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| Pocket Idiot's Guide to Poker Tells |
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Andy Bloch's Bio
My name is Andy Bloch and I play online poker exclusively at FullTiltPoker.com.
I've won over $4,000,000 playing poker tournaments. In 2006, I finished second for over $1 million in the first $50,000 buy-in HORSE tournament at the World Series of Poker, after the longest recorded heads up battle in WSOP history, eventually losing to the legendary Chip Reese.
Later in 2006, I won the Pro Am Poker Equalizer, which aired on ESPN early in 2007. In 2007, I finished in the top 8 players in NBC's National Heads Up Poker Championship, and in 2008 I finished 2nd to Chris Ferguson. Three months later I finished second again in a WSOP bracelet event, this time the $10,000 buy-in Pot Limit Hold'em Championship. As of the beginning of 2009, I have 20 WSOP cashes and over $2 million in total WSOP winnings, despite never winning a bracelet, or cashing in the $10k Championship Event. I believe I have the most final tables of anyone this decade without winning a bracelet (and second most overall) -- this is a record that I hope to lose this year.
Since 2007, I've been on NBC's late-night poker show, Poker After Dark, four times. After some bad luck my first three tries (including losing heads up to Gabe Kaplan), I finally won in my fourth attempt, in the "Brilliant Minds" week. I ended up heads up against Chris Ferguson, a rematch of sorts of the NBC National Heads Up Championship which was played only a few weeks before.
In 2005, I won the $10,000 buy-in Ultimate Poker Challenge II championship event and a WSOP circuit tournament at the Rio. I have had two WPT final tables and eight WPT money finishes, plus another Ultimate Poker Challenge win and three other UPC final tables. Other wins include the 2002 Seven-Card Stud event at the World Poker Finals, and the 2004 $1,000 No-Limit Hold 'em Hot Tex! Tournament at the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas.
People often ask how I got to be a professional poker player. Here's my story.
I practically grew up with a deck of cards in my crib. As a young child and throughout high school, I was always playing card games with my friends and family, and winning. I played a little poker with friends, but I didn't get serious about poker until after I graduated from MIT with two electrical engineering degrees in 1992.
That's when I got started playing casino poker at the newly-opened Foxwoods casino. I was working as an engineer in a small company in Westchester county, NY, and in December 1992 I decided to visit Foxwoods. There I saw a board listing the tournament winners from Foxwoods' first "World Poker Finals." I had no idea what a poker tournament entailed, but I was always good at games and I wondered how long it would take for my name to make it there. I started playing some small $35
weekly tournaments at Foxwoods, making the 2-hour trip maybe once a month. And by the end of the year, my name was on the winner's board -- I won one of the World Poker Finals tournaments, a $100 entry fee no-limit hold'em tournament. That was the
first time I ever played no-limit.
In the spring of 1993, I had an argument with my boss and got
myself fired from my first job. I jokingly told my parents that if I
didn't find a job I liked I could always play poker for a living.
A few months later I did find and start a new engineering job near Boston, while I continued to play poker one or two weekends a month, and joined a weekly poker game in the Boston area, which I had found through the Usenet newsgroup rec.gambling. The discussions on rec.gambling at that time (circa 1993-94) were a great resource for new mathematically-inclined poker players like myself. Partly as a tribute to those who shared with me in those early rec.gambling days, I continue to share strategy tips and advice with others, now mostly on www.wptfan.com, a site I created and run, with 6000 members as of June, 2005. I also can be found answering questions while playing on fulltiltpoker.com and on Full Tilt Poker's poker forums at pokerforums.fulltiltpoker.com.
While unemployed in 1993, I came across
a new game at Foxwoods called "Hickok 6-card Poker", which was played against the house, similar to Caribbean Stud or Let it Ride. While starting my new job designing computer networking chips for Digital, I wrote some computer programs and developed a strategy for playing Hickok that gave the player a pretty substantial edge of about 6%. Through my weekly Boston-area poker game, I met some fellow MIT alumni who were part of the MIT blackjack team, and we put together and trained a team of MIT students and others to play Hickok. We won consistently for few months, but the casino caught on and changed the rules. A casino gaming
newspaper reported that we had won $1 million, but unfortunately, that was an overstatement by a factor of more than 10. We won only about $30 per hour played. Hickok was a success, but not incredibly profitable.
More important than my share of the profits, the Hickok experience was my first true foray into the world of professional gambling and my introduction to the MIT blackjack team. I started going to MIT team practices in late 1994 and went on my first blackjack trip to Las Vegas with the team in early 1995. Meanwhile, I grew bored
with my engineering job and few months later, I quit my job and began playing blackjack and poker full time while I decided what I wanted to do next. (My blackjack team experience was the subject of a 1997 article in the Hartford Courant. I was featured in a DVD documentary on blackjack called The Hot Shoe, and in an episode of Fox's reality series "The Casino" which originally aired August 2, 2004.)
As I was moving to Las Vegas in the fall, I decided to apply to law school, but I'd only go if I got in to Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. Yale and Stanford rejected me, but I got in to Harvard Law School, so I started law school in the fall of 1996. I paid for my tuition and expenses and more by continuing to play blackjack and invest
with the MIT Blackjack Team. I had to curtail most of my poker trips
but I still wouldn't let school prevent me from playing the World
Series of Poker in 1997 and 1998, even though I had to miss part of the last week of classes both years. (I had to skip the WSOP in 1999 or I wouldn't have graduated!) For the 1997 World Series, Tom Sims, a good friend of mine, was looking for a volunteer to "sweat" and record all his hole cards (a low-tech precursor to hole-card-cams). I agreed. His records turned into a 2-part Card Player Magazine article and the entire play-by-play can still be found online at
http://conjelco.com/wsop97/bloch.html.
I worked one summer during law school at a major law firm doing high-tech intellectual property work, but I didn't find it too intellectually stimulating. The second summer I played blackjack and poker and started writing a book. I wasn't interested in a regular legal job. I graduated from Harvard Law School and passed the bar in 1999, but I hadn't found a law-related job that would keep my interest. (I'm still
"looking" -- at least that's what I tell my parents.) So I went back
to playing poker, and I also traded stocks heavily for about 1 year. I was growing tired of the poker tournament world and considered looking for another change, until the World Poker Tour started. In the first WPT season, I finished in 3rd place in two tournaments, and I decided to follow the poker tour more closely. With all the major televised poker tournaments, I'm now quite busy traveling from tournament to tournament around the world.
Trying to capitalize on poker's popularity, in 2005 I joined up with other top pros including Howard Lederer, Chris Ferguson, Phil Gordon, and Phil Ivey, in representing what was then a new on-line poker site called Full Tilt Poker. Full Tilt Poker has since grown to be one of the top two poker sites in the world. Players at FullTiltPoker.com can find me and other top pros playing there frequently,. I often play
low-limit games that everyone can afford, and sometimes in play money games, promotional tournaments, and charity events, to give everyone a chance to sit at a table with a pro. All the money I win on the low-limit games at Full Tilt Poker goes to charity.
To help family, friends, and fans keep up with me, I have a personal
website at www.andybloch.com with both poker and non-poker content. I'm still a licensed lawyer, but I've never practiced, other than defending myself after I was arrested in 2003 at an anti-war protest in front of the White House. (Full details of my arrest, the trial, and my successful appeal are available on my website at www.andybloch.com/appeal.)
Links:
Last Updated Friday, February 13 2009 @ 09:24 AM EST
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