What's Jeremy Becker's secret?

He seems like one of those "fire 12 bullets" type of guy. I think they should post how many times every participant entered the tournament at its conclusion.

Have played with him several times. First played with him March 2023 before all his hype and he definitely caught my attention even back then with some cool plays and a slightly different style. I think his results are a combination of being very good and playing VERY high volume. I don't know him personally, but I see him almost every time I'm in Vegas. I'm guessing his live MTT volume is at least top 0.5% of all active players. Even among regs he seems to love the tournament grind more than anyone. Only a handful of very good regs will play the $200 dailies around town when nothing big is running, but Becker seems happy to play every day.

The other thing is that he got a big publicity boost from Negreanu picking up on the story and platforming him. If you look at the same time frame when Becker has become a well-known player, there are other guys who have been on a similar trajectory like Nicholas Seward and Daniel Sepiol. Players know them, but they are not as well-known to the casual audience because they haven't gotten the same type of attention. Becker was a more viral story.

Sepiol and Brandon Wilson have been fun to watch lately.

Probably a combination of a few things:

1. He's clearly good - fearless and willing to make what he perceives to be the right moves. Given the volume he plays, he has a mental database against the locals that is probably unrivaled.

2. At the same time, he's probably firing ridiculous bullets in these tournaments. Bust? Don't care, Rebuy.

3. Because the other regs know he's going crazy early, he's going to get paid when he has it, so he will run up big stacks and running up a big stack early is a huge edge in a daily. He probably plays the chip bully very well.

If one has the time and the bankroll (or backing) the strategy is viable, so long as you can play the end game well. Becker clearly does that; he seems to be an outstanding closer and that's where the money is. But you have to have lots of time and the financial ability to weather freezing cold runs where you fire 20-30 bullets without so much as a mincash, and not give a single F about that.

I would only add one more point.

4. He has run very well. Extremely well.

I don't mean that to smear him. He is a WAY better tournament player than I could ever hope to be. He is a very good player. Absolutely no doubt.

But it is really hard to argue that he hasn't run good. Tournaments are ridiculously high variance. Even the most high volume player who shows positive results over a period of a couple of years of live tournament play has run good enough to at least avoid negative variance. There are lots of decent live tournament players who have run bad and have mediocre results to show for it.

That said, he does know how to close. Absolutely. Give him a large stack in a daily with 13 people remaining and he is at least a %25 chance to bring home the win.

He made his bones in Tampa which is probably the best region in the country for live poker. I think there's 6 rooms in town running tournaments daily and you're only a few hours from others in any direction. Young cat so maybe was living with his parents low/no overhead on the comeup simplifies building a bankroll. Appears to genuinely love the grind(this is the hardest part imo) To play so much volume in live low stakes and not let the toxic misreg degen energy infest your mind body and soul is a special skill few can master I think.

Another sunrunner who plays tons of volume. Literally for every one of these threads about "what is [Insert recent sunnrunner]'s secret??" theres 100+ players with the same skill set or better who are simply not sunrunning. To get noticed to the point that your results stand out in live low stakes tournaments, you have to be an insane luckbox. Thats the simple truth.

I don't know if sunrunning is a good explanation in his case. I think people may underestimate the crazy volume the guy has put in.

He finished top 10 in total Hendon Mob cashes in both 2023 and 2024:

https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/ranking...
https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/ranking...

He is already top 100 in lifetime cashes despite being a young-ish guy who is relatively new to the live scene. If he keeps going at this rate, he will top this list in a few years:

https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/ranking...

He gained notoriety by winning a bunch of tournaments at the Wynn in a short time span in spring 2023, which maybe required a hot run of luck, but also seems very doable given the smallish and softish fields. Other players like Zakariya Mouhib and Bryan Allen have won a bunch of these things in short stretches. A good player firing them every day is going to have a good chance to get on the podium.

When I think of luckboxes, I think of guys who shipped one or two huge tournaments and then faded. Becker is almost the opposite of that. He built up his winnings through a high volume of small scores rather than a small volume of high scores. It looks like he did not get his first six figure score until September 2024, which is more than a year after he went on his run at the Wynn. In his summer vlog, Negreanu said both Becker and Tice were DOWN for the summer of 2024 during the WSOP, which suggests that Becker endured some significant downturns in the midst of his ascent.

I think he's simply the intersection of high edge and high volume, like the live equivalent of what Shaun Deeb was on PokerStars in the late 00s. When you are good and you are playing everything, you are going to have some deep runs. Doing it over such a huge sample suggests the opposite of a flash-in-the-pan.

You can bring playing well in soft fields and also be running super hot.

If anyone wants to hear from the man himself, check out the video below or search for Table 1 in your podcast app (November 2024). Great interview in my opinion.

00:00 Early Life And Gambling With Friends In High School
05:35 Why Go From New York to Tampa?
10:19 Corrupting His Classmates
13:16 Learning About Poker & Improving Without a Computer
21:09 Moving Up & Figuring it Out
25:49 Going Pro with a $3k bankroll
35:12 Finding Tournament Poker
39:21 Moving to Las Vegas
53:54 The King of the Dailies and 5-3o
1:04:50 Landon Tice & Daniel Negreanu
1:19:44 Shifting Opinions on Backing
1:24:03 Future Jeremy

Think he’s a tad overrated but a very good poker player regardless.

Don’t think he has sun run. Hes a solid live mtt player. Puts in volume and has solid results. Nothing too insane for someone that plays so much. I think he prolly plays a great exploit style against weaker live players which can help results.

Think people don’t understand how soft live mtts are. If someone is making the right decision 98-99% of the time with rfi, 3!, and can play an exploit game- they are going to have many deep runs against soft fields of folks that don’t study and allow themselves to be exploited in game.

Sure when it gets to 20-30bb avg stack- that’s when players need to run well or ok to win some flips etc but solid players are going to get deep more often and give themselves more chances to get that late game run good to bink a tourny. Final table play is an art form also +
Shorthanded. So many live players don’t adjust well to shorthanded and can be exploited easily when a tourny gets down to say 3-6 handed.

He's a fun character at the tables. He definitely has that charisma aspect that makes people want to follow him as a pro.

I've played with him a few times and he's a smart and dangerous player that I'm sure is crushing the midstakes fields. He's very good at the exploitative game of making reads and putting people in tough spots.

He probably needs to be more disciplined against tougher competition, IMO, and maybe put in some more work on the technical aspects of his game. He's still young though.

Hes legit the top 0.5% of the low stakes tourney poker. he knows how people play in these fields and crushes them.

negreanu says it every year at teh wsop whe he plays the 50$ NL tourneys or less whe he has to he says that anyoen could easily make a living playing in those tourneys. he always says how juicy they are (if you are good)

The lower stake live games are insanely soft and depending on how he plays you can develop a style that dominates while lowering variance. I'm sure in a live 500 when you get to the final table with the big stack it plays similar to an online tournament from 2008 - you can probably chip up with minimal pushback.

3 Bet C Bet!

gotta win your all-ins

high volume at the same location, with the same player pool. the wyn. not much else to it. maurice hawkins uses the same formula.

This, this, this, a hundred times this.

This, too.

Volume. But it's not just volume in terms of how many hours he plays. Jeremy's volume has some nuances. He just absolutely loves playing poker tournaments and can play his A+ game for the vast majority of his volume. As we all know, for most players, live tourneys become a grind, and boring, after a while, and jaded pros often play their B game and sometimes their C game. Jeremy hasn't reached that stage and he may never will. Eric Baldwin also loves to play a lot after decades of grind. When you love it so much and have no other commitments in life, not only you are putting in insane volume, you are going after every ev+ spot, disregarding variance and ICM to some extent. Especially because he is in Vegas, there is always another tournament right around the corner. By taking more chances in the middle game, he puts himself in a very good position to play a big stack bully during the end game. His final table and win to cash ratio is very good as a result of that. I think in an interview he talked about this shift in strategy where he goes after final tables and wins more than cashes, just before his dream run started. Also another aspect of his volume in Vegas is he knows the reg player pool and their tendencies very well. For outsiders, it takes time to tell the regs and recs apart (because live is so slow) let alone individual exploitative strategies against individual regs. Jeremy can do that because of his insane volume.

Having said all that, it's instructive still how long and deep the downswings and losing stints can last. Case in point was the Landon crossbook during last year's WSOP. Over a pretty large sample over 8 weeks of playing multiple tournaments daily, Jeremy ended up pretty deep in the red. Negative 70Kish if I recall correctly. He still won the bet because Landon ended up even deeper in the red.

Really insightful take.

Volume paired with sharp mid-game decisions and reg profiling is a powerful combo — no wonder he stays so consistent.

That WSOP run says a lot too