#573 - World Series Final Table Profile #1 - Craig Marquis - Cash Game Killer

New Year’s Eve, 2007 - Craig Marquis, 21, attends the New Year’s Eve party of Tom Dwan and David Benefield, a pair of even younger men who recently bought a house in Forth Worth, Texas. Marquis is, like most 21 year-olds, just beginning the journey to get to where he wants to go: he was a full-time student, he also worked full-time in cell-phone sales.

As a friend of a friend, Craig didn’t know the hosts but he was suitably impressed. “Wow,” he thought, “This is a really nice house. It’s got nice things, nice cars - and they’re younger than me. How did they do this?”

At the party, he befriended Mario Silvestri, a top online tournament poker player who plays under the name pwnasaurus on Full tilt. Silvestri told Marquis that all that nice stuff - house, giant TVs, furniture, cars - came from online poker.

Craig and Mario became friends and, eventually, he became close friends with Tom Dwan and David Benefield as well. But that didn’t happen until later.

The next day - New Year’s Day, 2007 - Marquis deposited $100 on Full tilt Poker and started playing $5 + $.50 Sit-n-Gos. By the end of January, after playing “a billion of those things,” he had had $1,000 in his account and began playing $50-buy-in cash games.

INSTRUCTIONAL NOTE #1: Notice the instantly smart bankroll management. Craig started playing SnGs with no more than 5% of his bankroll at a time. Naturally, because he started winning and building, we didn’t get to see if he had the discipline to move down or redeposit to keep that ratio, but he started at the right level. And even though he moved to $50 buy-in cash games “quickly” - one month - it was only after getting his bankroll to $1,000. As his bankroll rose, he tried - at prudent times - to play correspondingly bigger SnGs. “I seemed to lose every single $10 I played so I just kept at the $5 + $.50s and started playing more and more tables. Toward the end of January, I was 12-tabling them before moving to the cash games.”

INSTRUCTIONAL NOTE #2: SnGs are a good proving ground for future poker killers. I don’t know how many stories I’ve read about today’s emerging and top players getting their start on heavy diets of $5 SnGs, but it’s a lot. Craig’s is the third story I’ve WRITTEN about a winning player starting there. Taylor Caby and Tom Dwan also started at $5 SnGs and they haven’t done too shabby either.

In March 2007, Craig took a trip to Las Vegas with some friends for spring break. He played live casino cash games for the first time but did not win. Including expenses, his losses for the trip totalled about $1,000. Far from being discouraged, the challenge forced him to redouble his efforts. He started playing more. A lot more.

INSTRUCTIONAL NOTE #3: Says Craig Marquis, “The best piece of advice you can give someone just starting out is to play a lot. The more hands you play, the more you face different situations, and the more that happens, the better you’re going to be able understand and deal with those situations. And that’s what poker is all about: analyzing and correctly responding to different situations.”

By April 2007, Craig was making more money playing poker online than at the cell-phone sales job. So, after working full-time (in addition to going to school) for five years, he said good-bye to bosses, offices, stores, customers, and paychecks. In May, during a relatively rare shot at tournament poker, he won the $24,000 Guarantee on Full Tilt. With over $4,800 added to his bankroll, there was no big celebration. Poker was his job now, and that merely meant his working capital increased, allowing him to play bigger games or more tables without fundamentally jeopardizing his roll.

Subsequently, he put his education on hold. Though he may resume his studies at some point, he was majoring in finance, a field in which now is an especially bad time to be entering. He also picked finance to help him find a lucrative job. Since April 2007, poker has been sufficiently lucrative and interesting that Marquis hasn’t needed to consider training or looking for something better.

Craig, now just 23, is living proof how online poker has sped the learning process. Although he will be the youngest World Champion if he wins, he has gathered a lot of experience. Since he started playing online, he estimates that he has played about a million hands of poker.

He has played online from very small no-limit games up to $200-$400 on Full Tilt. No-limit games that big don’t run very often on Full Tilt any more, so he plays between $2-$4 and $25-$50. He mostly plays no-limit hold ‘em but will play PLO, even as high as $200-$400 but, understandably, “the game has to be right.” He plays head-up of short-handed games - “I’m terrible at full-ring no-limit” - and, based on the stakes and bankroll requirements, up to 12 tables at a time.

In addition to the experience of playing so much, Craig Marquis credits his friends with Mario Sylvestri, Tom Dwan, David Benefield, and some other top players with speeding his development. Poker is a solitary occupation and online poker can be even more isolating than games against physically-present opponents. It is interesting to see how this generation of players adapts.

After the New Year’s Party, Craig struck up a friendship with Mario and, through him, got to know Dwan and Benefield. He spent a lot of time with Benefield and learned he and David had a lot in common.

Marquis and his friends talked about poker hands all the time. Playing 6-12 tables at once, there wasn’t time to reflect on difficult hand during a session. But after, Craig would take his hand histories and pull hands about which he had questions. Playing a few thousand hands a day, there was always something he wasn’t sure about.

His friends, previously in Craig’s position and new developing as some of the best online poker players in the world, never hesitated to tell him what he was doing wrong and why. (With heavy playing experience and such solid advice, the questionable situations have become much more scarce. Marquis estimates that he’s sent just one or two hands to Dave Benefield and Tom Dwan over the previous several months.)

Success at the World Series of Poker proved contagious. Craig stayed at Benefield’s Las Vegas home during the 2008 Series. Benefield finished 73rd in the Main Event and just missed the final table in the World Championship events in both Pot Limit Hold ‘Em (10th) and Pot Limit Omaha (13th). Another roommate won the $5,000 6-Handed NLHE bracelet, and still another just missed making a final table. And the whole group did well in cash games during the Series.

INSTRUCTIONAL NOTE #4 - You don’t need Durrrr and Raptor as buddies to get good advice about how you played particular hands. Many online communities devote forums to posting and commenting on hands. Many poker sites “have awesome forums where you can post hands and people answer questions and comment. You can get so many other players’ perspectives on how you’ve played something by posting [on a forum]. It’s good to have that other perspective.”

Why He’ll Win

Craig has one of the shorter stacks at the table, with 10 million chips. (They were playing 120k-240k/30k ante when play broke.) With his emphasis on short-handed cash games, he has relatively little experience in full-table tournament situations. But that also means he’s less likely to get crazy and try to outplay the 9-handed table.

If Marquis waits for the game to come to him, he has the chips to wait for (a) overactive players to bust (or get lucky and bust someone else) and (b) solid hand values by position, which is not the usual way to play at some final tables (like 2007). If he picks up action with a big hand or uses his extensive post-flop experience, he could chip up and find himself with a big enough stack to tangle with a table of 5-6 opponents.

That scenario plays to Craig’s wheelhouse. Think Joe Hashem in 2005.