Jason Senti is another leg-shaker. It’s his right one and it’s bouncing up and down at a furious pace.
“My table is probably a little bit below average from what you would expect to get at the WSOP Main Event, and I probably have the worst seat at my table.” Senti tells me.
I can see his point. After all, he does have a shark sat immediately to his left. Well a man wearing a tall shark hat that is. A hat that I catch Senti staring at each time the dealer shuffles his cards. He’s either thinking, “man what a dick,” or “where can I get one of those from?” He never stares at the hat during play though. Senti remains focused on everything that goes on around him. He has the senses of a bat. He can smell blood from a mile away.
“It’s been three years since I made the November Nine, but someone will always bring it up when seated at my table. A lot more people than I would expect still remember me.” Says Senti in response to my question of whether he still gets recognised from that performance.
It was 2010 that Jason Senti entered the final table of the WSOP Main Event, as the short stack, and was very unfortunate not to go deeper than the seventh place finish that’s currently engraved in the history books. During that run Senti was one of Phil Galfond’s lead coaches on the highly successful BlueFire Poker. I remember following the twitter accounts of both players, as they just kept getting deeper and deeper in the tournament. It was a fascinating experience.
The world that Senti knew back in 2010 has changed. The former engineer earned the majority of his income through online poker, and coaching. Black Friday took both of those streams of income away from him. Things had to change, Senti had to adapt.
“I was looking to move on when Black Friday hit. The games were changing and things were getting tougher, so I didn’t want to give so much information away…in the short term at least. So I stopped the training videos and moved part-time to Vancouver to playing online poker. I might get back into it in the future, but for now I just want to concentrate on playing.”
Senti’s videos were superb. He is a great coach and has a wonderful way of passing on information with ease. I could see why Galfond hired him because he reminded me so much of Galfond himself; or as Senti humbly puts it ‘I guess I was a watered down version of Galfond because he’s the best.”
“I go to sleep watching training videos, which is pretty weird. I watch videos on pretty much all of the sites. My favorite video maker is Phil Galfond, but I also like Ryan Daut’s videos at Cardrunners; Brian Hastings does some good stuff, and Jason Koon and the Dang Brothers at Run It Once are also great at creating wonderful videos.”
It’s been a disastrous World Series of Poker (WSOP) for Senti. He has played over 20-events, including some of the biggest, and has bricked all but one where he cashed for a measly $1,868. But the man still walks around with a huge grin sandwiched in between his well-trimmed beard. He knows he is blessed and he loves what he does. If anyone has a back-up plan should things go south then it’s Senti.
“I don’t make as much money as I used to, and I have had a terrible series, but I still love playing poker and continue to have a lot of fun doing it.”
