i had his polk interview on in the background while doing some work a while back and had to pause and rewind at one point because I was pretty sure i heard himself identify as a winning professional who needs to make special allowances to make the recs feel comfortable

was absolutely shocked because I figured at worst he probably viewed himself as a break even or slightly winning recreational player and couldn't believe he viewed himself as a tier above

also had to pause and rewind later when he said keating was a good player who would crush the game even harder but he instead gambles it up a bit more to keep the recs happy

was just shocking because those games likely largely exist because guys like keating and airball are at the table - yes as far as bad opponents go, they are aggressive, which makes them far more difficult to play against vs the more common passive/nit bad player

if we were to assemble a list of all the players in the world who are rolled for and desire to play those kind of stakes and had to create a set of power rankings those two would easily be in the bottom quartile if not even lower

i've played somewhat high stakes games with 9 pros all seated to play the one whale at the table of 10 and that whale was often a far better player than airball or keating

this is not a knock on keating btw, he seems pretty down to earth, I don't think for a minute that he thinks he's an elite player but rather just having fun - it's also possible airball said that in a don't tap the glass so hard that you needlessly praise the fish inside the tank but it felt kinda genuine the way he only spoke of keating rather than other big whales in those games

Bro, he's an "investment banker" who makes that much each day before lunch.

Oh no he's not!
Airball said he "quit" the 'investment banker' job because of the negativity surrounding the infamous Robbi's J4 hand.

I know, it doesn't make sense to me either.

Oldest trick in the book,make the weaker regs feel like the crushers.Get them to gatekeep anyone who doesn’t play the game the way you want to.When they go broke get new ones to hype up.

yeah this makes perfect sense, saw an interview with mrdrbatman and again I was expecting to hear a story about how this successful businessman fell in love with the game of poker but instead he's talking about starting at 1-2 and crushing and then moving up and crushing and i'm thinking absolutely no way any of that is true and it's just insane this guy is trying to make us all believe he's a winning crusher at the highest stakes when all he does is punt

but i kind of hated him from the start as the interview started with "so how did you choose this name" and he was like oh no i used to be a nurse and helping a drunk guy at a concert while dressed as batman and he called me that and it just stuck as everyone called me that since

yes, this may be true, but he's ignoring the fact that literally nobody would know any of that if he didn't walk around using that name, there's a great scene in the tv show hacks where the new manager shows up and introduces himself and then says "but everybody calls me weed" and they asked "oh why is that?" and he responds "oh this one guy just used it one day and it stuck" and their response was "no, it sounds like it's sticking only because you are introducing yourself to everyone as that"

anyway, as i'm typing this i'm also thinking specifically of guys like eli elezra, who despite being the obvious fish the game ran around, everyone treated with the utmost respect and reverance and went along never disagreeing with his statements that he was a professional poker player to the point where most casuals believe that's what he was instead of the whale the games ran around

It’s exactly that Rick.

That's horrible. So many future billion-dollar investment deals scuttled by J-high. No matter, his next job will be CEO of the universe.

Airball on his humility/rehabilitation tour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKCdZbVnlJ4

it's a shame they need to film that show where there's all this blinding sunlight requiring nick to wear sunglasses and a hat

whatever ended up happening with garrett saying he would play airball heads up. has there been any developments with this actually happening or what?

airball said he has no interest in playing him hu.