East Bay's Friedman takes WPT title
By Arnold Warner

With a few exceptions, Prahlad Friedman has generally avoided poker’s spotlight. Many of his biggest successes have occurred in the relative obscurity of live games played online. However, now that he’s added a World Poker Tour title to a resume that includes a WSOP bracelet and two deep runs in the Main Event, he’s finding the attention isn’t so bad after all.

On Aug. 26 Friedman was the last contestant remaining in the WPT’s Legends of Poker tournament at the Bicycle Casino in Bell Gardens, Calif. There were 279 entries creating a prize pool of $2,650,500 with Friedman taking the winner’s share of $1,009,000. This happened only a few weeks after he took 64th place (and $90,344) out of the 6,494 entries in the WSOP Main Event.

When asked how he managed to pull off the WPT victory, Friedman said, “I played some great poker. I thought I played really well. I didn’t make hardly any mistakes.”

On a more modest note, he acknowledged that good fortune had something to do with it too. “I definitely ran well,” he added, “which you really have to do to turn 30,000 in chips into 8,000,000. You kind of have to get lucky. When you have A-K and they have queens you’re going to have to win every now and then.”

As if to prove the point, he almost ­didn’t even make the TV final table of six players. “I almost TV bubbled cause I got it in with A-K versus kings and it looked like I was doomed, but the ace rolled off right on the flop to give him one out. So that was pretty lucky.”

When he got to heads up against Kevin Schaffel he had a big chip lead (6,675,000 to 1,780,000) but on the sixth hand Schaffel doubled up with two pair to make the stacks almost even. Then, 14 hands later, it was all over when Friedman had A-Q against Schaffel’s K-J.

“It’s funny, because I was talking to my buddies that were in the stands and when it got to heads up I said, ‘Hey man, an ace-jack and I’ll probably play for all the money.’ I had already decided,” Friedman stated. “That’s with all the information I had up to that time and how aggressive he was. He was pretty damn aggressive. He was raising a ton. It seemed like every time he was in the small blind he would raise my big blind. Every single time. And I would throw away a lot, but I noticed what he was doing and I had plans. You’ll see when you watch [on television]. I made quite a few bluffs where he’d raise from the small blind and I’d re-raise with a like a 9 high. So I was very patient for a while and I kept giving it to him and then, when there was a lot of money on the line, I started re-raising him. I had built up that image of giving it to him, giving it to him, giving it to him and so now when I re-raised he’s got to give me a little big more credit.

“But I was thinking A-J was probably good enough, but my buddies were like, ‘Nah, what about A-Q or something?’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know, A-J might be good enough. We’ll see.’ So now it comes to this spot where he raised to 300K and I figured A-Q was the best hand so I re-raised to 800,000 and then he moves all-in. And I thought about it for a while because maybe he’s got A-K. I wanted to think about it for a while, but then I was like, ‘He’s just a little too aggressive for my liking for me to fold this hand.’ And I decided to call.

“I’m just hoping he’ll show me an ace, other than A-K, and he shows K-J, so I was feeling good. I could easily have lost that hand, but I got it in a pretty good favorite and ace high held up. I never thought I’d win a million dollars with ace high!”

Friedman’s road to poker fame, cash and glory started in Denver, Colo. but by the sixth grade he had moved to El Cerrito in the East Bay. He lived there until his senior year of high school when, for reasons having mostly to do with basketball (he excelled at both hoops and track) he transferred to Nathan Hale High School in Seattle, Wash. After high school, he attended Highline Community College in Des Moines, Wash. where he was on a scholarship for track and cross country.

From there, he came back to the Bay to attend UC Berkeley where he majored in Ethnic Studies, but his track career was a Title IX casualty. It was around this time that he would go with his dad and, at only 19 or 20 years old, sneak into the San Pablo Casino and play $2/4 poker.

Once he didn’t have to sneak any more he started spending his spare time away from Berkeley at the Oaks Card Club. “I started playing at the Oaks because it was real close. Right there in Emeryville. When I first went there I was playing $3/6 limit Hold’em and I always seemed to come out of there with a couple of racks and, occasionally, a five-rack win. I was doing real well and reading all the poker books, as many as I could find.

“When I get into something I go nuts with it. I really get obsessed with things. I like to master whatever I try. I’ve gotten into ping pong and just sat there and played all day. I got into Scrabble where I’d go out and buy a two-letter-word book and try to memorize it. Whatever I get into I go nuts. Golf—Golf Channel all day, playing two rounds a day. That’s kind of how it was with poker. I really got into it.”

This was around 1999 and poker was treating Friedman quite well. “When you’re a college kid you’ve got no money and you win a hundred bucks and it’s huge. And I’d win a hundred or two each time I played it seemed like.

“Then I looked over at the $6/12 and thought, ‘Man, those guys are sharp.’ But I went ahead and gave it a try. I was pretty nervous but had a good first day and won a few hundred. Then I became a regular player in that game. Of course, I’m always eyeing the bigger game, looking over there’s a $15/30. It had some tough players in it, but I gave it a try and before you know it I’m playing $15/30 every day and having thousand dollar days, and then I’d even play with an overs button so it would be like $30/60 with whoever was in there.”

Always on scout for bigger games, he heard about the Lucky Chances Casino in Colma. “I went over to Lucky Chances and started playing $40/80 and started doing well there and then I heard about no-limit. Lucky Chances started a no-limit game and it was $10/10/20 blinds and it would go off about two or three days a week. I had some early success with that. I went broke a few times.

“I remember one time Huckleberry— Huck Seed—came to town. He was a friend of mine and he loaned me $5,000 and I ran it up to about $20,000 or $25,000 and gave it back to him. I did pretty well. I was beating everyone up with my aggressive overbetting style. I kind of picked that up from Huck. I’d never really saw people overbet the pot. A lot of people play no-limit and they play it like pot-limit Hold’em. They’d just bet 80 percent of the pot, stuff like that.

“But then I saw Huck. The pot would be $500 and he’d bet $2,000. I had never really seen that before. He had some unorthodox moves you could say, and I loved it. I kind of took that and really ran with it. I know he does it every now and then, but I kind of took that and used it a ton. I’d be overbetting with no hand so you get people to fold more often. If the flop comes 2-3-K and you make an overbet, usually the pocket 8s might fold right away, whereas if you make a regular bet they’ll usually call once. The overbet sometimes just gets it done. They’ll just lay down and if they come then you know they probably have a big hand. So I would mix it up with overbetting with nothing and also with the nuts. Obviously, because I can’t only overbet without anything because people would catch on.”

Because the no-limit action at Lucky Chances was only a couple days a week back then and he didn’t want to return to the lower limit games, Friedman decided to make the move to Las Vegas where he was assured the action he was looking for every day. Remember, the only Moneymaker we’d heard of at this point in time was as in “Shake your ….” The poker boom we would come to know and love was still a couple of years in the future. Meanwhile, no-limit games were hard to find even in Vegas, but the limit games got much bigger. Friedman started out there playing $80/160, but soon found himself in $100/200, $200/400, and $300/600 games as his bankroll grew.

“I remember the first time I played Stud 8-or-better was in a $400/800 game. So I would learn games on the fly. I had read books on the game, but never put it into practice. If you have good poker knowledge you can usually apply it to all the games,” Friedman said.

“No-limit has really been the biggest thing that’s happened to me in the game of poker,” he added, “but limit was cool and I made money in limit. I did well. But no-limit is just a lot higher skill. I’d say it’s about like chess compared to checkers or something like that. Limit being checkers. I basically got back into no-limit [playing] online because Vegas didn’t really have no-limit going anywhere. It was all mixed games, limit Hold’em and so online I started playing no-limit.”

Friedman may not have embraced the poker celebrity which has led some players to get treated like rock stars at live appearances, and he may eschew the endorsement opportunities that further enrich his peers, but he has nonetheless had his moments in the spotlight, by choice and by chance.

First there was his “Poker Is Fun” rap for ESPN. While he did it as a quickly tossed off “freestyle” just for the fun of it (and because the network asked him to), he has received both praise and scorn for the effort. “I think everyone can admit, even though a lot of people would say ‘I’m not into it’ or whatever, that people like being on TV—their family gets to watch it. So I’m going to admit I don’t mind being on TV because its fun. You know, your mom watches, your cousins watch, everyone’s watching and I love to see someone I know on TV. It’s kind of fun. So when I got on there I thought it was pretty cool. I’ve always loved to rap and I write raps and I make beats and I produce hip hop music of my own.

“So they said, ‘What are some of your interests?’ and I said I like to freestyle, I like to write, I like to do this, and they were like, ‘Oh, you want to kick something?’ and I was like, ‘sure, why not? That’d be fun.’ So I just did a little freestyle. Of course, some people thought it was wack or whatever they want to say.”

Then there was the “Lisandro Incident” which began with a pot short one ante and escalated into a virtual death threat. They were deep into the 2006 WSOP Main Event and it was unclear who hadn’t put in the 5,000 chip ante for the upcoming hand. Friedman and Jeffrey Lisandro then got into but good and kept going round and round until things reached the boiling point. Looking back, Friedman wishes the whole thing would just go away. “I’m sure the guy doesn’t like me that much, but I’m not hatin’ on him. I mean, he threatened my life or whatever on national television, but he was in the heat of the moment. It’s something that I’d kind of like to just move past.”

Friedman continued, “I’ve said before I wasn’t 100 percent sure who put the ante in and all I wanted them to do was check the cameras. It was a TV table, they had cameras everywhere. Why don’t we just run it back, it’ll take like 20 seconds, let’s see who put the ante in. What happened is, they refused to check the cameras. They said they wouldn’t and I didn’t understand that. And so I always try to do the right thing, and I thought I was trying to do the right thing and can we just check?

“I thought it was like 60 to 70 percent that he didn’t put it in. Of course, you see the replay—I was wrong. So it makes me look kind of bad and why was I raising such a fuss, and then he ended up being the one who put it in. But what it is, is I have a good ability to read people and I knew that he didn’t know that he put it in, but he was talking … he wasn’t sure if he put it in or not.

“So I kind of wanted them to check the cameras and then we kind of egged each other back and forth because he said he was getting upset and I said ‘What if this kid got robbed for 5,000? Can’t we just check the cameras?’ I didn’t mean it the way he thought like, ‘Oh, you’re a thief. You intentionally stole the 5,000.’ And then he got so pissed off and started getting crazy with me that I kind of retaliated by saying like, ‘I don’t trust you, sir,’ and all that stuff.

“It got nutty but I guess it was good for television, but I’d like to forget about it. And it gets a little tiring when I sit at a table and someone makes a stupid joke like, ‘Oh, did you put your ante in?’ It gets a little old. And they bug him about it too. He has to go through the nonsense.

“But I did see him at the World Series [this year] and I gave him a smile and said ‘Hey, no hard feelings,’ or whatever and he kind of smiled back. I’m sure he doesn’t want to go and hang out with me anytime soon, but I don’t think any teeth will be getting knocked out. We’re both poker players. We take poker seriously, so that’s our main concern I think, is to make a living and do well in poker rather than this drama.”

After a couple of years in Las Vegas, Friedman and fellow poker player Dee Luong (to whom he was then engaged and now married) left for a return to the Bay Area where Friedman planned to resume his college career. Online poker continued to dominate his schedule though, and he never did make it back to classes at UC Berkeley. Instead, after a short time the two of them relocated once again, this time to Southern California, where they continue to reside.