Three former TPHS students compete and place at the World Series of Poker

By Max Sutton-Smolin

Side games and satellite tournaments abound at the World Series of Poker, held annually in Las Vegas, but the series’ $10,000 buy-in no-limit Texas Hold ’em “main event” garners the majority of its massive media and spectator attention. This year, the main event also captured the unique success stories of three Torrey Pines High School graduates.
Jesse Steinberg, David Liu and Mark Ninyo all competed and placed at the 2010 WSOP, held at the Rio All Suite Hotel and Casino from May 27 through July 17. The tournament is one of the biggest and most popular in the world, and the winner is semi-officially considered the world champion of poker.
“The coolest thing about the world series of poker is that it’s the biggest stage in poker [because] you’re playing with all the best players in the world, but anyone can play in the tournament,” said Steinberg, 23, who placed 337th and won $36,000. “All you need to do is buy in the $10,000.”
With more than 7,000 entrants, the main event requires four different starting days to get everyone at a table. As the knock-out or elimination-style tournament proceeds, the field shrinks. On day three, all remaining players are combined into one day, Steinberg said. At the end of day four, they are all in the same room.
“At first, you can’t even see an end to it, you know? … Then on day five, you see the tables shrinking, and half of us are gone,” said Steinberg, who graduated last June from University of California San Diego with a degree in biology. “It’s really cool as it progresses, that you can actually see an end.”
Steinberg and Liu, 2006 TPHS graduates and best friends since freshman year of high school, are now professional poker players. They met with little luck in the past two tournaments, busting on the first day and once after two hours of play.
“It’s kind of a grind,” said Liu, 23. “You have to play a long time, put in a lot of hours. You’re just trying to survive and pick your spot, when to attack and when to be patient.”
Previously in the WSOP, Liu busted on the first day and on the fourth day, but this year he placed 154th, winning $57,000.
“I’m pretty disciplined and good with my money management,” said Liu, who attended UC Santa Barbara and needs one more class to graduate with a degree in philosophy. “I don’t overextend myself. I carefully pick what hands I want to invest in.”
Mark Ninyo, 24, placed 335th, winning $36,000. Ninyo graduated from TPHS in 2004 and from UCSB in 2008 with a degree in business economics and is currently working in downtown Chicago at Consolidated Trading, a proprietary trading firm.
Unlike Steinberg and Liu, who bought in to the tournament with their own capital, Ninyo scored a free seat at the WSOP by winning his company’s poker tournament. The company gave him vacation time and paid for his flight to Las Vegas and his lodging at the Rio.
“I don’t consider myself a great poker player. I was just hoping to catch some cards and play as well as I could, and I just loved it,” Ninyo said. “The first day I got extremely lucky and didn’t play so well, but after playing for so long I sort of got in the swing of things. Then I felt like my luck wasn’t that great, but I just played really well, making good decisions and not doing anything too crazy. By day five, I was actually at one point in 25th place, had like 900,000 chips in front of me. I ended up blowing it pretty quick.”
Ninyo began playing poker at age 17 when it started to become popular around the world, and he gathered most of his knowledge base by constantly playing at friends’ houses. But “it was never a big part of my life,” he said. “I never had aspirations of being a professional poker player.”
In contrast, Steinberg was introduced to poker and learned the rules at a very young age by accompanying his father, Craig, to his penny-ante games. Occasionally, Steinberg was allowed to sit in for his father.
“Actually, the other guys at the poker table were sort of afraid of him, because he would always make the right moves all the time, which was funny for a little kid,” Craig Steinberg said.
According to his father, who attended the WSOP with his son and Liu, Steinberg was doing quite well this year until he hit what is referred to as a “bad beat,” losing a critical hand that at that point would have put him at number one in the entire tournament.
“I think he probably would have gotten final table, and at least a million dollars,” Steinberg’s father said. “But that happens, and you end up with $30,000 instead of a million.”
Steinberg was disappointed when he lost, especially because he was in the top chip counts every day he played, he said.
“He played the best poker he’s ever played. He didn’t make any mistakes, he did everything right, he was stealing pots, making people drop hands that were better than his. He played perfectly,” Craig Steinberg said. “There’s nothing you can do when you get excellent cards, and the other guy just has a little bit better.”
Poker is a long-term game that requires carefully thought-out strategy to optimize both losing and winning, Steinberg said.
“I think one of the biggest reasons I’ve been successful in poker is that I have no ego at the table,” Steinberg said. “Some people will go to a table and just try to beat someone, or just try to win every pot and get mad when they lose. But when I lose, I forget it. I’ll remember what happened, so I can use the information for the next hand, but actually losing the chips, losing money, doesn’t faze me at all, and I never, ever try to just focus on one player and beat them, like I know many people do.”
Liu has also had success by dropping emotional motivations from his game, he said.
“I don’t let the whole nature of gambling really get to me,” Liu said. “If I lose a whole lot or win a whole lot, I just keep plowing through, regardless of what’s going on.”
Liu, Steinberg and Ninyo were all on the same tennis team at TPHS their freshman year (Ninyo’s sophomore year), and Liu and Steinberg played high school basketball together for two years as well.
Former TPHS principal Rick Schmitt remembers Liu and Steinberg from his tenure at TPHS. They were great students who were very involved, so he is not surprised by their poker success, he said.
“What was a surprise was the amount of dollars at stake, how much those guys earned and were playing for,” said Schmitt, now associate superintendent of educational services for the San Dieguito Union High School District.
All three winners credited garage games with friends with much of their poker skill development, but online poker playing presented the biggest learning curve, Steinberg said.
Steinberg usually plays four tables at once online, but he knows people who will play 16 or 20 tables at once. Even at lower stakes and against worse players, there’s no way he could do that, Steinberg said.
“Poker’s supposed to be about the psychology between yourself and your opponents, right? When you’re playing that many tables, the whole reading your opponents thing just goes out the window because you can’t do it when you have that many tables going,” Steinberg said. “Poker basically becomes a formula where you’re dealt this hand, what do you do with it, it doesn’t even matter what your opponent does.”
Ninyo doesn’t play online at all, while Liu plays almost all of his poker online, he said.
The online poker playing phenomenon is almost solely responsible for the best players being between ages 18 and 25, Steinberg said. Where Steinberg plays 20,000 or 30,000 hands of poker per year, some people play 2 or 3 million, he said.
“Some players have played in one year online more hands than the top professionals, the ones who you see on TV all the time … have played in their whole lifetime,” Steinberg said.
When Steinberg was 18, he started his online poker career with one $50 investment on one Web site. He is still playing and hasn’t yet had to reinvest.
“He’s level-headed,” Steinberg’s father said. “I don’t think he’s going to be one of these guys who just makes a lot of money then just blows it, like a lot of poker players do. He doesn’t brag about it, and you can’t tell if he’s won or lost, which is good.”
Both Ninyo and Steinberg said their ability to read players is not as important to their success as their mathematics and quick reasoning skills.
“It’s such a hard game concentration-wise, you don’t want to make any critical mistakes,” Ninyo said. “So you’ve got to stay focused. A lot of people will play well and then on one hand they’ll just break down.”
However, Steinberg stressed how little the math can matter if a player fails to get an accurate read on his opponent.
“[Reading faces] definitely works with some people better than others. I definitely try to, but I get more information from analyzing betting patterns,” Steinberg said. “It’s like trying to put a puzzle together, and each hand adds to the puzzle.”
Steinberg has a strong interest in travel, so whenever he would have a break from college, he would look for a poker tournament in some place in the world that appealed to him and try to make a vacation out of it. He recently made a summer trip to Barcelona, London, Amsterdam and Paris.
“With nothing invested except his time, he’s had quite the life,” Craig Steinberg said. “He’s had a lot of success, and he’s travelled to play poker tournaments in Ireland, Aruba and Monaco.”
Despite his poker success so far, Steinberg does not share Liu’s ambition to pursue the game as a professional, long-term career because it is so easy to get burnt out on it, he said.
“When you start playing professionally, poker is your job, a job you have to go play,” Steinberg said. “And one of the worst things I think in poker you can do is play when you don’t feel like playing … It’s just too easy to get burnt out.”
Steinberg is currently studying for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) and hopes to be in medical school by next fall.
Steinberg is also trying to use his poker career to jumpstart a nonprofit philanthropic foundation. The foundation would donate money to a different charity each year, and poker players could donate percentages of their winnings at tournaments or cash games to his cause.
“Poker players do nothing for society,” Steinberg said. “They just sit at a poker table taking money from each other, right? So I’m hoping this is a good way to have a positive impact.”