Part-time poker player, Full-time MLB Great...Orel Hershiser
Former Major League Baseball pitcher Orel Hershiser is well known for his competitive fire. Nicknamed “Bulldog” by former coach Tommy Lasorda, Hershiser is arguably one of the best pitchers to have ever played the game, having won World Series MVP honors as lead the Los Angeles Dodgers to the 1998 World Series title. Although now retired from the game and currently working as a baseball analyst for ESPN, Hershiser still does his best to keep his competitive juices fl owing by playing poker.
According to Hershiser, poker provides him with an outlet for his driven nature. “It is something you can be competitive at while sitting down. As your body starts to fail you as an athlete, you fi nd it hard to fi nd places that can get your adrenaline fl owing.”
Although he sometimes played cards with his teammates while traveling, it wasn’t until recently that Hershiser decided to take the game seriously. “After I went through my divorce, I started dating a woman from Las Vegas. When I would come to visit her, I wouldn’t have anything to do while she was working, so I started going over to Bellagio to play cards.”
Always looking for a challenge, Hershiser quickly saw several similarities between pitching in the big leagues and playing poker. “Pitching is all about position and so is poker. Pitching is about what’s your best stuff and it is the same when you play your cards. The same kind of thinking applies. I use the same mental outline for poker that I would come up with for pitching. There are times when you can be creative as a card player or you can be basic, just the way a pitcher does. You can go strength against strength and say, ‘I’m stronger than you,’ which is basic, and then there are other days where you are card or pitch dead and you have to get creative.”
Hershiser also believes that playing tournament poker is similar to having a winning season in baseball. “You need your breaks, you need to stay away from injuries, and you need to have a good roster. You also need to get lucky at the end. You play 162 games where talent can get you there, but you end up in the playoffs which are best of fi ve and best of seven, and it’s a lot like poker in that talent can get you there, but you have to win several coin fl ips at the end to be the world champion.”
Considered one of the most dominating pitchers in history, things didn’t exactly start out the same way for Hershiser at the tables. “I can’t believe all of the mistakes I made when I fi rst started. I must have been the ‘dumb jock with a lot of money’ sitting at a table. Now knowing what I know and being able to watch other people make the same mistakes, I’ve come to realize that I must have been the fi sh at the table – a lot. I got my but kicked and lost close to $40,000.”
It wasn’t long, however, before Hershiser began to see the error of his ways. “Eventually I came to be a break-even player at that game, but I came to the conclusion that I would never become a good player if I stayed at those limits. I had to move down in order to learn new styles and become comfortable with them. Once I dropped down, I began playing different ways on different days so I could see how that style panned out and decide if I should add it to my game.”
Determined to evolve his game and become a more solid player, Hershiser began asking other players how to get better. Eventually, a friend introduced him to several books and DVDs, which would eventually lead the former Dodger pitcher to poker pro Mark Gregorich.
“I ended up watching a Mike Caro video that had Mark Gregorich in it. It was about the lifestyle of being a pro. After I watched it, I decided that if there was anyone who could teach me the game, it would be this former school teacher. Plus, he had mannerisms like me, he was down to earth, and he was really low-key like me. One day I ran into him at the Bellagio and I decided to introduce myself. It turned out he was on a softball team and he was only able to hit singles. I offered to teach him how to hit and he offered to teach me to play better poker. I think he hit a home run two days later. We’ve been friends ever since,” Hershiser said.
Motivated more by the competitive nature of the game than the fame and riches, Hershiser fi nds himself easily drawn to the felt when he’s not working for ESPN. “It’s not about the money for me. The money is just a scorecard. I love learning how to play and I love competing. I love the camaraderie aspect of the game and I have made a lot of friends playing poker. Thanks to my new deal with PokerStars, I’ll be doing some traveling as well and I’m lucky enough to get to play in several big tournaments.”
A true fan of game, Hershiser feels very strongly about poker’s appeal and he considers it to be a legitimate sport. “In the olden days, people would look at poker and say that it was played in back rooms by cigar- smoking derelicts. Now it’s out in the open. I know plenty of men around the country that are members of country clubs and I am one of them. On Saturdays and Sundays we would gamble $100 to $250 on our Nassaus [a betting game in golf]. So to go to a $1 to $2 game and play poker for fi ve hours, risking $100 to $200, or $200 to $500 in a $2 to $5 game, it’s not as bad as people believe. Instead of paying my $75,000 country club membership and my $2,000-a-month cart fees, I decided to start a poker account.”
Although he says he still has plenty to learn about playing poker, Hershiser has plenty of advice for poker players of all skill levels. “When I talked to a lot of the online players at the PokerStars tournament in Costa Rica, they asked me to teach them something about handling pressure. I said to them that it is just as easy to win a million-dollar pot as it is to win a $100 pot. It’s just as easy to throw a pitch in the bullpen as it is in the seventh game of the World Series. When you learn that it’s the same pitch, the same hand, the same pot every time, that is when you’ll be yourself – and when you are being yourself you are at your best. When all of a sudden you think it is a different pitch or a different hand because of the possible results, then you’ve got a problem.”
