LiveHands Origins

I grew up in Minnesota and played my first card games for money in Boy Scouts at summer camp in Wisconsin. In college I started playing no-limit hold'em with friends in small sit-and-go tournaments we would organize on weekends. When I got my first real job in 2003 working in fantasy sports, poker was everywhere: tournaments were happening at work and at home. I built a custom racetrack hold'em table with friends for games I hosted. It was a social thing, but I loved the strategy and competition. Fast forward through what felt like several different "lives" as I progressed through roles in project and product management, digital marketing, and a few entrepreneurial ventures. In the summer of 2022, I played my first real live tournament: the World Series of Poker Main Event.

At the time I didn't have the bankroll for the $10,000 buy-in, and honestly I thought I was going to be playing the $777 Lucky Sevens at the WSOP as my first go. But after getting on Bravo Poker Live and realizing that I could buy in on a credit card, well, it changed things a bit. I registered for the Lucky Sevens but also decided to register for the Main Event, putting it on my Discover card. I hadn't played live poker in a few years, and the poker I had access to leading up to the WSOP 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 was fourth.

On July 5th I caught a flight out to Las Vegas and made my way to Bally's on the Strip. That night upstairs in my room, I'm having a few second thoughts. You know — about to sit for a $10K buy-in I had put on a credit card, having knocked the poker rust off on Xbox. What could go wrong? It was a fair question, but a momentary dilemma. I decided that I was here to play, to have the experience, and to endeavor to win the tournament — come what may. The next morning I arose for Day 1D of the WSOP Main Event.

Quick note: everything here says Bally's because that is what it was in the summer of 2022. The property was on its way to the Horseshoe rebrand, but it wasn't there yet.

A Wild, Memorable Tournament

Day 1D at Table 626 in Bally's Silver was a lot of fun. Looking around the table, there was David Miscikowski, a 2022 bracelet winner; John Smith, a legend in heads-up poker; and Steve "Kally" Kallenberg, who plays in the same home game as George Holmes. It was pretty sick to learn that when George finished 2nd in the 2021 Main Event, the guys in his home game had contributed his entry fee that year. As Kally put it, "We all got to wet our beak a little."

I knocked out four players in the first few levels. I had mentioned that this was my first tournament, which likely put a target on my back. Still, I hit a disguised straight and a nut flush against two opponents, and both made early exits. It was true that it was my first tournament, but I never said it was my first time playing poker.

If you're paying even half attention at the WSOP Main Event, there are notable players everywhere. Bryn Kenney was sitting one table over alongside Rampage. A few tables in the other direction was David Peters. At the start of the second break I noticed him on my way out of the room, said hello, and introduced myself. He was friendly and wished me luck.

At the end of Day 1 I bagged 192,400 in chips, 96th out of 3,484 in my starting flight. As I walked back to the hotel room, it was a strange feeling to be both tired and amped up.

We had the next day off as the earlier Day 1 flights combined for the first Day 2 flight. That evening in Bally's, I walked right past Mikita Badziakouski chatting with Aleksejs Ponakovs as they headed back to the tournament area. A minute later in Paris, I passed right by Koray Aldemir, the defending Main Event champion. It was a bit surreal.

When Day 2 play resumed for me, it was mostly breakeven, with another good group of players. It got stressful midday when a new dealer arrived. The issue? The dealer insisted on placing the button between players, so no one could clearly tell who was on the button. This led to confusion in nearly every hand, and after an orbit the entire table was tilted. The dealer threw a bit of a fit, telling the table, "You can have it quick or you can have it good." I told the dealer that people just wanted it to be professional, and the table seemed to agree. I bagged 321,500 for the day.

Day 3 started with my first time playing in Paris. I played a hand against Stefan Lehner, another 2022 bracelet winner, where we both flopped two pair — I had top and middle, he had top and bottom. A fortunate flop for me, and I took it down at showdown. Then our table broke. Everyone bagged up their chips and walked from Paris to Bally's — eventually the entire tournament ended up there. We were told to follow a staff member and not fall out of line, with violations punished by disqualification. We made the short walk out of Paris, down past the WSOP store, through the slots at Bally's, and finally into the tournament area. Time to find my new table.

Moving tables isn't my favorite, but it's part of the deal as the field shrinks. Sometimes you are glad to leave your previous table. Either way, it's worth taking a minute to absorb the new table dynamics before making any big moves. When I landed at the new table, I found myself across from Kenny Hallaert, who finished 6th at the 2016 Main Event and would go on to finish 4th in 2025. He seemed to be getting a massage most of the day, and while it looked great, I think it would have been distracting for me — to each their own. Kenny was a great ambassador for the game, as you would expect, and when I asked what's worth seeking out in Europe, he kindly recommended EPT tournaments.

On a break that day I noticed George Holmes standing by himself on the side of the hallway and decided to say hello. I mentioned I had played with Kally from his home game. George asked if I was still in — yes, turns out we both were. "Good luck," he said. "You too," I replied.

Later that day at the same table, an aggressive player put me nearly all-in on a flushing river. I had Kings. I called fairly quickly, on a feeling. He had been jamming rivers frequently but never showing down a hand, and I felt like he had been doing it light and getting away with it. This time I busted him when he showed down air. He stood up, asked me for a selfie right there at the table, and then 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'd seen. I was just glad I hadn't lost most of my stack a few levels before the money bubble burst.

The Bubble

As play neared the money bubble, the tension rose at my table and across the room. We were nearing the point at which every remaining player would be guaranteed a payout. It's known as a min-cash — it returns the entry fee plus a small premium on top. No one wanted to bust that close to the money. Players with smaller stacks had started taking a long time on decisions, hoping others would bust before them so they could slide into the money. Some players started to police the pace of play at other tables — unsurprisingly, conflicts followed.

As Jack Effel ran around the Bally's event center with a microphone and camera crew to cover every all-in with a potential elimination, a huge crowd would surround that table. If the player at risk survived, the crowd booed. If a player was eliminated, cheers went up, as everyone else in the tournament was now closer to the money.

I've never seen anything like the chaos near the Main Event bubble and the celebration that followed. The bubble finally burst at around 1 a.m. after more than an hour of hand-for-hand play, and in the wildest way possible: three players busted simultaneously on the final hand, forcing a race-off in which they split the $15,000 for 1,300th place. That left 1,299 of the 8,663 who started, every one of us now guaranteed at least $15,000. When the announcement came that all remaining players were in the money, you would have thought people had lost their minds. The relief in the room was palpable. I felt good that my credit card bill was now covered. I bagged 730,000 that night — in the money in my first real tournament. Back in the room, winding down and getting to sleep was tough.

On Day 4 I played a few hands at my first table before it broke. I arrived at the second table of the day and picked up Ace-King offsuit almost immediately. The player to my right 3-bet large, and after a moment, I looked at the dealer and announced "all-in." It occurred to me later that this was the first time all tournament I had been all-in, and I had a big drawing hand. It folded around to the player on my right. He turned and stared at me for what felt like an eternity. Eventually he called and tabled pocket Queens — a flip where I was slightly behind. The flop came Ace, King, blank. The remaining cards were of no consequence, and I dragged a nice pot while knocking out another opponent.

I sat at that table the rest of the day next to Alex Mantovani and across from Toby Lewis — a bracelet winner who finished 7th at the 2023 Main Event. Both were very nice guys and great players. It was the best table I sat at all tournament. At one point when we were kidding around, I told Toby I should invite him to my home game, to which he replied, "I bet it's good action." I ended the day with 1,330,000 in chips.

On Day 5 I arrived at the table to find a numbered card at my seat that was new to me. After asking around, I learned it was a media ID number used to cross-reference your identity if you end up in a hand that gets coverage. When I looked down to the other end of the table, there was a camera crew set up across from Alejandro Lococo, who finished 7th at the 2021 Main Event. Lon McEachern — the ever-present voice of the WSOP Main Event and, coincidentally, of the Battle for the Bracelets video game — stood a few feet away talking with Paul Spitzberg, who was seated to my right. Two seats to my left, Jeremy Wien, another bracelet winner, rounded out the table notables. Later, while chatting with Paul, I mentioned that I'd been hearing a lot of talk about being deep in a tournament and asked what his definition was. He looked at me and said, "When you can look around and see everyone left in the tournament in the same room, you're deep." It started to sink in that I was among the last few hundred players remaining in arguably the most prestigious tournament in the world, one that everyone wants to win.

In the second level of Day 5, I won a 1.5 million chip pot against Lococo — fives full of twos. I really got lucky to have the goods on that one — he's aggressive and tough to play against. Then the table broke. At the new table not far away, I took the seat to the right of Victor Li (founder of PokerOS), who had a mountain of chips. On my right was Andrew Ostapchenko, a highly ranked GPI player and bracelet winner who holds the most consecutive Main Event cashes. In the third level of the day, I flopped a set of fours on an all-hearts board against Ostapchenko. He bet, I raised all-in, and he snap-called. My heart sank to see him table the nut flush. It was a nearly five-million-chip pot. The turn and river were blanks, and I was out in 239th place.

It really is one of the worst feelings to bust the Main Event. I wanted to keep playing, and it was more about momentum than the money — I had been playing to win, not just to ladder. I had been on an incredible ride for five days, and busting was like hitting a wall at speed. You come to a sudden, jarring stop.

When It's Over: The Payout Room

I stood up and waited near the table for a minute until a floor person came over and handed me a small stub of paper — a receipt for my tournament finish position. I took that slip over to a staff table on the side of the room, then made the short walk to the payout room in Paris.

Inside the payout room were staff sitting behind tables with laptops tending to issues, a line of waiting players, and a cashier's window, behind which counting machines ran nearly non-stop. I had a good chat with a few international players in line while we all waited.

I got up to the window and handed over my paperwork. The cashier looked at me, smiled, and asked, "How do you want it?" Not having done this before, I asked what my options were: cash, cashier's check, casino chips, or electronic transfer. I took a small amount in cash and the rest as a check — that felt a bit more responsible in Las Vegas. That night I returned to the tournament area and watched from the rail, seeing players I had sat with still competing as those remaining moved toward Day 6.

Experiencing the Main Event

During the first few days of the Main Event, there were so many people trying to move in and out of the Bally's event area that it felt like you were continually exiting a large sporting event. You sort of flow down the hallway at the pace of a lazy river while people look at their phones. Once you sit down, show your ID, and hand over your buy-in slip to the dealer, it starts a cycle that will define your life for the rest of the tournament: two hours of poker, then a 20-minute break, with a 75-minute dinner break after Level 3. You play five levels per day (10 hours at the table), plus breaks, and — if you make it — bagging chips. It's a long day.

With two-hour levels and a 60,000-chip starting stack, the tournament pace can feel slow. Sometimes it feels like time stops altogether when someone goes in the tank for several minutes. Most players move it along pretty well when the action is on them, and in my experience players seem to afford each other some extra patience in how quickly they act. For most, it's the highest stakes they will play. Combine that with a freezeout structure, where your only second chance is next year, and it's easy to see why the Main Event is so memorable.

I found that staying upstairs on property at Bally's worked really well for the 20-minute breaks. It was a short walk to the hotel elevators, but the hallway congestion meant it took me about five minutes to get back to the room from the tournament area. That left enough time to grab a protein bar or Advil and use the bathroom, then another five minutes to get back to the table. On dinner breaks it worked out great: within ten minutes of leaving the table, I had something to eat in my room without waiting in line. The quiet and the space to myself were refreshing, because most of the day you are elbow to elbow with other players at the table.

By the last level of play, after all of the start-stop-repeat motion of the day, you're starting to feel mentally fatigued. You've been making high-stakes decisions all day long, and it wears on you as the day goes on.

When play concludes, the tournament director announces the end-of-day bagging procedure. The dealers pass out clear, sealable plastic bags with pens, along with a form prefilled with the next day's table draw. You write your information on the bag, fill out the carbon form, drop in your chips along with a receipt, seal the bag, and leave it with the dealer.

After you get back to the room, the big challenge is winding down. I didn't have a well-worn routine prepared, as would have been advisable, so it took a long time to turn my brain off from the data stream of the day and fall asleep. As the tournament wears on, the impact is cumulative: if you aren't eating or sleeping well, or both, by Day 4 or 5 you are likely dragging — and it affects your performance and decision-making right at the moment your decisions are of increasing importance. I was feeling quite run down by the time I busted midway through Day 5, and was fully sick with something by the next day. I had planned to stay longer but wrapped the trip early and headed home.

The Hands I Cannot Reconstruct

When I got home after the most intense poker I had ever played, 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 stayed with me and made me think. 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 built the tool I wished I'd had at the Main Event to capture the hands that mattered. In "Anatomy of a Poker Tournament", Nate Silver shared his perspective on the value of capturing live hand histories, and acknowledged that he personally logs every tournament hand he plays for an event — doing this a few times a year manually, without an app like LiveHands. He writes: "I work with a poker coach, and I've found that reviewing an entire start-to-finish tournament hand history works much better to detect problems than a 'highlight reel' of hands. If you have leaks in your game that you aren't aware of, you may never catch them with the highlight reel approach because you'll never think to bring them to your coach's attention."

LiveHands is a mobile hand logging app for live tournament poker players. You capture hands fast between deals while the details are fresh, and export in PokerStars format or Discord-ready plain text. LiveHands is the digital capture-and-export workflow and study pipeline that live players haven't had before.