Poker News Daily: You won the World Poker Tour’s Gulf Coast Poker Championship and also won a WSOP bracelet in 2007. In your mind, what’s your greatest poker accomplishment to date?
Edler: From the perspective of one single tournament, I’d have to say the bracelet win. Any World Series of Poker bracelet is wonderful. That one was particularly tough. It was a six-handed tournament with a $5,000 buy-in and it had a deep field of all of the best players. I think six-handed poker requires more talent and I was happy at the way I played in that whole tournament.
The Gulf Coast victory was wonderful and I did a lot of things right. At one point, I was really short-stacked and had to get lucky to get chips again, so I always feel a little sheepish about that victory. Winning the bracelet was a better performance on my part. However, I was happy at that whole year (2007). I was proud of having three major victories in one year. I also won a $10,000 heads-up tournament.
PND: How did you get started in poker?
Edler: I used to work in the real world at Pacific Bell in California. I was out to dinner for someone’s birthday. We went to an Italian restaurant in San Francisco that serves family style and were seated near Lee Jones, who at the time was just a fan of poker. He subsequently became famous in the poker world for being the PokerStars Poker Room Manager. Back at that time, he told us all about poker. We were so ignorant that we thought gambling was illegal in California. He said that there were legal poker rooms in my town. For fun, we went out and played a few times thereafter and enjoyed it. It occurred to me that it’d be a fun way to make a living. It suits my personality well.
PND: Talk about what Lee Jones has meant to the poker world as we know it.
Edler: PokerStars is at the top of all online poker sites with a few others, including the one that sponsors me, Full Tilt Poker. Online poker would not be the same without PokerStars. Its success has a lot to do with his hard work and vision throughout the years. He also worked at the European Poker Tour for a while and is a bright, energetic, terrific guy.
PND: You’re a member of Team Full Tilt. What makes the site so attractive?
Edler: It’s everything that you’d want in a site. It’s fun to be able to play with the big-name pros like Phil Ivey, Chris Ferguson, and Erick Lindgren. They’ve signed quite a stable of pros. I think it’s fun for a lot of people to play with them or watch them play. The integrity of the site has never been questioned by anyone and I know a lot about the site just by working with them. It’s nice to see a site that is successful treat its players well and with the highest level of integrity. I know the top people at Full Tilt Poker fit that description. Finally, one of the most important things about online poker is always having a game to play. The sites that have a lot of players become more attractive just by having volume. There is always going to be a large selection of games available.
PND: Whose game do you respect the most?
Edler: There are a lot of players who I respect. The easy answer to that question is Erick Lindgren because I know him well. I’ve known him for years and his poker mind is unique. He is exceedingly logical. He knows exactly why he’s doing everything and takes in a lot of information from other players. He is able to assess information and then react accordingly as well, if not better, than anyone I know. I am never surprised when he has success in a tournament. He’s an impressive guy.
PND: You’ve been dubbed by the World Poker Tour as “one of the nicest guys in poker.” Does that in any way help you strategically at the tables?
Edler: That’s nice that someone said that, but playing as much as I have on the WPT, you get to know the media and they become your friends. They’re inclined to write things like that about you, so you have to take it with a grain of salt. I’d say that I try to be pleasant at the table and act like a gentleman. I don’t think that it hurts my game.
There are some people who feel that you need to intimidate your opponents in order to have a maximum advantage, but I don’t believe that’s really true. In poker, the bad apples are the minority, but if you go to any random table in any tournament, you’ll see a lot of people having fun and being nice to each other. That’s generally the way poker is played. It’s not a mean-spirited, intense situation. Instead, it’s people doing their best.