Patrick Leonard is a successful professional poker player and ambassador for CoinPoker. He has over $3M in recorded live tournament earnings, a WSOP winner’s bracelet, and has established a formidable reputation online, where he has won 10 World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) titles and 8 Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) titles, among many other accolades.
As I write this I’m on a Ryanair flight to Cyprus to play my first EPT in a long, long time, and as Ryanair doesn’t have wifi to fleece customers for more money, I’m using it as an opportunity to write my first PokerOrg column that I’ve (somewhat ambitiously) agreed to do weekly.
Once upon a time I used to be a pretty decent writer. I studied journalism at university (although I only attended three classes in three years!) and I’ve always enjoyed writing my thoughts and opinions (usually relayed as facts!) across various forums, social media platforms, and even privately in journals. In this column, I’m going to talk about what I’ve been doing, what I’m going to do, what I think about topical stuff in the industry, and obviously spam as much CoinPoker stuff as I’m allowed.
A crazy month
If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll often hear me describe the world as crazy, but there’s nothing crazier than a September in my apartment in Vancouver during WCOOP season. 30 days of 20-tabling for 10 hours a day, wagering millions of $s with the hope of getting slightly more back by the end. 929 stories updating every 15 minutes of each day. The ups, the downs, the bad beats, the hero calls, the pain of bubbling, the joy of winning. I get lost in it and try to give a behind-the-scenes ‘real’ look to people on Instagram, who can follow along as they play too.
Usually when you see updates on social media, it will be big wins; your feed will be full during WSOP of ‘bagged xyz’, but behind every success in poker there is 10x failure and pain. If 15% cash a tournament, 85% didn't, but what you see online will be 90%+ positive, so essentially you’re given a completely false narrative and image of what’s happening.
If you’re on the wrong side of variance it’s very normal to have resentment for others or, even worse, for yourself. Why can’t I win? How can he win? I put all this effort in for what? The thing with poker is that there is no justice; if you put in X hours, you aren’t guaranteed Y profit. The only thing you’re guaranteed to see is people who are on their top 1% run posting about it, and 99% of the time you won’t be in your 1% run. It’s a really crazy world.
Personally, I did very well. I ran incredibly at the top end of my buy-in range, coming fourth in a $25K (the only one I played) for $525K, coming second in a huge $10K to the GOAT Niklas ‘Lena900’ Astedt (I only had three $10K bullets all series) and chopping the biggest $5K of the series (the World Championship of 6-Max). Things could have gone, and usually will go, very differently. It’s easy to feel fortunate, to feel a false sense of how good you actually are, but without trying to be Mr. Humble, I feel mostly guilt for running so good.
I put a lot of effort into preparing for WCOOP, but to run so far over expectation is almost embarrassing at times, especially when close friends had the opposite fortune in the same tournaments. If somebody runs good, somebody has to run bad. But it’s the sunrunner in the headlines, not the guy who played just as well but didn’t hit his flushes. It’s a crazy world, but with a little bit of empathy, we can make it slightly less crazy.
PocketFives GG’d?!
Mama mia, maybe I should write headlines for sites instead of powerjamming for a living? Unfortunately, it’s tough to have much humor around this topic. PocketFives rankings were the only reason I played tournaments, initially.
I had one Sunday where I played and went from 10,000 in the world to 8,000. After that I played tournaments every day for a year, addicted to how my PocketFives rankings would increase. Getting to #1 was the proudest moment in my career, even though you don’t get anything from it.
My mum, dad, friends, poker friends, poker enemies and everybody else would log on every Monday and see how the rankings increased. We’d collect badges, we’d try to win ‘triple crowns’ (winning a tournament with 100+ runners on three different sites in a week) and we’d try to increase our all-time money earnings.
This week we all logged in on Monday as normal and the rankings had been deleted. GG had acquired PokerStake a couple of years ago but had always kept the rankings. This week they decided to delete them and focus only on staking.
It’s a devastating blow to grinders, and a devastatingly empty place on the internet where poker history has been gutted. For those of you who aren’t quite as in touch with the online poker scene, deleting PocketFives from the internet is like deleting The Hendon Mob.
That flag you flew for? GG’d. Those earnings you looked back on fondly? GG’d. Those tournaments you reminisced about and showed your kids/grandkids? GG’d. GGPoker does so many incredible things in the industry; I love playing there, and when they bought WSOP I spoke publicly about how it could be great news for the poker industry. I really hope they reverse this and keep the initial meaning of their name - ‘Good Game’ - and don’t become better known for the slang we use it for, which is ‘deleted’.
GG Wynning the war
My headline writing is legit elite. Everybody I speak to in poker has the same question: Bahamas or Wynn? I don’t think I’ve seen the community more divided. ‘Divided’ is maybe the wrong term - I feel like everybody would like to go to Wynn, but the value and WSOP brand in the Bahamas carries a big weight. I think we’d all like to do both!
But with both companies at war and in a fight for this space, I think it will have to be WPT who budges and moves the World Championship to another part of the poker calendar. That brings a lot of risk. What if they move and then GG runs another tournament over the top of it? Short term, it feels great for players. Regs are divided between both stops, and both sites invest a lot of money to bring a substantial amount of qualifiers.
It feels easy to moan, easy to wish for a ‘perfect world’. But before peace, there must be war, and the only people who are hurt in this war are the owners, which is rare in war! We all prosper from it, and hopefully in the long run we can have both events on all of our calendars. I think we’d all love to support both. It feels weird/wrong to have to skip one of these incredible events. But then again, it’s a crazy world after all.
CoinPoker growing!
You didn’t think I’d complete this article without a bit of spam, right? Last month was great! We started to run CSOP. Do you know what it stands for? CoinPoker Series of Poker? Crypto Series of Poker? Probably not right? Well, hopefully, as we continue to grow it over the years it will become a household name like WCOOP or SCOOP, but of course it’s not there yet.
It was successful. Our guarantees were smashed, and we continued to build data and feedback. Every series we run will be 10% better than the last one. I’m not very good at maths, but after a few years, I think that means we will be 70% better. Or maybe that’s not how maths works and with a compound effect we’ll be 385% better? That sounds better to me.
Olga Iermolcheva also joined us. Probably the most attractive (stop, I don’t mean like that) ambassador a site could acquire. She ticks all the right boxes of what we are looking for and she’s going to be pivotal in helping us grow the game in the way we are looking to. With Mario Mosböck, Olga and myself, I am hypersensitive to the fact that we need to hire another ugly ambassador next.
In the CSOP marketing, it looked like I was next to two supermodels; did you see them? Mama mia. We’re supposed to be online geeks, and they’re lining me up next to chiseled gods and goddesses. It’s a crazy world.
So if you hear from me reaching out and asking you to be the next part of our CoinPoker jigsaw, it might not be as complimentary as it sounds.
EPT Cyprus is next. I’m not sure what to think, really - I haven’t played an EPT in so long, but I have always loved PokerStars. What they do for poker is great, and I’d like to support them in the upcoming years. I’ve played, cashed, and won more COOP events than anybody else in the last five years, but I want to extend this support to EPTs too. Winamax too; I’d like to go to a Winamax event in the next 12 months. I like what they do.
Oh, and I promise a hand history for next week's column. If you got this far, then thank you; and remember – it’s a crazy, crazy world.
You can follow Pads on X and Instagram, or find him on the tables at CoinPoker.
