Alan Keating - The Official Thread

Jboogs looks like he's about to cry everytime he loses...

Jboogs is worth like 50 million. His brother is post malone.

Lol really? I have no idea if you are being serious or not. It looks like the money matters to him though and why would his brother give him that much?

Someone on Reddit a while back posted a n obituary of someone with last name Keating who was some business tycoon and “survived by his grandchildren , names including Alan” right around same time Alan went from playing 5/10 to nosebleeds.

The reason he’s rich guy who was still slumming 5/10 was because he had not yet inherited the money.

I don’t know why there’s such speculation around the source of Keating or airball money. They inherited it. If someone got money off crypto or investing 99% of the time it’s obvious because they spend a lot of time talking about it. Also, 5/10 grinders wouldn’t even be allowed to be angel investors by federal law .

The speculation is dumb, it’s inherited money.

The only real question is why so many people would watch rich kids do flips with their inheritance instead of actual poker. HCL used to be Garrett Art Chris Brewer now it’s been Keating and Airball seemingly forever and it sucks.

So it used to be grinders (who helped set the lineups like Garett) taking rich kids money but now it's worse because it's rich kids passing it back n forth.

Airball is at least entertaining. If your using it to study poker your better off spending your time elsewhere regardless.

Tons of people got rich off of crypto that don't run their mouth about it . Maybe it is inheritance. But it's not exactly far fetched that that poker players who were big on crypto and were also actually using it ten years ago made piles off of it.

Not knowing is why there is speculation.

The chain of reasoning you're trying to sell is 'a guy off 2+2 saw a guy on reddit mention the death of someone rich with the same name around the same time he started playing high stakes'. It's certainly still a possibility but even if you could find all that evidence, it would still be weaksauce circumstantial af.

I watch poker for entertainment. Airball is not entertaining to me in the slightest. He's just a fat, bratty trust fund kid.

To me, watching great people is entertaining. More people would rather watch Lebron James than the Harlem Globetrotters right? Are those people trying to 'study basketball' or just appreciate a game being played at a high level rather than as a farce?

I strongly reject this notion that "shitty players=more entertaining". Hustlers biggest moment in the last few years was the game Tom Dwan and Doug Polk - who both rose up by being great poker players. Basically nobodys talking about these recent big games other than a few Keating hero calls, which arent even that impressive considering he also makes wrong hero calls so he really just likes to press call.

Same with High Stakes Poker - when it was at its peak, its selling point was it was the best players like Ivey, Brunson, Esfandiari, and Hellmuth. They even brought Galfond and Mercier on there. Now, I'll condede the pros of 2000s had more personality than the pros of 2020, but it doesn't change the simple fact that poker has peaked in entertainment value when they brought players who were perceived as great players, not just donkeys flipping. Some donkeys are necessary to convince the pros to play, but I don't remember anyone gushing over how amazing Sam Simon was on old High Stakes Poker.

Most of the push for "we need action players cause thats the entertainment value" is actually the hosts of these games wanting soft games cause they sometimes play in them! Remember - Ryan Feldman is producer AND plays in these games.

If you just want to watch dumb people gambling, there's tons of slots and roulette vloggers. Just watch those.

Poker rose because, as they said in the movie Rounders, one of the key pieces of media that kicked off the Moneymaker boom: "Its a skill game Jo"

I'm not claiming I have definitive proof. It's just Occams razor.

Do people get rich off crypto and not talk about it? Sure, but none of the guys I know who got rich off crypto did that. Bitcoin rose in value precisely because its big hodlers constantly shilled it and told all their friends to buy and retweet Michael Saylor. Wesley from Hustler Casino Live is someone I believe got rich from crypto because his Twitter is mostly about crypto. Similarly, people who do angel investing or venture capital talk about their investments, because they want to promote those investments, because it helps them find dealflow, it gives them favorable terms on future investments, etc.

It's kinda just the "mythos" that someone just stumbles upon some early tech investment opportunity, randomly gives them $10k, and is set for life. In reality VC and angel investing are basically full time jobs and people who do full time jobs have some sort of record of doing them.

Sure, maybe he beat Justin Bieber for 50M in a home game, got in early on Shiba coin etc. I'm not saying its impossible. I also can't say for sure that Mike Postle didn't just have amazing reads on his opponent. I'm going with the obvious, simple explanation though.

Yeah much of this is pretty spot on, good post.

Lol @ this narrative that back in the Garrett days HCL was high level poker. It was one single guy curating lineups and letting players worse than himself play. Mostly huge fish, but some worse regs like Andy and Art. It was at best like the shitty latter seasons of HSP when it was just Antonio and other mediocre regs brown nosing billionaire recs.

The one time Garrett faced a lineup that was overall somewhat competent he did zilch except get schooled by Daniel Negreanu. If you still believe Garrett is some kind of cash game god youre deluded - by all means well played by Garrett and HCL to curate that image, too bad he was dumb enough to throw it all away over the punt of a mega whale.

Garrett made millions of dollars almost exclusively by playing poker. Maybe its not high level if we're talking the top-top of online pros but he's still in top 1% of players, easily. Its true its lame how Garrett pushed for ultra-soft lineups on the show and that does hurt his legacy , as well as his handling of j4, and maybe he's just elite and not elite-elite, but its still absurd to suggest he's not a high level player.

Nobody questions "where did Garrett get his money" cause they saw his ass playing mid-stakes to high-stakes every day in LA for 15 years. He was a high level successful poker pro. Thats why I want to watch him play poker. Same reason I'd rather watch Lebron play basketball for a match with no stakes, than Airball play Keating at basketball for a million dollars. Cause I just don't care to watch trust fund kids gamble at stuff they suck at.

Art is also an excellent player. This Garrett vs Art hand is still one of the best poker hands of the last decade:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=deskto...

In fact, its silly to pretend Art is bad while saying Garrett controlled the lineups, because Garrett controlling the lineups became a story precisely because he boxed out Art!

Its subjective because again we're talking about entertainment value. Its very obvious that some people find spewy punters entertaining and others enjoy watching a high level strategy game. But somehow, this idea that the majority of people want to watch punters and "action" became common place. Despite the vast majority of the most memorable cash game poker content being between top players, whether it was Dwan bluffing Ivey on High Stakes Poker or Andy Stacks 3betting Chris Brewer on the river bluff vs bluff.

I can not remember a _single_ interesting hand Airball played.

But, what hand did you bring up - Garrett vs Negreneau. Funny how, the hand you remember is the hand Garrett played against a hall of famer and a top 10 all time tournament winner. Now, Garrett and Airball played a ton of hands - whats the big interesting hand you remember between those two guys? Whats the hand between Keating and Airball that everyone talked about for a month? Somehow they've been playing at the same table non-stop for 2 years and I can't think of a single one.

Look, if HCL continues to grow, and crush the numbers, good for them. I predict the opposite cause when you focus on "action" and "bigger games" at some point, you can't go any higher, so there's a shelf life to the gimmick. And the action also gets so big you only get trust fund kids and Chinese whales who care so little its high stakes in terms of money but very low stakes in terms of impact to peoples lives. Garrett feeds his kids with poker money so if he loses there's real stakes. If Airball or Keating lose they'll just do more drugs and withdraw from the fund again, there's no stakes no matter how big the game is.

I do think _some_ stupidity is good for poker and Live at the Bike found the perfect balance but last two years somehow Airball and Keating became the faces of live cash and as a result televised live cash is the most boring its been in a decade.

I have no clue how Alan got his money, but I'm skeptical whenever someone cites the idea that dances around in their head the hardest and then says "Occam's Razor". That's not a logical argument.

Maybe he did get a massive inheritance but people have been speculating about this guy forever on the Internet and it seems highly unlikely to me that someone wouldn't be able to link to this supposed obituary from tycoon Keating and his grandson Alan, if such a thing existed.

If we are to make some sort of statistical argument, look at the "new rich young whales" in these high stakes poker games. Airball has likely always had access to large amounts of money, so we are talking about guys like Texas Mike, Aussie Matt, Wesley, etc. Most of them got their money from crypto, Texas Mike being more of an exception. Throw in Keating's gambly side, internal calmness and above average intelligence, and he even has the personality traits to have been a successful COVID-boom crypto shot taker, and as far as I can tell the timing fits perfectly too.

Also, I honestly don't understand the desire to see only good play. If you want to see the best players in the world play GTO-adjacent poker against each other, that's all good but there's already plenty of places to do that. The chaos introduced by the absurd punts is mainly what makes HCL entertaining to me.

Poker sports comparisons and analogies are almost always terrible and this is no different.
The NBA is extremely popular. People want to watch great athletes do great things. Watching Lebron do amazing things is entertaining. Watching Curry shoot the lights out is great. Watching high level poker for 99.9 percent of people is like watching paint dry. Watching a bunch of quiet tanking players trying to replicate slight variations of the same strategy is awful.
Early HSP was way better than watching high level players today even though today's players are better. Players played fast, had personalities and weren't all playing the same way. If you eliminated the shot clock, and when Lebron was surveying the court everyone had to freeze in place for several minutes while he figured out the exact optimal play nobody would watch.

As for rich crypto guys- I know several former cash grinders who got in super early. They never talk about it now and barely play anymore and when they do they throw a party for a few hours and go home. If I didn't play with them 10 or so years ago I'd have no idea today.

Some people like attention some don't. Some like bragging about how they made their money and some don't.

I don't know how Keating got his money and neither does anyone else in this thread.

Love how ppl continue to think aussie matt isn't a broke degen cuz one time on Party Montreal stream it was mentioned he had a ton of crypto. Hundreds of millions lol. Yet still can't pay off debts and is basically unseen in any televised or reported games in years.

I don't doubt you on that. I didn't do due diligence on Matt, just took his supposed backstory at face value as a sloppy data point. There's others that can take his place though. Taras from Live at the Bike, maybe Charles Yu? My only point was when people showed up out of nowhere flush with money after the crypto boom, it often (probably well over half the time) was due to crypto. Now if anyone wants to find anything on who Alan would've inherited money from then I would obviously believe that, but I think crypto is the more likely case.

Aussie Matt got in Eth at IPO. He made 600 million dude can lose a million every day and be fine.

Inheritance is one of most logical answers if it’s true he went from 5/10 to magically being at 1000/2000. I guess it could be crypto but I don’t there’s the meaningful distinction between the two.

The only time HCL was interesting to me was when Lindgren was on there as money was meaningful and he was going to try and play well. A good show has a variety of types.

The whole money isn't meaningful thing I don't buy. Why are some people upset over hit n runs (or perceived hit n runs).

Why can't they get people to buy in for a million dollars and had to change it to 500k?

A lot of the pros just sell action too, anyone being smart and not a complete degenerate shouldn't be shattered by losing a few buyins in any game they play.

For all we know Lindgren was able to sell most of his action (maybe he doesn't have the credibility for that but again who knows look at the lineup he is playing against)

Maybe he just realized he was a god awful poker player and he shouldn't waste all his money? Funny that someone would think the only reason anyone would quit poker is because they are broke.

If you pay off all your debts immediately then your going to keep getting invited back and keep losing more if you've got that degenerative gene in you.

600mil ain’t what it used to be

Keating has played like one session at hcl between last years million dollar game and this years

Taras created some computer game like Runescape or something like that. Minecraft. Cant recall the specific one

Found the Reddit sub MannerPlease referenced:

https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/s/0jGtt3t...

After finding the father’s obituary with Alan’s name, the father’s LinkedIn referencing the “Keating Network” company with 500+ connections, and the timeline just matching up too well for Alan to go straight from 5/10 to 100/200… it has me personally convinced from “probably not inheritance, more likely crypto” to “very likely inheritance, maybe also crypto”.

I’m sure hypothetically most of us shouldn’t care where the money came from… but subconsciously, we’d all like to wake up one day and suddenly be rich AF like him, so no surprise we’re curious.

I figured he didn't make his money from poker, calling raises with 84o, etc.