At the 2010 World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event, David “The Maven” Chicotsky was among those on the rail of Joseph “subiime” Cheong, whose 6bet all-in before the flop with A-7 against Jonathan Duhamel’s pocket queens sent him out in third place. Poker News Daily caught up with Chicotsky in the lobby of the Penn and Teller Theater to get his take on the action and get the inside scoop on the world of poker coaching.
Poker News Daily: Why are you here rooting on Joseph Cheong?
David Chicotsky: He’s a buddy of mine and he’s the best player here. He has a math degree, a psychology degree, a statistics background, and he’s super levelheaded. I think that’s the biggest thing going for him: he’s really calm, collected, and has a lot of experience playing 10,000+ tournaments online.
All that said, John Dolan is amazing. He’s another online pro. John Racener is an online and live pro. What can you say? At 22 years old, Racener has $1.5 million in live earnings and $1.5 million online. Must be nice.
PND: When you coach your students, can you teach someone to be levelheaded or is that a trait you either do or do not have?
David Chicotsky: I had to learn it along the way and it’s something that I definitely espouse to my students. I’ve hired Sam Chauhan in the last year and, in general, our big philosophy is no partying whatsoever. If you win a hand, you don’t celebrate. If you lose a hand, you don’t cry about it. Over time, you get numb to it.
The best analogy I can think of is you driving around in a car all day long. Every red light you get to, you get unhappy. Every green light you get to, you get excited. By the end of the night, you’d be emotionally drained.
PND: How did you get into the poker training business originally?
David Chicotsky: From the get-go, I was training a whole family of players how to play – a brother, a sister, a cousin, and an uncle. This was five or six years ago and they all became good players. One or two of them went on to do good things and I was just very surprised how well everything translated.
In 2004, I didn’t know anything about poker. I grew up as a kid playing Five Card Draw at camp and forgot all about it. When I got out of grad school, one of my friends, who is a genius, was making $1,000 a day in cash games. I was making $300 or $400 a week grinding sales, so I said, “Hey, you have to teach me how to do this.” He basically mapped it out with an Excel program. I was lucky in the sense that I had he and his brother lay out what to do.
I was able to have guys who were smarter than I am break down the game. Then, I was able to get on my own two feet and met Ari Engel, who at the time was the #1 online player in the world according to PocketFives.com. After I trained with Ari, it was almost immediate. Within one week, I got third in the $100K on Bodog and won two other tournaments. I went from having $1,100 in my account to $17,000 one week later.
PND: You’ve been in the training business for a while. Are you still very active?
David Chicotsky: It’s very active. We just sold 21 seats to a boot camp last month. We’re halfway sold for this month’s online boot camp, which is our first online boot camp ever. Every Wednesday night, my former students are able to watch me play in entirety. They can see my hole cards, they can hear me talking, and they can ask me questions while I’m playing. At this point, we have a huge community.
