Online Poker: An Interview With Kevin 'BeL0WaB0Ve' Saul

Kevin "BeL0WaB0Ve" Saul is a busy man; there's no doubt about it. After busting out of a $1,000 no-limit hold'em (with rebuys) event at the World Series of Poker, he rushed to get his 73rd-place payout ($6,453), buy a pack of cigarettes, and snag an Amp energy drink from one of the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino's gift shops. He was hustling because he wanted to get to his room upstairs in time to register for the seven tournaments that he planned to play that night now that he had no World Series commitments. Oh, and he had an interview to do with Card Player, as well.

Saul sat in front of a laptop-computer screen with seven tournaments running on different poker sites, a cigarette in hand, his energy drink nearby, a stack of chips to shuffle while playing, a hand towel over his shoulder (whose use I never determined), a constantly vibrating cell phone, and my voice recorder all cluttering his work area. The room was full of cigarette smoke and a cacophony arose comprised of my questions, his answers, and seven online poker tables beeping to get his attention.

Saul proved himself to be a true multitasker, though, as his attention rarely wavered from either his tournaments or his interview. He obviously knows what he's doing or he wouldn't have made six final tables in Online Player of the Year-qualifying tournaments already this year. He told Card Player about his early years in online poker, what helped him become successful, his strategies for different kinds of tournaments, his thoughts on the World Series of Poker, and his ever-increasing expertise in the field of Getting Your Chatbox Privileges Revoked.


Shawn Patrick Green: First off, the obligatory question: Where did your name come from, for those who don't know?

Kevin "BeL0WaB0Ve" Saul: My original name was doc697000. When I first started playing online, I kind of had a gambling problem which I sought help for through Gamblers Anonymous with the help of my father and a couple of other family members. I didn't really take poker as seriously at the time, or as a way to make money, I just saw it as another outlet to gamble. One weekend, I basically went on a NETELLER binge where I made around $2,000 worth of deposits into my NETELLER account through my bank, which then got deposited into my poker account. I had the cash to put into my bank account, but it was going to basically leave me broke. I overextended myself, as I had done many times in the past, because of gambling.

So, I went and closed my bank account that Monday to make sure that NETELLER couldn't get the money [laughing], which then led to NETELLER e-mailing PokerStars about me and my degenerative situation, which led to PokerStars sending me an e-mail saying that my account had been closed and that it could be reopened once they got confirmation from NETELLER that I had settled everything there.

So, that situation lasted quite a while until I finally took care of it. In the meantime, I had to come up with a new account to play on. At the time, I used to rail all of the big-time players and the big tournaments, and one guy who just absolutely crushed everything in sight was teecoy. So, I created the account teecoys#1fan.

But at the time, one of my good friends named AboveEveryone was doing very well and he was kind of offended by the fact that I wasn't "Aboves#1fan" and instead I'd picked this guy teecoy. He said that I should have been his number one fan, especially since he was a better player than me. That led to a little pissing match between the two of us. Eventually, he said, "Let's play a heads-up match." If he won, I had to create the account BeL0WaB0Ve so that everyone knew that I was below AboveEveryone and if I won I got the cash. I was putting up $100 and he put up $200, so I got 2-1 on my money. In the end, his A-J beat my queens and I became BeL0WaB0Ve.

[Note: Saul wanted to make it clear at this point that he never used both accounts at the same time and that he had the teecoys#1fan account deleted by PokerStars support]

SPG: What kind of setup do you have for playing online poker?

KS: At home I have dual monitors and I play eight tables at once with no overlap.

SPG: But can you play eight tables at once, comfortably?

KS: Yeah, I can play 12 comfortably, actually.

SPG: Are you using something like PokerTracker?

KS: No, I don't use anything to help me other than my memory, as far as past history with players and playing hands with them. I kind of consider PokerTracker and things like that a form of poker steroids. I wouldn't say it's as bad as how people look at steroids in baseball, as far as controversy, but for me, personally, I think it takes some of the pureness away from the game. I pretty much know most of the players that I'm playing with in these large buy-in tournaments.

I do use some tools to help me, though. When I'm in a situation where I want extra info on a player, I use online poker Web sites to check to see if he's a winning player or losing player, what his average buy-in is, what game he normally plays, and so on. Especially in larger buy-in tournaments, I'll search for players and do all of the research and find out what their other screen names. I'll also take note of whether they satellited into the event - meaning the money is really going to influence them - or if they look like they're experienced in these kinds of situations to the point where the money is not going to influence them. Obviously, it's easier to exploit the players who are likely to be influenced by the money.

SPG: To what do you attribute your early success online?

KS: Well, I didn't really have success early, but I started becoming successful when I started communicating with other online players. My first big win was for chopping the $11 daily rebuy tournament on PokerStars, the one that I've won so many times since then. I think we chopped it three ways and I got $4,000 out of it. Right there I thought "Wow, I can do this and make so much money," blah, blah, blah. Probably within four or five days that $4,000 was down to $500, or maybe less, and I found myself re-depositing. So, I made the executive decision to keep my day job. That was in November of 2004.

The next January, I had taken second in a $30 freezeout and then I won a $50 rebuy tournament in the same night. The guy who I took second to in the freezeout was being coached while he was at the final table by a player known back then as BigSlick789, and who is now known as ozzy87, one of the sickest players ever. A few days later, I was talking to VeronicaO [Veronica Olson, a prominent Internet player] on messenger (who I was backing in rebuy tournaments because I had a little crush on her) and she said "BigSlick789 wants your messenger screen name. Is it cool if I give it to him?" and I was like, "Yeah, sure." I very well knew who he was; he was a very good player, and I started talking to him and that kind of started the process of talking to a lot of really good players and seeing the benefit of talking to improve my game.

Ozzy87 really took my game to a whole new level as far as actually having a plan for what I was doing. Before, it was just aggression, aggression, aggression and there was never any real method for the aggression. It wasn't like I knew that some situations were good spots and some weren't. I was naturally aggressive given my natural tendency to gamble. I was always aggressive and raised and liked to bluff people off hands, and a lot of times I got more pleasure from winning a pot by making a nice bluff than actually getting somebody to pay off a huge value bet. To me, now, when you can maximize value for a big hand - when you have aces and flop a set or something - that's harder to do than to bluff somebody off of a hand.

So, Ozzy helped instill a few rules that I still live by today. For instance, when you're deep in a tournament with a large stack and you get down to sixhanded play - let's say $80,000 when the blinds are $1,500-$3,000, a little above average - under the gun you should be raising at least two and a half times the big blind with any two cards; it doesn't matter what your hands are. To this day, I use that rule a lot of the time. There are some situations when I'm at a table and I can't use that rule because there are some players who will play back at me. Being who I am, I get played back at a s---load. It's caused me to tweak my game a little bit and change some things up.

He also helped me to start recognizing situations when I could resteal versus opponents as far as late-position raises, stack sizes (when people were committed and when they weren't committed), when you have fold equity, the art of shoving without fold equity and gaining folds that way [laughing], which is one of my favorite moves, and so on. He helped me a lot.

Ozzy87 and I have kind of gone separate ways now, as far as our poker careers are concerned, so we don't talk very much anymore, but we see each other at live events quite a bit. He's always been one of my favorite people in the poker world.

From Ozzy87 I started talking to MrSmokey1 [Steve Billirakis] who absolutely abused the s--- out of me today in the 1K rebuy [at the World Series of Poker], and if he weren't to my left I probably wouldn't be out right now. Then, that April, there were probably a dozen of us that went to Turning Stone in New York: VeronicaO, MrSmokey1, Ozzy87, ZeeJustin, and a bunch of others I'm forgetting. We just talked poker, that's what we do. When we're around each other, 90 percent of the time, we're going to talk poker. We're constantly discussing hands and situations. "Could you have gotten more value here?" "Could you have gotten away from this hand?" and whatnot. Learning from others helps in your development in the game.

I would venture to say that there are very few excellent players online who haven't made any friends at the table, don't know anyone at the table, don't discuss hands with anyone, and make poker a completely solo project. It's just not very likely. I think to be successful in this game you need a good support system around you to help you develop your game.

SPG: What kind of strategy do you employ early on in deep-field tournaments like the Sunday Million on PokerStars?

KS: Well, I'm probably not the best person to ask about that, because I hate the Sunday Million.

SPG: Why do you hate it? [laughing]

KS: Because I never do well. I'll build a large stack and then I'll stub my toe and find myself turning it into a grind and just giving chips away.

But I try to play aggressive, I try to be very, very focused on position, and I try to be more focused on those tables than other tables. I try to not be card-dependent and not be really tight; I try to find out who the other aggressive players are at the table so, if they want, we can go to war. If not, then I'm going to win, but if we go to war, well, then I'll probably win then, too. [laughing]

I'm not really finding people stacking off their chips to me. A lot more if it is people just giving me 10 percent or 20 percent of their stacks at a time. I'm chipping up without showdown, which is the key to tournaments, in my opinion. If you have to go to showdown with every one of your hands, or even the majority of your hands, you're not going to win a tournament. You have to be able to chip up without showdown.

SPG: How does your strategy differ between that kind of tournament and tournaments like the $1,000 buy-ins on Full Tilt and PokerStars or the $200 with rebuys on Sundays on PokerStars that have much smaller but theoretically tougher fields?

KS: Well, I consider the Nightly Hundred Grand on Stars a big buy-in, small-field tournament, and it gets almost 1,000 entrants. I don't really play them too differently, because I'm still aggressive. The structure in that tournament is better late than it is early, so you don't have too many moving chips in the beginning. In that tournament, I play tighter early, for the most part, unless I have a favorable table, even though one of my greatest qualities is my postflop play. The tight play often means I'll be in push-fold mode right before the structure improves. I'm comfortable playing push-fold poker because I'm generally pretty good at recognizing situations for when I'm supposed to push and when I shouldn't.

SPG: In your opinion, how shortstacked do you have to be before your options become all in or nothing? How does your playing style change when you're nearing that point?

KS: It depends on the tournament. In the 1K with rebuys at the Series today, for instance, there was about $8,000 in the pot preflop from the blinds and antes, and the blinds were about to go up and our table was the next table to break and redraw seats. Also, with it being a rebuy tournament, everyone was so deep that me pushing for $35,000, which was almost 12 times the big blind, wasn't that big of a push. So it does matter if it's a rebuy tournament or a freezout tournament and if it's online or live. The antes live are a lot larger, so you start pushing earlier in live tournaments. And, actually, Full Tilt tournaments have larger antes, as well, so you'd start pushing earlier in Full Tilt tournaments, too. So, when you push all in with 12 times the big blind in those kinds of tournaments, it's not really all that bad.

To be honest, my comfort zone in a tournament is between eight and 10 big blinds. Or give me a ton of chips, something like 40 times the big blind. The stack that I personally have the most difficulty playing, and which I think is the stack that everyone has a problem playing, is the stack that's in the 15 to 20 big blinds range. When you have 15 big blinds - say the blinds are $1,000-$2,000 and you have $30,000 - if you open the pot for a fairly standard raise of $6,000, all of a sudden you've committed 20 percent of your chips. And what do you do if somebody reraises you? If you were just blind stealing or whatever and now you have to fold, you've just lost 20 percent of your chips, and a lot of people leak chips this way. You do that one more time and suddenly you're shortstacked. When you have 15 times the big blind in your stack, what you're supposed to do is find the other players at your table with similar stacks, or maybe even a little bigger, and try and exploit their raises and attack them because you have reshove equity on them. So, I'm looking for spots to reshove to get my chips in, I'm not looking for spots to be the open-raiser, unless I have a big hand and I'm calling a shove.

Another big leak in tournament play and with tournament players is calling off chips late in tournaments. It's a thing that I used to do way more than I do now, and it's a big leak. You're not going to be really successful in a tournament if you're calling all in late in a tournament. It's always better to be the pusher than the caller. I mean, obviously if you have queens, kings, or aces, it's one thing to be calling with those hands, but when you're calling all in with A-J thinking "that's a position-raise and I'm ahead of his range," blah, blah, blah, it's a mistake.

SPG: How has the World Series been treating you this year?

KS: Better than last year. Up until I cashed in my first World Series event this year, for my poker lifetime I was like zero for 37 in World Series events. I'm not quite sure it was 37, but it was zero for a lot, at least. Last summer I ran really bad. This summer I hadn't had any luck, but I ended up cashing in a $2,000 no-limit hold'em event in 38th place [$12,810], which was two away from a money jump. But that kind of stuff really doesn't influence my play.

SPG: How much time are you devoting to online play during the Series?

KS: Actually, quite a bit. More than I usually do when I'm traveling. I haven't done very well online when I'm on the road, historically. I'm out of my comfort zone. At home I have two laptops and my comfy chair. I've got my fridge full of Amp [an energy drink] and my own personal hand towel that I use. Just everything in general is more comfortable.

SPG: What do you think of the changes they've implemented at the World Series this year? Especially with regard to the changed blinds structure, the sequestered tables, and the registration process.

KS: The payout process is a complete mess. To begin with, it's frustrating for us players. Every player that goes through the payout process for an event, except one, is completely frustrated and sick that they just busted out, for the most part, if he's human. And then you have 87 people congratulating you on your finish when you don't want that. Take me, for example, I was cashing for 1 percent of what my goal was, so what are they congratulating me for? And the payout process is long and tedious. It takes a half hour, if not longer.

As for the sequestered tables, I think next year it will be a lot better than it is this year. This is the first year they're doing it, so obviously there's going to be some problems with it. Right off in the beginning, the first one that they did, I could be wrong, but I believe the players were sequestered and they weren't allowed any guests with them. For instance, if I were to make the final table I'd probably have some friends and whatnot there who would want to watch me. Last year, for instance, two of my best memories from last year's World Series were being able to rail Jon Friedberg and Eric Lynch [known online as pokertrip and Rizen, respectively]. Jon ended up winning a 1K no-limit tournament, which at the time was the biggest tournament, as far as players, in non-main event World Series history. And then Rizen took third in the pot-limit event, and I had an absolute blast being able to rail them.

SPG: What do you tell people who contact you wanting you to train them to be able to reach your level of play?

KS: At one point, I joined a training site called PokerMentors. That was where you dealt with a one-on-one mentoring situation where either you were shadowing the player or the player was shadowing you, and that's when I really figured out that one-on-one mentoring just took up way too much time. I eventually had to discontinue my mentoring with that site, but a few months later sheets [Eric Haber] and JohnnyBax [Cliff Josephy] opened PokerXFactor.com and Mindwise [Scott Pendergrast] came to me and asked if I wanted to be a guest pro. So, I joined their site and that's what I respond to people with: "I don't have time to do the one-on-one mentoring, which is why I joined PokerXFactor as a guest pro, so I could still give back to the community and hopefully help other younger players grow in their game by producing these videos." And a lot of people accept that as an answer. I don't get too many hate posts or, "he's gone Hollywood," etc, etc.

I'm one of those people who fully believes in the saying, "don't forget where you came from." It's not like I just started in this game and absolutely crushed everything in sight. The people who do that are very, very rare. I needed the help of others, so if I can give that help to others, then I'm going to.

SPG: What kind of advice could you give to people starting out online with a bankroll of around $500?

KS: My first piece of advice would be to make sure that, if you're going to play poker, you have your priorities in order as far as not overextending yourself at all and keeping your personal life and personal money away from poker. Keep that money and your poker bankroll separate so that you can differentiate between the two, because a lot of the common mistakes that they players make are related to that.

As far as managing the $500 that you have for your bankroll, you have to be smart and you don't want to overextend too much in one area. So, if you have $500, you don't want to be putting $200 into a sit-and-go.

SPG: What kinds of buy-ins would you say they should be looking for, in terms of multitable tournaments or sit-and-gos?

KS: I don't actually really recommend people with that kind of bankroll jumping into multitable tournaments. But if they are, I'd recommend them sticking to the smaller buy-ins like $5 or $10, or maybe the $3 with rebuys, but when playing the $3 with rebuys, allowing yourself just one rebuy (in addition to the initial rebuy and the add-on). But, for the most part, I'd recommend playing the lower buy-in sit-and-gos for $5 or $10, which are very soft.

If they play cash games, I'd stick to the $0.10-$0.25 or the $0.25-$0.50 at most, but I've also never been very good with bankroll management, myself. It used to be that if I had $215 in my account, I'd play a $215 sit-and-go. I was a shot-taker; I was a gambler. Most of what I learned about bankroll management I learned from others simply by talking and whatnot. To be honest, $500 is not a lot of money to start playing if you want to be able to withstand variance.

Sometimes when you're making the decision to move up limits with your bankroll, the deciding factor shouldn't be your bankroll but rather how comfortable you are playing with those players and how comfortable you feel at those levels. There are very few people who are successful when they make that big jump in stakes after winning big in a tournament. That's a common mistake and oftentimes what's how players go broke.

When I'm at home, on an average day I usually have between $3,500 to $4,000, and sometimes $5,000, in tournament buy-ins. And believe me, there are many days where I end up putting up a big goose egg and I don't cash, and I'm losing $4,000. I mean, if somebody tried to make that jump in levels after winning a $10 rebuy tournament for like $13,000, they'd go broke very quickly.

I definitely recommend, if you can find the money for it, joining a training site. I work with PokerXFactor and I definitely, wholeheartedly recommend them, obviously. I also have one of the free memberships with CardRunners. I like watching the videos and I learn from watching them. Those are both well worth the investment, and they will prove, in the long run, to be a profitable investment for you.

Also, if you want to start with just $500 - if you work and it's just something that you want to casually pursue with the hopes of pursuing it wholeheartedly later - I would recommend saving money for however long to put into your poker bankroll. Save your money and start with something larger than $500. Even if it meant that you saved just an extra $500, so instead of playing the $6 turbo sit-and-gos you could play the $16 turbo sit-and-gos on PokerStars; the difference in play between those two is huge. And when you're playing against bad players, you're going to take a lot of bad beats and the variance is going to be high no matter what.

SPG: So I read on your blog that you have a permanent chat ban on PokerStars and a three-month ban that started recently on Full Tilt. Just how filthy is your mouth? Or are your violations of a more "I'll kill you!" nature?

KS: No, no, not at all. My first chat ban was probably two months into the account and it was for a month. And, honestly, of all of the chat bans that I've gotten, that was the only time when I got out of line. I swore, and anything vulgar was said. Most of the others were retarded rules about spamming which, I'm sorry, but when friends are deep in tournaments people are going to get excited and they're going to root for them. Poker is becoming like a sport and they have to accept that nature. And that's what all of my chat bans on Full Tilt have been for, "scrolling the chat box."

The last one was a month and a half ago when JohnnyBax got deep in the Full Tilt 500K, I supposedly typed the number 8, rooting for an 8 to come, something like six times in four lines, and that got me banned. It's really ridiculous. The one that kind of set it off on PokerStars … well, we already discussed my struggles with the Million. Back in January, somehow I actually managed to get deep in it [the Sunday Million], and this was a new thing for me. There was about 220 people left and the blinds were $8,000-$16,000 and I shoved for like $80,000. I had A-4 suited from about two or three off the button in late position and the big blind had to call $64,000 more and would have been left with like $30,000 if he lost, and he called with Q-J offsuit. That moment, when the disappointment of being so far in that tournament and coming up short [the Q-J won the hand] to what I thought was a pretty suspect call, got the better of me and I typed in the chatbox "get AIDS." But I did follow that comment with "nice hand," "good game," and "good luck all."

SPG: Well, good luck to you, too, in the remainder of your events. Thanks for taking the time to do this interview.