Brandon Riha (BRiha5254) Interview with PokerSoftware

Brandon “BRiha5254” Riha is a 21-year-old professional poker player with more than $1 million in career earnings in online tournament play.  Recently, he joined up with Team DeepStacks to become an instructor at DeepStacks Live classes around the globe.  PokerSoftware caught up with him to see how the tournament pro has enjoyed his first live World Series of Poker (WSOP) grind, what his home setup looks like, and, of course, his favorite poker software.

PSW: How has your first year at the World Series of Poker gone so far?

Brandon Riha: It has gone pretty well so far.  It started out pretty poorly, though, as I was 0-for-25 in tournaments, but then I got off the snide a little bit when I made Day 2 in one of the $1K events at the Rio, which gave me a little bit of confidence and made me feel a little better about my game.

The next tournament I played was the Venetian $550 and I chopped heads-up in that for a $50K score.  After that, I made another deep run in another $1K event at the Rio, finishing in 25th there, so it has been a pretty good Series.  I’ve learned a lot and a bunch of my friends have been doing well too.

It’s a little bit of a grind, but I played a lot of tournaments live between the ages of 18 and 21, so I’ve got a pretty good amount of live tournament experience.  And I’ve also traveled around a little bit playing live tournaments, so it’s not as much of a grind as it could be for a first timer I guess. But I enjoy live poker a lot.

PSW: Do you have a preference for live play or online play?

Brandon Riha: I started out when I was 14 playing with my parents and their friends before I ever played online.  I got my love of the game there, so I kind of prefer live play over online tournaments.  There are times when I miss online, of course, but I think that online poker tournaments can be more of a grind than live tournaments just because you’re there every day, locked in, and if you have a deep run, you’re there for around 14 hours.

Sure, you have some long days playing live too, but online it seems like every single day when you’re running a session, they are just those really long grinds.  So, I think that I prefer live actually.  I’m sure that’s not the normal answer you get these days, but for me, it’s absolutely true.

PSW: When you’re playing online, do you have specific tournaments that you play better than others?

Brandon Riha: I’d say that six-max tournaments fall into my preferred style of poker.  I definitely prefer six-max as opposed to full ring because of that.  It just seems to really play into my strengths.

PSW: When you play online, what kind of systems and poker software are you running?

Brandon Riha: I use Holdem Manager every time I play in tournaments.  I think I lay out my tables a little differently than most people do.  I just use the top half of my screen and make one half of it Full Tilt and the other half PokerStars and then I’d just stack tables on top of each other.  I do that because if I tiled my tables, then I really couldn’t see the HUD numbers.

I still would have a ton of information from playing with these guys regularly for so long, but I found that if I stacked the tables, I can get a pretty good idea of how they are playing without having to see them actually play.  That way, with the HUD running, I could see how much they’re doing whatever they’re doing, like how much they’re raising, how much they’re 3betting, etc.

PSW: What statistics do you keep up in your HUD?

Brandon Riha: I have three different rows and then a bunch of information on pop-ups.  The first row is the standard VPIP, PFR, and 3bet, and the second row is bet flop, bet turn, and bet river.  The third row is fold to flop bet, fold to turn bet, and fold to river.  Then, on the pop-ups, I have fold to 3bet, 3bet fold, the 4bet statistics, and a few others.  I have a lot of information in my HUD.

I’d use Holdem Manager when I did hand history reviews as well.  I didn’t do a lot of hand reviews, but when I did, I’d go back into the HEM hand replayer and take a look at how I should have played a hand.  I’d also compare it to PokerStove on occasion, but those were the basic things that I had.

PSW: What’s left for you while you’re in Las Vegas?

Brandon Riha: I’m probably going to play the last $1K at the Rio and I definitely want to play the Venetian Main Event if I can after the Main Event of the WSOP.  And I want to try and satellite into the Bellagio Cup after the Series.  Then, I’ll be traveling around on the DeepStacks Live Tour.

You can follow Riha on Twitter (@xBlah) be sure to catch up with him on the Deep Stacks Live Tour.