Heads-Up With Ankit Ahuja – ‘A Recreational Player Who Likes to Crush Pros’

Heads-Up With Ankit Ahuja
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  • Attreyee Khasnabis February 26, 2020
  • 6 Minutes Read

At PokerGuru, it is always our endeavor to bring to you insightful interviews with poker players, operators, and industry leaders. Today’s feature is about an unsung hero of the poker industry. A man whose passion for the game led him to join the world’s biggest online poker company, PokerStars. Someone who has diligently studied the game, both as a player and as an operator. A man who was in the news just last month for shipping the Red Dragon High Roller at the PokerStars LIVE Red Dragon Manila series. Still haven’t guessed? We are talking about the one and only, Ankit Ahuja (cover image)!

Talking to Ahuja made me realize that he is indeed a ‘one of a kind’ personality. His love for poker made him quit his corporate job and approach various gaming companies, and one of those emails landed him his dream job with PokerStars at their Isle of Man base. For six years, Ahuja, in his role as a Product Development Manager, was a part of several turnkey projects at the company before he eventually parted ways with them in 2018.

Ahuja’s poker story reads like a page-turner. The 33-year-old Delhi born admits of being an engineering failure, and he pursued a degree in mathematics after getting inspired by the famous MIT blackjack team. His competitive nature, combined with his dedication to studying the game and hard work, has helped him come a long way.

Having left PokerStars around 18 months back, in his own words, today, he is “a recreational player who just likes to crush pros.” Sounds about right for someone with over ₹5 Crores in live tournament winnings, with his personal-best live score of $330,134 (~₹2.37 Crores) coming through in June last year in Las Vegas.

In this interview, Ahuja reminisces about his time at PokerStars (pre-Amaya days), his take on the current shape of the poker industry, and he even goes on to explain why he doesn’t have a base since the last two years, among other things. Here are the excerpts.

 

Hi Ankit! Thanks for speaking to me. Before we dive deep, tell us a little about yourself. When did you settle outside India?

I’m 33 years old, was born and brought up in Delhi. My family still lives there, and I go to visit them pretty often. About the current base, I don’t know if I have one at the moment (chuckles). So, in the last couple of years, it’s been mostly Ireland and Germany, like I go back and forth a lot. Over the last few months, I’ve just been traveling a fair bit.

In terms of education, I studied maths in college, and before that, I went to high school in India. My university for further education was in the US. Both of my parents have retired now. My mom was in the hospitality industry, and my father was an engineer, and both of them live in Delhi. I have a younger brother, and he runs an events business back home.

I moved out of India when I was 17 and since then, have stayed abroad. I did spend a couple of years back in India, I think between 2012-2013, but then I moved to Europe. I have just been traveling for the last year and a half, and don’t really have a base.

I lived in America for about nine years or so, you know doing university, jobs, trying poker as a profession, online poker in the good pre-black Friday days. Then I moved to Europe because I found PokerStars, lived in a lot of places, and traveled a lot over there.

Ankit Ahuja

 

We know that you joined PokerStars Isle of Man almost six years back, but your first live score dates back to 2011. Was that your first live score and first title as well? Certainly, you knew the game. Was the move into the poker industry a calculated one?

Yes, it is true that my first live score was my first title. It was a very small tournament, like a $120 buy-in. I wasn’t a tournament player back then, I think I mainly luck boxed into it. I was very much a recreational player. I was always very competitive and used to play mostly cash games. Before Black Friday. I used to play a little bit online, just Sit N Go’s on Full Tilt or PokerStars, but mostly live.

When I was in India in 2012, after I moved out of the US, I tried my hand at various things. I knew that poker is a game that can be beaten, and its a skill game. So I was just very competitive about it. So when I was in India, I did make friends with some poker players, and I was playing poker in India, and I was looking at the gap. I think Adda52 was just about to be launched then, and then I thought maybe I can do something here and maybe start a site of my own, so I dabbled into that a little bit.

I obviously failed miserably. I think I was way ahead of time, but also I didn’t have a lot of capital to invest in getting licenses and the marketing spend, and the Indian market was very nascent.

I had got a job which I didn’t really like, so I approached PokerStars, and I was already playing on their site and grinding cash games, you know live and online. I knew that I did not want to work in the corporate sector in India. Poker was my passion, so I felt like approaching some gaming companies and see what happens. So I shot an email to PokerStars, Betfair, and a couple of other gaming companies. I didn’t expect much to happen. I remember I had gone on a camping trip to Manali. While I was on my way back, I saw all these emails, and there were a couple of emails from PokerStars. So I talked to them, and I said like hey, look there are certain things that we can do in terms of just improving the product and where PokerStars can be better, and luckily, there was an opening there, and I knew that they were trying to launch into India as well around the same time. They were more or less exploring the market.

So they invited me to the Isle of Man to work for them. That was a pretty great experience, and this was before they got acquired by Amaya. That’s when I joined and got into it. Obviously, once I got there, I got to meet so many great people, some brilliant minds in general, and some in poker who were successful poker players before they joined PokerStars. Some of them were intelligent people to work with. So just working there, I learned so much about the industry, about poker itself.

 

Please define your role as the Product Development Manager at PokerStars and the key responsibilities that came with it. What are some of the biggest challenges and learnings during your tenure at PokerStars? Why did you leave PokerStars?

I don’t think I can go into too much detail about exactly what I did as it involves a lot of confidential information, but I think I can give a broad overview. I sort of managed developing games, basically working with game designers, looking at new ideas about how we can improve poker, and how to attract recreational players, how to try different things. Just overall performance of the business. Also, you know looking at things that would be better for poker in the long run and specifically, online poker. I managed certain kinds of game offerings or product offerings that we had. Things like Knockout poker, Spin N Go, even Power Up. Power Up was actually one of the most fun experiences that I had over there.

I was not a part of the core team developing Power Up, but the people who were behind this idea decided to experiment with the workplace. So there were a lot of poker players that worked with the company. Also, there were a lot of them who didn’t know poker. So we actually played Power Up live where we were experimenting and game testing to make the game balanced. We would look at different aspects of the game and figure out how to attract people and make it not so easily beatable.

The whole idea was to sort of make poker more fun because online poker, over the years, has been declining, and you know with things like HUD’s, BOTS, and game integrity issues. I don’t think the project was a success, but it was a really fun project to work on. It was a fantastic experience working there, especially at that time, it was basically like one family. We were all in the Isle of Man, middle of nowhere, and we were experts either from the UK or Ireland or much further away. We just had a great time working together, and it didn’t feel like “work” at that time.

If you have ideas, pitch them to the management, and let’s see something sticks. We were all trying to do something new with poker. Our team was full of geeks like Star Wars geeks, poker geeks, and video game nerds.

 

Please share your professional growth trajectory.

So my learning curve at PokerStars was very steep. I learned a lot, not just about poker, but overall. Things like how to grow the business, how to work with customers, how to analyze data, how to go from an idea to launching a product in a market, and then watch it grow. I got to work with different business units and departments like marketing, work with engineering, testing games. I mean, essentially, I had a job where I was getting paid to build and play games for a living. It was pretty awesome.

I left PokerStars about a year and a half ago, and my last role with the company was that of Product Manager for the casino department. So I was moved to the casino department from poker, and I was tired of living in the Isle of Man, so I moved to Dublin to join the casino team.

It was good, but I don’t think I had the same passion, the way I had in poker, and I sort of got just tired of life because it is not the same company anymore. They grew into this giant business where everything was about essentially creating value for the shareholders because it’s a public company. So that the startup environment wasn’t there anymore. When you come to a point where you don’t feel like going to work on Monday morning, and you’re not really enjoying your job as much, I think that’s the time to move on. There were external challenges in terms of gathering data, developing technology, working with engineers, and stuff like that. There were time constraints or budget constraints.

 

You must have been involved through numerous turnkey projects and revolutionary steps in the growth of the sport. Will you be able to list down the top five moments of your professional career?

All the projects that I launched. I mean, I shouldn’t say just me because we always worked as a team. When you look at something that you have built from scratch and see actual users playing the game, it’s a fantastic feeling. When you see the graph going up and see the revenue building as well, it just gives you a good sense of accomplishment that yes, we did this.

I can’t say the top five moments precisely because you are involved in so many things, you have the daily tasks that you want to accomplish, and every time you can achieve them, you feel good. I initiated the instant play version, so it was first launched in Sweden and then got expanded. It was just me, one developer and one guy for quality assurance.

 

You have studied Applied Mathematics, how has that helped you in your professional and poker career?

Actually, it was the other way around. I first went as an engineering student, and I was an engineering failure. As most Indian kids are brought up, I was a 90’s kid, and when I was growing up, I was supposed to become an engineer or a doctor, or I would be a failure in life. That didn’t work out very well, and I had started playing a little bit of poker. I got into blackjack and followed the MIT blackjack team and see what they were doing, and I was like, wow, this is so cool, so I should actually study maths.

I was drawn towards probability and games of chance or odds. I was a bit confused, like what my career is going to be like. Maybe I would like to work as a quant, or perhaps I would like to work on Wall Street, and so finance, gambling, blackjack, and poker sounded pretty good.

In hindsight, I think as an undergrad, I don’t think it matters what you study really. As far as poker is concerned, or even blackjack is concerned, you don’t need to have a degree in mathematics to be successful. You need some basic maths, and that’s not that hard to do. As I’ve grown professionally and as a person, I realized that education is crucial, but not where did you study or what you study. At the age of 18 or 20 or 21, we are expected to plan our life. Or even at like 15 or 14, you’re supposed to choose in high school if you are going to study art/science/commerce. How can you even know that at that age?

I think the pursuit of your passion and your interest is the most important. If you are just passionate about something and you pursue it, more likely than not, you will have fun doing it, and when you have fun doing it, you’ll probably be successful.

 

When and how did you discover this game? I am also curious to know what got you started playing poker seriously? Tell me about your poker graph from when you started playing poker seriously and where you are placed today.

I think I took poker pretty seriously, but I wasn’t playing tournaments at that time. I was just more serious about cash games, but I seriously started studying poker in 2017 and actually started working hard, especially on MTT’s. Today, I mostly play PLO cash or tournaments. I rarely play Hold ’em cash anymore. Studying and hard work is sort of showing.

Back then, I would travel on the weekends. I would go to London or Dublin and even play some online. Since I was a PokerStars employee, I could not play on PokerStars, obviously, so I played a little bit on 888poker. I started frequenting the European circuit, and as I got more confident in my game, I started studying more, became friends with some really solid, really good poker players in the UK and Ireland circuit. I learned a lot from them as well.

The more time you spend, the more you study, you start enjoying it, and you just get better at it. Also, the fact that I enjoyed it a lot, but I still love poker, and I really enjoy playing, that just keeps me motivated to go to all these events and try to get better.

I don’t see a point really playing online now. It’s tough to beat Zoom PLO, for example, on PokerStars now. Online cash is so tough, and on top of that, you have to worry about bots, HUD’s and all of these things. The higher stakes are not as prevalent online and live, you can find really good games depending on where you are in the world.

Usually, what I do now is, go at it really for like a month or six weeks or maybe two months playing cash games and tournaments both, and then I just take it easy for a month. I think it helps me to not burn out and just keep going and keeps me fresh.

I think it’s pretty important to have a balance in your life. Poker can be so consuming, and before you know it, life passes you by. It’s so important to have other things in your life, you know other activities or other interests. Even in any other profession, say you are a doctor, and if you just practice medicine 16 hours every day without any break, you’ll just burn out. It’s the same with poker players, and poker has variance attached to it.

Ankit Ahuja

 

Would you call yourself a professional poker player? You have a slew of live scores to your name, but we are yet to know about your online presence. Can you share some details?

I’m still a recreational player who just likes to crush pros (chuckles). No, on a serious note, I am very competitive about poker. I obviously want to be the best that I can be and play to the best of my ability, but being a full-time poker pro, I don’t know if I would call myself that. Maybe a semi-professional. If you think of just being a full-time poker professional and spending all these hours just playing, it sounds pretty sad.

I usually play live, and I play about anything from 5/10 to 25/50 blinds, which can be pounds/ euros or dollars. If I’m playing online, I play like $1/$2 to try certain things, and then obviously, I study a fair bit as well. I’m definitely not a grinder, and that just seems like a very sad life being a poker grinder.

Live I’ll play anything. Ireland is like my second home, and I have a lot of friends there. I really enjoy going there. The Irish Open is one of the most fun stops of the year. Everybody is in a good mood, and the cash games are great. The Irish are just fun to be around. If you go to an EPT or you go to some of these other poker tournaments, everybody is so serious.

 

The live poker scene in India has just started blowing up, and we saw you at the recent IPC too. Will we get to see you in Goa more often, going ahead? Also, what international stops are you looking forward to playing this year?

I am not sure about visiting India to play just poker. Currently, I am here in LA for the LAPC, then there will be the World Series, and maybe then I will go to EPT Monaco and EPT Barcelona. We’ll see how it goes, trying to be non-committal at this point, but most likely, I’ll be in all of these stops that I’ve mentioned.

 

Since your time at PokerStars, you would have seen the company, as well as the poker industry, evolve. Will you be able to share your personal views on PokerStars’ global strategy of focusing on recreational players instead of pros? Also, from a domestic perspective, what’s your opinion on PokerStars India’ strategy so far?

To be honest, I don’t know what PokerStars India’s strategy is at the moment. I’m quite far removed from it, so I don’t know what they’re doing.

In terms of focusing on recreational players rather than pros, I see how they (PokerStars) get a lot of hate from the poker community, but we also have to understand that they are a business. They are in it to make money, so they are well within their rights to do whatever they please. In terms of the pros or like what you can call the rakeback grinders, you need pros to run the games, but you need recreational players too. Due to the predatory nature of poker, it’s so hard to find a balancing act. I understand that we need pros to run games, and they should get some kind of compensation, but the way the rakeback model runs, I do not think it’s sustainable. And so does PokerStars and I am with them on that. Maybe the way they communicated it and went about the stuff was not the right way to do it. So it was probably a PR error, but in terms of the decision, yes, I support it in the long run.

As for poker players, you can’t make everyone happy. It’ s all about self conservation, we are so selfish. Like we’ ll just go wherever the money is. I am sort of somewhere in the middle on this. I see both sides of it. Having some kind of a bigger picture helps.

 

What’s your take on the Indian poker industry? With Indians finally on the global map and the flourishing online sector, how will you describe the evolution of the Indian market, and what do you make out of the current scene? Your opinion on what’s being done correctly and not by the Indian poker operators?

Obviously, the Indian market is blown up. The Indian poker scene is very vibrant at the moment. I haven’t followed it very religiously, though. I just showed up to IPC, and some of my friends told me about it. It seems very positive, there is a lot of talent in India which is really heartening to see. But obviously, at the same time, there is a lot of competition in the market, and a lot of operators are coming up.

I mean this whole debate that I saw recently where one site just added an extra flight to meet the guarantee, obviously that’s not good. It’s a very subjective question right, there are certain things that you should be doing well live and certain things that you should be doing well online.

As a market, it is still going to have a lot of its challenges because it’ s still a grey area right. There’ s a lot of awareness that needs to be done, making the general public aware of poker as a game and that they can play it competitively.

What I saw in IPC, I obviously felt it was a fairly well-organized event, but obviously, I noticed that a lot of dealers were inexperienced. They needed help in terms of calculating the pots or overall running the game, but from what I heard from other Indian players, they told me like it used to be a lot worse than this. So obviously things are moving in a positive direction, which is a good thing.

I have not played on a single Indian website, I have not played a single hand of poker so I can definitely not comment on the state of online poker. I see certain debates on the player’s group or when I talk to my friends about the TDS issue or adding an extra flight or something like that, but that’s second-hand information.

 

The big question, how do we persuade or incentivize recreational players to play more of a game of skill? Also, will too many professional players in an ecosystem disrupt that?

Every game – every sport, evolves. In India, you watch cricket, right? Is cricket today what it used to be fifteen years ago? No, it’s not. Is poker today what it used to be fifteen years ago? No, it’s not. Poker first boomed because of the Moneymaker Effect in 2003. But in the US, poker has been played in the backyard or on the dining tables for ages. Amongst families, people play poker after dinners for pennies or with match sticks. In India, people know Teen Patti or maybe play court piece, or they play bridge, or they play rummy, but how many families play poker?

So how to get the recreational player who’s just there to have a good time, it’s obviously harder. The big question is, are you having a good time playing poker? When I’m going to go to the movies or playing poker with some super serious sharks, wearing headphones and hoodies, where would I have a better time?

What poker is missing is, like when it first boomed, it had all these characters, and it wasn’t solved nearly as much as it has been solved now. It’s still not completely solved, but the game has just evolved so much, it has become so scientific, we know precisely certain things to do in the exact situation, bet sizing, in what position what hands should be opening, what is the 3-betting range in certain spots, what is the 4-betting range in certain places, what is the calling range in certain spots. It is so scientific now. A recreational player doesn’t know all these things, someone who’s new to the game just wants to come and play cards. So If they can find that experience in poker, they will play poker, but if they find that experience in some other game, they will play that game instead.

Even in Europe, we pretty much see the same faces, how many 18-year old kids do we see nowadays, coming out of Europe and being these poker phenoms? So yes, it is tough to grow poker. Will it always be like this? I don’t know. We can only try different things for it. The online operators can only try these new things that are very important for growth. They should try and market the sport in whatever way they can, and I’m sure they are doing that. But yes, growing poker is becoming harder and harder.

At the same time, I do think live poker is here to stay. Like online poker is obviously declining, and that is where businesses like PokerStars, partypoker or Spartan or Adda or whoever, be it an Indian operator or be it a global operator are going to find it as a challenge because every product has a life cycle. It grows to a certain point, and then it flatters and then starts to decline. It’s the same with poker. But live is a different beast; it’s here to stay. You see higher numbers in the World Series and some of the EPT’s when you go there. So that is promising, so maybe it’s just sort of a transition. We just have to be better at live poker than online, I suppose.

Ankit Ahuja

 

What would be your advice to players looking to get better in the game?

Try to be pretty self-aware and be honest with yourself. That’s it. Make friends with people who are better than you, seek advice from them and talk to people who would give you an honest opinion about your play. If they tell you that you made a very shit play over there and why are you doing that, what was your reasoning behind that, then take it in your stride and learn from it.

As poker players, we obviously all have egos, and, to be honest, a little bit of ego is important to be successful. To have that drive, to move forward and move up the stakes or even move up in life, it acts as a motivator. More than that can obviously be detrimental, then you are just in denial, basically. There’s always room for improvement, so just be self-aware, be honest and if you have a passion for poker, then focus and give your all to it.

 

Are you an avid follower of the Indian poker scene? Are there stakeholders that you frequently communicate with or take updates from? Do you follow any Indian poker players or Indian circuit? If so, who are the players you consider strong?

There are so many (laughs). There are so many good players around the world today, like so many strong poker players. I probably don’t even know them all. Adi Agarwal (Aditya Agarwal) is one of the OG’s of Indian poker. He is obviously excellent. There is Abhinav Iyer, Sushi (Aditya Sushant), Dhaval (Dhaval Mudgal), Nikita (Nikita Luther), and she is pretty focussed as well. I met this one guy at the last IPC, and he is a really good player. Sriharsha (Sriharsha Doddapaneni), he seems to be really good. I’m friends with all of these guys, and they’re pretty good.

 

Any immediate or long-term poker goals? What about professional goals?

The goal is always to win tournaments or to win money, to do well, and it should be realistic. If I say that my goal is to win this LAPC that’s coming up, it’s a great goal to have, but am I likely to achieve it? Probably not. Can it happen? Yes, it can. So I would say the goal is just to get better, and hopefully, I am on the right side of variance.

The plan is to do what I enjoy. I enjoy the freedom that poker has given me. The goal is just to make the most of what I have, enjoy myself, and live the best life that I can.

Ahuja signs off!

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