"To Beat Poker, You Have to Be Poker"
Here’s a new adage for you: “To beat poker, you have to be poker.” We’ll tell you why we care about that phrase in the first place in a little bit, but in the meantime, we’ll say that Andy andyh26Holman took down the PokerStars Sunday Storm last month for a commanding $36,000 after a three-way deal.
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“It feels great to win a any tournament, let alone one of that size,” Holman said of the 47,000-entrant tournament. “The cash is pretty useful too.” When five players remained, Holman was offered a chip-chop for $36,000 with $6,000 left to play for. “I made a mistake,” he said. “One of the players asked me for an extra $2,000. I declined and offered him $750. I really should have just given it to him, as there was a real danger he would ask to see ICM numbers rather than chip-chop.”
That’s exactly what happened, too. Rather than deal, play continued on and the tournament was ultimately chopped three-handed. Holman admitted, “I probably would have won an extra $6,000 if I just said ‘yes’ right away.”
Holman told us that the final table was “pretty soft, as you would expect in a low-stakes tournament with 47,000 players. I was very confident I was going to win anyway. No one gave me any trouble at all. I was opening an absurd amount and 3betting a lot. It’s easy to win when you have so many chips and you are certain that all of the other players are playing scared.”
Facing off against nearly 50,000 entrants can be quite a daunting task, even with a chip stack to carry the day. “I like to play quite a few hands in the early stages when there are so many terrible players waiting to give you their chips,” Holman said of his strategy. “I would always plan on adjusting my ranges depending on the players at the table, but the whole way through the tournament, I had so many chips at soft tables. I kept stealing pots without much resistance.”
He potentially plans to purchase an iPad with his newfound earnings and started playing poker in 2006 when his roommate won a freeroll. “I was a student at the time,” Holman said, “and decided to deposit $50. I lost that quickly and did the same thing again a bunch of times. I saw how much money some people were making and wanted to do the same, so I took up sit and gos seriously.”
He began grinding sit and gos full-time two years after he started playing and never looked back. “I have always been a competitive person,” Holman said about the allure of poker. “I enjoyed the competition and obviously winning money is great. I spent a lot of time studying and thinking about poker, particularly early in my career. I remember someone once said, ‘to beat poker, you have to be poker.’ It couldn’t be truer.” We think a fortune cookie might have that phrase one day.
Holman has $1.1 million in tracked scores in his PocketFives profile, including a $22,000 hit for finishing second in the iPoker $200,000 Guaranteed in 2011. He is the #4 ranked player in Cardiff in the UK and just passed 1,800 in the money finishes, including 51 wins.
He is a pool and snooker player away from the game and said he plays a few times each week. He concluded by commenting, “I want to thank all of the people who have had an influence on my game over the years. I’ve met a lot of great people through poker and wouldn’t be where I am today without them.”
The Sunday Storm and other big-time tournaments run regularly on PokerStars. If you don’t already have a PokerStars account, sign up through PocketFives’ link and make a deposit to get one free month of PocketFives MTT Training. You’ll also get a 100% up to $600 sign-up bonus. Click here for PocketFives’ PokerStars link.
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