In the summer of 2022, I played the World Series of Poker Main Event. It was my first live tournament.
I did not have the cash for the $10,000 buy-in. I put it on a Discover card. The poker I had access to leading up to the tournament was World Series of Poker 2008: Battle for the Bracelets on Xbox — I skipped every other event and just ran the Main Event over and over. My best finish in the video game was fourth.
Then I flew to Las Vegas and sat down at a real table.
Five Days
I was in the top 200 every single day for five days.
On Day 1, I knocked out four players — including David Miscikowski, a 2022 bracelet winner, and John Smith, a legend in heads-up poker — and ended with 192,400 chips, 96th out of 3,484 in my starting flight. On Day 3, I started with a big hand against Stefan Lehner, another 2022 bracelet winner, then moved tables and landed across from Kenny Hallaert, who finished 6th at the 2016 Main Event and would go on to finish 4th in 2025. Later that day, an aggressive player put me nearly all-in on a flushing river. I had Kings. I called and busted him when he showed down air. He stood up, asked me for a selfie at the table, and left. The dealer, Marcus — one of the best in the room, the kind you see dealing featured tables at the Main — told me it was one of the sickest calls he had ever seen.
On Day 4, I picked up Ace-King offsuit almost immediately at the new table and got it all in against pocket Queens. The flop came Ace-King and that was that. I sat most of the rest of the day with Toby Lewis — a bracelet winner who finished 7th at the 2023 Main Event. At one point I told him I should invite him to my home game. He said "I bet it's good action." I ended the day with 1,330,000 chips — 158th out of 1,340 remaining players.
Day 5 started with a camera crew across the table from Alejandro Lococo, who finished 7th at the 2021 Main Event, and Lon McEachern standing a few feet away talking with Paul Spitzberg in the seat to my right. That was when it hit me that this was serious. I was in the last few hundred players of the biggest poker tournament in the world, and I had never played a live tournament before this one.
I won a 1.5 million chip pot against Lococo — fives full of twos. Then my table broke. At the new table, I flopped a set of fours on an all-hearts board. My opponent bet, I raised all-in, and he snap-called with the nut flush. The board did not pair. I was out in 239th place, in a five-million-chip pot, in the third level of Day 5.
The Hands I Cannot Reconstruct
When I got home, I had this five-day experience — the most intense poker I had ever played — and I could not reconstruct the hands that mattered. I remembered the players, the tables, the feeling. But the actual poker was gone. The Day 3 Kings call, the Lococo pot, the spots where the tournament turned — I could tell the stories, but I could not replay the hands.
That gap stayed with me. Live poker has never had what online poker takes for granted: a record of what actually happened at the table. Online players get hand histories automatically. Every hand is captured, exportable, and ready to study in analysis software. Live players get nothing. You play for twelve hours, go home, and try to remember.
I spent a decade in product management building SaaS and platform products for competitive players. All of that experience came into play when I built the tool I wished I'd had at the Main Event.
LiveHands is a mobile hand logging app for live tournament poker players. You capture hands at the table between deals while the details are fresh, and export in PokerStars format — actual hand history files that import directly into PokerTracker 4, Holdem Manager 3, and Hand2Note. It is the study pipeline that live players have never had.
Why I Write About This
I've been a poker fan since the Moneymaker boom in 2003. I was early in my career in fantasy sports at the time, and hold'em was everywhere — work events, home games, late-night ESPN reruns. I built a racetrack hold'em table with some friends that I still have. I've read more poker books than I'd like to admit, and I've watched more tournament poker than is probably healthy. Bottom line: I'm passionate about tournament poker. Hope to see you at the table.