Paul Phua With Rui Cao And Wai Kin Yong: What Mistakes Do Young Players Make?

‘The next poker boom will erupt in Asia’ is quite a common thing to hear nowadays, but for those in the know it’s already upon us, and Paul Phua’s latest video features one of the best and brightest of the new generation - Wai Kin Yong cashing for over $3million since focusing on the game late last year.

His eponymous interview series ‘In Conversation with Paul Phua’ has already featured the likes of Tom ‘Durrrr’ Dwan and Phil Ivey, and adding the likes of Yong and French-Chinese high-stakes crusher Rui ‘PepperoniF’ Cao is an excellent way of opening the poker world’s eyes to the ‘Eastern’ approach to the game.

Discipline and Ego

Two of the most important factors to be aware of when playing the high-stakes cash games which Cao and Yong play in say the guests, Cao once describing how:

“The pots are as much as €500,000 and that it's normal that people win/lose more than double that amount in just a day”.

“I think that discipline is one of the most important things in poker,” says Yong, crediting Phua for teaching him this lesson early on in his career.

“If you are not disciplined you are just giving up EV. Good players punish you when you make mistakes a lot, and they punish you really hard.”

Cao, who has locked horns with the likes of Phil Ivey, Tom Dwan and Patrick Antonius at the nosebleed stakes accepts it’s one of his weaknesses:

“It’s like a kind of an ego thing to really want to show off and to let the other people know that I want control here. I think it’s an ego problem.”

Long nights of poker

For a multi-billionaire with an entire world built around him, Phua himself doesn’t appear to have ego issues – the Paul Phua Poker website is his way of sharing his own good fortune and giving something back to the poker community.

As he explained to Phil Ivey in last week’s episode of ‘In Conversation with…’ it might be hard to keep the same level of enthusiasm for the game after several years, but even so he still manages some of the long, long, legendary Macau sessions.

“Nowadays also there are less sessions of 40 hours, 50 hours. Why? Maybe our friends tell us it’s not good for our health, our families keep complaining, ‘I don’t see you for two days, three days’…but we play still long hours compared with other games; 15, 20 hour games are very common!”

Personally, I really enjoy these bite-sized chunks of interviews with the world’s best players – and his two guests this week were actually new to me, so even better. Free subscription means I’ll be following Paul and his guests with great interest in the future too!