Meet The Nation: Jacob Tryba

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Meet Jacob Tryba. You may know him better as jacobsharktank. He is an active member of the TPE Nation who can frequently be found on Twitter and the TPE forums talking about poker.

So Jacob, how did you get your start in poker?

I got into poker around 2007 through $5 home games in high school. I streamed Full Tilt Poker Learn From The Pros, read a printed copy of Super System, and helped start a degenerate fire among 20 or so guys in my junior class. We organized 9 handed SNGs at least once a week and had a 30 person tournament maybe once a month. Looking back, I’m so frustrated we didn’t play cash games. I would have learned so much quicker and made so much more money. Truth is, I ran super hot over a hundred hours or so and replaced any teen job I could have picked up at the time.

So poker was your first job. Nice! What do you do for a living now? Do you ever think about playing poker full time?

I hold a degree in economics from Florida State University and have a passion for statistical analysis. I thank poker for that. As some of the guys at TPE know, I used to be a programmer for the state of Florida. I spent many hours, that would have otherwise been wasted, blogging in the forums or studying hand histories. Currently, I work as a receptionist for a law firm and grind MTTs a few nights a week. I’m working toward securing some contract business analyst work so I can afford more time working on my game.

Long term goals include a real life work schedule that affords time for the best poker opportunities. I think finding some kind of balance of 20 hours of work and poker/study elsewhere would do a lot of good for my mental self. I’ve recently been inspired after reading 2+2er Limon’s Well Thread from several years ago. I want to work for myself, and I see poker as a large means toward doing that. Your journey is pretty obviously the most inspiring one yet to surface in our community, so I try to keep it in mind as I push through the night. “Just one more chipEV simulation.”

Well if you want to do what I did, you’re definitely in the right place. How long have you been a member of TPE? How has the experience been different from other training methods you’ve tried in the past?

I’ve been an on and off member of Tournament Poker Edge since 2012. I attended one of those poker training seminars at a local card room and one of the coaches was a former TPE coach. I had been a member of pokerxfactor.com prior to that for a couple of months. At that point, I was studying pretty much all alone. I knew one person who was involved in the poker community. Everyone else saw me as some degenerate gambler. It was quite frustrating, as anyone even remotely interested in poker always wanted to talk about that time they made $40 playing blackjack. I spent a month or two watching pokerxfactor videos, particularly ajkhoosier’s low/mid stakes MTT videos. I must have watched 3 a day or something.

After that mess, finding a forum that was filled with people always trying to improve was a god send. Joining TPE gave me a place to talk without much fear of group think or cancer. People are always ready to admit their experience level, so you can understand where their responses are coming from. Other sites involve pulling your dick out and telling the table all of your flaws are strengths and all of your outs are live. Just look at any goals/challenges thread. It always devolves. TPE has given me friendships and business opportunities I don’t think I would have otherwise formed without the community. I met the TPE crew during the 2014 WSOP for a brief stay. One night was spent spouting off the state capitals for like 2 hours. That doesn’t really sound fun now that I type it out, but it was one of my favorite nights.

I’m a huge trivia geek so that actually sounds pretty fun to me. Who did you do this with and how did that topic even come up?

It was one of the last nights of my WSOP trip and we were hanging out at the TPE house. Bigdog really wanted to get a fun spirited TPE Live episode going and instead they settled on cooking hot dogs at 1am. While that happened, Levi and I discussed state education and school sports. Before swim practice every day, we had to run about a mile around the park as a group. I was terrible and was always in the back of the line. I’d shout states or capitals at the girls who ran as slow as me in order to distract us from the pain of running. This little contest went from me just spouting them off to this guy outside of the TPE house to all of us inside sweating whether or not I’d remember the capital of Maine or Minnesota or something like that. It was a sick sweat.

Ha! I’ve had some unexpected conversation with the TPE coaches as well. Have you ever been coached by any of them? What are some of the biggest aha! moments you’ve had?

I’ve gotten the most coaching from Marc Alioto. He’s quick to tell you you’re an idiot, but will also let you know how your thought process fairs against the competition. For someone with extremely low confidence levels, this is almost necessary for me to function. Ben Reasons coached me a little and has a very analytical approach that floors me. He told me about a cash game hand once where he included details I couldn’t even fathom having relevancy. I’ve had one session with Matthew Hunt where we reviewed 10 hands from a Bovada $215 final table. I think we spent 90 minutes on the first hand alone. I’m also going to quote a TPE member here and say that I’ve gotten the most-free coaching out of Andrew Brokos. He is constantly in the forums asking me why I’m doing something and is almost never salty about my page-length analysis that is often misguided and simple.

I’ve had a couple of “aha” moments in poker. One was continuation betting and bet sizing back in 2012. My entire tournament game was raising preflop and c-betting for the longest time because I sort of stumbled into this realization that smaller bet sizing got a ton of folds on a lot of boards in my player pool. Another big one for me was during my session with Matthew Hunt. I completed in the BB with AJo facing an open from early position and a button call with 30bb effective. I think the flop was JT3 rainbow. We check/called one and then check/folded the turn. Basically, with the stack to pot ratio as low as it was, I tended to overplay hands in this spot. I realized that the original raiser’s range is obviously crushing me and even though I have the top of my range on the flop, it’s easy to see it was a fold. Seeing it and then confirming it with the discussion really got my mind thinking. Results were something like EP had AA and button had middle set. Whether or not the hand was played well didn’t matter because relative hand strength was really starting to click.

What are some of your favorite TPE videos?

Recently, my favorite series has been Marc Alioto’s multiparter that includes co-analysis with a few different people (Dannyn13, Reasons14, Mark Herm). Mark Herm talking about HU game flow was very informative. I’m always going to advocate the old Bigdog videos because he puts himself in so many thin situations by playing aggressively that you can really see how opponents tool out while trying to adjust. I almost don’t want to talk about Daryl’s 3betting video because a lot of it contains one of the only edges I had on people for a while, haha.

What are some of your biggest online scores?

I measure my biggest online scores in dollars and buy-ins. For the longest time, my biggest score in buy-ins was getting 2nd place in the $11 10k last year on like a Monday night. I strolled into work after sleeping for maybe an hour, perfectly content that I took home 170 times my buy-in, which was pretty close to my average buyin at the time. A few months later, I shipped a $55 10k for $4k, which has been my biggest MTT cash. A few weeks ago I hit my biggest buy-in score, winning the $2 3k for 250 buyins. I’ve had a couple $2k scores in final tables, but nothing worth noting. I made a pretty bad ICM mistake at my first $215 final table about 15 months ago. Average stack went from 40bb to like 15bb 7 handed where 7th was $2k and 1st was $13k. My biggest live score is getting 50th place in a $350 buy-in 1 million dollar guarantee event. I think I cashed for $2k and the top 5 cashed for 100k+ each. Live poker is fun, but the slow pace of tournaments and the quality of structures available for buy-ins I’m likely to find myself playing leave me rarely wanting to play.

Before I let you go, is there anything else you’d like to tell the Nation. Any members/pros you’d like to shout out?

Shout out to DougyFresh, Jason Mauney, Steve Barton, Mike, Marc, David, and all the people who help me study. I’ve been granted access to materials through this community where in any other career field or hobby, I’d surely go without. Watching TPE videos, studying Flopzilla, analyzing cash game hand histories, and sweating tournaments has gotten my level of thinking to where it is today.