Welcome to a new Pokerati feature, Inside the Poker Circles, spotlighting the personalities, strategies, and stories behind some of the game’s most compelling players. Drawn from the pages of Between the Blinds: Interviewing Poker Professionals by Sara O’Connor (coming this fall), each installment offers a seat at the table with a pro who’s redefining what it means to play the game well, on and off the felt.
Few have captured the heart of the poker community quite like Brad Owen. He’s an everyman turned icon who’s made the game more accessible, entertaining, and inspiring with every vlog he posts. With his signature mix of humor, honesty, and sharp play,
Owen has taken viewers along for the ride through the ups and downs of professional poker. From quiet beginnings to co-owning a cardroom, his story is one of growth, grit, and the ever-evolving landscape of the game.
This is more than just a poker journey—it’s a masterclass in staying true to yourself while chasing the dream. Welcome to Inside the Poker Circles!
Do you remember your first time playing? If so, what was it like?
I first played 5-Card draw when I was around 6 or 7 years old in a camper with family friends. One of the parents was teaching us and gave us a few dollars each. I ended up winning $5. I liked the game and winning, but wasn’t hooked just yet.
The next time I played was during Christmas, a few years later, with my brother and some of our cousins at my grandparents’ house. The very first hand was memorable because we accidentally were playing with a Pinochle deck. Everyone had ridiculously strong hands.
It wasn’t until I was about 14 or 15 that I started playing Texas Hold’em around the kitchen table with my older brother and his friends for $1-$5. I remember feeling like it was the first time I was at least as good, if not better, than my brother at anything. His friends were even further behind us.
Can you tell me about your poker career? How long have you been playing, and when did you feel ready to call yourself a professional?
I’ve taken poker seriously since I was in high school. When I was 17, I told my dad that I wanted to play poker for a living. He was in the casino industry as the Vice President of Operations for a company that basically flipped run-down cardrooms in California.
I didn’t quite get the reaction that I’d hoped for from him. He told me that he never wanted to hear me say that again. He had watched a lot of people lose everything and didn’t distinguish poker players from other degenerate gamblers, so he thought he was looking out for me.
I went to college in San Diego, where you could play poker at the tribal casinos at 18. I played a lot of $3/$6 limit and small $40 tournaments and did well. I was also playing online, but was not doing well there.
When I graduated college in 2010, it was tough to get a job during the recession. I was living with my parents during the summer. I managed to win a $100 satellite that got me into the WSOP Main Event.
That buy-in was the biggest one I had played at the time. I did well on Day 1, but got knocked out in the middle of Day 2. From that point on, I believed that I really could play for a living at some point.
I worked a job leasing apartments in San Francisco and started playing $2/$5 No Limit at Lucky Chances whenever I had time off.
I made friends with the first poker professional that I knew, Charles Michna. He helped me out a lot. Charles rented out rooms in a house he owned in Las Vegas.
In 2012, when I was 24, I quit my job as a Leasing Consultant and started playing poker for a living. This is when I started calling myself a professional poker player (aside from a few other times when I was trying to pick-up women in San Francisco and felt like telling them I was a Leasing Consultant would be too boring).
It turns out telling women you’re a professional poker player isn’t all that appealing either, though!
How do you not let past success affect your current play?
I have a lot of people who depend on me, including my son, two stepdaughters, and partner. I need to be successful now and in the future in order to take the best care I can of all of the people I love.
Sometimes past success can still creep in and affect me negatively. It actually happened recently when I won $25,000 in a cash game at Bellagio.
The next day I was invited to play in the game even though I wasn’t really feeling like it, and I proceeded to lose almost all of it. Usually, it’s good to take some time off after a big win or big loss to give your brain some time to process it.
Any least favorite moments when playing?
I lost $300,000 over the course of three sessions at The Lodge in February of 2023 when we were launching our new stream room so that people could watch us play poker at home.
I was running bad and not playing particularly well, especially towards the end. I was on a downswing before we launched the new studio, so I wasn’t too keen on playing super high stakes anyway, but I hoped it would go well. When it wasn’t going well, I was annoyed and embarrassed.
Here I was at a cardroom where I’m part-owner repeatedly getting my face bashed in as we’re showcasing our new stream setup for the first time. It was probably the toughest thing I’ve had to go through as a poker player aside from going broke.
It’s easier to look back at it now because I quickly came out of that downswing by “final tabling”(i.e., reaching the point in a tournament where the last remaining group of players occupy a single table, which is usually nine players) at a WPT event and a WSOP event a few months later.
I thought it might take years to recover all of it; I’m glad that it didn’t. That might actually be the accomplishment I’m most proud of – not completely collapsing after publicly getting destroyed.
Do you ever drink or smoke when playing? If so, how, if at all, does it affect your game?
When I’m hosting an event or playing on stream, there’s usually some pressure to be entertaining and often I’ll have some drinks. My tolerance is pretty high and I’ve been playing poker for so long that it doesn’t affect my game a ton except in rare instances.
If everyone is drinking at the table, I like my odds. Normally I don’t drink at the table if I show up to play a session somewhere on The Strip. The only exception is when I’m with friends or if I plan to hang out with friends later and want to take advantage of free drinks.
Not many players share their “going broke” stories. Thank you for that. What was it like going broke and deciding to enter the playing field again?
My goal with the poker vlog was to show people what it’s like as a professional poker player. A lot of the tough things I went through happened before I started my YouTube channel.
I don’t want to glamorize what I do too much or make the idea of playing for a living enticing for younger viewers. It ends up being a dead-end for a lot of people, so my blanket advice is always to encourage people to keep it as a profitable hobby.
The people who don’t have the heart to make it professionally will be dissuaded and the ones who are truly capable of making it work might end up trying harder.
I went broke within a year of deciding to play for a living. I moved from Las Vegas to Los Angeles to be closer to my girlfriend at the time. My expenses were higher, and I was playing bigger partly due to the structures of the L.A. games at the time.
I was extremely stressed out and not running well, which led me to not playing well. I had to move back in with my parents, which was humbling and embarrassing.
I ended up going back to school to get my Master of Science in Accounting degree and became a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). I worked for Ernst & Young for a year knowing the entire time my heart wasn’t in it.
Making the decision to go back to playing poker full-time was extremely difficult. I remember telling my parents over dinner at Javier’s inside Aria during the summer of 2015. They were furious.
They spent a lot of time and money on my education. They were very proud of me as a CPA and loved telling their friends about my career, but they didn’t understand how unhappy I was at the job.
I had to disappoint a lot of friends and family with that decision to do what I felt was the right thing for me… At least I hoped it was right.
How did you celebrate one of your first or most memorable wins?
Most of my memorable wins have been in tournaments. I’m usually exhausted after playing 3-5 days of high-intensity poker against talented players, so I don’t often celebrate. I’ve never won a major event either, so I tend to be disappointed that I didn’t get first if I final tabled an event and fell short once more.
The only time I’ve really celebrated was when I made my first major final table and got my first 6-figure score. I got 4th place in a WPT event, which was one of my favorite poker experiences.
The first 4 days were played in Los Angeles at Gardens, but we had a few days off before playing the televised final table in a big studio in Las Vegas. I felt like I was on my home court.
My brother, sister, girlfriend, and a lot of friends came to watch and support me. They all had oversized pictures of my face on a stick that they were waving around; it was surreal for me.
I’d played on TV before for cash games, only being invited due to being known in the industry; this final table experience was particularly cool because I earned the television appearance by outlasting hundreds of other players.
Anyway, once I got knocked out, I took my friends and family to a steak dinner at Mandalay Bay.
Do you have any pre- or post-game rituals you practice while preparing to play your best or in winding down after a session?
I often throw away pieces of garbage on the way into a poker room, partly for good karma.
What’s it like balancing fatherhood with the game, especially travel?
One aspect of my life that I don’t normally talk about is that I’m a stepfather of two little girls. We’ve been in each other’s lives for six years and they’re sources of happiness and inspiration for me.
I just had a son of my own who’s only weeks old. I’m on my first trip right now since he was born. I had a few tears when I said goodbye to him at the airport this morning.
My goal is to be a good role model for all three of the kids. I also like to be as present as possible going to soccer games and birthday parties. It hurts to have to miss those kinds of things occasionally for work.
The issue is that there’s no real precedent for what I’m doing as a content creator in the poker industry. I’m not sure how long opportunities will last or how long people will be interested in my story. I need to take advantage of the position I’m in while I still have it, so I can make money and provide for my family.
What’s nice for me is that when I’m writing scripts and editing videos, I get to work from home and be around my partner and kids all day. I end up playing more when I’m traveling and then when I’m home in Las Vegas, I tend not to play nearly as much; I just work from the house.
You’ve been there since the beginning and really helped start poker content creation. How, if at all, have you seen the sphere evolve, and how do you continue to see it evolving over the next 5 to 10 years?
When I started there weren’t that many poker content creators. It was such a blank canvas. Casual fans of the game were all of a sudden able to get insight into what it was like to be a professional poker player when they couldn’t before. It was new and exciting.
The YouTube viewers wanted more content than was being created. Now there are hundreds or thousands of poker content creators on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. It’s much more difficult to stand out and get traction.
A lot of creators like seeing numbers go up, so it’s discouraging how difficult it is to make that happen on YouTube with long-form content.
A lot of creators have started focusing on reels and shorts because the different platforms push those out to wider audiences. We’ll probably continue to see that trend over the next several years.
Live streams are more popular now than ever as well. Production value for all content is going way up. I’m not exactly sure what the landscape will look like in 5-10 years, but I hope I’m still playing a part in helping to shape it.
