and not let it happen in the next match."
"I’ll be so intent on the match that Monica (his girlfriend) will be talking to me and I’ll be totally oblivious to it. I’ll be staring through the guy’s name as if I’m looking him in