Player Spotlight: Brandon Adams
Brandon Adams might be the most interesting man in poker.
Aside from cashing out $3.6 million in live poker earnings, the 40-year old has authored multiple books since graduating from Harvard when he was just 19 years old. That’s a lot of accomplishments to fit in one sentence.
There’s clearly much more to him than check-raising and c-betting, but this week, poker’s Renaissance Man remains focused on playing his best game at the 2019 U.S. Poker Open.
“I’ve been working hard on my game and for me, the U.S. Poker Open has displaced the World Series of Poker prelim events on the poker calendar,” Adams told Poker Central earlier this month.
The tournament, Adams said, embodies the sort of player-friendly structure that the industry as a whole should embrace. For instance, this year’s USPO will feature a $100,000 bonus for the series’ top player.
“It’s exactly the direction the poker world needs to move,” he said.
On the second day of the open, Adams seems comfortable as he is enjoying a spot among the dominant chip leaders of the PLO $10,000 buy-in Event #2. As players played down to the final two tables, Adams sat comfortably with more than 800,000 chips from the 125,000 starting-stack.
Adams once published a book about poker entitled Broke: A Poker Novel, but it must not be an autobiography. Last year, he had five top-five finishes in high roller tournaments, including a victory in Event #2 of the 2018 Poker Masters – a No-Limit Hold’em $25,000 buy-in that won him $400,000. That result was sandwiched between a 4th and 5th place finish in Events #1 and #2 of the Poker Masters, respectively. He also boasts a Poker Masters victory in a $50,000 buy-in during the 2017 series.
To reach that same level of success at this year’s USPO – a series which attracts some of the best tournament poker players in the world – Adams said he will need to “maintain unpredictability.”
Here’s a prediction: 2019 will have lots of final tables and deep runs in store for Brandon Adams.
When he’s not on the felt, Adams is currently writing a book for serious amateur players titled “Advanced Poker in Two Hours”. Watch Adams in action during the U.S. Poker Open, exclusively on Poker exclusively on PokerGO. Check out the full schedule right here. Listen to a lengthy podcast with Brandon Adams right here. Follow Brandon Adams on Twitter.
