Faraz Jaka dishes out the tips on how a tuna sandwich on the road could save you as much as good fold

I’m sitting at the final table of the NAPT Venetian $25,000 Bounty Shootout with $460,000 on the line. The room is packed, the ESPN cameras are on and I’ve dressed to impress: a $200 Paul Smith shirt, a $700 pair of Louis Vaton suede loafers and a $300 hat from Barney’s New York. Hell, even my belt costs $100. But when the meal break comes, I skip the restaurant and skip the take out.

I’m staying sharp, and most importantly, cheap, with a 95¢ tuna sandwich I made in my hotel room a few hours earlier.

That might not make sense to some, but this is what I call budgeting.

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Poker pro Faraz Jaka reveals how he learned to humanize the poker greats.

When I started playing poker at 19-years-old, I was a sophomore in college and ignorance was bliss.
It was pure chance that I discovered Texas hold’em.

A couple of kids who occasionally ran a game in my dorm invited me to come play a few times. I didn’t watch poker on TV, I didn’t read online forums and I certainly didn’t know the names of any poker pros, aside from maybe Doyle Brunson.

Yet only a few months later I was playing online heads-up matches for $10,000 buy-ins.

Over a six month period I played for hours each day, often until 5 a.m., battling players I didn’t know, my bank roll fluctuating between $30,000 and $175,000. Admittedly, I was young and dumb. I was playing out of my bank roll and probably out of my league. But I did have one advantage. My fearless ignorance.

Sometime later, as I began to hang with more poker players, I remember talking to one of my friends. He was going on and on about the top online players. Two of the names he mentioned sounded familiar:” Zweig” and “Crazy Horse”.
“I used to play against those guys” I said.
“What?!?” he exclaimed. “Do you know who those people are?”

A couple of Google searches revealed that I had been playing against Prahlad Friedman and Ram Vaswani, unbeknownst to me, two of the most feared and dominant online players out there. At that time, Friedman had already won a WSOP bracelet and Vaswani was coming off a World Series with three final table appearances.

 

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