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Students feverishly emptied the ATMs. It wasn’t a hold-up, but rather a hold’em: Texas Hold’em poker, that is. The gathering of freshmen played all night in Hill College House, continually dashing to the nearest cash machines for more betting power. As Rick Heaslip and Joe Smith* recall, it wasn’t morning that stopped the game — it was a lack of funds. But poker wasn't the one to blame; they had managed to bankrupt the ATMs before bankrupting themselves.
The knit cap pulled low on Heaslip's head and the un-tucked blue polo shirt and khakis sported by Smith are ordinary at best. Their basic stats are no different: Heaslip, 21, hails from Bucks County and graduated from Penn in December with a degree in English; Smith is also 21 and a senior in Wharton. That they’re about to go rock climbing together in Pottruck isn’t notable either. Ask about their post-graduation plans, however, and suddenly the two men leave normal behind. Heaslip is a professional poker player, and Smith intends to match his salary next year with his poker income by playing after work.
And the rock climbing? They believe a healthy body enhances their concentration on the game that they spend two to six hours a day playing online.
The duo describes that night in Hill during their freshman year with nostalgia that seems to stem not from the temporal distance but from the “old” way of playing poker it recalls. They’ve traded live, social games for PokerStars.com and FullTilt.com, treating poker with the sobriety usually reserved for AA meetings. They affirm that Penn has a close-knit poker community, but for them the game has become a job of sorts, and they have too much respect for poker and its players to ruin other students’ casual sessions with their own serious approach. But there is another reason for their switch that humility makes them reluctant to state: the size of their bankrolls puts them beyond the reach of most players on campus and playing online is far more lucrative.
Indeed, Heaslip claims approximately $7,000 as his biggest single-day win, a number all the more astounding given that minimum wage in Pennsylvania is $7.15. (Do the math: that’s a reward of over 979 hours of minimum wage work in a 24-hour period.) Smith’s largest single win is $3,000, since he mainly plays $100 buy-ins while Heaslip plays $200. But both live modestly, using their poker income for rent, tuition and food, though Heaslip admits that before he learned to save he “went through a phase where I went to like every Stephen Starr restaurant in the city.”
Their winnings also buy them tools that boost their playing ability. A peek into Heaslip’s off-campus apartment reveals one such purchase: a three-screen set-up connected to his computer that grants him ample desktop landscape for the 10 to 15 tables he plays at a time. And since a good player rakes in $10-20 per hour at a single $200 buy-in table, playing 15 tables at once can yield $300 per hour, says Heaslip. Nevertheless, he clarifies, “That’s not guaranteed… There’s a lot of variance in the short-term.”
What’s more impressive than those numbers is that their bankrolls are built from almost nothing. “I deposited like $25 and played $3 tournaments of these single table ones and then kept moving up stakes. Later I moved over to cash games,” explains Smith. Heaslip learned to play in high school but echoes a similar trajectory. “As far as online money goes, I started off with $20, and now I have lots… And I’ve never lost all my money, ever, in years of playing.” He also notes that aside from his initial investment, “I never, never, never take money from outside of poker and throw it inside.”
This self-imposed rule reflects their highly rational approach to the game. While the current economic climate weakens the comparison, Heaslip and Smith draw parallels between poker and trading. “It’s all about money management. If you manage your bankroll well, and you never risk a lot of it at once, then it’s very, very hard to actually lose all your money,” Heaslip explains. They insist that it’s money management, not pure skill, that trumps in the long-term.
The Wall Street analogy proves integral to how they conceptualize the distinction between poker and gambling — a word the two men never utter when discussing the game. “Anyone can bet on the stock market and treat it like gambling; or, if you know what you’re doing, it can be… not gambling at all,” Heaslip says. This element of strategy is what differentiates poker from casino games governed solely by luck, like craps or roulette. Luck may dominate in the short-term, Smith adds, but “if you push that probability over and over and over again, that’s the element of skill.”
*name has been changed
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