On and off, I play poker online. Three weeks ago, while playing, I was looking up the players I was sitting with on the ole webbarooni (not worth going into, but there are ways to research your opponents as you play them) and saw that one of them, Amir Lehavot (AmirSF) was a pro who had just started coaching players. (Obviously, learning that someone is a pro tells me to avoid getting into big hands with him or her, it's valuabe info.)
Later that night, I emailed him and asked him about his coaching. I had heard of at least one coach who trained people in exchange for a percentage of their future winnings, akin to a literary or theatrical agent, who only gets paid when the client gets paid. As it turned out, Amir has all the students he can handle right now but said he'd be happy to do one session with me. A session turned out to be my sending him my "hand history" for one tournament, about 400 hands or so. He went through those hands, sent me an extensive email detailing "leaks" for me to work on and offering other tips. We then chatted online briefly and set up an appointment to go over the tournament history after I'd looked it over.
Once I'd looked over the 40 or so hands he'd singled out, we had our appointment via google chat. It lasted almost three hours and was invaluable. As a wary New Yorker, I kept wondering what the catch was, what he wanted from me, but, aside from asking me to check out his new poker training site PokerWit (http://pokerwit.com), he asked nothing of me, he just wanted to help a less experienced player who was eager to learn. He gave I'd say about six hours of his time and offered to go over another tournament history with me after he got back from Vegas, where he was going to play the big one, the world championship event of the World Series of Poker, which started last weekend with over 6,000 entrants and runs through this week and into next. When the championship gets down to one table, they'll stop, and build the hype for a few months before playing out the "November Nine."
Well, I can't believe I'm even writing this, but they're down to 1,400-some players and Mister Amir Lehavot is currently sitting in FIRST PLACE! So if you're into poker and want a rooting interest in the WSOP, I say Amir has earned my support and yours too! You can follow it here and here and see how he's doing.
The tourney costs $10,000 to enter, and the top 648 get paid with prize money ranging from $21k to $8.5 million for the last player standing. No one in the decade since the main event's gotten huge has been the day two (which is really the 6th day of the tourney, fyi, as there are four day ones and two day twos because there are too many people to seat at once) leader and gone on to the final table, so it's still a long way to go, but with 610,000 chips, over 100,000 more than the guy in second, he's a hell of a player and in better shape stack-wise to make it than the rest of 'em, so: Go Amir go!!!!
