Sam Greenwood, the longtime Canadian professional poker player who nearly has $40 million in tournament winnings stopped by Reddit’s /poker club to answer questions submitted by users. An online pro since 2006 and high roller tournament mainstay, he has several titles, including one in the 2019 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure $100,000 Super High Roller and a World Series of Poker bracelet.

Q: Do you ever play poker drunk like eight beers and play at lowest stakes $1/3? Do you ever short buy like $60 then go all in preflop no look then laugh maniacly? Those are my two biggest leaks — how can I fix them?
Greenwood: I’ve made it a challenge to answer every question asked so I’ll start with this one. No. No. How to fix this leak? You could start by not drinking 8 beers, but that’s no fun. So I will say, at least look at your cards before you go all-in dark.

Q: Did you lose emotions in life due to poker?
Greenwood: Never took an ADHD drug in my life. I wouldn’t say I “lost emotions,” but you do train yourself to have less volatile emotions. However, I had a very quick fuse as a teenager, so maybe poker taught me maturity and emotional control. It’s tough to say if poker made me even-keeled or I would have naturally become more even-keeled as I aged.

Q: If your Hendon says you have made $39 million in tournaments, how much do you think you are down overall? / How much were the buy-ins to win that $39 million/ How much was yours own action?
Greenwood: Wrote about that here: I min-cash around 15% of tournaments. If you mean make money on an individual tournament after accounting for everything. That’s a harder question to answer. Sometimes I three bullet and a swap wins and book a small profit, sometimes I cash fire one bullet, mincash and lose money on the tournament because swaps did poorly. It’s not really a way I track results. I am up money overall. $38,999,999.

Q: If you could swap poker skills for one day with any player past or present, who would it be?
Greenwood: I think I would swap skills with someone like Chance Kornuth to see if he actually has live read magic. It would also be fun to get in the head of someone who can hyperfocus in a way that I often cannot.

Q: In spots where you’re out of position with a medium-strength hand, how do you balance check-calling vs. check-raising to protect your range to prevent villain from running you over (200bb cash game)? How has the rise of solvers changed your cash game strategy, and where do you still rely on intuition over GTO?
Greenwood: With 200 bbs deep, you rarely check-raise medium strength hands. You make the pot too large and risk losing a monster pot to a better hand or getting bluffed by a worse one. There are some exceptions that are mentioned below, but those tend to be designed to get better hands to fold and worse hands to call.

I tend to use game theory principles to structure my play on early streets and use my intuition more on later streets. It’s easier to made adjustments like “I think my opponent is bluffing too much, so I am going to call the river with any reasonable bluff catcher” versus, “I think my opponent three betting too much so I am going to create an entirely new you four betting strategy when I don’t really know their response to my four betting strategy”

Q: If you were playing super high rollers, what percent of your thought process is trying to play near equilibrium vs making player/pool-specific adjustments? How does this differ at $5–$10k events and vs more rec-heavy fields?
Greenwood: My thought process in a poker hand is usually to think of what the equilibrium is and then ask myself if I want to deviate for a specific reason in a given hand. When I am playing vs recs, I do the same thing, but it can happen very fast. Something like “I think I am supposed to mix flop check-raises with a set, but I am never trapping versus this guy who I already sized up as calling station”

Q: When you’re playing super high rollers, what percent of regs are winning? Who are the best 3 live MTT players in the last 10 years? What is a good ROI for SHR regs? Can someone still climb from the bottom and be a winning SHR reg today?
Greenwood: I’ll try to bucket one and three together.

I think the best regs are probably winning somewhere between 10-15% on their highest EV bullets (so no max late reg bullets). I think there is a huge swath of regs playing the tournament who after rake are making somewhere between like -5% and +5% and it’s very tough to figure out which are which.

1. Chidwick, Ike and I was going to say Mikita except he didn’t really start playing SHRs until 2016. So I will say someone who is criminally overlooked in this conversation Mike Watson. All three of guys I listed play multiple games at a very high level, play very high stakes, have great work ethic and have had longevity.
2. Depending on the exact rake structures of the tournament how much they late reg, etc. Probably somewhere in the 10-20 percent range. People have climbed from the bottom to be winning SHR regs recently. Look at someone like Leon Sturm, it is very hard to do, but it’s possible.

Q: How much did you miss the old days of 2+2 and the photoshop threads community?
Greenwood: For better or worse a lot of the story of the internet is large communities becoming siloed and insular. Many 2p2ers are doing great things within poker and outside of it, but the feeling of the OG 2p2 is gone, but it’s also partially nostalgia for being 18 again.