Tomato Interviews: MrX

In the first of what we hope will be a long running series, the resident investigative journalist Tomato interviews GameLive.com poster and scientist MrX about his his career as a professional gambler.




Actually, I barely knew him when he brought up the idea of a poker game. It was the game, not him, that interested me. We were both mildly obsessed with pinball, and that was the only environment I knew him from. He became a partner in crime. We talked a lot about poker in the following year. We shared books and took trips to the riverboat casinos. As he progressed with his phd work, he played less and I started playing full time. We lost touch for a long time, but somewhere along the line he far surpassed me.

As an interesting side-note, Chris was married, even as a grad student when I met him. He had to ask his wife if it was okay with her for him to play some poker with their money. She said that he could play with $20, and if he lost that, that was it. He never lost the $20 and never added any outside money. That original $20 has grown into his current gambling bankroll, which I'm sure is over a million.


I transitioned out of poker several years before I began looking into sports. And I dabbled with modeling sports for a couple years before it became my main source of income. So, I'll treat it as two different questions.

After nine years, I was plenty sick of poker. I was lucky enough to be in a casino town that was really good place to be for some new types of banking slot machines, and I was lucky enough to notice them. They were a big bankroll booster and also a big eye-opener to the fact that there were many possibilities beyond poker. I spent the next few years playing various +EV machines and table games.

As far as sports goes, I had a friend who worked in the poker rooms who was good friends with a famous casino-security consultant. He was always talking about the various groups that were making a fortune doing this or that. He knew I liked to program, and had been telling me for a couple years that there was big money to be made modeling baseball.

Around this time, I ran into MrsX online. After a few months of writing and talking on the phone, I went to Detroit to visit her, and didn't leave. Being stuck in Detroit for awhile without much income potential, I decided to finally work on baseball. I only dabbled with it for a couple years before I got it right.


Good question. I generally do enjoy the little rush I get from having money on a game, but the cumulative effect is usually negative and I end up not watching the games. But even when not watching the games, I still like the excitement when checking the results. I like having what most people consider to be an interesting profession, so I guess there's some ego there, although I have no interest in aspiring to be "the best" or even "one of the best". I like the actual programming. Not all of the time, but when there's a nice elegant solution, it can be pretty satisfying.


I do, but I'm less sure about that than I used to be. I originally figured that I'd continue growing aggressively and retire as early as possible. The last couple of years, I've made a big shift towards optimizing my current quality of life instead of bankroll growth. I took an entire season off to go hiking, made my bet-staking less aggressive, and farmed out some of the more stressful aspects of my work. My expected growth is way down, but I'm much happier. I could proceed like this for a long time and be content. If I see an opportunity for big cash-grab, though, I'll gladly take it and quit altogether if I find myself with enough money.


I don't know. I think the thing about gambling is, as soon as you know you're supporting yourself gambling, and still leading a happy lifestyle, you're good.


Independent. And honestly, even when we were "partners in crime", the actual learning was pretty independent. I think we shared enthusiasm and that helped us stay motivated, but we didn't really work things out together. I didn't really pick up any similar relationships in poker after leaving school.

When it came to machines, I developed a friendship with another gambler that has been very valuable to the learning process. Lately I've been working with a friend on sports modeling. I'm not sure how much we're learning from each other. We're mostly just doing what each of us is good at and combining the results.


Usenet (rec.games.poker) and poker books in the beginning, I guess mostly by recommendation. Stimulating interest in poker became pretty difficult. I remember being pretty excited for awhile after reading Mike Caro's Book of Tells (later The Body Language of Poker). It was a departure from the pretty unimaginative style that I was used to playing, and gave me some confidence to play in harder games. The best thing for stimulating my interest and keeping me going was always a major move into another arena, poker to machines, machines to sports, etc.


I feel like the learning with and without a mentor/partner were about of equal value.

The biggest turning point in my career was just noticing something that was going on right under my nose and having an open enough mind to see it.