I Went Bankrupt 6 Times | Confronting A Professional Gambler

what's up guys it's anthony unofficial i am a retired poker player and ex-child actor wow great yeah that's good that's it that is awesome well first of all anthony welcome to the podcast this has been a long time coming and what's cool about this is that you and i met probably 10 years it's probably been 10 years yeah i bet 10 years ago from lotuses yeah anthony and i both had lotuses we're both on lotustalk.com we became friends from one of the car meets and just kept in touch ever since yeah the good old lotus forums but this is a really cool podcast because i feel like you have such an interesting story and a lot of insights into the world of playing professional poker sure uh i mean yeah after well it was really i was acting and you know you go on auditions during the week and stuff and then i had my weekends open i started coming to vegas at 21 and i realized i liked poker i liked the aspect of it where the psychological and because i was an actor i sort of you know i could get into character and so on the weekends i would be playing a character just like i would be when i was auditioning or on set and you really do you can't be yourself especially if you're too nice or you don't like to take money off like if that's a problem for you don't play you got to get cutthroat with it you got to be you know fu type of thing because otherwise uh the worst thing you could do is have somebody crushed and you'll see this happen too in high stakes games where people will actually give you they'll say okay i had you crushed there let's just chop the pot which means no way yeah so let's say you have somebody crushed like i have pocket aces you have pocket kings pre-flop we get all the money in and i go jack can't afford like i i don't want to do this to you you couldn't afford the 50 g's we put in each right pre-fly we got it all in jack thought he had me with kings woofs you flipped the kings i go gotcha jack i got aces and i go i don't want to do this to you man why don't we just chop the blinds so graham let's say would have been big blind here let's say we were playing uh were we playing 200 400 no limit graham had the big blind at 400. so what we're gonna do is we're gonna chop the pod we're going to chop graham's 400. so you each get 200 yeah so we need to get it nice yeah and then so graham gets screwed over here but i didn't hurt you right but at the same time i was only 80 to win the hand so really you did have a 20 chance of win but if you think about it you put in 50 grand i put it in 50 grand you're way behind like that's not good that's not a good spot for you great spot for me but then again one in five times you hit a king or you hit running cards and make a straight or something crack my aces that's cracking the ace yeah so at the same time i'm not taking the risk that one in five chance right that makes sense so you know uh but anyway what was my point oh you got to be cutthro so really if we sat down and played and you said i got 50 g's anthony let's do this what i would say okay and then if i get it all in with you i have aces dude we're running it you know we're running it that's the way that's just the way i would you wouldn't feel bad for me or anything you just take it off not in because you knew i know you're right you're right yeah yeah absolutely yeah so how many times have you seen it in situations like that where the person is just devastated afterwards do do people ever feel bad afterwards and like oh you lost but okay let me give you some back does that happen so the true pros i i mean they know they know the ebb and flow they're so good that really at the end of every year like they're up money in a typical year and that includes let's say they went three months of red they were in the red for three straight months then they maybe had a couple good months one bad month four or five good you know you'd call that running good you run good for a while sometimes you run back and you have to be able to withstand that i tell everybody this some people do ask me for advice even though i haven't played seriously in like nine years people will ask me they'll say like you know i really i want to make a go at it and i tell them okay you have to be able to withstand months it's tough of just losing and again this would be okay let's go back to the aces against king's hand let's say you're only supposed to lose that one in five times if you get it all in pre-flop what if you lose that like three times in a row that's not supposed to happen so statistically you should be able to lose one and then win the next four times you get the you know 80 20 could be jacks against tens uh you know tens against threes like i'm supposed to crush you on all those hands about one out of five times i'm not but what if i lose three or four of those in a row you start you go how can i how can i do this like i'm doing everything right and i'm still losing and that's the interesting thing about poker is you can play at a very high level you're playing perfectly sometimes you sit down you don't make a single mistake like you look back you you lose for the session that session gone you're out and you walk away and you go i did everything right and yet i i lost and then it'll happen to you the next night and the next night and weeks can go by and you start questioning everything and so i told you you you know give it a try and see some people are able to just stick it out and everybody goes broke by the way so i think that's part of the answer to that question is you got to be ready to go broke look at doyle brunson look at any of the greats they'll tell you they went broke countless times joy brunson look it up he probably went broke like a hundred times i mean something unfathomable to most people like he's dead dead bro has to start from from the beginning so that's the thing is you'll like move up in stakes as you get better as your winnings you know grow you go up in stakes and then when you go broke unless you can borrow money which typically you get to know players they'll loan you money if they know you're good if they know you like i know you would loan me you know a lot of money right now so that's great um but that'll help you get back too got it but assuming you can't get a lot i mean you got to start from whatever whatever you got uh you know edd you got to take that and then try to grow it back you know whatever whatever you got to do you got to do got it now let's start from the very beginning because you said child acting oh yeah how did you get started in that or my friend childhood i grew up with this dude he lived two blocks from me and he was two years older than me so he was two i was a baby we just now he was acting since he was a baby so we're talking kindergarten cop like movies you've seen yeah he's been in him from the 90s from the 80s 90s so by the time i was nine i had said i want to do this because i saw him in commercials and everything i thought was so cool so i told my dad now my dad had done commercial acting in the 70s and he had basically retired by the 80s when i was born but he knew how to do it get an agent and get head shots and then you just start auditioning so he'd take me to auditions it just so happened i booked my first audition which was for the role of linus in the peanuts gang now this was just supposed to be like one they needed you you know for a commercial yeah it was a metlife commercial so i played linus i went in i just read i don't know i could read good i could read good you know so i read the lines and it was just it was so easy and i had the pure like linus is supposed to have sort of a pure now my voice has changed obviously my voice has changed and that's when i lost the role so i had it from 9 to 15. but it turned into all kinds of stuff supposed to be the commercial but it's sort of like once you prove yourself like if you're good on the first one they're just like okay you're lying this now like wow for a while that hit you to be linux is because charlie brown is huge she's been huge for decades yeah did you did that concept stick with you back then that you realized like this is linus yo uh charles schultz was the bomb i mean that's when it it got real but did i i knew of peanut butter you know at nine years old i just sort of i knew charlie brown and snoopy and you know watch the movies and stuff but once i met charles schultz and i got to be 10 11 and he was such a cool guy by the way he would get all the the voice actors all the kids would get christmas gifts from him every year and like it was just it was he was like your grandpa because i didn't know either of my grandpas like so uh that was kind of cool to like have it he was just the nicest guy yeah so very cool experiences definitely at that like a dream job at any age but to be making money and having so much fun at nine ten years old how much can can you say how much megan it was pretty good i mean i did couple movies i guess the thing i don't even know like i look back at the resume you can imdb me and i go it was so much fun you did they just bring you in they'd show you the lines you just read the line i didn't even know what projects they were for sometimes cd roms or cd-roms this is how yeah this is a long time ago so uh commercials the commercials are lucrative so you're saying like how much did i make off being linus i mean it was six figures right there yeah at that age and then of course a lot of that is put away like your parents legally have to put a lot of that away for you jeanette mccurdy we had her on she said that they only had to put away 15 percent now the other 85 percent the parents can spend however they want but they would hope that it would wind it back and like you know housing and stuff like this sounds right i would not disagree i don't know the exact figure i think my parents were cool i think it was probably a lot higher because my parents were they wanted me to have a college fund or you know the poker fund is really what it is but um at nine years old they're like you know what he needs a poker fund when he's 21 he's going to go to vega he's going to gamble it all brilliant yeah they were great like that but you took the initiative after seeing your neighbor doing that then you decided that you wanted to become a voice actor i just wanted to do i really wanted to be a race car driver my mom wouldn't let my dad so my dad raced cars too he res he raced scca in the 70s he was really good and i kind of had the bug because he had a lot of cool cars and i remember what telling him that and he just sort of he let me down easy and i remember the conversation where he just said look mom is gonna let you and i found out later it was because my mom he knew if something happened to me yeah it would have been divorced it would have been like my mom would have never forgiven him so he was like i don't really want to get divorced like i don't want that to potentially happen let's try to keep anthony a little bit safer and just let him act to protect the marriage i think it was a really good marriage yeah but they knew either you're going to be good at it but to protect the marriage i could have been yeah that could have been the next lewis anyway but that would have been fun but acting was great too i have to say but i want to know like what about your voice made you so good for lions and this is your first audition right i would say it's that purity so if you if you look at charlie brown sure he's got more like the horse yeah yeah yeah yeah that so i i would have never been charlie brown yeah and that's just genetics i mean you there was unless you can create that but at that age they didn't want that at that age what charles schultz would look for is just like you speak right now and he'd say maybe you're good for this voice or you're just not oh you didn't even know you're going in for linus you were just going in i think i went in but this was a long time ago jack but like i think they just they gave you some lines and they had you read them and they'd be like and there was a casting director too before charles ever heard you the cast nerd would be like okay you sound like a linus you know and then they give you maybe more of the linus lines instead of just the generic lines yeah you read a few linus lines and then they send it like to charles was like okay but it was it was quick like he made he didn't mess around he made a decision fast i remember knowing like that night that i got it can you can you say a linus line in your linus voice oh man you got me yeah i haven't even watched this stuff that's the crazy you didn't watch it after you were no no i mean like in years oh okay i haven't watched this stuff in two decades so i would love to but it'll just be some bs that i'm creating right now try it um no linus wouldn't say that oh gosh charlie brown oh my goodness let's go over here charlie brown it was it was always really interesting very innocent character you know totally the opposite of me right now [Laughter] geez so so how did that evolve then from charlie brown into other projects so once you break into voice acting and man is it a tight circle and again this was my friend who i grew up with uh if you break and you're on a couple shows what happens is they tend to hire people who are proven and it's tough there's so much talent just in la the talent pool is so extreme that you've got here's the big circle of talented people that are out there and then here's the one of people already working the only way you break in from being killer and if you're not killer talented don't don't waste your time right so you got to be good and then okay maybe give it a shot try to get an agent now what you'll end up doing is if the agent you know you send in your demo or a lot of times now youtube if you can do voices and stuff put them on youtube and be like here's me doing batman here's me and people will search to search you out because they may not want to pay the guy who does the spot on batman who's already making a g every time he says a lion as batman they may let's say it's a low budget you know project and they want to pay a hundred bucks they might go on ebay and be like that guy that's pretty good batman how about a hundred bucks you know boom and you can break in that way now but let's okay let's say this is an old school wave you get an ag make a demo tape with all your voices or it's a commercial tape and you get an agent now the agent is going to take you on because maybe their top people are working so much if you're in that the the inner circle you're working all the time and it very lucrative okay so the agent's going to say bob is working every day this week i can't even he doesn't have to have time to audition but let's take on so and so okay we'll take you on and now you're gonna get those auditions when bob is busy and now you got to deliver you gotta nail it and if you're good you're gonna start you know booking work and now the more you book the more proven you become and you enter that inner circle that's my best way of explaining voice acting voice acting is probably the toughest niche i'm just going to say it it's the toughest niche of the entertainment industry to break into and start working but once you are working and you're proven golden beautiful i bet it's because so many people are so versatile with their voices so i've seen so it's it's almost every voice actor does like seven characters per show oh yeah it's been really cool to watch uh even a lot of the voices of the rugrats do multiple characters same with the simpsons uh they they do at least five to seven eight different characters on the simpsons and a small group of like four people can do voices of 30 people there you go and think about it the more versatile you are the more likely you get you're gonna get to get hired because they can have you now you're in the booth already they're paying the same money and it's like okay yeah do the other voice and hear the other lines hear the other lines why would you want to hire that out to like the simpsons they'd need 20 people yeah but now they don't because and you didn't change your voice at all for linus or did you change it so i hit puberty and it was all over how sad were you to hit puberty because you knew that that would be like the end of your did you ever think that like i could delay this dude it's like it hits you and it says i went in and i remember them being um they were a little like disappointed sad i don't know what emotion but you could feel it in the room where they knew and they put out the casting call and that's it oh did what did they tell you did they just never get called again are you serious you know the entertainment industry you don't get but but you don't think that like from nine to how old were you fifteen i made it to fifteen fifteen so from nine to fifteen so you've been working with him as a child for six years and i think that last year started interrupting but that last year i think i was try i was like fake it you can still oh trying to raise your boy you know i know i was but you don't think that after six years of working with relatively the same group of people that they would sit you down and be like hey uh your voice is changing thank you here's a gift best of luck like we have other projects no they were so nice though you can't hold that again the entertainment street is you know it's all about yes you gotta there's no time for that okay i mean really if if we're facing fast they just gotta move on and it happens every so often when the voice actors age out it's just a normal thing for them it's not you know to you as the actor it's a bigger deal so you knew this was coming oh yeah i mean so now it's coming back to me i haven't thought about this in a long time that i was faking because you don't want to lose the game that's right and i remember talking with my dad and yeah sure we had all those discussions okay make sure you raise your but keep your voice when you're not doing the line like you wouldn't want to be going oh no charlie brown and then be like cool guys or we don't you know what so so you gotta be baking your shirt the whole way and then but they could tell at a certain point they know you know i'm sure a lot of voice actors go through that then yeah the younger ones like they have to fake their voice and everything being a child actor is a trip because now we could move into what happens with you on camera and so some kids are cute this sounds really i don't know if i'm being too blunt they're cute when they're kids and now they're 15 16 18 and maybe i mean i'm not gonna say they're not cute anymore or you know at but they don't have whatever the it factor was that made them good for projects as a kid as a child all of a sudden it's like oh so and so is 18 now and you come out and they go i remember you from whatever the movie was home alone you know and now i don't know about you at this stage right who's the who's the kid from the sixth sense he's the first one that comes to mind but he's been on some stuff he has now he has yeah he's get he's getting it going yeah completely different character yeah yeah so it's never over but for me at a certain point then i retired at like 32. i said look i stuck it out in my 20s but i would say my career started in my 20s you know just i could see the work drying up and that's not to say now perseverance is is high up on the list of what you need to succeed as an actor that could be number one i mean it might be above talent i don't know talent talent for sure and of course like luck and timing i mean you figure everybody who's become something you look at like their breakthrough and you go if that movie if that project wasn't made at that point in time they mean they may have never made it so you do need some luck and but i would say perseverance is key because not everybody makes it at 18 20 years not everybody makes it at 30. look at john hamm uh you know so i don't know i at a certain point though i just had to say i'll move on i had a good time i did everything that you could probably hope to do really right is if you're not greedy i mean stage voice acting commercials i was on a sitcom i was in a feature film with bruce willis you got a name dropped now can you tell us about these projects okay so that movie was banned it's 2001 bruce willis billy bob doran directed by barry levinson kate blanchett so killer cast that's a lot of fun if you need a date movie from the early 2000s yes highly recommend it um check me out in that with azura sky we're making out on the couch azura was great you were looking i was 16 when we shot that yeah i forget but somewhere around there and uh yeah we're making out and bruce was about to break out of prison spoiler alert but you should still watch the movie but i can tell you that they break out of prison they come into this house because they're trying to lose the cops they pull into the garage garage door closes cops go by now they come into the house we're making out on the couch they walk in and we're surprised and okay now go watch the movie so forced into essentially like a make-out scene i had to make out with azure skype how many takes did you ever stop yeah can we do another barry can we do another take one more take yeah i messed up a little bit hold on i need to get in character here yeah sorry that light is really distracting me over there if we could just let's talk more about the makeout scene so like was it awkward like was it comfortable was that the only makeout scene you've ever had yeah it was the only one it's like it's clinical i mean it's rolling action and you start making out but it's cool i'm not i can't say it's bad it's like you know but you don't have exactly the emotions and you're thinking about you know you're trying to be stay in character and then of course they interrupt us and then we're gonna panic and so you know you just try to take it second by second but i would say there are a couple seconds where you're you're kind of into it right i mean as you might be yeah come on yeah so how many times were you uh did you have to do that uh how many takes yeah i think five or six wow yeah imagine if they just started casting you as the guy that makes out yeah oh my god yeah and they would they had playback too so it was rolling playback so they had music like pumping yeah during the scene because the vibes have to be right on some of these projects they won't they'll just add it in later so there's actually no music when you're shooting scene but we had playback and it was led zeppelin which they didn't end up using they couldn't get it it was gonna be too much money or they just couldn't get it but it the vibes were very uh intense so great experience how did she feel about that she was great uh i gotta say though consummate professional you know i mean uh she was just really on point everybody almost that i've ever worked with i don't have that many disaster stories about like all this actors really i don't know i was in that's why i said i can't ever complain i never say uh acting but i never talk because how could i she was so on point everybody on set on that set we could go into other projects if you want about some of the the best actors i've worked with these people are any field that you're in and you you look up to people i mean i worked with some of my heroes basically so really cool stuff and she's she's like who so i would have to go back to jon hamm mad men i was lucky enough to get a recurring on mad men in like five episodes this guy uh he was there before everybody every day every day i would be i'd come in i thought i was early his car's there i would leave late his car is there this guy never flubbed a line and if you watch the show you know he had dialogue he had some serious dialogue he's in almost every scene of the show and this guy just knowing his lines right away you gotta give somebody some respect you never saw him on book like i never saw him looking at anything just bam locked in and then man when they would say even before rowling like you could just see him he'd he'd be in character like and i don't know if he was method or anything but so locked in and the respect i have for people like that it's unreal every scene that i saw him do or was lucky enough to be in one scene got cut which was unfortunate because we had a couple lines back and forth that would have been cool so i was sad to see that that get cut but the guy is to me the the pinnacle of like being great at your job he took it so seriously and it and it comes through let's face it you watch the show but it wasn't one of those things where like oh that was a lucky take like oh he was in it that taken they used that one every take i saw from him you could have used just uh yeah i would rank him as high up as you could ever get but it's not just talent see it's work ethic i think he has both the people who have both in any industry right those are the the top you're going to be successful what about bloopers would would those ever happen while you're recording like funny bloopers or people will start laughing mess around on that set if you had seen some of the blue which i saw at so like red wrap parties they would either do they'd stage like a funny thing on video and show it like for the creator matt winer and you can find this on youtube well i haven't looked at this in years we actually sang a song and it was supposed to be for matt winer the creator mad men just for his eyes only that's what they told us for his eyes only and we sang bye bye birdie song from the 60s you can look this up right now put like mad men bye-bye birdie into youtube well not right now finish watching it and then the episode okay after the episode and you'll see me in there and we're all singing bye bye birdie they cut it all together and then it gets put on youtube like wait a second i didn't sign up for this but luckily i was pretty good i think i was all right so they would do funny stuff like that and i remember at one of the wrap parties they cut together a lot of bloopers uh of people running around set naked and like it was if you saw that one now that i don't think is on youtube but you could try to find it but uh that was pretty wild so that's the thing about acting is it was really so much fun um it doesn't feel like work most of the time what about method actors you you mentioned that like have you had any experience with that and explain what method actors is for anyone who may not know you're basically staying in character the entire time so when you're on set uh this would be like christian bale as batman okay you don't hear him uh he he's not british you would think he's american i mean he stays in it and that can help by the way when you're doing an accent or something like that you don't want to be jumping back and forth typically because now it's like action you're like do the australian accent um that's usually where you'll see but some actors are all the way uh daniel day lewis would be a great example i mean and these are people where you can't argue with it even if they're a holes like because they're so in character all the time you're like what is it with this guy but if it's gonna resonate with an audience and if that's what's gonna get you to that upper echelon that daniel day-lewis um you know uh i don't know it's worth it i think and i never did it but i could see where the payoff could be massive so how did you transition from that to 21 then poker so i started playing poker on the weekends i would act i would do you know audition everything during the week i'd drive to vegas and i tried to calculate how many trips have i made to vegas in my life well a lot of times i was going every weekend like every weekend so it'll be like 52 weekends a year that's what 52 round trip drives and i like to drive and really like to fly so that's hundreds i've made hundreds of trips telling to me that la to vegas is just like here we go again yeah just uh automatic at this point so i started doing that and i started making more money playing poker than i made as an actor let's let's pause there for a second how did you learn how to play poker at what age were like oh i wanna because i don't think you just pick up at 21 and say hey i'm gonna play poker this weekend and then just keep going back yeah i started playing online for sure i remember bulldog bulldog.com was one of my favorite sized poker stars oh man these sides back in the day this was uh i don't know it's different now you know um i definitely played a lot online but i wasn't that good online but i learned the game my grandmother is partially responsible for my love of cards in general used to play cards with her and i would beat her occasionally as a kid and she would get pissed what would she be what would you say and these other random games that to this day i asked like my uncle i'm like what was that game yeah and he sort of he sometimes tells me and then i forget again but random games and i just always loved cards oh video poker she loved video poker too and she had these little the handheld video every grandma has that by the way i remember going to my grandma's house a little battery-operated one there it is it would flip open and it was like it was just the one game pretty much i think it was like nobody would know what it was yeah i remember that yeah oh wow we should get one of those i bet they're on ebay yeah okay that could be the one of the best ways to learn poker yeah little video handheld yeah so i mean i at least knew the hands right i knew pear through royal flush and everything so that was good and then i started playing it just organically started to happen i can't tell you was there like a a moment of clarity where i said this is it no i built up uh and just started playing really low stakes i remember playing two four limit that means you can't raise more than four dollars i mean you know like the big blind would be four dollars i could raise to eight dollars so that's a good way though if i'm laughing about that i just mean that that's where i started and it's kind of funny but i wouldn't laugh at anybody if they said that's what they were going to go play great way to learn um get on the grind i mean if you think you want to take a shot at it start grinding and then see that's the only way to really find out i imagine that's similar in every career acting again if you really want to give it you you got to go for it you'll never know if you don't try so you realize then you came to vegas that you had a knack for playing this game at a certain point yeah i started realizing i was winning a lot and i was like this is cool i like the the money i like the money uh yeah but it also it's rewarding so like acting sure very rewarding i mean uh it's it's cool when you walk away and you say man i played killer it's a good feeling even even if you aren't up that much money you still you know uh it feels good about that your self-esteem yeah what were some of those early games like do you have any stories from back then or like things that you tripped up about or players that you played with back then yeah i played with some some pretty uh cool players i'd say min lie is one of my favorite dudes uh if you do the accent daniel negrano does the accent really well um he's just he's funny like the guy again very serious like when he plays but when he's not playing like great dude great dude to hang with and um i've actually played back raw with him too which is a dangerous thing i want to say like why did i stop if we want to jump there why did i retire it's because i played table games too much and that can be dangerous because you're not you're at a disadvantage when you play tables the house edge will grind you out so what would happen is a lot of times i would win big playing poker because i would have the advantage if you play well enough you have the advantage you're gonna maybe win and then you go to these tables roulette craps whatever and now you're playing at a disadvantage over time you just can't win you're gonna lose and so when that started happening to me too much uh i just had to wrap it up i'm i'm bad at around casinos so that's not to say i still don't go it's still something that i battle with and uh you know you try to have fun i would say set your limits all the the cliches yeah right now about but um yeah i played with some cool people and by the way very helpful uh like if you have questions just start talking to some players especially away from the table at the table at the table hey man is this hand good yeah what do you think of that don't do that you know what you have put away from the table you can ask you can ask for advice and everything and a lot of especially i was young right and as playing with guys 30s 40s and it's the typical like mentor type relationship if you play with these dudes long enough they will want to see you succeed i mean as long as you're not beating them yeah you know but still um how many of those guys are full-time versus how many were just coming on a weekend play here and there and leave a lot of full-time relatives so that's why i had to start saying it should i keep acting but again i kept saying oh the perseverance thing i was like i'll just if i stay in it and i can do both and i managed to make that work pretty well i think it was in retrospect probably the wrong decision if i could do it over again i would have bought a house out here in the late 2000s especially when the market i mean you could pick stuff up for dirt sheep out here so i could have picked something up and taken it really seriously and gone seven days a week or six days and you know one day and just and done it as a career i think that's where i messed up is i tried to do both and i think maybe that's good advice for most careers if you really want to succeed you want to be the top in something you got to go at it full time you got to take it seriously what's the mental toll that takes on you though to do gambling full time like that gambling could be one of the most stressful i know there are a lot of stressful jobs that people are going to be offended right now my job is stressful yeah but it's got to be it's up there we're talking top five top 10 most stressful doc you'd have to say professional poker professional gambler in general um also it's the swings okay you work let's say a typical quote-unquote job you're gonna make money that day when you go home at the end of the day you've locked in that income you made that money it's gonna come to you you're done in poker yeah you made okay oh you just came home from the tables you made money what's gonna happen tomorrow you're putting that money back at risk and you can lose so the swings are massive like i said everybody goes broke and prepare yourself every when i say everybody everybody you're gonna go bro especially starting out you'll never just go oh i started with a thousand dollars and i've never looked back no just does not happen how many times have you gone broke uh and can you give us an example run us through a story of one time where you weren't broke and then you went broke and then you got out of being broke okay well so i've never thought of the exact number but it has to be around five six seven times you know not anything totally crazy but yeah when you go broke it's sort of like you had a bankroll together you know typically in cash cash and chips let's say you built it up to 50 grand and man that can go fast if you're playing at high enough stakes that can be your buy-in you can buy in for 50 g's things go bad again i i get the kings this time and jack has his 50 g's here and he wipes me out and i just went broke because what if i brought that was my entire bankroll that i brought here and i'm gonna get jack jack said not today and now i just went broke and you got to find the money somewhere now so luckily okay if you have a second income so with acting i'd get residual i still to this day get residuals from stuff like you know a bug's life i was in some stuff that still makes millions of dollars so you get a little cut of that because you were in it you get residuals and so just even from things like that and you can take that money and again build it up so you got to start then i can't play jack for 50k again but i can go back to the casino and play some 2-4 and try to make a thousand and a 10 and then i'm coming for you jack i'm coming for you again you know and then maybe next time you you get up to a hundred and you get up to 200. yeah but now see you you tend to raise the stakes or at least i did in general you go up in stakes the bigger your bankroll gets and so then the risk is there you could have and you're not supposed to do that but it happens where you take your entire bank roll or let's say you got 100k and you play 20. that's still too high but it happens you'll do it you'll convince yourself i'm gonna go for it and now you lose that 20 you go okay next night another 20. lose that and it's those losing streaks and it happens to everybody and what you're hoping to do is build up enough of a bankroll to where you can withstand twenty one night twenty the next night twenty the next night and then you'll have a big night and you'll make it all back plus twenty forty and now you're up to a hundred and you so you had sixty you had some bad night whatever it was and you're just trying to at the end of the year the bankroll should be bigger than it was at the beginning of the year what's the biggest loss that you've seen six figures have heavy six figures yeah and when you really see pros they take it like it's just another day at the job and that's how you have to be with it i remember seeing chris ferguson um and this dude is a mathematician i mean genius but that's not enough with him it's he's a genius and he can manage his emotions because if he didn't have that it doesn't matter how smart you are you have to have your emotions in check and this dude can take uh you know he can take a loss for sure and just bounces right back it's just it's just a bad day at work but you know hey yeah reminds me of a story i i saw this recently actually on youtube this came up recommended for me about the luckiest guy in vegas forget who this guy's name was uh we could put him up on the screen here yeah i think he went from like zero yeah i think he started with like a thousand bucks yeah grew that to like 40 million dollars over the course of a few years uh you would think he would stop didn't stop went on a losing streak lost it all borrowed ten thousand dollars from somebody else did it again yeah he got 30 million dollars the second time and instead of just walking away he kept playing it and then he went down to zero and has not been able to recover i'm gonna say imagine that yeah archie karis is that maybe hold on if i look how close that sounds i googled it and it just said archie charis boom yeah that was him cool yeah archie karis great guy yeah the days that saw archie cares turned fifty dollars into 40 million dollars from 50 bucks 50 bucks jack that means if you have 50 bucks right now we could turn that into 40 million dollars i can do it right now right now well it'll take a few years it'll take you but you got to just keep winning just keep winning but you have to think too like the statistical odds it's got to happen to somebody someone at some point will just go on that lucky streak where everything they do and i think it's his is just him keep he just keeps pressing and pressing and it just worked in his favor until it didn't what a story yeah and i think i think he lost it all in like two three weeks i mean like four years where the work was gone like that just in a bad losing streak and it can happen like yeah when you hit a bad losing streak oh yeah and he said it affected his health unfortunately and that's what i'm talking about when i say it's one of the most stressful oh yeah you're under i mean because that money you it's it's the you can lose it all it's not something else where you can either oh you have a bad day you didn't make any money how about you can lose everything you work for for years in a day in an hour that's stress yeah how would you say uh gambling and all that has affected you over the years i've got some gray hairs jack i've uh you know they're starting to yeah it started to happen um i don't know it's sort of like if you could live another life i'd probably have lived something um less dramatic you know it would be fun to have that but you only have one like yolo baby you know let's do this so i figured i would just go with my passions and um i don't know it's not boring i'll tell you that much so i can't say i've had a boring life whatever i might complain about that wouldn't be a complaint so what would you say then to people who want to get in to playing professional poker start small you could play online play with friends learn the game read some books again doyle brunson is a bad place to start watch some youtube videos uh daniel negranu killer genius dude kid poker um watch youtube videos and read books and play play play play play your ass off the more you play you're always going to keep learning so talk to any pro and they're going to tell you they're still learning it's a game you will never like master you're never like okay i got it down so uh after a certain point maybe move to the casino play with money you can afford to lose ideally and if you go broke go broke with okay well that was my poker bankroll and maybe you still got some money in the bank that would be good yeah um but i mean it happens where people are playing with literally their lives like they're going for it's it's all at risk and when they go broke they really go bro you know i mean they're begging for why do you think you were such a good player i think it was the acting it was the fact that i always looked at it as i'd get into character and i knew i knew i had to i couldn't be anthony at least the anthony i was in my early 20s because i was probably too nice i just wasn't gonna go for it so and i learned that early on like i i'm not gonna say i was winning immediately i definitely was not and then i realized like okay i gotta dress the part because how i normally dress is just t-shirt and i derp around i love to you know be comfortable but dressing the part it helps every drug helps give us some examples how do you dress you could do the sunglasses although you know now that's more looked upon as like who's the d bag with sunglasses i assume that that was like still a thing like you'd put on the sunglasses and the hat and the the the headphones and just kind of choose some gum sure uh yeah the headphones is a thing um you know look the part uh otherwise you're you're a marked man too out there you don't want to look like a tourist although maybe you could look like dirt that's the other thing switching gears i was always good at that that's the term for your playing aggressive one minute and they look at you as this guy's raising every hand and now you tighten up and so i was always good at switching gears that was definitely something that came naturally to me and that can throw people off just the second they think they've got your number you switch it up and uh it can throw people because you're always trying to get a read i mean we could go in a little bit of poker strategy you're trying to get a read on the person and that's where my acting background is good i was good at reading people because emotions i'd been in acting classes since i was that young 9 10 years old so i was good at managing my emotions and also throwing people off i could make it happen to where it seemed natural if i looked a little stressed i could do it in such a way where i'm really not stressed i got you i got you right now you're drawing dead i got a full house i got quads on you but i'd make it seem like maybe i don't and it's subtle very subtle because the second you overdo it and you try to act stress away typically now that's a tell that means that you have a big hand and you're trying to look stressed so there's a fine line and if you can walk that fine line you could be a top player so what would you do if you got a bad hand fold what kind of question is that no bluff bluff what are you talking about you got a question so you gotta you got jack's option and you got graham i know what jack would do now we have a play play we got him all in i played for seven hours i played poker with anthony sometimes he would have the worst hands but go all in and you would just immediately like i don't i don't want to mess with this that's because you probably play super tight so knowing knowing who graham is he probably plays super tight well this is great because what we're getting to is you can't be scared money this is another great point so that money if that's your rent money on the line you're a screw you're in bad shape because also you're gonna know what the decision nine times out of ten even as a beginning player you're gonna have that intuition you know what the right decision is can you pull the trigger you know you should go all in against jack and make him fold can you do it what if that's the rent money you're gonna say to yourself i know i should pull the trigger because i can get him to fold but what if what if i'm wrong there's a one percent chance he has even though i'm 99 sure and you can't do it and you fold that means by the way you're playing too high state or you shouldn't be playing at all yeah don't be scared money i have taken i've i've killed people uh not literally but i've killed them financially the people you smoke are typically scared money whoa uh they're in bad shape because if you're not yeah you're gonna be making all the right you make all the right decisions i'm not all the right but like you're gonna follow through on what you think is the right decision far more than they are have you ever seen someone lose a huge hand and then just freak out yeah uh definitely i've been called every name in the book um probably most names in the book by people who usually it's when you put a bad beat on someone so a bad beat would be want to do it one more time i got the kings and you have the aces pre-flop you're 80 percent to win that hand if we get all the money in pre-flop pl oh by the way pre-flop means like in texas hold them and by the way we're talking about no limit texas holding here that's the game that's the cadillac of poker that's all i really ever played there are many other games and a lot of the top players play a multitude of games raz you can they're really cool games but in no limit texas hold'em pre-flop means that all of us if it's the three of us let's say we're three-handed which means just three of us at a table we each get two community cards well graham let's say folds irae grandfath and now it goes to you you go all in and i go well i have kings and that would be i have two kings because those are my two cards you have two aces and we get it all in you're 80 to win with the aces if i crack your aces so let's say i flop a king and the flop is the first three cards so let's say it's king five deuce and then it the run out like the turn and river so there will end up being five community cards total and let's say the turn is a three and the river's a ten okay nothing much happened there other than i hit my king so i made a set of kings three kings trip kings and i cracked your races because you only ended up you're gonna play the top five cards out of the total seven cards you're gonna play the five highest cards i'm gonna obviously play my three kings you can only play your two aces you didn't improve so your pair of aces loses to trip king so i beat you you might freak out i don't know i don't know how would you freak out you might yeah because it was like statistically very improbable right yeah but it happened yeah that that reminds me of one time where i was playing and i had i was dealt pocket queens and uh i kept raising the pot because like the flop came and i still had the best hand they were all you know significantly lower no chance of a straight no chance of a flush and i raised a little bit and then it went around most people folded and then it was like me and this one other guy after like uh the turn came or whatever like then it was it was just me and this one other guy okay and um heads up yeah and it was heads up okay and i was feeling good and i raise again yeah and um so i think i'd raise three times pre pre-flop flop and then you know turn or whatever and then uh you know so four chords four four cards are out and then uh what happens i yeah like i said i raised he called and then the final card came and it was a king okay and i was like okay yeah so i was like okay so what's what's happening now and then i'm like i'm like uh okay and then i go a check and then he goes check and he turns it over and he has like king seven off suit and i i show my cards and i was i i was devastated i knew he had won too i knew it as soon as the king came and i remember i was like oh and i leaned back in my chair and i leaned back a little too far where the entire chair just fell over backwards in the dead quiet poker room no one's talking it's just me and i lean back and the entire chair just topples over how did it feel to lose a dollar this was like no this is probably like 250 bucks and this is when i was definitely not in the same position as i am now sure hey it hurts at any denomination i don't care when you get rivered it's a gut punch yeah yeah it can be brutal yeah um what other strategies do you have because the one thing i learned from you that one time we played anthony like and it didn't hit me until the end of the game anthony would bet the most random amounts at like random times so like just let's say we're going through he'll throw like 14 or like 17. everyone else is doing like five 10 15 20 25. and he's like 14 with no limit hold him you can do that right and i love to throw in that render even in tournaments oh we didn't discuss even turn you can play tournaments too if you want to get into both what's nice about tournaments is the buy-in let's say it's a 200 buy-in that's all you can lose so you have 20 grand in chips or whatever yeah if you lose that 20 000 it's just tournament chips you're really only losing your buy-in and then if you can make it obviously deep in the tournament the payouts can be huge so we didn't even touch on that we were playing i was talking about cash games this whole time that's another way and you'll see a lot of the top players make very good incomes playing tournaments and then so other people only play cash games but yes in so even in a tournament i love to do that instead of raising to 3 000 i'll raise the 3100 if i have you know some quarters in there i'll raise the 31.75 and you can also just say that too that can be very intimidating so you can just like when it's your turn right instead of a lot of people just like to put the chips in because they think maybe they're in their voice there will be a tell imagine if your voice it halters or you know 31.75 or you know quivering so some people but i was always able to be like 3175 and i like to use that too because sometimes it makes you look like you're trying to be stronger than you actually are i'll use it a lot of times when i'm in a when i have a big hand so i know i've got the person crushed and i'll just say it but i won't say it too strong but just the fact that you even utter the words expressing what your bet is will make people think you're trying to act strong when you're really not they'll think it's a bluff so when i say to you i've been quiet this whole time and the turn hits and i go 31.75 and i'll say it right to the dealer too i won't even look at you i'll go to the dealer so the dealer knows and without putting the chips in you can say it and then you throw the chips in but you'll say i look right at the dealer and i go 31.75 and i'll put it in but i won't try to be like 30 once not too strong but just the fact that i say it and so the strategies are endless you can play so many mind games with people and that's the really fun card apart i've even done things as weird as when i've made a bet and then man i've played some really sick stuff on people now that i think about it so i'd make a bet and let's say now it's your turn to act and you're thinking about it like i bet we're in a tournament and i bet 5200 on the turn and now it's your turn to i was first hacked after the turn right so it's on you and now i'll just go into like you know deep and let's say 5 000 is a lot of chips at this point in attorney so i'll be deep in thought now and i won't be looking at you and what i'll do is if you make a motion towards your chips or something i'll pretend i've done this a couple times i don't know if i'm happy about this but pretend to wince or something you know so i'll i've thrown the cards in like all like i'm folding like in other words like i was bluffing and i thought you raised out of the corner of my eye but i'll do it on purpose and so you can do i don't know you know this isn't like the best thing to do sure but you'll do what it takes to win you know and all like like fold and now that's folding out of turn like you're not even allowed right right so now it'll be like you get the cards back and now the you'd be totally thrown off at this point you would think like whoa anthony thought i raised and he was ready to just fold to any race he must not have it and then it's happened a couple times where then i've gotten the money in because the person thought i had nothing and i've got like a huge wow so you can get really some crazies that's one that i'll give away wait a second anyway so you could fold before your turn yeah because it's on you yeah so i'm not allowed to fold because i just bet 5g 5000. so i'm not allowed now to fold until you act and but when i fold out a turn like that the dealer goes uh he didn't and i get returned the cards and now you think that i was scared that you had ray but use i've only done it when i've seen like you would make a motion for your chips or something and i pretend that i think you just raised so like because i'm like this and it's like you make a motion there and i just go like unfold that's crazy okay i mean we want more i don't know yeah that that's me though being deep in character and that just came to me like some of these things just happen naturally i it's not like i sat around and planned out like what could i really do other than reading book that's another reason i would say to read books you can find out some really cool strategies that are more just like that's a rare circumstance that i'm talking about that happened maybe twice in how i don't know how many years that i did that but there are things that you can utilize on a day-to-day basis like i talked about switching gears that's one of the ones i would use every day you don't want to play aggressive the whole time you're gonna get eventually they're gonna be like this guy raises every pot boom you're gonna get crushed because they're gonna know the same way if you play too tight now they know all they have to do is raise you're gonna fold anything but pocket aces you can't play like that how well do you think dan bilzerian plays i've never played with him and i've heard about him i've heard pros say that he was not at the level that he said he was at um i don't know i i you know i would have loved to have at least met him at some point because i think you know cool character um but i can't really speak to it you know um some people probably try to talk about that they played higher stakes than they actually played but typically i would say you can you can tell just by talking to a person for how long have you been talking i think you can tell you know what do you usually look for to see if they've maybe exaggerated some of their claims probably not knowing like terminology um not knowing like where to play where to get into some of these games um i feel like if you're an expert on something you can tell when someone who isn't an expert is trying to bs themselves right yeah maybe have them teach you ask them for advice i taught you a little bit i remember uh revving you up one day and just giving you some quick things like okay well if you get in this situation don't be afraid to do this or fold or do whatever so um if they don't know how to calculate pot odds like if they're not good at math that might be uh you know a telltale sign i was luckily always pretty good at math so that was good that definitely helped me a lot um but not that you have to be genius level but if you can just calculate simple things and you can find uh tips and tricks so if you don't if you're not like great at math you can do things where like all you have to do is calculate like to calculate percentages like the 80 20 or let's say we're already after the turn and i put you on a hand so you got to also be able to do that but if i put jack on a specific hand and i know that well he probably has four outs well if we've already seen the turn we only have the river to go multiply by two and you can get the percentage of like what he is to win the hand so if i think he's got like a two outer like i've got him crushed right now but there are two kings left and you have pocket kings there are two kings left in the deck okay two times two times two is four percent so he's like you know four percent to river and people go how do you know these four percent to river right there but that's an easy way to calculate is d times four for after the flop so he's got a two hour after the flop two times four eight percent to win with two cards to come in it's cool this makes me excited i want to play poker night damn i'm getting hyped right now i really want to go to the department i'm getting hyped let's play let's play right now what about what about the uh the table games do you know how to count cards in blackjack no i never learned that uh i tried to and then i just didn't stick it out um the problem is that now they've got it so the casinos have figured it out i mean it's very difficult the problem is to get the good rules you got to be playing these games that are at least 100 minimum if not like a cosmo 500 minimum you know and uh now the problem is you want to raise your bet but ideally you want to be betting small until you get a count right so back in the day you could play five or ten dollars and then when you get a count you raise it up now you go to 500. now the problem is you've got to be playing the good games like with the good rules you don't want to be playing six to five blackjack or dealer hits on soft 17 and you gotta look for the tables with the good rules the tables with the good rules have high minimums and so you've got to be betting 500 a hand until you get a count and now you get the count and now do you have the bankroll to okay i've you know i i have the advantage now i'm gonna bet ten thousand a hand whatever it would be fifteen thousand twenty thousand because you gotta make up too for all the time you were playing at 500 minimum they've got it all figured out then they're gonna see you raising the bet all of a sudden you were a 500 player and they're like why did this guy go to ten thousand all of a sudden by the way they can count cards too so you've got the floor pit boss the dealers they can all count and they do count and by the way they'll be quizzed on this so at certain points that that's a test of like the dealers at any point floor can walk up and say what's the count to the to the dealer are you serious this doesn't you don't hear any of this or you'll see the floor with the pit boss and you'll see them talking like like this whatever well from what i know they will check in with everybody and say what's the count especially if i raise my back the second i go to 10 000 a hand everybody starts talk you know there's there are things happening behind the scenes because guess what that guess what happens once they think you're counting and they they go oh he raises better whatever shuffle they shuffle wow once they shuffle your account is gone so oh i'm not trying to deter anybody from counting cards it's still possible of course to beat the casinos i'm just saying they've made it a lot harder they no is that only are they only counting cards in the high limit rooms because i i doubt if you go to the 10 table the person sitting there with five people like counting cards you want my opinion yeah every single dealer at a legit casino what do you want to say resorts world is the the new invite win encore venetian palazzo aria bellagio caesars go down the line all the dealers can count can count but but do they yes how sometimes it seems like they're they're bored like you're just you know they're just doing their things they're so good for someone having to talk it's as natural i would say to good dealers as us talking english right like we're not thinking about like the english language right now we just talk when they deal they just have the count like they did sir john they do it every day that's from what i know wow that's insane so is there anything that is as close to beating the casino besides poker no uh no probably focus poker is the one and stay away from in general everything else i do know there are professional sports bettors who make a living at it this is a select group of people some of the people who you might find out there who are telling you they've got the picks and just pay me x amount whatever those typically aren't the guys who are winning they're making the money off selling selling the picks yep and not their actual bets and you'll notice they don't typically show you their tickets if you don't see somebody showing you they bet on the game and now i'm giving you that pick you bet on the game they don't show you the ticket i wouldn't i don't really trust them you know and so sports betting is possible but you gotta do your research and uh extremely difficult there's a handful of probably people who really make good money at it it's that difficult so we got a clips exclusive here just available on the iced coffee hour clips channel and i asked this question it was good enough to be featured here so does it exist in a casino where you see in the movies where they take you back into the back room and there's like a dimly lit room and they put you down on a chair there's like you know a few big guys behind you and they kind of shake you just does that exist yeah uh this did happen to me um yeah i guess i'll just admit it i'll tell you the full story okay and technically i committed a felony so while i was sitting here i was researching your amazing acting career and i saw that you were on an episode of icarly that's right can you tell us a little bit about that because we we just had jeanette mccurdy on a few episodes ago oh yeah so the episode was i stage an intervention and i was playing a geek which was in my wheelhouse i played the nerd a lot and so i remember um i originally had one line and i came in jeanette by the way so cool everybody on set was fun and it was a great time but we had rehearsal days and so i went from one line the first day to two lines the second day and then i picked up more so by the time we shot the episode i had whatever i had for like i forget how many i had but it i it kept getting merged and they were like oh you got new dialogue today and i was like where's so and so and they were like not here not coming back so you got to be on point okay this is what i talked about how it's good to be good i mean to take it that seriously no matter how small your role is they're looking for you to be to deliver and the more you deliver and other people don't you could reap the rewards and hey i mean you know sucks for that like it's sort of like it was totally out of my control but at the same time you're going great i mean picking up more lines so it was fun um yeah that was a a definitely a great set to be on and to this day everybody knows icarly so that's a fun one to mention like if i want to mention stuff i was on i would say that or i say even stevens another good one and one more thing you know i want to mention you guys should go and check out the family vlog channel because anthony came and we vlogged it and he pulled up in a ferrari f430 now you might have noticed i kind of said ferrari a little weird uh i'll say it slower fo rari there it is like a like a foe it's a fake why'd you say it like that it's a replica it's a replica yeah anthony purchased a fake ferrari f430 that was built off of a uh what was it toyota celica yeah gcs and it's parked in the driveway right now it looks from the back exactly like a ferrari 430. so if you guys want to see it go and subscribe to the family channel in the description you're going to see anthony pull up in this thing it's what it listen it'll fool you from 100 feet away it looks exactly like everybody gets a laugh out of it so 25 000. why why did you buy the ferrari because you because you have a real lamborghini yeah you got to be eccentric i guess i'll just own it i'm not going to say crazy yeah i'm eccentric okay so yeah everybody who owns a kit car they're a little bit off all right i'll just accept it so it was just for the for the lols or yeah just you know you get bored what else are you gonna do with your time by fake exotic so with that said you guys thank you so much for watching i really appreciate it anthony thank you so much for coming on today thank you guys embracing us with your wisdom on everything i really appreciate it now one big important announcement here public reached out to me the other day it's big they've now raised how much you can get from a free stock from what to 70 all the way up to thousand dollars you can now get a stock worth all the way up to a thousand dollars yeah so if you haven't done that already you may as well use the link in the description oh in order to do that you have to use the code gram that's it you use the code gram and that'll apply incredible so enjoy the free stock let us know which one you get uh the clips channel is also down below in the description all of our instagrams all of our instagrams go and follow unofficial anthony on youtube he's posting the ferrari on there oh yeah and with that said you guys until next time and we'll just have a conversation for an hour okay cool well