Bridging the gap between the life of a poker player and a professional on the media side of the game is a tough business. It’s grueling, demanding, and challenging in a myriad of different ways. But when your home game is 7,000 miles from the poker table you want to be at, it’s nearly impossible.
With the emphasis on nearly. Israel’s Robbie Strazynski has balanced life as the founder of CardPlayer Lifestyle with the part-time life of a passionate mixed game player.
Scheduled from October 5th – 9th, the latest Mixed Game Festival XV, the 15th iteration of Robbie’s series, takes place at Bellagio in Las Vegas across five fantastic days. With Robbie flying into Sin City very soon, we spoke to him about his crazy lifestyle and what he loves about mixing up poker and business both on and off the felt.
Life in a Suitcase
When I catch up with Robbie, he’s in his homeland. Moving from Los Angeles to Israel in 1998, Robbie’s life has been one of travel, both long-haul and for a long time.
He has lived in his native Israel for the biggest part of his life but feels the clarion call of Las Vegas like many millions of poker players across the globe. I start by asking him how he balances life at home as a religious husband and father at the center of his family, with the poker player who loves to gamble.
By going as often as I can and staying for as long as I can… but making sure I always come home, Robbie says. Something I’m trying to focus on is being present where I am. Part of the appeal of Vegas beyond the obvious is what I can do there that I can’t do here in Israel.
I have my home game here, and I love it. I’ve been playing for over 20 years with my dad and my lifelong friends. We spend five or six hours a week together and it’s wonderful. I enjoy the competitiveness and like winning more than I like losing, and it’s about coming together. We don’t have any casinos or poker rooms. To play in those, I’ve got to get on a plane, and Las Vegas is unlike anywhere else on Earth.”
When in Vegas, Robbie is either a blizzard of business activity, or at the poker felt. There’s no in between.
There’s always a game I want to play in. Whatever else I need to do and get done, I feel like cramming it in to free myself up to play in the game, which is something I can’t do at home. I can sit on my computer anywhere in the world – and at home. Poker is very much what I love about Vegas and the mixed games specifically; that’s what keeps drawing me back again and again.
At home, Robbie returns to the loving arms of his wife and children and his homeland. He says that “it would be great” if Israel mixed games and cardrooms to play them in, but all he has is his home game with his Dad and a set of lifelong friends.
When you don’t have the thing you want, it makes it that much more precious to you. When I’m here, I miss Las Vegas; when I’m there, I miss here and being with my family.
I’m loving the poker, but I look around, and my wife and children aren’t there, as well as all the adjustments I make for my religion. It’s an ongoing balance, and I feel blessed that I live in Israel and can go to Las Vegas as often as I can. I have two wonderful places that I love so much.
The Growth of Mixed Games
If the lifeblood of poker is liquidity, both live and online, then for an online poker site to thrive, that operator needs to run as many games as possible for as long as they can. The same is true for live games, but mixed games aren’t even 10% as popular as Texas No Limit Hold’em. For Robbie, that means location is vital.
Las Vegas is the Mecca of mixed games. I’m pretty sure I’ve got my finger on the pulse of the mixed game scene, and while it’s not as easy to find as many, you can find a tournament in Vegas every single day at various stakes, even up to $300/$600 and bigger. I see all the way down to a $3/$6 starting at Golden Nugget soon. There’s a great local player base in Las Vegas and at the Mixed Game Festival.
Robbie was always of the belief that there were the players to take on the series, but it was a question of how to get everyone in the same cardroom at the same time.
Five years ago, before the first festival, I thought if I gave them notice, send out the ‘Bat Signal’ a few weeks or months early, the Avengers will assemble. They’ll fly in from Japan, Israel, and Malta. Las Vegas is the place.
That exact thing happened and has been happening more and more ever since.
I hope to expand the festival’s footprint to other places, but Vegas was the most logical place to begin. Tourists can come to Vegas and see the poker scene, but there’s nothing like summertime when the poker world descends upon the city, and everyone’s there.
We have the most tables going in our festivals, and people come in wondering, ‘Oh, what’s this?’ and they find a format they play in their home game. They say: ‘I had no idea it ran in Las Vegas!’
Robbie believes that mixed games are destined to grow, but organically so, in a steady fashion, not like the Hold’em ‘boom’ of the early noughties.
There’s a higher barrier to entry and more events to learn, but it’s going to continue growing, he says. I’ve seen more players entering mixed game tournaments, player numbers are up in WSOP mixed games, and Las Vegas is going to continue to be the epicenter of that.
I ask Robbie what his favorite mixed game is, and although it’s not the most played variant on the planet, he’s loved it since he was very young, and that love has only grown.
I’ve always loved Stud and Stud 8. I know they’re both different, but I love them both equally, and I learned how to play them as a little kid. Studwas the game. Its past is a glorious one, and it’s been said that the game is dying for so many years. That’s a kind way of saying that the people who are playing it are dying. At a Stud game, I’m always the youngest.
While Stud is a shadow of its former self, Robbie loves that you get a lot of information about your opponents’ game when you play it.
If you have good card memory and know how to play against other players, I certainly wouldn’t call it a solved game. I love all the other games, but they’re a close second.
Gambling and the Global Game
Robbie is passionate to a fault about poker, the game he was taught as a young boy. What he’s not is any kind of gambler at the other games Vegas has to offer.
I come for the poker and only for the poker, he smiles. I have still never placed a sports bet in my life, and I have no temptation ever to play a slot machine. I suppose I understand the appeal – everyone wants to win money – but it doesn’t do it for me.
Robbie says that while he’s put the odd $20 bill in a video poker machine or bet on red or black on the roulette wheel, that’s the extent of his experience of anything other than poker, the great social game that he loves.
It really is all about the poker, the camaraderie around the table. It’s not about morals, because poker is gambling but with skill. I just love always paying attention in mixed games, to the cards and the social atmosphere.
Think of any other scenario where you could meet people from all over the world, with different political, religious, or personal motivations. It broadens your world.
Robbie’s experience is that poker enhances his knowledge of the world and learning other people’s perspectives on the world we all cohabit. He’s played $20/$40 mixed and even $80/$160 and says it’s “a far more social affair” than any game of Texas Hold’em.
I’ve been going to Las Vegas since I was a kid. I was maybe eight or nine years old the first time I went here. The Mirage or Treasure Island was where we stayed. This was the family-friendly era of the 1990s; they had kids’ shows and all that stuff.
It had not yet turned into a corporate world where they turn the tourists upside down and shake as much money out of them as they possibly can. It was about delivering value for that money.
As Robbie sees it, while everyone who goes to Vegas comes with the knowledge they’re more likely to lose money, just like at a visit to the supermarket, you want to get value for your money.
People are just fed up of being nickel and dimed to death, he tells us. The locals’ casinos like South Point, Durango, The D, those palaces are packed. The owners of those establishments offer value, better odds at craps, and no parking or resort fees.
Casino owners or corporations have a bottom line, meaning shareholders, pencil-pushers, and quotas that need to be filled. But if it keeps going in that direction, you’ll see less and less people.
Playing the Long Game
Robbie is the walking, talking embodiment of the well-held belief that most players who visit mixed games are happy never to leave them thereafter. While he understands that some operators will prioritize short-term gains above anything to stay afloat, he implores brands in poker to play the long game.
WSOP are the premier brand and have to offer all the different varieties of poker. But it just doesn’t do the numbers. Hold’em? Great, it’s on; you can deal 30 hands per hour, not 20, and it’s a faster shearing of the sheep compared to limit games. But from a long-term perspective, people will come back day after day and year after year to mixed games; that buck will go further.
The operators who can integrate mixed games will benefit from that customer loyalty, according to Robbie. With Bellagio, Caesars, and Golden Nugget in Las Vegas starting to offer mixed games, that barrier to understanding the different formats applies to viewership too.
The hope is that more people think long term and understand that poker is much more than hold’em, Robbie tells me. This is my 15th festival; the idea had legs, and it keeps growing, slowly and organically. Bellagio are wonderful, and I love that they keep wanting to work with me, as Resorts World did. People are hungry for a little variety!
The Changing of the Age
The older Robbie has grown in the game, the more life has changed for him around it. His family of five has gotten older, and he now has more time and energy to put back into poker. This more conservative way of doing things, by having his family young, is partly the reason life is easier now.
So many people go out in their twenties, go out and travel and play, and only in their forties start a family. I got married younger and had children younger, and I put a lot of my energy into it. I’m so happy I did.
As much as I felt like I was always looking through the window, I took my first poker trip in 2016. Now things are changing; my youngest is 14, my eldest is 18. It was a healthier way and the right way to go about it, building a career and a portfolio of work, still scratching that itch when I could in my home game.
Over these last 10 years, Robbie has added in more hours playing poker and with a twinkle in his eye, says he would like to add more.
I did a month as an experiment to see if I could ‘hack it’ playing as a semi-pro, and I wrote a five-part series about the experience. It was awesome. I didn’t have to depend on it to make a living, and I had my work to fall back on.
This was key to the enjoyment of it, in Robbie’s belief, and he’s not sure about ever playing full-time, not least because he’s loved building up his business and hosting Mixed Game Festivals.
To take trips a bit more frequently and really play sounds awesome to me, and I love it a lot. You have to have enough of a bankroll to withstand the down, and you have to keep putting yourself in the position. I feel like my game is better than it’s ever been before, and I continue to improve. I’m 44 years old, and you want to try and pounce while you can.
Robbie’s great friend and Poker Hall of Famer Eli Elezra – whose book he translated for its release in Israel – is still an example he looks to.
Eli is still playing at the stakes he does. I love that he can do that and have the skill to enjoy being a consistent winner. I’d love to win a tournament, and it would pay for a lot more buy-ins. I hope I continue to love playing like that.
When I ask Robbie about his dreams in the game of poker, he has a neat way of outlining his ambition but tempering it with a dose of reality that shows why he is so adept at picking up the mixed games he loves to play. Just like he is skilled at dealing with people of all nations when they come to his festivals.
My head might be in the clouds, but my feet are firmly attached to the floor.
That’s a recipe for fun that will continue to come. Robbie Strazynski has been mixing it up since he was a boy, and that won’t end any time soon. One gets the impression he wouldn’t have it any other way.
