Damien Cooper: Baller On a Budget

It's strange that just a few years back the words "poker" and "vlog" almost never occupied the same sentence.

Nowadays, new YouTube poker vloggers are popping up almost every day. Poker fans used to be limited to big televised shows and a few poker-themed movies as far as entertainment goes, but now we can just cruise the Instagram or YouTube in order to find new fun and interesting content.

Degen On a Budget

Have you ever thought to yourself - "hey I think I like photography" and then you proceeded to read some articles about it or enrolled in an online course - congratulations, you're a normal person.

This is not how Damien Cooper rolls. Damien decided to sell his house, and cross the ocean to study photography in New York, where he also caught a poker bug. Given his claim that most of his decisions are rather frantic and intense, it's pretty safe to say that Damien was a degen long before he became a poker player.

Damien's first vlog also contains a cautionary tale about a relationship that consumed most of his bankroll (not to mention the six years of his life) and gives some validity to the words of Worm from "The Rounders" ("In the poker game of life, women are the rake").

And so Damien Cooper promises us a series of vlogs with an interesting premise, showing his journey from local small stakes cash game pro to the WSOP Main Event and beyond which is something many poker fans might find interesting.

Las Vegas in Austrian Dude's Basement

Relationships jokes, playing basketball at 2 am in the morning and winning a few buy-ins while using the best poker gear one can find in a basement? Damien delivers fairly quickly on the 'baller' aspect and shows us what things like televised poker tournaments newer could - how free and exciting a life of a professional poker player can be.

In the world where many people obsess about triple range merging, GTO and robots it's very easy to forget the romantic aspect of playing cards for a living that brought many of us to the game and Damien's vlogs manage to perfectly showcase that missing piece.

One Night at the Office

If you thought about taking live poker more seriously, but you don't have a giant bankroll, Damien's YouTube channel can be a great source of information and motivation. Videos like the one linked above showing a night in a life of a live poker grinder bring a new and interesting perspective to the table that wasn't really available to the fans before.

Winning a €1700 pot in deep small stakes PLO live cash game might not seem that exciting when we compare it to the stuff we were used to seeing at High Stakes Poker tables but at the same time it's not as removed from the reality of an average poker enthusiast.

Let's be honest here, the vast majority of people won't ever get the chance to play in a 10$/20$ game or higher, but becoming good enough to enjoy a solid success in local small stakes games is something many more players can aspire to. 

That's why vlogs of players like Damien Cooper can be so interesting and entertaining to follow.