Like mushrooms, poker games have been multiplying on campus over the past couple of years. And like any predominantly masculine endeavor, poker games tend to breed poker stories. Every player tells them — the big wins, the awful beats, the nights you just can't lose. Matthew Cherackal's poker story puts them all to shame.
Oh yeah, did we mention the money?
Cherackal, a senior from Storrs, Conn., won $700,000 on March 25 for finishing in third place out of 735 competitors in the fourth annual PartyPoker.com Million Tournament, played aboard the cruise ship MS Oosterdam in the Pacific. The tournament cost $10,000 to enter, but Cherackal won his seat playing over the Internet after an initial investment of $20.
In other words, after laying down just $20, Cherackal got paid back at a rate of 35,000-to-one.
"I won a seat into a $200 satellite, which won me the $10,000 buy-in plus the cruise," Cherackal said. "It was in December. [At first] I wasn't very enthusiastic. I didn't think much of it."
While No Limit Hold 'Em has garnered most of the poker world's recent attention because of the popularity of the World Series of Poker and the publicity of being televised on ESPN, the PartyPoker Million is notable because it is one of the largest Limit Hold 'Em tournaments in the world. Unlike No Limit, Limit Hold 'Em is a more regimentally structured game which demands that a player win hands more frequently over the course of a tournament to be successful. Cherackal, who won his seat through No Limit satellites, admitted that the change in game, as well as the timing of the event, gave him pause.
"I would have taken the 10 grand [in cash] for the seat if I could have because I'm not as good at Limit and because I didn't want to miss a week of school," he said.
The seat was nontransferable, though, and Cherackal said that once he arrived on board the ship, he became comfortable within a few hours of the beginning of the six-day event.
"I just relied on my Hold 'Em experience," he said, while adding that the beginning of the tournament did not go well for him. "I was getting hammered over the first two days, losing big pots to aggressive players."
After starting with $10,000 in chips, Cherackal survived the tournament's early stages, but had a relatively small stack of around $65,000 heading into Day Three. It was on this day that he caught his first big break, getting pocket aces in the big blind position against a player in the small blind with pocket kings. The cards — the two best starting hands in Hold 'Em — gave Cherackal a significant advantage to win. He wound up doubling his chips on the hand, and, within a short while, he had built up his stack to a robust $230,000.
"At that point I was slightly greater than average stack, so I was pretty confident," he said.
Already knowing he was going to go home with some money, Cherackal settled into a rhythm, passing over one million in chips and surviving against some of the top poker pros in the world to the end of Day Five and into the tournament's final 10 players. Cherackal also had the thrill of knocking out well-known poker pro Eric Lindgren.
Despite the increasing pressure — and payouts — Cherackal insists he wasn't feeling the heat.
"The money never made me nervous," he said. "I just felt like I was playing Hold 'Em. I felt quite comfortable going into the final table."
Cherackal went into the final table with the hope of getting at least into the final four, with a payout of a half-million. He wasn't totally able to avoid trouble at the final table, though, and lost a critical hand late in the day.
"I had Ace-Queen in the big blind, a player on the button [dealer position] raised, and I re-raised. The flop came A-Q-X, all clubs, and I bet and he called. A club came on the turn and the river, and he had an ace with the three of clubs," he said. His opponent had made an improbable flush.
"On the flop I was 95 percent to win," Cherackal said. "The pot was almost two million and it would have given me more than half the chips at the table. I was pretty crushed."
The loss effectively crippled Cherackal's effort, though it earned him a great deal of support from the crowd, and his demise was not long in coming. Still, after finishing third, Cherackal couldn't help but wonder whether he could have done even better.
"As soon as I lost I did think about what might have been, but that night so many people were buying me drinks and congratulating me that it kind of hit me," he said.
Having returned to school $700,000 richer, Cherackal seems as normal as any of the other hundreds of poker players on campus. Though he admits he's considering taking one to two years off after college and playing poker full time, he makes it clear that poker is not the dominant force in his longterm plans. And to those who think that it is easy for him to say such things when he's got the big bank account, Cherackal responds that he doesn't think the money has made him a different person.
"Whether I won the money or not, I don't think I've changed much after winning. I have the same issues I've always had," he said.
Not to mention one really good poker story to tell around the table.
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