The Greenhorn

Each issue, our man of the poker people trawls the cardroom floors looking for real-life stories from everyday players.

When Albert Kim sat down to play the first live tournament of his life, he wasn’t nervous in the slightest - he didn’t have time be nervous - he was busted within five hands. The 33-year Los Angelino freely admits he was an awful player: “I just really didn’t know how to play. I didn’t know what was going on,” he chuckles. “I’d played poker with friends and colleagues, but I never really knew how to play well. We used to play crazy games with a lot of wild cards, like Anaconda and Baseball. I’d only been playing Hold’em a few months. I was totally unready for tournament play”

No one had much hope when one month after this woeful debut Arnold entered the Chipleaders.com MBA Poker Tournament – a tourney open to students and alumni of MBA programs up and down the country – at the Hollywood Park Casino. But as they say, you can never keep a good man down, and, as a recent graduate, Albert had been putting his academic acumen to good use, spending the month between the two tournaments cramming everything poker. Sklansky, Brunson, Hellmuth, Caro – all the important poker tomes had been poured over obsessively and hungrily consumed. In no time at all, Albert had transformed himself into a super tight-aggressive poker demon.

The golden rule for beginners is ‘play it tight’, and it was this advice that he took with him to the tournament. “I remembered Sklansky on tight tournament play. I noticed people were going all-in far too much on marginal hands and getting lucky.”

Despite being short-stacked for most of the tournament, Arnold sat back and waited. Sure enough, the chips continued to fly back and forth and he slowly moved up as the crazies busted each other out. Eventually, he caught a few hands, was able to double up, and was more surprised than anyone to find himself sitting at the final table with a healthy stack of chips.

Then came a turning point: “I raised from early position with K-K and everybody folded – which surprised me, because they had been playing so loose. But, as I went to muck my cards, my hand accidentally collided with the dealer’s, revealing my K-K to the whole table. It was pure accident, I wasn’t ‘advertising’, but it worked a treat. People seemed less enthusiastic about calling me after that, and I could bluff a little more.”

Albert’s confidence rocketed and he was soon going head-to-head for first place. To hear him describe the last stage of the game, you’d think he’d been playing for years. “My opponent had a few more chips than me and went all-in on J-K. I had A-K so I immediately called. I was just surprised – why did he do that? Why did he go all-in from early position without raising first to see where he was? That crippled him, and two hands later, the game was over.”

It just goes to show nothing succeeds like some good hard study. A week later, Albert went back to the scene of the crime and tried his luck in another tournament – and guess what? Let’s just say that his tournament career is now boasting a 66% success rate, and there aint too many people who can boast that.