What happens when your job and your obsession are the same thing?
There I am, sat in what was most likely the craziest cash game on the Las Vegas strip, more than my annual salary sent into the middle on a single hand, spectators watching in genuine disbelief, wondering if it was real. Me too.
Or in a private game back home, being told by the whale at the table that I’m not allowed to leave after over twelve hours of play. So we battle on until morning, an unreasonable amount of my net worth sitting in front of me, the adrenaline barely containable. The euphoria of walking out as the sun comes up, booking my biggest ever poker win, celebrating with my best friend. That one I’ll never forget.
It could even be playing a cash game in Los Angeles in the late hours, and turning to my right to find Johnny Chan sitting next to me. Yes, the guy from Rounders. A great movie.
It all started with an internship at PokerStars in the Isle of Man in my second year of university. I got to meet some of the nicest and most professional people I’ve encountered in my career, and I was thrown into the deep end before I even got started. You couldn’t ask for a better introduction to what poker is, was, and has come to be. I was hooked immediately, watching old episodes of High Stakes Poker and looking forward to the Live at the Bike stream every weekend, researching the online regulars who battled week after week in the flagship $5,200 Titans event, where the best players in the world went head to head every week.
I took that obsession to the local £25 buy-in tournaments on the island and looked forward to them every single week. I studied, learned, and kept going back to test myself. It felt like fate when I turned a $5 satellite into a seat in that same $5,200 tournament, sharing a table with players like Adrian Mateos, Fedor Holz and Christoph Vogelsang, the same players I’d spent years idolising. A goal I hadn’t even properly articulated, suddenly real.
Even better was getting more involved in the content side of the industry. Sitting one-on-one with Benjamin ‘Bencb’ Rolle to talk poker. Getting to cha with Ryan Feldman, co-founder of what started as Live at the Bike and became Hustler Casino Live, a show I’d watched obsessively. That poker fan in me never dims, even after meeting these people or sitting across from them at a table. I just love getting inside the minds of people who have genuinely made the game better.
Becoming a winning online player, after losing badly when I first started, is one of the things I’m most proud of. I spent countless hours studying, grinding, tracking, patching leaks, and looking honestly at where I could improve. That process taught me more about discipline and self-awareness than almost anything else. From there, the pull of live poker was inevitable. Once you feel it, you understand.
Trips to Vegas (more than I’d like to admit), Los Angeles, Texas, Canada, Estonia and more, all because I just loved playing this game. Sitting at tables with people from every walk of life has given me a perspective on poker that I genuinely don’t think you can get any other way. It means something completely different to everyone who plays it. Having that view from both inside the industry and across the felt has been one of the biggest advantages I could have.
I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the most well-known brands in poker since that internship on the Isle of Man. Now I’m embarking on the freelance chapter, and it feels exactly right. There’s a level of authenticity you get working this way, it becomes very easy to tell who really loves the game and who’s just extracting from it.
Like any industry, poker has its shadows. The gatekeeping is real, the politics can be exhausting, and the toxicity in certain corners of the space is something I could write a whole series on. But I’ve come to see those things as signals, that the people who operate that way rarely last, and they never really understood the game in the first place.
Right now I’m working with some brilliant brands and passionate poker people, and it’s been one of the most refreshing experiences of my career. Long may it continue.
If you want someone who eats, sleeps and breathes this game, for content, SEO, PR, social, live events or anything in between, get in touch.
I’m sure we’ll cross paths at a card room or poker series near you.
Cameron Dhaliwal 