The New King Of Poker
Inside the deli of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida, Michael Mizrachi picks lazily at a vegetable omelette. He’s wearing a backwards baseball cap and black T-shirt with matching black pants. It’s 1:00 in the afternoon, but he just woke up, having spent the previous night playing poker. This meal, for the 6-foot-plus Mizrachi, is breakfast, and despite his gentle eating style and laid-back appearance, he’s the new king of poker. When he plays, he’s aggressive, to the point of appearing to hardly care about money. That approach has contributed to Mizrachi’s unprecedentedly great summer, one that has earned him millions.
He won the World Series of Poker Main Event—outplaying 9,734 other entrants to take home the first prize of $10 million—which wrapped in July at the Horseshoe Las Vegas and Paris Las Vegas casinos. Mizrachi also aced the highly competitive, $50,000 buy-in Poker Players Championship, which went on during the World Series. That tourney attracts a slew of top-talent pros and features a mixed-game format. This means that you need to play expertly at eight different poker variants, ranging from razz to Hold‘em and beyond to do well. The victory added an additional $1.3 million to his summer haul.
The Poker Players Championship crown was Mizrachi’s fourth, a record. For anyone who didn’t know, Mizrachi made it clear by holding up four fingers as he posed for photos with piles of cash and the cards that showed his winning hand. If all that was not enough, at the rallying of Daniel Negreanu and Phil Hellmuth, Mizrachi was ushered into the Poker Hall of Fame without the standard voting process.
“The guy’s a legend and an icon,” Negreanu told Card Player magazine. “[He] should have been in already.”
Mizrachi seems to be completely immune to the money at stake when playing, invincible to outside influence. So what’s the secret? “When I sit down to play poker,” says the 45-year-old, “I feel like I am the richest man in the world.” He approaches a game with life-changing sums as if the money is inconsequential and he has no reason to make the experience anything but a blast. “Every time I play, I’m just having fun,” he says. “I play like it’s a home game with my family. I’m not afraid to lose; there’s always another poker tournament.” And that kind of thinking clears the way for Mizrachi to “put a lot of pressure on people and make them think. I am not afraid to do that.”
Mizrachi stands out as an anomaly in a game that has come to approximate high-stakes math. That can be attributed to a popular strategy known as Game Theory Optimal, which was conceived in the 1920s and expanded on in the ’50s by mathematician John Nash (the movie A Beautiful Mind is based on his life). But GTO has been a poker cornerstone for only the last 15 years or so. It came into vogue when so-called solvers, which calculate perfect plays in various situations (used for review purposes and forbidden at the table), became readily available. GTO’s mathematically sound way of playing hands is largely viewed as being unexploitable by opponents.
But Mizrachi, who’s never spent his free time entering data into solvers, actually finds ways to exploit the seemingly unexploitable. “I’m like an old-school, feel player,” he says. “I’m always smiling; no hoodies, no glasses. I just know the way people think and the way they’re trained. Then I do weird stuff that people don’t see very often. Like I’ll min bet with the nuts, looking super weak and hoping for someone to raise me. I do stupid things, funny things, things that don’t seem to make sense. But I know exactly what I am doing. People get lost in the hands.”
Recalling one such play, Mizrachi remembers a frustrated Jason Mercier (the 2016 WSOP Player of the Year) folding aces to his pot-sized bet on the river. Mizrachi says Mercier pleaded to know what he had. “He made the right fold,” says Mizrachi. “I had a full house,” which he completed after the board paired fives on the river. “I do stuff and can’t be figured out.”
Easier to figure out: Some of Mizrachi’s priorities in life. He wears them blatantly on his sleeve in the form of tattoos. There is the flag of Israel (his father comes from the Promised Land; after winning the Main Event, Mizrachi and his supporters celebrated by waving Israeli flags), a roulette wheel (gambling is clearly a centerpiece of his life), ace of diamonds (ink scored during a recent trip to New York City, to commemorate the river card that closed the Main Event for him) and the word Grinder, his nickname. He gave it to himself when he was still in his teens and began playing online poker, where everyone needs a handle.
Usually, self-given nicknames come back to bite you in the ass. Not in the case of Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi.
“Phil Ivey told me,” says Mizrachi, “ ‘Damn, that’s the best nickname in poker.’ ”
Indications of Mizrachi’s never-say-die attitude were on full display when it was less than 10 minutes into day eight of the Main Event this past summer. Already in the spotlight for having won the Poker Players Championship, he was dealt ace, jack off-suit and shoved in all of his chips pre-flop. Mizrachi was called by John Wasnock, who would go on to make the final table. Wasnock held ace, queen, which put him ahead. An ace came on the flop, no cards fell to improve Mizrachi’s hand, and the pro from Florida was left with a meager three big blinds.
Arguably, Mizrachi’s shove exemplified one of his off-kilter moves. The outcome would have taken the wind out of many players, leaving them with one foot in the game and the other on the rail. Not Mizrachi. He was rewarded with a stunning run that combined luck and skill—going all-in four times and choosing his spots strategically—to rise from 1.9 million in chips to 15.8 million in less than an hour. Immediately following the crippling loss, he was a long shot to survive for the next orbit, never mind to make the final table.
But, of course, he did. It begs the question as to what went through Mizrachi’s mind when he found himself in the jammed-up situation. “It’s always a tough spot,” he says, thinking back to that moment. “But I was 27th out of 27 people left and still in it. You’re going to have to get lucky. But I just believe in believing. I felt that it was my time, and I was put into position to win it. I wasn’t even thinking about losing. I thought only about winning. I knew it in my heart.”
Belief and manifestation can go a long way at the poker table. Embracing risk doesn’t hurt either. As Doug Polk, a poker player and influencer, put it about Mizrachi’s emotion-loaded run: “Michael Mizrachi is behaving like he is at a hot craps table, standing up, saying stuff, getting into the gambling.”
Ironically, gambling is not what the World Series of Poker is necessarily about. For a number of top players, the WSOP is a high point of the year and treated as such. There are some 100 tournaments played over the course of 51 days and many show up eager to buy into every event and score as many bracelets as possible. Not Mizrachi. “I played only 15 events, cashed in 12 and won the two biggest,” he says. “No one even drafted me in the poker fantasies [WSOP fantasy leagues play like typical sport fantasy leagues with participants bidding on players and putting together crews of eight]. No one knew anything about me. They didn’t think I would play any tournaments. I was in Florida, playing a lot of big private games.”
Such games are profitable for Mizrachi—and fun. On a recent trip to Israel, he recalls, “I played private games there and made some good money. But everyone left with a smile.” Back in the day, they were so good for the up-and-coming Mizrachi that the games were difficult to leave. “I remember one game where I was going on three days of no sleep and I had to be at a surprise party. I didn’t know what to do. I just took a bunch of vodka shots to wake up. I was delirious.”
While mega sessions like that are part of Mizrachi’s past, the day-to-day poker lifestyle can still take a toll. Mizrachi says that he “came to the World Series out of shape” and paid no attention to getting a good night’s sleep. That runs counter to most serious players in the mix. Mike Matusow, for one, actually times when he takes his sleep medication to ensure that he can doze off an hour after play ends and be well rested for the following day. Mizrachi’s post-tournament protocol is more haphazard, even when tournament play stops around one in the morning. “I walk around the casino, maybe go to a nightclub or get into a cash game,” he says. “After a tournament, I can’t sleep. I need to keep the momentum going. It sounds crazy. But sometimes I’m better with two hours of sleep than eight.”
You can make the case that Mizrachi has spent his life preparing for the major moments of this past summer. Nobody’s won the Player’s Championship and the Main Event in the same year and it’s unlikely to happen again. They are the two most significant tournaments and Mizrachi finished on top without even appearing to try.
But appearances are deceiving. “He’s very exploitative, hyper aware of changing situations; he knows how to win chips and he knows how to close,” says Alec Torelli, a professional poker player and the founder of ConsciousPoker.com. “He’s relentlessly aggressive, which is a hard thing to do well because most people have a fear-based mechanism and don’t want to lose chips. Mizrachi makes moves that other people can’t make—and he makes it look easy.”
Mizrachi says gambling is in his genes. Born to an Israeli father and a mother from New York (affectionately known as Mama Grinder within the poker world; both parents were on hand to witness his Main Event triumph), he’s been around gambling for as long as he can remember. Within his household, it was viewed as a positive, just like how some families might emphasize being funny or focus on cooking gourmet meals.
“We had a roulette wheel and slot machines in our house,” Mizrachi says. “You put in quarters. One time I hit the jackpot on my older brother Rob’s machine. He pulled the plug. The quarters stopped coming out and he said, ‘Casino closed.’ ”
Born in North Miami Beach and raised in Hollywood, Florida, Mizrachi lived in a world where the casino never really closed. “My parents were always in the casino and gambling just runs in the family,” says Mizrachi. “Friends would come over for poker and I’d play for baseball cards. If you want to be the greatest poker player in the world, you need to have that gamble. You need to take the risks.”
He grew up with three brothers. (Older brother Robert, also a poker pro, has nearly $10 million in tournament winnings.) Mizrachi considered playing high school football until his mother figured it was too dangerous. “That was when the poker kicked in,” says Mizrachi, who started playing online, honed his game via gambling cruises that went into international waters, visited an Arizona casino where money management lessons from brother Rob failed to take and hit Vegas for the first time with his dad on a Super Bowl weekend. “I was 18 and got away with playing even though I was underage. I played for 72 hours straight and fell asleep during the Super Bowl.”
Vegas soon became a second home for Mizrachi. Like most gamblers there, he had his share of ups and downs. A major hit, away from the tables, came when the subprime mortgage crisis led to the hemorrhaging of over-extended real estate investments. He acknowledges having gone broke “many times; I mean that’s how I go.” But he has a metaphorical ace in the hole that always leads to financial comebacks. “I know my talent and how good I am,” says Mizrachi. “I have passion for poker. It’s my everything. I just give it all I got.”
Mizrachi had a great life prior to winning the World Series of Poker Main Event and the Poker Players Championship. He loves cards and thrives in the gambling world. Hell, even with being more of a cash-game player than a tournament whiz, his tourney winnings were nearly $18 million before the summer and now stand a nip above $29 million, making him the 36th winningest player in the game.
And now, possessing high-octane poker notoriety like no one else, Mizrachi has everything in his life elevated. Asked where he lives these days, Mizrachi cheekily responds, “I live on airplanes.” Mizrachi is in high demand, negotiating big sponsorship deals. In October he signed with GGPoker and is also lined up with real estate estimator AngelAi. He’s also been drafted by the canny Patrick Nichols, president/CEO of Venetian Resort Las Vegas, where he will play in and host games in the poker room.
Particularly surprising is he was even scheduled to head to Atlantis in the Bahamas to host a slot machine tournament. At first, it sounds like a respectable cash grab, the equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger selling energy drinks via Japanese TV commercials. But no, Mizrachi is actually into slot machines. “I enjoy playing slots,” he says. “Sometimes I have an edge. If I feel that I can beat a slot, I play it.”
Mizrachi is quick to emphasize that he is no rube when taking on the one-armed bandits. He knows that people play slot machines for a living. Operating as advantage players, they look for bonuses that are left over in the machines, abandoned by people who might have to leave for dinner or just don’t know the correct strategy. When those bonuses come close enough to paying off, the slots turn mathematically advantageous for gamblers.
To prove the point, after lunch, he moseys over to the Hard Rock’s high-limit slots room. Mizrachi does not play the first machine he sees, and he has no interest in hoping for pure luck. Instead, he senses which machines are likely to pay off. “I understand a lot about how these machines work,” he says. “But I’m willing to gamble.”
Mizrachi reaches into his pocket and pulls out a $10,000 wrap of $100 bills. He starts feeding them into a Buffalo Link machine, getting excited when pixelated buffaloes stampede across the screen and wins pile up, seeming annoyed when they don’t, rooting for the machine to fill with outcomes that lead to payoffs. The technique works, as Mizrachi believed it would (nothing in a casino, he knows all too well, is a sure thing) and he winds up a few thousand dollars ahead when the bonus resets. Now, the machine is no longer worth playing for the time being.
Buffalo Link coughs out a paper receipt. Mizrachi takes it to the cage for cash. Then he begins searching for another.
“I have to slow down a little bit,” he says, reflecting. “But I still have it in me. The sickness doesn’t go away.”
