Interview with Tom Marchese, NAPT Venetian Winner

I was curious who ended up winning the NAPT Venetian which I played last weekend and had to google the name “Tom Marchese”. Not only did I learn that he plays online as kingsofcards, a tough regular whom I avoid at 25/50, but I also found this kind of old but interesting interview with him. It’s not very long, but it’s a nice picture of what it takes to break through the “ceiling” of the mid-stakes games and start winning at high stakes poker:

For me my biggest problem was that I was always playing 9-12 tables. Because of this, I was making a lot of money but never really working on my game and improving. I think this is a problem that many mid stakes players struggle with as to improve and move up they most likely will need to sacrifice a little bit in the short run in order to progress as a player. I also found that playing heads up greatly improved my hand reading skills along with improving my game in blind battles and when playing OOP. Most of my success at the 5/10 – 25/50 level has come when I was playing 1-5 tables and truly concentrating on every hand instead of just going through the motions.

I often encourage students who come to me for 6-max or full ring coaching to try playing some Heads Up, particularly if they struggle with hand reading and thinking outside of the box.

This bit of advice, on the other hand, is either dated or just plain impractical:

I think when playing HU game selection is so key. Early on when I was putting up a huge winrate at HU I game selected religiously and for the most part just destroyed fish. Once you get into playing other good regulars you’re just looking at a variance nightmare which can often take tens of thousands of hands to iron out. I’d say for the most part just try to concentrate on playing fish or exploitable weaker regulars and you can maintain an extremely high winrate with relatively little variance but if you decide to play other good players expect 20-30 buy-in downswings semi regularly and a much lower winrate

Yes, it would be nice to play heads up all day long with fish at 5/10, but they just aren’t that easy to find. If you aren’t willing to play some decent regulars, it’s hard to find any action at all.

Overall a pretty good and interesting interview, though!