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Marc Karam is not a lucky man. He is a wealthy man, sure, only 30 years old and already a millionaire. He has a nice condo, a pretty girlfriend and a passport with more stamps than Canada Post. He has a job that occasionally brings him into contact with famous comedians (like Ray Romano) and famous thespians (like Tobey Maguire) and famous Olympians (like Michael Phelps). But all these good things — the money, the lifestyle, the works — are products of talent and dedication, not luck (well, except maybe the girlfriend). Yet when people find out what he does for a living, they often think he owes all of it to luck. Those people, says Karam, don't know poker.
"Many people don't understand how poker is different from blackjack or roulette. People think that they're all just casino games, that they're all the same. Somebody who doesn't play poker might say it's all about the luck of the cards," says Karam, a professional poker player who is often described by members of Ottawa's tight-knit poker community as without equal in the city. "But in the end, everybody is going to get the same hands the same number of times. What determines if you are going to win or not is if you can make better decisions than your opponents."
The ability to make good decisions at a poker table comes, in part, from making many decisions at many poker tables. To even have a chance to succeed at the game, you have to put in the time. Karam, who enters several live tournaments a year but plays the majority of his poker online, estimates that he has spent at least 15,000 hours honing his craft. When he started in 2002, he would play online for five or six hours in the evening after putting in a full day at a glass and aluminum company. By 2005, he was winning enough money to quit work and make poker his full-time job. Now he adheres to a strict schedule, getting in at least 50 hours of poker a week, which provides him with an annual income of about $500,000. Add to that his career winnings from live tournaments — a not-so-shabby $2.6 million — and you could say Karam has this poker thing figured out.
To achieve that level of success in poker, though, requires more than just experience. According to Mark Silver, a local poker guru and a friend of Karam's, few people possess the innate qualities needed to make a living — let alone a comfortable one — playing Texas Hold'em or Omaha or seven-card stud. To graduate from Saturday night champ to big-money pro requires a rare mix of confidence, discipline, patience, doggedness, competitiveness, and raw intelligence, not to mention a knack for quickly calculating probabilities. Even if you do have those traits, says Silver, odds are you don't have them to the same degree as Marc Karam. "Marc is in the 99th percentile of those people. He is one of the smartest people I have ever met. He comes up with concepts in poker that don't even exist. He comes up with ground-breaking stuff that he could write a book about," says Silver, a man who is no slouch himself, recently winning just over $13,000 in two days at poker tables in Las Vegas. "Out of all the players I know, and I know a lot of poker players, Marc is the best. It's not even close. To do what he does is basically impossible. He's as rare as they come."
Players of Karam's calibre are indeed rare, no question, but less so than a decade ago. Since the rise of online poker in the early 2000s, the game has exploded in popularity around the world, and there are now more highly skilled players than ever before. Still, despite the proven ability of top professionals to consistently win more money than they lose, the question of whether poker is a game of skill or luck persists — at least, it does in courtrooms of the United States. And the resolution to that question is potentially worth billions of dollars.
* * *
Karam sits down at his computer to begin a new session and finds 22,000 poker games in progress. He selects 24 games to join, the maximum the website allows. A green table appears on screen, the avatars surrounding it belonging to people from all over the world: Germany, Sweden, Argentina, Russia, Belarus. It typically takes a second or two for Karam to make a decision — fold, raise, call — and a keystroke later the table is replaced by one from another game.
On the flat-screen TV mounted above the computer, professional golfer Stephen Ames birdies a par-5 at the Banff Springs Golf Course. On Karam's monitor, adjacent to the steady stream of poker tables and below the window displaying statistics on his opponents' betting patterns, plays the sitcom How I Met Your Mother. Karam finds marathon poker sessions tedious without the distraction of television. Sometimes he'll also chat with his girlfriend, Mona Harb, while she plays poker beside him on her computer. Harb, who studied journalism in university, met Karam while making a documentary about poker, and has since become a deft player herself, often playing a dozen or more tables at once.
Within minutes, Karam wins a hand with three kings, claiming a $170 pot. Seconds later, his flush beats an opponent's three queens. Karam pauses a moment to check where he stands after 23 minutes of play and sees he is already up $492.55. Not bad. If he keeps this up, it won't take long to top the $1,700 he made during a three-hour session earlier in the day, before he darted out to play soccer. (He won the soccer game, too, by the way.)
Karam is what's known in poker circles as a "grinder." Instead of hoping to score big in a few high-stakes games, he plays many tables at once for long stretches, relying on his skill advantage over most opponents to overcome the variance in cards from hand to hand. On a recent Sunday, for instance, he played 24 tables simultaneously for 16 hours straight, completing some 26,000 hands. "If I play close to 2,000 hands an hour, my actual risk factor is literally zero," says Karam. "I'm only risking $200 at each table and I have an edge. If you're good enough to make a living playing poker, and you put in the volume and have the bankroll to withstand the variance, you won't lose."
Putting in crazy volume, however, takes a toll. Many grinders, no matter how skilled, struggle to stay sharp after hour upon hour of split-second decision-making. For Adam Fyshe, another member of Ottawa's poker elite, maintaining focus is the hardest part of the game. Karam's incredible mental stamina, Fyshe says, is another trait that sets him apart. "He has a better work ethic than anyone else I know," says Fyshe, who estimates that there are only a dozen or so online players in Ottawa who win enough money to pay their bills. "Marc is super-human that way. His focus lasts forever."
How is Karam able to maintain a Zen-like focus no matter how long he plays? He attributes it to a competitive nature that, even he admits, borders on the unhealthy. But he's always been that way. In kindergarten, when his game of choice was marbles, he'd practise outside his house after school until his mother dragged him inside. That obsession with winning may have only resulted in schoolyard glory as a child, but it has earned Karam millions in poker. He hates losing so much, he says, that he will prepare like mad to ensure he wins. That preparation breeds confidence, which a poker player needs in spades, especially at live tournaments, where you could end up sitting across from some of the top professionals in the world. "If you don't think you are better than everyone else, you aren't going to win," says Karam. "If you think the guy in front of you is better than you, you are just going to let him outplay you."
Another advantage a young pro like Karam has, at least against older online players, is his background in video games. Like many men his age, Karam spent countless hours in his youth playing complex electronic games that bombarded him with non-stop stimuli — ideal training for building the mental and manual dexterity needed for the grind of online poker. Former gamers also tend to view online winnings as a score — not as money for the mortgage or car payments or credit card bills — and so play with less fear than opponents who weren't weaned on "Call of Duty." "If I lose $20,000 in a hand, that's just a number to me. It doesn't affect me," explains Karam. "If you are scared with your money, you are going to get killed in this game. You have to determine the optimum move and then make it, no matter what."
Karam's unusual combination of skill, talent, and experience are so well suited to online poker that he could easily feed his bank account in perpetuity from the comfort of his condo. The reason he travels to live tournaments a few times a year isn't so much for the money as the exposure (not to imply that he wasn't happy to pocket $1.4 million for finishing second at the 2007 European Poker Tour Grand Final in Monte Carlo). When you perform well at a high-profile event, you get on television, and that could lead to a sponsorship deal from a poker company.
In 2010, it worked out just that way for Karam. The online gaming giant Full Tilt Poker took him into its stable of pros. He would actually get paid for every hand he played on the site. For a while, that was working out pretty well for him. Then came Black Friday.
* * *
Karam was playing golf when he received a text from a friend with the bad news. At first, he thought it was a joke. When he found out it was all too real, his scepticism turned to worry.
On April 15, the United States government shut down the three biggest online poker sites — PokerStars, Absolute Poker, and Full Tilt Poker — charging them with fraud and money laundering. About seven million Americans used to play online poker for money at least once a month, even though it was deemed illegal in 2006 under the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. Though the poker sites are headquartered in places where gambling is legal, like Antigua and Isle of Man, they stand accused of tricking or bribing U.S. banks into processing unlawful payments to and from their American customers.
Karam had a lot of money sitting on the Full Tilt site and had no means of accessing it. Fortunately, within days the site went live for players outside the United States. Two months later, however, Full Tilt went down again, its licences suspended by the two countries where it is registered: France and the tiny island nation of Alderney, located a few kilometres off France's north coast. By then, Karam had shifted his play to another site, so it didn't affect him as much as his American peers, who remain banned from playing poker online.
Thomas Miles, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, says the U.S. ban is a step too far. The core of the issue is whether poker is a game of luck, and therefore gambling, or a game of skill, similar to a sport. Traditionally, says Miles, U.S. courts have taken too narrow a view, concluding that luck dominates because the most skilled player at the table is not guaranteed to win any given hand. A better approach, he says, is to determine if skill dominates over time.
As it happens, Miles recently co-wrote a paper with economist Steven Levitt that suggests just that. The study ("The Role of Skill versus Luck in Poker: Evidence from the World Series of Poker") looked at 32,000 competitors at the 2010 World Series of Poker, and found that the 720 players rated as highly skilled won an average of $1,200 at each event they entered. That works out to a 30 percent return on investment. If the people who manage retirement funds were that good, there would be scores more 50-somethings spending their weekday mornings on the fairways instead of in cubicles. "There is very weak evidence of the persistence of skill in the management of mutual funds, but no one thinks of the mutual fund industry as gambling. The persistence of skill in poker is much stronger. Yet, bizarrely, we prohibit poker," says Miles. "There appears to be enough skill to say it should not be prohibited. There may be ways to regulate it, but outright prohibition seems like a draconian response."
Other academics have taken a similar interest in the role of skill in poker. In a paper by economists from several U.S. universities ("Poker Superstars: Skill or Luck?"), the rates of success for top poker players were compared to that of professional golfers. They found that 70 percent of highly skilled poker players who entered the 81 events considered in the study finished in the top 18 at least once. For top golfers competing in 48 tournaments, that percentage was only 24 percent. The odds of two top-18 finishes were equal, at nearly 15 percent, for both groups.
It seems, however, that the American legal system is not yet interested in considering empirical evidence in the skill-versus-luck debate, so online poker remains unlawful in the United States for the time being. That's why some American players are moving to other countries, says Karam, and if Canada ever banned online poker, he would do the same. "I would move the next day," he says.
In a few years, though, Karam hopes to be in a position to stop grinding anyway. He owns an Ottawa outlet of the wireless carrier Mobilicity, has bought real estate in Oregon, and has other long-term plans outside the game. If he can earn enough income from his investments, he plans to play less poker — perhaps travel to a few big tournaments a year and venture online only for major events. In the meantime, Karam will stick to his schedule, putting in enough volume to exploit his edge. And if you, dear reader, occasionally fire up your laptop to play a few hands against the big boys, you might some day find yourself playing against him. If so, you better hope luck is on your side. Marc Karam doesn't need it. You will.
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