Jerry Schrader, a locksmith from the town of Woodridge in Washington state says that playing competitive poker in the Dome is a little like cracking a safe: “You have to have patience,” he said. “When you sit in front of a safe and try to manipulate it, you’re going to be there for one to four hours, so you have to follow a pattern, follow the guidelines, and if you stray from it, it’ll take you three times longer. It takes discipline.”
He should know – Schrader said he’s played 250 000 hands of poker online. “It’s like anything,” he said. “You’ve got to do it over and over and over until you don’t have to think about it.”
To hone his skills, Schrader trains for the Dome every day, in every spare moment, punching his keyboard, moving his mouse, letting all the kings and queens and spades and diamonds form patterns in his mind and triggers in his reflexes. He wants to win a million dollars. He plays a thousand hands a day, reports the Washington Post.
The Dome is a soundproof pressure chamber where players are fitted with anxiety-tracking heart monitors and have 15 seconds to make all-in or fold-’em decisions that determine who plays on and who heads home. For the successful players, the prizes can be considerable, including the million dollar cheque that the ultimate winner of the Mansion Poker Dome Challenge gets after the final in March next year.
The Washington Post reports in an article this week that the Challenge is part game show, part gladiators arena, and one of the newest gimmicks in televised gambling.
Every week, players enter the dome’s aquarium-like inner sanctum to compete for cash prizes and the right to move on to the next round. Having won $25 000 in the first round and $50 000 in the second, Schrader is the third of six finalists from around the world who will play in March for the $1 million pot.
After winning the qualifying competition this month in Las Vegas, the 36-year-old Schrader has earned a seat in the final round of the 43-week Mansionpoker.net Poker Dome Challenge on Fox Sports Net.
Schrader’s path to the Poker Dome began with a win in a local tournament organised by the National Pub Poker League, which runs Texas Hold ‘Em competitions in bars across the country, the Washington Post report reveals. Regional pub champs are sent to Las Vegas to enter the 216-player Poker Dome series, joining online tournament winners from the Gibraltar-based online poker marketing site Mansionpoker.net.
The Poker Dome format is “like Internet poker adapted to live play,” said David Scott, the regional manager for the Washington area pub leagues. Players get 15 seconds to act on their hands and sit behind the glass of the dome’s fishbowl design, surrounded by TV cameras and unable to hear the audience’s reactions to their decisions.
“The big selling point is the technology,” Scott said.
In addition to the heart monitors, computer sensors inside players’ cards and chips track their hands and cash totals for the TV audience. Mood lighting and dramatic music pump up the suspense.
An estimated 23 million Americans wagered roughly $6 billion online last year.
Schrader’s rise from key-cutting to card-sharking has occurred almost entirely online, the Post’s report reveals. He was a precocious poker talent in family card games as a kid, but Schrader hadn’t played for more than 10 years when he entered a free tournament one night in 2003 at a Woodbridge sports bar – and won.
“I instantly got hooked again,” he said. “And soon after that, I discovered the online sites.”
Since then, Schrader has lost some and won more, leaving him up $5 000 overall with his online pastime, after pocketing $320 in two Internet tournaments one day last week. Minimising losses is a question of knowing when to walk away from bad luck, he said. “If I drop $100, I quit for the day. There’s a certain point where you’ve got to say ‘forget it.’ “
As with most card games, succeeding at speed poker is both a question of luck and one’s ability to maintain a steely countenance when that luck arrives. “Tells” are subtle indicators in body language that can betray a player’s hand. For example, Schrader said he’ll check to see where players glance once they get their cards from the dealer. “If they look right at their chip stack, you know they’ve got a monster,” he said.
When Schrader won the $50 000 on Oct. 14, he advanced to the final round by beating out a prosthetic limb inspector from New York. Schrader’s heart rate – normally in the mid-70s – hit 156 beats per minute, as if he were running a marathon. The game took 3 1/2 hours.
“That was the most insane ride I’ve ever been on,” Schrader said.