May 25, 2008
The SEABEAST Unleashed
To borrow a cliché (though let’s be honest, who doesn’t love a good cliché?): it’s the quiet ones that you have to worry about.
At the poker table, Jay Kinkade doesn’t draw much attention to himself. Conservatively dressed, softly spoken, he keeps his thoughts (and chips) largely to himself.
But catch him online where he plays mainly under the moniker of ‘SEABEAST’ and it’s a different kettle of fish.
As well as being a long-term winner at mid-stakes NL games, Jays’s also a regular presence on the 2p2 forums and coaches on Leggopoker, sharing his cash game secrets with students eager to learn.
While most online poker players would be stoked to enjoy the healthy hour win-rate that he does, Jay’s not the kind of person to rest on his laurels.
In search of a new poker challenge, he’s recently declared war on the global online MTT community, putting in some massive volume that has seen SEABEAST bolt up the PocketFives tournament leaderboards to being a country mile ahead of second place on the West Australian standings and gaining ground on Australian tournament machines Kochan, StevoL, Bond18 and rkruok.
He even managed to scale his way to the top of the PocketFives May TLB and held on to the title for a while until online legend ShaunDeeb overthrew him.
Some highlights from his recent run: second in the Sunday Mulligan for 28k, two victories in the Stars $109r for 18 and 15k, winning the 65k guaranteed on Full Tilt for 20k, the Stars 50-50 for 11k or so, victory in the Full Tilt 30k and a second-place finish in the Party High Roller for 11k. My personal favourite though is Jay winning the $109r, $33r and $22r all in the space of 24 hours. Sicko.
It’s been a long and exciting journey from playing Magic: The Gathering with friends to being weeks out from a month in Vegas and the trials and tribulations of the WSOP for the 26-year old poker pro (trivia: Jay also plays guitar in thrash band Extortion).
Join us on the journey as we delve into the belly of the Beast…
How did you learn about poker?
I learnt about poker through playing Magic: The Gathering (MTG). I played that pretty seriously and was one of the best players in WA and heard that some of the best players over east started playing poker online after Rounders came out. Also my friend Hao/Michael had a card store and we used to stay there after hours drinking and playing 20c/40c limit hold’em. So it was a pretty direct transition from MTG to poker and because of that, I always came at the game strategically.
Did you start playing live or online poker first?
My very first poker was played live at my friend’s card store and at other friends houses. I was actually less interested than most of the other guys and probably lost at first because they were all reading Super System and stuff and I was just passing the time until we could play MTG again!
How much did you deposit when you first started online?
My friend from Adelaide who was one of the best MTG’ers in Australia shipped me $50 on Party (Poker) to play .5/1 LHE. I felt so awkward about someone I didn’t know that well lending me money to gamble that I played all night and morning until I had doubled my money and could send the $50 back. I’m still going off that $50.
What was your aim with that money you first deposited money online?
I wanted to see what it was like playing online and playing for money, whether people still sucked and whether I thought I was good enough to make any decent money from it as I had heard stories about other MTG’ers who were playing as high as 20/40 limit hold’em and making thousands of dollars a week!
What sort of level did you get to playing MTG?
I was ranked number one in Western Australia for a long time as well as top 20 in Australia. I never won any really big tourneys though, just had a very good record in medium sized ones. When I started playing poker, I was a student living off Centrelink.
Did you play any other sort of card games before Poker and MTG?
I never really played anything else before MTG, just videogames and stuff like that.
You’ve bought your home through poker, are a respected 2p2 forum member and coach with Leggopoker: what’s left in the world of poker for you to achieve?
It’s funny you should ask, I have just started getting into tourneys heavily. I won a couple of seats for the WSOP and am heading to Vegas in June. I have been practicing a lot online, doing pretty well, and I would like to try and become the number one ranked online tourney player in Australia. Part of the reason for that is exactly what you mentioned, I’m trying to keep myself interested and motivated by setting new goals. I don’t really aim to play nosebleed stakes and I’m already playing in the highest NL games that run regularly, so I’m looking elsewhere to keep myself interested and I actually think I’m naturally a better tourney player than cash player anyway, just there is a little less money in it.
There’s a tonne of resources out there for people to learn how to beat the games. What did you poker education consist off?
From when I started to when I became decent I learnt everything through 2+2 basically. I have probably read 2+2 every day of my life since about 2003. Nowadays I watch a lot of the vids on Leggo to pick up ideas from the other guys who play a little different to me so I can stay open-minded and pick up new tricks. I think 2+2 has gotten a lot worse now because the best former strategy posters are all coaches or affiliated with a video site, so watching videos or getting coaching is almost mandatory nowadays.
With all these resources out there, the games have understandably gotten tougher. Do you think games will continue to get tougher and tougher until there are (in theory) no soft spots left?
The games will definitely continue to get tougher and tougher, but there will always be soft spots in the game because gambling is part of human nature, and fundamentally, people almost always overestimate their own ability. Plus things like intelligence and how hard you work will always play a part. No matter how much information is out there, the smartest, hardest working players will always have an edge. The bad players are becoming “ok” players, but the good players are becoming truly sick.
What form of poker do you enjoy the most?
I enjoy playing deep in tourneys the most. As far as cash games go, I probably like limit more than no-limit but play mostly NL because it’s where the most money is.
What’s the most common mistake you see new and low-limit poker players making?
Thinking that poker is about cards when it’s really a series of situations in which cards are involved¬ – trying to learn how to play good cards, rather than how to accurately analyze situations. Of course, when you first start off you need to know what hands are “good”/”bad”, but the first real breakthrough in poker is when you realise that the cards are merely tools, and your goal is to make the right decision each time the action is on you, based on the variables, of which your hand is only one.
Has coaching improved your play and thought processes as a player?
Yeah it has actually, quite a lot I think. I have a much better understanding of how “ok” players play, which helps me fine tune ways to outplay them, and also getting asked questions you intuitively know the answer to but have never actually thought about directly or organised coherent thoughts on is really helpful too. I have had a couple of students who asked really good questions.
“LOL donkaments.” What are your thoughts on this comment?
LOL donkaments - totally appropriate! I actually own one of the lol donkaments shirts that got made with barry g’s face on it. If I ever make it onto a TV table I wanna wear it. There’s a lot of skill in tournament poker, and in any given tournament only x per cent of the field have any chance of winning it… nevertheless tournaments feature a lot of incredibly poor play, and in a field where the skill level was roughly equal, the predominant determinant of who won and who lost would be luck rather than small skill differences. Fortunately however, most tourney players are terrible - even winning players.
How do/will you change your tournament play live compared to online?
Good question. I will be more willing to make laydowns because people’s ranges are smaller and they are more scared to bluff. I will watch how people play carefully and make more specific reads/decisions rather than just basing strategy around math/intuition. Hopefully I can be psychologically tough enough to still play as aggressively.
What are your expectations leading up to your maiden WSOP campaign? In addition to the main event, what other events will you be playing?
I’m probably going to play a ton of events actually. Depending on how I’m feeling day to day, most of the 1500, 2500 and 5K NL events, some LHE and PLO maybe. Expectations? Lots of annoying people, very exhausting and draining… I’m really hoping to go deep in at least one tourney if I play a bunch. The Main Event I really don’t think I’ll take too seriously unless I am still alive when it gets serious, like if it gets close to the money and I’m still in and the media starts to circle around then great, that would be amazing, but realistically, it’s basically the lottery and I’m not going to put pressure on myself to do well.
While the poker landscape has gotten a lot broader than NLHE as of late, can you see any other games getting the same popularity as no limit?
I can see PLO continuing to get popular, but I think NLHE will always be the most popular game.
As well as your NL talent you’ve got some pretty handy limit chops as well – without opening the entire chest of SEABEAST secrets, what are some of the fundamental differences that NL players don’t seem to grasp when they try their hand at limit?
The whole idea of NL players trying their hand at LHE seems weird to me, I can’t imagine playing NL first as I played LHE for so long. But definitely a fundamental difference is that the only way you can ever make a big mistake in limit is to fold incorrectly, which means playing looser and much more aggressively is absolutely necessary.
What’s the story behind your handle SEABEAST?
After lurking 2+2 for a while in 2004 I decided I finally knew enough to start posting there myself without getting abused so I signed up for an account. Around that time, a band I like called Mastodon released an album with a song on it called Seabeast, and I thought it fitted the poker fish theme well. I still like the name.
What’s your daily routine like? Do you play poker everyday and go on holidays where you take time off poker completely?
It’s very day to day. I have probably had about 20 days off in the past three years so I do play most days, but until recently I never had any kind of schedule at all. With the tourney grind now I’m basing everything around the US run of tourneys in the morning and sometimes the Euro run of tourneys in the middle of the night. In general, I just do whatever I feel like doing most of the time. It’s a very hedonistic sort of lifestyle, but I play in three bands at the moment and have a girlfriend, try to get to the gym when I can, and so on. Tourneys are much less healthy than cash games though. Playing cash games is more like a 45 minute session here, then go for a walk and eat, then come back play a little more, kill some time, then go out and do something for rest of day and maybe play once more before bed. Unfortunately though, you can’t really justify playing online tourneys without playing a whole bunch of them for a whole bunch of hours.
Do you treat poker as more of a “game that you make a living from” or a “job”? How important do you think it is for poker players to have “passion” for the game?
100 per cent like a game, and I think it’s absolutely essential to have a passion for the game. It’s something you can’t fake, either. I would say only five to 10 per cent of the population (maybe less) could ever make serious money from poker, no matter how hard they tried, and not that much of it has to do with intelligence – you could be the smartest guy in the world but risk-averse and not very competitive and you would never get very far. Whereas you can be average intelligence but very competitive and have a really strong urge to learn how to win, and you will for sure end up beating mid-stakes. You have to want to win more than you want to avoid losing. You have to have serious drive and competitiveness, but also be ok with the antisocial element too. If you’re not going to be able to get up day after day wanting to beat people, even after already knowing that you can do it, then you won’t really get anywhere. Sometimes it feels like a bore to me, but every time I take a holiday or something and don’t play at all for a few days or a week, I can’t wait to get back onto the tables.
In addition to a sound understanding of poker concepts and strategies, what are some of the other skills poker players need?
Poker players definitely need mental and emotional discipline. The game is almost like a mirror that reflects what you put in to it. If you are humble, and treat the game with respect (ie only play when you feel like playing, only sit in games you can beat, keep trying to improve and thinking strategically, and being realistic and honest with yourself about everything) then you will win. If you play when you shouldn’t be playing, in games you shouldn’t be playing in, and externalise everything bad that happens, you will lose. The best way to look at the game is to make decisions today as though you are looking back on them from tomorrow.
How much crossover is there between poker and your normal life?
I like to keep my worlds pretty separate. My friends all know that I play poker but I don’t talk about it much. I talk to specific people about it but mostly I feel sheepish talking about the money, and frustrated answering the same few generic questions about the game. I am very fortunate that my parents have always been supportive of me, my mum worried at first but that was years ago. I’m sure my dad wishes I took the academic path but he knows that I’m suited to poker and that he’s most of the reason for that, so he is supportive. But yeah I definitely have different sides to my life, like I have poker friends, music friends, et cetera.
Music also plays a big part of your life – is it important for poker players to have other interests outside of cards?
Yeah it definitely is, I mean poker is very immersing but there are many elements to life other than just the mental/competitive… there’s physical, emotional, spiritual, etc. It’s especially important to make connections with people that aren’t slightly nerdy males, too, which obviously makes up most of the poker demographic.
What are some of the sickest swings you’ve experienced in your poker career? how do you learn to deal with these swings?
Sickest swings… I had a $100,000 downswing in March that was kicked off by losing $55K in less than an hour. I was never very good at handling swings to be honest, that was my biggest weakness when I first played (like a lot of ex MTG players I think… MTG is like poker tourneys: when you lose, you just “don’t win”, there is no actual losing like in cash games). But as time went on I got more confident and better attuned to how good I was/wasn’t, and more able to tell when I had an edge and when I didn’t… and if I did, then losing was irrelevant. And then when Leggo came along and coaching went really well, I got to another level of confidence in my poker abilities and also financial security (because I knew that at worst, I could always fallback on coaching) so I became much more comfortable moving up and playing higher stakes. All this year I have played only at $1000NL and above and it has gone well. Really, the more you play the more utter disrespect you have for money, and the chips are just a way of keeping score.
If you weren’t playing poker, what would you be doing with your life?
I don’t know what I’d be doing. definitely playing some sort of strategy game a bunch of the time for fun, but whereas at 16 to 21 I couldn’t care less about money. Once I reached my 20s, I started realising that as you get older, like it or not, you need money, so I guess I would have had to get my ass back to uni and actually gotten myself into a decent job of some kind. I was studying psychology/criminology and wanted to be an ASIO profiler or something like that. I’m definitely interested in the way people think.
If you went busto tomorrow and had to try building a roll back up from another $50 deposit but still have all the poker knowledge you already have, how would you do it?
Probably playing a bunch of small stakes sit and gos I think. I would go insane trying to grind microstakes cash games, but infinite-tabling microstakes sit and gos could be fun, and they are very systematic so you can be fairly detached from the outcome or the stakes.
