FULL TILT POKER BLOG

Posted by Editor | Filed under CardRunners, I = Idiot, Professor/Banker/Suicide King

Full Tilt and CardRunners.com are announcing today that Team CardRunners, the players who operate that leading poker-teaching site, will now play exclusively on Full Tilt.

Joining the ranks of red Full Tilt Pros will be

Taylor “Green Plastic” Caby

Andrew “muddywater” Wiggins

Brian “sbrugby” Townsend

Brian “Stinger885” Hastings

Mike “schneids” Schneider

Cole “cts” South

Eric “p3achy_keen” Liu

This continues Full Tilt’s trend toward expanding its red ranks to include younger/online professionals. Team CardRunners is comprised of young players (the greybeard in the group is Brian Townsend, who is 26) who learned poker online, play regularly online, and have built reputations based on their success online. Everybody with even a little respect for poker history and achievement knows about the skills and accomplishments of Lederer, Seidel, Juanda, et al. But the player on the rail who said to me last June, “If your blog doesn’t cover what sbrugby is doing at the Bellagio right now, you’re out of touch,” had a point, too.

What sbrugby (Townsend) was “doing at the Bellagio” was mowing through players like David Benyamine, Johnny Chan, Sam Farha, and others in some of the biggest no-limit and pot-limit poker games ever played. A $1-$2 no-limit player on Full Tilt follows Brian Townsend more closely than Mike Matusow or Allen Cunningham. And maybe he should; Brian was a $1-$2 player himself less than three years ago.

The announcement says nothing about the obvious synergy between these successful players who teach others to win and Full Tilt, where the motto is “learn, chat, and play with the pros.” A a betting man would feel comfortable predicting we’ll someday hear about some other ventures between Full Tilt and CardRunners.

For now, though, let me say WELCOME! (athough I think these men are already well known on Full Tilt). But if you don’t know them or CardRunners.com, their stories are compelling.

A JOB, A DODGE, A DREAM

In 2004, Taylor Caby and Andrew Wiggins were undergraduates at the University of Illinois. Taylor was a junior majoring in finance, Andrew a sophomore concentrating on accounting. They were friends and fraternity brothers, and they formed an additional bond as poker players. Caby introduced Wiggins to online poker and helped him develop his game. Taylor had started with $5 SnGs and was working his way through ever-bigger online cash no-limit games. Wiggins followed the same path.

By 2005, they were both winning and Taylor was beating the biggest no-limit hold ‘em games on the internet. This was during the period when successful casino tournament and cash-game players were starting to play for high stakes online. There was a great fascination with who these players were, especially “Green Plastic,” who was regularly beating well-known pros. According to Taylor, “I had an internship in the financial world but Andrew didn’t. We were playing a ton of poker and Andrew wanted something for his resume. We also wanted to experience what it was like to start a business. So we developed the idea for CardRunners.com, a new way of teaching poker.”

Other players were increasingly watching them from the rail to learn from their successes. They built a business from this, recording their sessions and adding audio instruction. They also added a forum and a chat room, so this apparently large but nearly anonymous group of avid players could become a community.

Their new web site, CardRunners.com, launched in September 2005 with just 5 videos. But players signed up right away because of the reputations of the founders and the promise of more to come. Caby and Wiggins made back their initial $10,000 investment in a week; new business came in so fast it paralyzed their payment processor. According to Andrew, “We got so many orders that we had a temporary problem with our payment processor. They couldn’t believe a couple kids in college could get so many customers so fast with a legitimate business.”

From the start, CardRunners delivered the goods. Even those first videos spoke to a generation of young online players in a way traditional instruction didn’t. The explosion of online poker – and the explosion of online no-limit poker – created a need for no-limit cash-game instruction that didn’t exist in 2005. In addition, Taylor and Andrew were in the trenches, playing and winning on a regular basis at the very tables their prospective customers were playing or, more likely, wanted to play.

The CardRunners library now swells with videos – approximately 650 by 30 instructors, with more than 30 new videos per month. Videos cover different forms of poker, short-handed and ring games, cash games and tournaments, and games of all stake levels.

CardRunners’ success has expanded with its library. Membership has tripled in the last year and they recently registered their 10,000th member. High retention rates suggest that members regard the $99 initiation fee and $27.95 monthly dues as a bargain.

BRIAN TOWNSEND: EXHIBIT A

The reason CardRunners succeeded from Day One was that its instructors were winning players and articulate instructors. The quality of the site’s videos has been demonstrated not just from its bottom line (i.e., lots of satisfied customers) but from the players’ bottom lines. The site takes pride in the successes of its customers; it made one of them an owner and the site’s most visible presence in big-time casino tournaments and TV poker productions.

In 2005, Brian Townsend was starting work toward his Ph.D. at U-Cal Santa Barbara and struggling to beat online $10-$20 Limit Hold ‘Em. Toward the end of the year, he decided to switch to no-limit and, based on a recommendation in a Two Plus Two forum from a player he respected, he signed up for CardRunners. In light of Townsend’s later affiliation with the site, maybe it’s not unusual to hear him say, “CardRunners was the number one tool for me to learn no-limit hold ‘em.”

But the proof is in the results: Brian started 2006 playing the $.10-$.25 no-limit hold ‘em, and ended the year winning at $50-$100 and $100-$200 no-limit, the biggest games available online.

One casualty of Townsend’s assault on online poker was his education. With his developing success during the spring, he took the summer off school and devoted himself to poker full time. At the end of the summer, he shared his results with his advisor. His advisor told him, “It doesn’t makes sense for you to be in the Ph.D. program.” With his professor’s blessing and an invitation to return if things didn’t work out, Brian withdrew from the program.

While continuing to play and win, he approached CardRunners about developing a business relationship. “I had played with Taylor and Andrew a little. I approached them about seeing if there was an opportunity for us. We met in the Bahamas in January 2007 and I joined as an investor and an instructor in February.”

Townsend, a very private person by nature, lived much of 2007 in a bubble: six- and seven-figure conquests and setbacks online, appearances at big tournaments and televised events (he loathes travel), and titanic wins and losses (though the wins, it should be noted, were bigger) in Bobby’s Room during the 2007 World Series in games so large he often bought in for a million dollars.

YOUNG GUNS

Last fall, I talked with some people at Full Tilt about developing an educational product. My main idea was for a video advertisement for the product. The ad would be set at some kind of academic gathering – caps and gowns, old-time professorial types. And there in the center would be Howard Lederer, as the “dean” of this institution. One of the others would say, “You certainly have your hands full with some of these students.” Cut to scenes lifted from Animal House, but with Full Tilt pros: Lindgren and Ivey hitting golf balls through windows, Gavin Smith riding his motorcycle up a flight of stairs, Gus Hansen hauling a ladder to the sorority house window, Matusow leading a horse through a deserted courtyard at night, etc.

The payoff would be Howard saying, “Students? That’s the faculty.”

No one even acknowledged this idea and Full Tilt has so far refused to pay even postage for my expenses on the project. When I think about CardRunners.com and the new pros joining Full Tilt, I think, “These are the real college guys.”

Brian Hastings. Mike Schneider. Cole South. Eric Liu.

A couple of these guys aren’t even old enough to legally enter a casino in the U.S. I was told a story about one of them – I’m not sure which but it’s just as well we don’t attach a name – at the World Series last summer. Because CardRunners.com had a booth at the Gaming Expo and just to enjoy the scene – in poker, these guys are like the Rolling Stones circa 1969 – the principals came to Vegas even though a few of them were too young to enter the Main Event. Several became part of a group that went to one of Las Vegas’s famous strip clubs. One member of the team got kicked out when he handed over his credit card to get a lap dance. The card was good but it didn’t match the name on the fake ID he used to gain admission to the club.

Stinger885, Schneids, cts, and p3achy_keen are well-known among top online players. But I don’t play much in cash games online – and certainly not in the big games at which these four are winners. I came by my ignorance not through bias against young internet players but through long experience.

OLDER BUT NOT WISER

In early 2004, I was doing my “stealth” research for The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King. I didn’t have a publishing contract and didn’t know any high-stakes players. Mostly, I was playing $20-$40 limit hold ‘em, winning a little, and asking regulars in the Bellagio poker room about the big players and the huge games between the pros and Andy Beal. Elena, a friend of my wife Jo Anne, mentioned to me that a high-school classmate of hers was a professional poker player.

She gave me his name, which I wrote on a scrap of paper and didn’t throw away only because I forgot. I was making $1,000 on a good night and hearing stories about some of the biggest players in the world. I didn’t need to talk with some small-time-degenerate-gambler classmate of Elena’s from 30 years ago.

Barry Greenstein was the classmate. I recovered from my stupidity, but only after hearing that Greenstein was the biggest winner at $4,000-$8,000 and eschewed tournaments but had recently started playing them for charity and won a WPT event. Barry became my first source who had played Andy Beal and I came to regard him as a brilliant, thoughtful, considerate, and brutally honest source and subject for Suicide King.

The moral of the story is that it’s a small world, especially for poker. If someone tells you they know somebody, it might actually BE somebody.

Did I learn?

My high school friend Julie, who has followed my publishing career, told me a year or two ago that one of her son Marc’s friends (Marc was 18 or 19) was, like me, playing poker online and, like me, had a blog. Was I interested in getting the URL of his blog? I don’t remember what I said but I remember what I was thinking: “The last thing in the world I need is to read the bad-beat stories of some kid. Every toddler with a computer thinks he’s a professional poker player. Just because he won for a couple weeks is meaningless. Good luck to him trying to hold on to it.”

That was Cole “cts” South, who I still haven’t met, because he plays way too high for me online and he’s not old enough to play in a casino. My instincts in 2006-2007 were just as good as in 2004.

Cole South is beating the biggest no-limit games on Full Tilt and has recently started learning PLO. He is taking time off from College of William & Mary, though I suspect he may decide it serves his interests better taking poker players to school than going to school himself. Plus, his videos demonstrate an ability to teach and communicate. When Cole began subscribing to CardRunners.com, he was struggling to win at low-stakes no-limit games. After a year as a subscriber, he made a million dollars playing poker online.

Brian “Stinger885” Hastings, like Cole, initially learned no-limit hold ‘em as a CardRunners customer. Between classes at Cornell, he is producing videos as a principal of the site and winning at $25-$50 to $200-$400 no-limit hold ‘em. I just learned from looking at his blog that he apparently plays PLO as well. When I say “apparently,” I mean that he’s won $450,000 at PLO in the first four days of March 2008.

Mike “Schneids” Schneider graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota. He could be the best limit hold ‘em player on the internet. Although he doesn’t play many tournaments, in early 2006 he won the Party Poker Million V, the world’s biggest limit hold ‘em tournament. The $1 million first-prize was his first live-poker cash.

Eric “p3achy_keen” Liu is one of many, many ridiculously successful poker players from Duke University. I would thoughtlessly attribute this to Andy Bloch spending a year in Durham while his fiancé Jen completed her degree but Eric has been beating up on internet players longer than that. He is a winning player wherever the biggest games are found online, in both no-limit hold ‘em and PLO, from $25-$50 to $300-$600. Because of his success in ring games online, he has recently been seen playing the highest-stakes games at the Commerce in L.A.

I welcome these talented players as pros into the Full Tilt community, though from a respectful distance.

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