Turning Pro as an older player with Dara O'Kearney

We chat to the online MTT legend and Unibet pro about what it's like turning pro at 42 and how the industry has ignored older players.

You are well known for being one of the most successful online MTT players to ever come out of Ireland and also your Unibet sponsored Chip Race Podcast, but I think the most remarkable thing about you is that you learned the game very late in life. There are a lot of stereotypes about older players being bad, but there really is a real age and a ‘poker age’, right?

Dara O’Kearney: I do understand that I stick out, and I do think you’re right there is your actual age and your poker age. I remember years ago I was hanging out with a German guy at the WSOP and he went to play in a Razz event and he sat down and everybody was old, so he said “they’re obviously bad because if they were any good I would have heard of them by now”. I thought that was spot on, you know who the good older players are.

It always annoys me that the marketing of poker seems to be around getting 18-year-old Millennials playing and that’s all that matters. If you think about what you need to play online poker, you need a lot of time on your hands and you need money. Who has that? Retired people have that. Yet a lot of marketing around poker alienates older players. You see this in Seniors events, they’re all suspicious of online poker - all the scandals and collusion and Full Tilt and UltimateBet – that plays very badly with that demographic. It seems like the poker industry doesn’t even make any effort with them.

"Online poker has overlooked older players"

The organic reaction to John Hesp last year proves your point, there is a big difference between what customers want and what poker operators assume they want.

Dara O’Kearney: I think the John Hesp story was brilliant, it was exactly what you wanted, the idea that a guy could just lead a pretty full life (not spending 18 hours a day with solvers) and still go over to Vegas and do very well at the final table of the biggest tournament in the world. That’s a very easy story to sell poker on, rather than it’s a young man’s game where you have to start at 21 and grind 2 million hands and spend 20 hours a day with solvers. It just seems to me that that’s a better narrative to sell poker on. When I am at Seniors events and say I play online, they ask me why I would want to do that. That is the way poker is sold to them, rather than it’s a really good pastime. It strikes me that a poker room that created a community for older players could do really well.

Your sponsor Unibet have shown the same thing with how they market to female players.

Dara O’Kearney: I basically think sites should sell to the older demographic the way they do with the female demographic, and I think they have more chances for success with the older demographic because older people do have time on their hands and disposable income.

If you look at Vegas a lot of it is based around retired people. Vegas gets this, you bus in the pensioners, these are people who have time and money, and for some reason online poker seems to have just missed that.

"The self-employed mindset"

It’s much easier for a 21-year-old to turn pro because usually they don’t have an established career they are giving up. That must have been the hardest thing about turning pro at 42?

Dara O’Kearney: I was atypical anyway because I was self-employed. My background is in electronic engineering and went into the software industry and by the time I was in my late 20s I owned my own software company. So there were two benefits, it wasn’t a secure thing I was always going to have to keep going out to make something of it, and I’d also built up a bit of money which was a decent cushion for poker.

What happened essentially was I went into poker with a long-term plan that it wouldn’t become my livelihood but my primary hobby. I had been doing ultra-marathon running before and I was one of the top 15 people in the world doing that at the time, but I realised I needed to find something new because I wasn’t going to be doing that at the age of 50. I just saw poker on TV and decided to do that as there were no obvious physical aspects to it. It was a long-term plan, I decided it would take six or seven years to get good at that, but I was massively successful live and online from the start, so less than a year from my brother explaining what a flop was I was making more money from poker than from the day job. It just seemed like the logical thing to do, I had the money cushion anyway, if it didn’t go well after a year I could just go back and rebuild the business.

It makes sense now that you were self-employed rather than a company man. I’m self employed and for years would fear the next ‘Black Friday’, but then I read Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile and he argued self-employed people are actually safer because they are always having to adjust, unlike somebody who has all their eggs in one basket at a company.

Dara O’Kearney: I started staking players with Jason Tompkins and David Lappin. David and I had a big argument at one point where David was saying it’s an inherent flaw in staking that what will happen over time is some players will develop into big winners and inevitably leave you, and you will be left with the players who haven’t developed into big winners and your stable eventually becomes weaker. My point was his argument is like an employer saying there’s no point in employing people because they’ll get so good at their job they will leave and become freelancers. It always surprised me working in the IT industry how you could always make more money self-employed, yet so few went for it, even the best people don’t go for it.

It’s a psychological thing, some people prefer not having to think about money every day. Being self employed is security through flexibility. The fact you know you’ll be able to roll with the punches and find a way around it. Having the self-employed mindset really helped turning pro.

You can follow Dara on Twitter, his blog and the Chip Race Podcast.