Phil Gordon recently relinquished his position as host of the popular Bravo! Network show, Celebrity Poker Showdown. His tall frame used to be an ever-present imposing figure on the tournament circuit, but he’s not been at the tables as much lately. His friend, Andy Bloch, just scored a huge $1 million prize for 2nd place at the World Series of Poker H.O.R.S.E. event. It seems that the casinos work diligently to make sure that he never plays any of that money at the blackjack pit, though. When we sat down with poker pros Phil Gordon and Andy Bloch, we found out the real scoop on what’s up with these friends.
John: [to Andy] Why don’t you talk to us, to start off with, about your background—your college days, poker, blackjack, and your new DVD. Start from the beginning…
Andy: Yeah, well I was always into playing games and gambling and stuff like that. I would, you know, go play, go play Bingo and my Dad was calling out the numbers. I think that was probably my first introduction to the gambling world. I went to college at MIT. I wanted to be an electrical engineer or a computer scientist. Got a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree, from there—went to work for a company in a New York, just outside New York City and, um . . . Got some disagreements with the boss and everything: ended up getting myself fired, but in the meantime Foxwoods had opened up—
John: Sure.
Andy: —started going to Foxwoods. In fact, uh, they just had one tournament a week: one thirty-five dollar buy-in, alternated between limit Hold ‘Em and limit Stud.
John: The old days.
Andy: It was. And, um, well the first time I think I was at Foxwoods, or maybe the second time, but the first time I noticed that poker, that poker room, they had a board up that had the winner of a poker tournament. I didn’t even know they had such a thing as a poker tournament, but it sounded cool, because I like poker and I like games. That was back in ’93 I think. Foxwoods opened, like, a year earlier. This was like the first time they did the World Poker finals. And then by the time the next year came around I was playing like, you know, a hundred dollar buy-in tournaments and I had won the first time I played a No Limit tournament at Foxwoods. So, uh, then I was hooked.
John: [Laughs]. That was the worst thing that ever happened! Winning it!
Phil: Sucks you right in. Once you get that win [Laughs].
Andy: It’s all like—you know when people that like they come in and then they play a slot machine and they hit a jackpot that first time —that’s it.
John: It makes addicts for life!
Andy: Yeap, they’re stuck for life. It wasn’t quite like that because I did play most of the thirty-five dollar tournaments and tried to work. Never really did much of that. Um, so I started playing a lot of poker. I moved to Boston and got a job at a digital, uh, equipment company—a computer company—designing computer networking chips and got bored with that: started to play a lot more poker. I figured out—at, at Foxwoods they had this game called Hickock Six Card poker, . . . some of the executives at Foxwoods had invented. So it’s pretty much only played at Foxwoods. And, I figured out—the first trip—the first time I saw it I’m like, ah, this looks interesting. I wrote down the rules, went home and did some back of the envelope calculations, you know. Then I decided to write a computer program to analyze it. Ran a couple programs, figured out that the player could have up to a six percent edge, which is pretty big in a gambling game. Blackjack in a casino normally has like a two or three percent edge, a card—a basic strategy player - can get into like a quarter to half percent, card counters maybe have a one to two percent advantage. So, six percent edge on a game is a pretty big game—you have a huge advantage. Unfortunately it’s slow and the win was only fifty dollars ($50 max bet), so it was hard to really make money, but, um, through one of the poker games, one of the local poker games, I was playing in Boston I met a guy that was part of the MIT blackjack team. And he actually was looking for someone to help him start a poker team, which would be going to MIT or other, other places, recruiting some people to teach them how to play Seven Card Stud or Texas Hold ‘Em and play for them over the summer. Well that part never really worked out. It ended up being a Hickock poker team instead of a regular poker team. We did, we did pretty well. Well enough to get the casino to change the rules on the game.
John: [Laughs]. That’s too well.
Andy: There were some papers - there was this gambling industry paper - that reported that we won a million dollars, but that wasn’t, that’s not quite true. [Laughs].
Phil: Fifty dollars at a time? [Laughs]
Andy: That’s a, that’s an order of magnitude too high. We, uh, we earned just about our expectation, a little bit less. Um, and a good chunk of that was hitting the royal flush for thirty thousand dollars, I think.
John: Wow.
Andy: It was, uh . . . you know, considering how much time we put into it, it was quite a ride for, I think, some of the players. As a person who invented the strategy against the game, I had a royalty plus I had invested in the whole bank. That got me connected with the whole business world of professional gambling: how to organize a team and all that. And so at this time I’m still working at digital and playing poker, you know, every Wednesday—Wednesday night game and all that sort of stuff in Boston. And then they recruited me for the MIT blackjack team. A lot of people when they get recruited they don’t—you know, they are friends of someone who’s already on the team. But here I had, I already had a record so I was welcomed in and so I started playing almost immediately, as soon as I got up to speed. In the beginning of ’95 that’s when I started, actually the first time I started played with the MIT team.
John: Tell us about that, lay it on us. Give us the scoop on those trips.
Andy: Ok. So the MIT blackjack has been around in one form or another for a long time. I don’t know the exact origins of it. I mean I guess probably when Atlantic City opened up there was a team, but, uh, the team I was in is the more modern team, really started in, I think the early ‘90’s and was structured more like a business. By the time I got involved in it, it was more of a team structure in that we didn’t have a lot of shadowy investors. It was a little more egalitarian in that we tried to expect everyone to invest, at least, once they made some money off the team. And we had, if you . . . you had to already be connected with the team to invest. We didn’t just take outside investors, which I think worked a lot better for the team because you have to—trust is such an important part of this kind of venture. And it’s always hard to figure out. Um, we have some complicated ways of splitting up the money between players and investors and I don’t think that would have worked out so well if you didn’t have those two groups overlapping so much. So anyway, the beginning, from the very beginning I assumed I was allowed to. After my first few trips I invested in the team and tried to reinvest all the money I made, which, which turned out to be very profitable. I mean, there are some people who have like created the MIT team, and were one of the original organizers, and one of these guys wasn’t very smart about like continuing to invest and he’s made almost nothing off the team over the years. And, you know, other people have made hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars off the team, by being smart, and reinvesting and being willing to risk, but understanding the risk. Um, so I started in 1995. The book, Bringing Down the House, the guy who is the main character in that book started about the same time I did. And then a couple of months after I started we decided to split up into two teams.
John: Why’d you split up?
Andy: We split up because the team just got too big, too successful. We were dealing with seven figure bank rolls: over a million, two million dollars. You’re starting to bet enough that, you know, you’re always hitting the table maximums. The, the small investors . . . felt like they don’t—can’t really invest enough to have a big share in it and they wanna have a bigger share. Um, and ultimately there was one player on the team who wanted more. He wanted to run his own team I think.
John: I see.
Andy: That was also part of it. And he wanted to—so, we split off. I went with his group, we called ourselves the Amphibians. We called the other team the Reptiles and that name kinda stuck. And they kinda even started calling themselves that.
John: So there was almost a feeling of competition between the two?
Andy: Well, it was a friendly rivalry. We didn’t—we occasionally would share information, but not too much. I mean, you obviously, you don’t wanna kill the game. They had a bigger bankroll than us when we started off. We started off, we had, like, you know, a four hundred thousand dollar bank roll, which sounds like a lot, but as far as we’d been playing with like a two million dollar bankroll. What that means is our betting unit, or how we figure out how much we bet, is one fifth of what it was before. So before you might be betting, you know, five thousand at one point; now you’re betting a thousand. That’s a lot of money. You can still make money, but you’re not gonna, you know . . . it’s, it’s, uh—it can be a big change. But it also means you can grow a lot faster, faster. I mean, it’s much harder to double on a two million dollar team than on a four hundred thousand dollar team.
John: The Bringing Down the House book—I read that one. They had some problems with getting identified, getting kicked out of casinos.
Andy: Yes.
John: They ended up wearing costumes once in a while to disguise themselves . . .
Andy: Yeah.
John: Was that something you got yourself into too?
Andy: Yeah. Definitely. I mean I’ve been kicked out of I don’t know how may casinos. Um . . .
Phil: All of ‘em!
Andy: I tell you what, pretty much every casino would probably kick me out if they knew who I was and I tried to play blackjack, for any serious amount of money. Um, you know, there’s a book out there, that’s put together by, or there used to be anyway, that was put together by a company called Griffin Investigations. And they are like the CIA of card counting, sort of—except that they are a private company.
John: Right.
Andy: And what they do, they probably do a lot of illegal things in that they share all of your information without giving you any chance to . . . you’ re not even supposed to have any knowledge that you’re in the book. I’ve seen my page. Well actually I’m on multiple pages.
John: [Laughs].
Phil: I bet you are!
Andy: There’s, there’s a Griffin mug book. I didn’t bring a copy with me, but on one side you’ll see just the mugs, mug shots, one or two pictures of people. If there’s two pictures, one’s from the side, one’s from the front, one’s from a security camera from one angle. One is my MIT yearbook photo!
John: [Laughs].
Andy: Yeah, they have my MIT yearbook photo in the Grif book. And then on the other side is a little, like, blurb: name, date of birth if they have that, height, weight, hair color, eye color, you know, association, affiliation, what you’re, what you’re suspected of doing. And they would always put the card counters on the tops of the pages. And they did all sorts of casino cheaters and people who would just pickpocket stuff. And then they would put the more common criminal, the people who were really criminals, on the bottom of the sheets and they would mix them together like that. And you could tell by the fact that card counters were on the top that their real focus was card counters. And they, several times they would refer to card counters as cheating, which it isn’t. It’s a hundred percent legal! The supreme court of Nevada has said it in several different cases. There was even a case that the MIT team was involved in where one guy; where one casino had tried to keep one of our player’s winnings. And well they tried to keep his buy-in first and his winnings. They gave his winnings back. We had to go to court—ended up going to the supreme court of Nevada to get his winnings back. And the supreme court said that, hey, it’s not illegal to hide your identity and hide your skill from the casino.
John: Right.
Andy: You know, you’re winning money from the casino because of your skill. Well actually they quite—they got it a little bit wrong because they said that he won his forty thousand dollars ‘cause of his skill. He won, you know, maybe ten thousand was worth it because of his skill; the other thirty thousand was just random luck.
John: Right.
Andy: You’re winning not because of who you are, you’re winning because of your skill and some luck and that’s really the important thing . . . that comes out of that is that it’s skill. That’s the important thing and that card counting is perfectly legal and it’s legal to hide yourself from the casinos, at least in the state of Nevada. You don’t have to go up to a—there’s no law that says you have to go up to a casino and say, hey, I’m a card counter: I can beat your game. It’s okay if you play. You don’t have to say that! [Laughs]. Especially because the casino is an industry that’s built on the myth that you can beat the casinos and if they go and kick you—if they force you to tell them when you can beat them, I mean, that kind of defeats the whole myth. It’s not really good for the industry as a whole if that happens. They want people to go into the casino and think that they have a chance of winning.
John: So is that what you’re gonna teach us in the DVD, Beating Blackjack with Andy Bloch?
Andy: Yeah. The, the whole thing—the basics, learning how to count cards, I could teach almost anyone to do it. It takes a little bit of practice. Some people take more practice, some people take less, some really smart people can’t handle it, and whereas some of the average people are gonna be great at it. And we called that the MIT blackjack team—we didn’t have to go there. We have people that didn’t graduate college in there. I mean you have to be, like, twenty-one. I think that was the only rule. At least twenty-one before you actually play with us.
John: I suppose so!
Andy: [Laughs]. But, uh, it’s . . . the other thing is you can split apart the job of gambling, of card counting, to more than one person. So one person could be the counter and you have someone else that he’s signaling who’s the big player. And that’s very important not just to make it easier on you, but also to hide yourself from the casino. That you wanna, um—
Phil: You wanna be able to spread your out as effectively as possible.
Andy: Right, like I said, the easy part is learning how to count; the hard part is getting away with it.
John: Right.
Andy: Because the casino—obviously, if you go up to them and say, hey, I’m gonna take your money they’re gonna say, no, you’re welcome to play roulette over there. Sometimes they’re not even that nice. And, you know, so you have to go and hide it, if you’re playing by yourself at counting. The way you get an advantage is by varying the bet when you have the advantage according to the count.
John: Right.
Andy: And that’s something that I go over in the DVD. Yeah, the way the MIT team did it is an optimal strategy. Now, if you follow that—casinos aren’t, aren’t completely idiots. They know about card counting too; they’re going to be able to figure out based on you varying your bet. There are times when they kick people out just for varying their bet, and they aren’t even card counters. They make a lot of mistakes that way.
John: Interesting.
Andy: So, you have to hide that from the casino. And one good way of doing it is by playing with a partner. Telling them how much to bet. And you don’t say, hey, Joe, go bet a thousand dollars. There are signals that you set up telling them how much to bet. And the signals can involve words, can involve chips. It can involve, uh, touches. I mean, we could have a male-female team, where the woman is the one that is actually controlling all the action, doing all the work. And she would like tell the big player how much to bet by, by rubbing his back or something, or his leg. So there are a lot of opportunities for you to, uh, a lot of ways to do it.
John: The same principle as you guys used for the two million dollar bankroll, is that going to work for the normal guy to go to Vegas with maybe a thousand bucks to gamble?
Andy: Yeah, yeah! Well it definitely will. You have to scale it to your, uh, your bankroll. And by bankroll, um, if you’re a professional gambler you consider your bank roll your entire net worth, at least maybe your liquid net worth. Maybe you have some money saved away for retirement or your house that you don’t wanna risk losing. For, uh, for someone else I might say, okay, whatever you can lose — you’d be able to lose without, like, going crazy or without like giving up gambling for good. If you have a side income, regular income, you can maybe, you can go and bet more, possibly. Let’s say you only have like two thousand. You get together with four of your buddies, you each put up two thousand, now you’ve got a ten thousand dollar bank roll and now you can go to casinos and you can play—start playing—well when you’re only going to be making like ten dollars an hour, twenty dollars an hour, fifty dollars an hour, but you’ll be getting practice; you’ll be growing your bank roll. And then once you, once you, double your bank roll you can bet twice as much.
John: Right.
Andy: Now you’re betting twenty dollars or up to a hundred dollar maximum, let’s say. And now you got forty thousand and you’re betting into two hundred dollar maximum. Now you get that ten up to a hundred thousand and now you can, you know, bet significant amounts. And have great trips and get comps and the intrigue can be very exciting. And that’s the thing. If you can start out slow— and in fact, I recommend everyone start out slow, even if you have a million dollar bankroll. You want to start out betting ten dollars a hand and getting the flow of it.
John: And we could keep building as we practice. This is great. Let’s talk about the style that your DVD’s. It’s not exactly what you see out there on the market. Often times they have the title page of what they’re gonna teach next and then they lecture. And Expert Insight DVD’s are more inside the mind of the player. It’s a different kind of teaching style.
Phil: It, it is. They’re really two ways to teach. One is professorial, where the guy is standing in front of a chalk board or sitting at a table and just talking to you about what you’re supposed to do. Okay, in this situation you do this and in this situation you do that. Uh, and then the method that we’ve found is experiential education. So you’re inside the mind of the expert and whatever craft they’re pursuing. In my poker DVD you only see my own cards, but in voice over on the DVD you hear all the thoughts in my head as I’m playing at the final table, making winning decisions, reading my opponent, figuring out what they have and then, you know, maybe getting lucky maybe not. In Andy’s blackjack DVD you’re only gonna hear—you’re gonna hear Andy’s thoughts as he’s applying perfect basic strategy, counting cards, varying his bet with the count and then working with his teammates to signal in the big players and the guerillas and the spotters; hopefully, to elude detection from the casino. So it’s experiential education. It’s definitely a different way to learn, but it’s also entertaining at the same time. There’s an entertainment component there that traditional instructional videos lack.
John: It is unique.
Phil: Um, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen some of the other poker DVD’s on the market . . . you’re nodding off after the first twenty minutes.
John: Right.
Phil: In my DVD, it plays more like a World Poker Tour event or the World Series of Poker event you wanna see what that next hand is, you wanna see—especially because you don’t know what the other players have, you know. And it makes it kind of compelling, compelling viewing. In Andy’s DVD you wanna see what happen. You wanna see if the big boss is gonna catch them and the security—you know, we cut away to the security cameras these guys are trying to catch, catch our guys, and you wanna see what happened there.
John: It’s like a refined television show or a …
Andy: It’s like a movie.
Phil: It’s like little movie.
Andy: Like “Ocean’s Eleven.” Anyone can do it.
Phil: But educational at the same time. Our first priority with Expert Insight is to educate. Our second priority is to entertain.
Andy: Right.
Phil: And if we can do both of those things in every title that we produce then I think we are going to be extraordinarily successful. I know that we’ve accomplished it in our first two. There’s no doubt in my mind. You know, Andy and I have been friends for a long time and he’s taught me a lot of the principles, uh, for card counting even before I saw the DVD, but after I saw the DVD I know what I’m doing.
John: Right. You know it works.
Phil: I didn’t, I didn’t really know before. There’s always that—those little subtleties that are involved.
John: It helps to see it.
Phil: Uh, that may be difficult to communicate when you’re professing: how to do something.
John: Right.
Phil: But when you see the guy do it . . . When you see what’s happening at the table and then you find yourself in that exact situation, iit’s so much easier to apply that knowledge that you gained. And envision yourself, really, in Andy’s spot or in my spot at the final table. Uh, the company’s gonna be doin’ thirty titles in the next three years. Not all of them are gonna be in gambling. In fact, this might be one of our last gambling titles or gaming titles, but, uh, our next one is golf. It’s with Jim Furyk the number seven golfer in the world—
John: Great.
Phil: —against Fred Funk who’s the number twelve golfer in the world. And Jim and Fred are playing what we’re calling the, uh, short game challenge. And in the short game challenge there are eighteen shots set up around the green at TPC Sawgrass, the site of the Players’ Championship. And each, uh, each golfer will take a turn. Walk up to their ball, analyze their lie, figure out what kind of shot they’re gonna hit. You know and you’re inside their mind the whole time, you know, well I only got a little bit of green to work with here, I gotta hit a, I guess I gotta hit a lob shot or . . .
John: Interesting.
Phil: You know, weight on the back foot, open up the club base. You’ll hear all those thoughts in their head as they’re planning, executing, and analyzing results of their shot. That’s gonna be a lot different than let’s say, I don’t know -- Dave Pell’s or an instructor standing with you—okay, if you have a bump and run shot this is what you’re supposed to do.
John: Right.
Phil: It’s a much different, it’s a different approach. And, uh, you can still see the entertaining aspects, the entertainment aspects in this DVD—in the golf DVD—because you know you wanna see who wins the match! It’s a real sports event. These guys are playing for a hundred thousand dollars.
John: All right. Cool.
Phil: You know. So, uh, then we have a couple of more coming out this year. We wanna do a NASCAR title at the end of this year with one of the major NASCAR drivers. We wanna do, uh, just a wide range, a wide range of DVD’s. We’re gonna have a health and wellness product very soon with a world-class nutritionist. So you’re inside her mind as she goes to the grocery store to buy food for her family for a week. And why does she pick blueberries and strawberries as opposed to bananas . . .
John: [Laughs] I might need that one!
Phil: With twenty-four percent of Americans thirty pounds overweight or more this is a DVD that’s really, really necessary. I’m not saying it’s gonna be as edu—as entertaining as say Andy or my DVD.
John: Right.
Phil: But at the end of the day I think we’re really going to be able to help people with our products. That’s one of the reasons I’m, why I started the company and am very, very excited about our prospects. Yeah. One of the reasons that I’m really excited about the product is that it really is going to help people. I mean, I get hundreds of emails, hundreds, from people that say, oh, I’d never won a poker tournament before. I was always the dead money in my home game, and I got your DVD for Christmas, or this or that, and I won my first tournament. And I know Andy’s is gonna help them and he’s gonna get hundreds of emails about all of these new teams that have been forming. I can’t wait to see, I can’t wait to—.
Andy: … to see the casinos?
Phil: —to, you know, walk through casinos. Yeah, I mean it could really, it could really hurt them. I mean it could really hurt them because the information on the blackjack DVD is so powerful and, and so compelling. And really Andy does such a great job of communicating the subtleties of the game. There will definitely be hundreds, if not thousands, of new teams formed in the next year, you know, and it’s gonna be really interesting to see what happens in Vegas with the rules of blackjack. I mean we already see a little bit of it with the blackjack only paying six to five and, you know, stuff like that. And the shuffle machine—those shuffle machines?
John: Ah, yeah, the continuous shuffle.
Phil: But . . . So it’s, uh . . . we wanna educate, we wanna entertain . . .
John: Right.
Phil: . . . and we wanna give you what it’s like to be in the shoes of the expert. You’re really, you’re playing along, you know. You’re in their thoughts. You’re hearing their motivation, and it’s a brand new way to learn.
John: In your poker it really is exciting. I mean, before the turn card comes out you might need a six to complete your hand—
Phil: Six, six.
John: Six, six, six. And the cocktail waitress might, might walk by and your mind gets distracted!
Phil: We all do that! I mean I’m not gonna hide anything from you. I mean—
John: And an ace comes out and you say, “Damn!”
Phil: [Laughs].
Andy: You say it in your mind. You don’t want to be saying it out loud!
Phil: But we all think that. If you’re not thinking that, something’s wrong with you. You know if you’re on a gut shot straight draw or something and you just made a big bet and got called, “f**k.”
John: Yeah. Right.
Phil: You’re definitely rooting for that card to come on the turn. You know? And if you’re not, something is wrong with you. So I kept it as real as possible, uh, and, and just let you know what I was thinking—you know, the whole time. So . . .
John: So what drove you to start this company? Was there somebody or something that drove you start it?
Phil: What started it was, uh, you know, Celebrity Poker and my success at the table. People—some of the company’s that do poker DVD’s had come to me and asked me to do a DVD for them. And I looked at their products and I’m like “no”. They’re just horrible.
John: Right.
Phil: Very casually produced. They didn’t spend enough money on the graphics and getting the content right, and I really just didn’t think they taught very much.
John: Uh huh.
Phil: I just didn’t really think that I wanted to be another one of a set of ten. I came up with the idea for the DVD, the inside the mind and only showing my hole cards, based on a segment we do with Celebrity Poker Showdown called “How would you play it?”
John: Yeap. Right. We all know that segment.
Phil: And, literally, every time I go out, people always say, wow, I really love that “How would you play it?” I wish you would do more—more of those hands. You know, and I said, people really like that. It’s by far the most educational segment on Celebrity Poker. That’s the one time, the five minutes, where I really get to, uh, to teach in a deep and meaningful way. So I thought it would be perfect for this DVD. I didn’t think that I could convince the other DVD companies to spend the couple hundred thousand that it was gonna take to do it right.
John: Right.
Phil: But you know it did. It took an enormous amount of money to put that DVD in your hands. I don’t know if you can tell, but . . .
John: Oh, yeah.
Phil: I mean there was a crew of forty on hand; it took three months to write the script—it was, uh, very complicated and very involved.
John: Even with the cover and the insert you can tell has more graphical designers and, just more “meat” to it than the other stuff on the market. Usually it is a stock photo of the pro who hosts the video.
Phil: This is high end stuff. You know Andy’s DVD, once again, it was a five day shoot, four locations. I mean these are movies. At the end of the day, I don’t want to call it an instructional movie—
John: Right.
Phil: —but at the end of the day these are instructional movies. I mean, my DVD’s an hour and forty minutes, times two audio tracks, is three hours, you know . . .
John: Right.
Phil: It’s an incredibly complex product. But at the end of the day I think it’s worth the investment.
John: Right.
Phil: You know I don’t think there’s a better DVD on the market and I know for sure, having compared some of the products, there’s not gonna be a better blackjack DVD out. I know I can do the same thing for golf, I know that I can do the same thing across thirty different subject areas with the team that I have assembled. I’ve got some of the world’s greatest filmmakers are my business partners, and you know . . . we’re, we’re going for it.
John: Right.
Phil: I’m gonna turn this company into an educational media juggernaut.
John: Right. So you’re looking at this kinda—this whole line being the DVD of the Dummies.
Phil: Yeah. The Dummies books when you walk into the bookstore—
Andy: But it’s much better than the Dummies books.
Phil: The Dummies books—
Andy: —are very basic.
Phil: They’re very basic, and not only are they very basic, but you don’t really know who wrote the, their book. I mean they have no credibility whatsoever. I’m dedicated to getting the world’s greatest teachers and practitioners.
Andy: Except the Idiots Guide—the Pocket Idiots Guide of poker, poker bluffs.
Phil: Oh, that was you. Andy wrote the Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Poker. It came out recently. But, uh, it’ll be the world’s greatest practitioners in real situations and that’s what are DVD’s are gonna be. We’re gonna educate and entertain by giving you the world’s greatest in real life situations and let you learn from them experientially.
John: So that’ll help you with the marketing because you guys are gonna have automatic buy-in from your consumers being that your poker and blackjack experts, both in the gaming industry, but your name might not necessarily help to sell a diet one or a golf one . . .
Phil: No, but, but Jim Furyk, number seven golfer in the world, number three short game in the world. Tiger Woods partner in the Ryder Cup this year, this coming year, U.S. Open champion.
John: Right.
Phil: I mean how can you get any better than that? [Laughs].
John: Right.
Phil: I mean that’s—I mean those are the types of, you know—Tom Brady voicing over an AFC championship game. Think Roger Clemens going pitch by pitch, you know, during a play-off game. Those, those are the kind of experts that we’re gonna sign for Expert Insight, those are the types of DVD’s: you’ll get inside the minds of the world’s greatest and hear what they have to say about whatever, you know, the stuff that they’re gonna teach. That’s pretty cool.
John: And how many investors did you start off with?
Phil: It’s me and my business partner Rafe Furst.
John: Ah, Rafe, yeah.
Phil: And, uh, Andy is one of our team. And Mike Keller is my chief creative officer and director and writer for all our DVD’s and a few small investors.
John: Have you cut any deals for distribution with major outfits?
Phil: Ah, well, we’re just now—we haven’t really spent a lot of time and money, at this point, in distribution. Reason being we have one DVD, you know? With one DVD you put it out to retail and it’s gonna get swallowed up. It’s very difficult to clear shelf space in major distributors with only one title. But now with Andy’s DVD ready for shipment, now we have a, now we have a little kiosk, right? It’s the busting Vegas kiosk. It’s Final Table Poker and …
Andy: Blackjack.
Phil: —and Beating Blackjack and that makes a compelling display. Now we’ve got a story to tell. With one DVD it’s like, oh, Phil Gordon trying to make some money on a poker DVD.
John: Right, right.
Phil: Now we have a story to tell. And when we have three titles, when the golf video is done in a few months, you know—now we’re a brand and we’re off to the races. So I have, I have a pretty firmly established plan for taking the company, a company that was gonna be a one DVD company to thirty in three years. We’re gonna have thirty titles in three years across twenty five subject areas.
John: And, uh, that’s a major undertaking. It’s gonna cut into some of your playing time.
Phil: It is and it already has. I mean I’m working eighty hours a week on Expert Insight now and I don’t have time play. So you’ll see me at the World Series of Poker, but you’re not gonna see me at any other events until then.
John: Until . . .
Phil: But you know what? At the end of the day this is what I wanna do. You know I get a lot of grief from my fellow professionals about not traveling to the tournaments and such, but you know I’m like you know what? This is what I want to do right now and I have never been one of these guys that likes to do one thing. I’m kind of a five year guy. If I look at my life— Well, every five years I kinda, kinda make a big change. I spent five years in high tech in the early ‘90’s. Was very successful there and sold the company to Cisco. And building a really huge company there. Then I spent five years traveling: traveling around the world, back packing, having fun, hanging out, not playing much poker. And then I spent five years playing, the last five years, playing poker and doing television and writing books and, you know, those things. The next five years I’m gonna spend a lot of time on Expert Insight and build another company that I truly believe has the potential to help millions, if not billions of people, um, learn what they need to learn. Learn what they wanna learn. You know, so that’s what’s exciting for me. You know, I’m still gonna play some tournaments. I’m still traveling around on the circuit. I’ve got a new book coming out in October, you know, continuing to keep my hands in the world of poker, but it’s more of a hobby now than a profession. The last five years it really has been a profession for me. I’m lookin’ now to transition a little bit, or quite a bit, and go back to work, quote-unquote. Although I don’t really—you know it’s funny when you’re waking up at six o’clock in the morning and you’re working ‘til ten o’clock at night. It’s work, but when it’s fun and it’s something that you’re very passionate about it doesn’t feel like work. And I’m very lucky to have such talented teammates. So . . . I don’t know. We really—we have a f***ing kick ass team. You can quote me on that.
John: [Laughs].
Andy: [Laughs].
John: Uh, I can try. Let me see if the editor will let that f-bomb go through! Well that’s great that you can enjoy your job—I mean good for you that you can do that.
Phil: A lot of money and a lot of pressure. You know when you’re a poker player, um, you really only report to yourself.
John: Right.
Phil: You know I’m single: I’m not married. I don’t have anyone, I don’t have anyone counting on me, you know? And, uh, it’s a completely different experience when you hire people, you know, and people work for you and they’re expecting the paycheck. You know and you have commitments to your distributors and to your business partners. It’s a whole different kind of pressure, you know, than, than playing poker for yourself. Essentially, you know, this company is gonna be—this company is responsible for twenty people eating and clothing and their kids going to school. [Laughs]. That’s a completely different pressure than facing a Phil Hellmuth all-in bet on the River. I can’t really—I can afford to lose that pot against Phil Hellmuth, but I can’t afford to screw the twenty people who believed in the company enough to this point to leave their lucrative employment to come work for a start-up. I can’t afford to mess that up. I owe it to them to give them my best effort and if that means I have to spend less time at the table so be it.
John: Best of luck to you and the company. We’ll all be practicing card counting AND poker!
In addition to being a poker enthusiast, John is a certified Counselor in the state of Pennsylvania and a National Certified Counselor (NCC). He has a Master of Arts degree in Counseling from West Virginia University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology with a minor in Sociology from Lock Haven University. You can find out more about the psychology of poker from “the Poker Counselor” at carlisle14@hotmail.com.
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