Second-year College student Matt Swoboda described playing poker as “just one of my hobbies, not even my biggest one.” However, this hobby’s payout for Swoboda rivals the salaries of some top-paying jobs. In an online PokerStars.com tournament held Sept. 21 and 22, Swoboda won more than $800,000.
Swoboda first began playing poker as a high school freshman. “We would play for 25 cents at lunch,” he said. “The first day I played I won $9, and I was like, ‘This is awesome. I want to keep doing this.’”
Swoboda said he continued playing throughout high school in both live and online games. Once he turned 18, he started playing Texas Hold‘em online for money, and he now makes several semi-annual trips to casinos to play poker.
This summer, Swoboda took advantage of a deal offered by the PokerStars network and gained automatic entry into a free-roll tournament. He said playing in the summer tournament was “just something to do while talking to [his] dad and watching the Olympics ... but [he] ended up winning.” Three thousand people participated in this tournament, and the top five finishers gained entry into a higher-stakes tournament held in late September.
In the week leading up to the September tournament, which was held over a span of two days, Swoboda said he “slept a lot, didn’t go out and just in general made everything conducive to doing well.” The tournament began at 4:30 p.m. Sept. 21, with a total of 2,185 players. The tournament continued for 12 hours straight until 4:30 a.m., then stopped and started up again the next day.
After the first night of play, Swoboda was in 17th place out of 60 players, meaning he was guaranteed to walk away with at least $18,000. “I didn’t really sleep that night,” he said. “I was pretty excited.”
The next day, Swoboda left class early to come home and continue the tournament. He said he was “optimistic but pretty nervous” as he started playing again, however, quickly “settled in and played pretty well.”
While playing in the tournament, Swoboda said, he made sure there weren’t any distractions. “I was just taking my time with every decision, making sure everything I did was, in my mind, correct,” he said. Although hundreds of thousands of dollars depended on the decisions he made, Swoboda said he did not “really stress out [and] was more excited than nervous.” Even if he was eliminated, he said, it would not have been “the end of the world.”
As more and more players were eliminated, however, Swoboda remained in the tournament. After about five more hours of play, Swoboda made it to the final table, which consisted of the top nine players in terms of chip count. “The other players who were left are professional players, so I felt like they had an edge,” he said. At the same time, he noted that he was pretty excited to have made it that far in the tournament.
The players at the final table then decided to make a deal guaranteeing each would walk away with a substantial amount of the total money in play.
“We did it to lock ourselves into a higher amount of money,” Swoboda said. “We didn’t want to flip a coin for $300,000.” Swoboda ended up finishing fifth out of the initial 2,185 entrants, and under this deal he was awarded $801,153.
Swoboda’s friends and family members followed the tournament through a live broadcast online. Second-year College student Matt Glienke, Swoboda’s roommate, said he started watching the tournament on his computer late Sunday night.
“Pretty much every time he won a big hand I’d get really nervous, because I was in a different room and couldn’t see what cards he had,” Glienke said.
Swoboda played methodically and was always in control, Glienke said. While he saw a great deal of the tournament, he did not watch the entire time.
“The biggest shock for me is when I went to sleep on Sunday night, there were 400 people left, and [Swoboda] was in a low chip position,” he said. “But I woke up and saw he was 17th out of 60.”
Third-year College student Jeremy Freid, who plays live poker with Swoboda several times a month, was especially interested in watching the tournament. Freid said he stayed up all night as the action unfolded.
“I always knew he was good,” Freid said. “But for him to outlast that many other people was incredibly surprising.”
Freid and two other of Swoboda’s poker buddies had their own stakes in the tournament. Each paid to purchase one percent of Swoboda’s actions.
“I wanted to make sure that even if I got out right away, I’d make a little money,” Swoboda said. “So I sold off percentages of myself.” Had he been eliminated immediately, Swoboda would have received $54 from each of his three friends. As it ended up, however, these three friends each ended up with $8,000 after Swoboda’s victory.
Freid said he will use the $8,000 to buy a new guitar and take his roommates out to dinner, but he plans to save the rest.
Swoboda, meanwhile, said he has cashed out all the money he won in the tournament. “This weekend,” he said, “I’m going to try and buy a new car ... I’m looking at an Audi TT or an old school Porsche.”
He said he has also set aside some money to go to Las Vegas and play in the World Series of Poker in July 2011, after he turns 21. Although the possibility of going pro has crossed his mind, Swoboda said he finds the lifestyle unattractive.
“To be a professional poker player, you have to treat it like a job,” Swoboda said. “It’s really solitary. It really doesn’t open many doors for yourself.”
Swoboda added that school comes first.
“Poker is just something I happen to be good at and like to do,” he said.
Swoboda plans to keep playing poker but said he “has no intention in moving up in stakes or anything.” His goal, he said, is to be just the same person as before and to avoid letting his win define him.
Perhaps the biggest testament to how the win has not affected him, Swoboda said, “is that 30 minutes after the tournament was over, I went to the library to study for my COMM 180 test.” Glienke, who said the win has not altered Swoboda’s outlook on life, added that he still “asked us to pay our share of the electric bill.”
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