About Tom Sullivan

Born and raised in Minnesota, I played my first card games for money in Boy Scouts at summer camp. 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 more than anything. Fast forward through an early career in online fantasy sports and product development, with a few entrepreneurial ventures along the way.

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 planned to play the $777 Lucky Sevens 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 put the Main Event 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.

I flew to Las Vegas, and the night before, I'm upstairs in my room at Bally's having a few second thoughts about what I was doing — about to sit for a $10K buy-in I had put on a credit card. Thankfully it was a momentary dilemma, and the next morning I arose for Day 1D of the WSOP Main Event.

A Wild, Memorable Tournament

Day 1D at Table 626 in Bally's Silver was a lot of fun — I knocked out four players in the first few levels. I found myself seated with David Miscikowski, a 2022 bracelet winner; John Smith, a legend in heads-up poker; and Steve Kallenberg, who plays in the same home game as George Holmes — and ended with 192,400 chips, 96th out of 3,484 in my starting flight. Then we had a day off, which felt like it was already needed.

When things resumed for me on Day 2 it was mostly sideways chip-wise, but again a good group of players to sit with. It turned stressful for a bit as the table and one of the dealers got into it. The dealer insisted on placing the dealer button between two players, leading to confusion in nearly every hand — it tilted the entire table. I bagged 321,500 for the day — 166th out of 3,594.

Day 3 started with a big hand against Stefan Lehner, another 2022 bracelet winner, then I 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'd seen. I bagged 730,000 for the day — 185th out of 3,075.

On Day 4 I picked up Ace-King offsuit almost immediately at the new table and got it all in against pocket Queens. The player was immediately to my right and stared at me for what felt like an eternity. But eventually he called, and the flop came Ace, King, rag — and soon you could hear the dealer announcing "Floor, payout!" I sat most of the rest of the day with Toby Lewis — a bracelet winner who finished 7th at the 2023 Main Event, nice guy and great player. 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 in arguably the most prestigious tournament in the world, one that everyone wants to win, and this was my first WSOP.

I won a 1.5 million chip pot against Lococo — fives full of twos. Then my table broke. At the new table, I sat to the right of Victor Li, who had a mountain of chips. On my right was Andrew Ostapchenko, a highly ranked GPI player who holds the most consecutive Main Event cashes (he'd get his first bracelet a few years later). 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 the nut flush — probably the only hand that wouldn't fold to an all-in. The board did not pair. I was out in 239th place, in a nearly five-million-chip pot.

It really is the worst feeling to bust the Main Event. For me it was that I wanted to keep playing — it was like hitting a wall at speed after playing for days on a razor edge, and then boom, you come to an unexpected, jarring stop.

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 built the tool I wished I'd had at the Main Event — and for any future live tournament I play where I want hand histories for discussion and study. 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 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 digital analysis workflow and study pipeline that live players haven't had before.