This is the first part of the interview, in which we talk about Ben’s early years, his adulthood and time in college and how he got into poker.
The second part of the interview, in which we talk about his trading years, his transition back to chess teaching, about Perpetual Chess Podcast and his family, is available here.
Introduction
Even though the chess world has been full of chess playing websites, book reading apps, computer engines, youtube channels and mediocre blogs 1 from the start of the digital era, for a long time it was severy lacking in the area of podcasts.
Apart from the Full English Breakfast 2, at the end of 2016, there wasn’t a single one out there. This gap was recognized by a former Poker player, trader and nowadays a chess teacher from New Jersey: Ben Johnson.
In December 2016, a first episode of the new Perpetual Chess Podcast was aired and as they say, the rest is history. 131 episodes and 195 patrons later, 3 The Perpetual Chess Podcast has gained a lot of recognition, and won the hearts of chess players worldwide by allowing them insight into the lives and minds of world best chess players, authors and promoters of the game.
A couple of weeks ago, I contacted Ben on a completely unrelated note. 4 The mail exchange was extremely pleasant, Ben indeed turned out to be the nice guy he seemed to be in his podcasts. So I ventured to ask him if he would be like to be the man on the other side of the microphone for a change and do an interview for Chessentials.
I am incredibly thankful to him for this. Even though I overdid it with the number of questions 5, Ben answered every single one of them – in great detail.
I am very happy he did so – I find his life story fascinating and inspiring. I think there is a lot to learn about chess, life, poker, business and being a decent human being, in general.
Hope you guys will enjoy it as much as I did.
Ben Johnson as a Kid
Q: Hi Ben! It is a pleasure and honor to have you on Chessentials. Since you have a very rich and versatile biography, there is a lot I want to ask you. But since this is a chess blog and you are a chess podcaster, it probably makes sense to start with chess-related questions. Can you tell me when and how you learned to play the game?
A: Thanks for thinking of me, Vjeko! As I mentioned to you via email, I am not sure if anyone will care about my background, but I will spell it all out here just in case.
I was introduced to chess by a family friend at the age of 6, I was immediately taken by it, but back in the stone ages I was one of those people who did not know at that time that chess books and tournaments existed, so I was not exposed to the game again for a long time.
Q: How long did it take you to start playing it „seriously“? How did that happen?
A: At the age of 12 I rediscovered the game when some kids from the just-forming school chess club were playing at lunchtime in the cafeteria. A friend and I approached them, joined the club, and the rest, as they say, is history.
That program – the Masterman Chess Club in Philadelphia PA – went on to win many US Scholastic team championships, with several master level player graduates, along with its most well- known chess alumni, my good friends IM Greg Shahade and WIM Jenn Shahade.
Q: Okay, now I understand why Greg was the very first guest of the podcast and why you announced that you sometimes have great guests, but sometimes you also have Greg during his latest (third) appearance. 😀
Anyway – 12 is a “relatively” late age to start playing chess 6, in terms of becoming a World Champion or professional. I can easily imagine a kid losing motivation after being beaten by his peers who have had a head start.
Was this the case with you? Could you already feel a marked difference of level between Greg (and/or other 12-year olds) and yourself? Did you ever get discouraged?
A: I agree that it feels like a late start these days, but that was less the case back then. In my later teenage years, I would often be on the bottom half of the US Chess “Top 50” (now top 100) lists for my age, so at that time I occasionally regretted having not started playing chess earlier, but mainly I was happy to be enjoying a new hobby.
As for feeling discouraged, I have always thought it was a good thing for me to encounter someone with more chess talent early in life, as it kept me motivated and kept me humble. I think this was particularly helpful when I became a poker pro, as I will likely detail later.
Q: In the end, you not only stuck to chess, but became a fairly decent player. According to your About page on Perpetual Chess Academy, you earned the title of the USCF National Chess Master and reached peak USCF rating of 2279 in 1995 – when you were 18. Considering your late start, it sounds like a great achievement.
Can you briefly take us through that journey? How serious was your approach to the game? Did you have a training routine? How often did you play? How did you balance chess with school obligations and… you know.. having a childhood?
A: During those years I loved chess and spent a good amount of time on it, but I would not say it was an unhealthy amount. The Masterman Chess Club had afterschool chess club twice a week, and I probably averaged playing two tournaments a month. I never had a personal coach, although Mike Shahade (Greg and Jenn’s dad, who is a US Chess Senior Master), certainly helped me out along the way. On my own, I studied maybe 5 hours a week on average, but I did it because I enjoyed it, not because anyone was pushing me, or because of any sort of driving ambition or goal.
Ben Johnson as a College Student
Q: Considering the circumstances, it is reasonable to guess why it was your peak. If I calculated correctly, 7 not long after you achieved your personal best, it was time to go to college.
First thing I would like to ask – in one of the episodes with Greg, you „cursed“ him because he got a chess scholarship for which you also applied. Since such things don’t exist in Croatia, could you explain what exactly it was about?
Did you already back then want to try for a chess career? Or was it more of a „that-sounds-nice-me-like-it“ decision?
A: Wow Vjeko, you really did your homework!
So, to clarify, Greg received two different distinctions in a span of a few years:
- A scholarship to University of Maryland-Baltimore County (UMBC) in 1996- at the time UMBC was one of the only schools giving full scholarships to strong chess players. Greg was a year lower than me in school, so that did not factor into my college decision, and going to UMBC was not something I seriously considered. I really enjoyed my college experience at Pomona College.
- A few years later, in 1999, Greg also won a very prestigious award called The Samford Fellowship. This fellowship gives money to the top young American chess player each year to pursue chess professionally. This is the one I was jealous of! However, let it be noted I was not jealous in the sense that I thought I deserved the award- I was 300 points lower rated than Greg and by now had long been his whipping boy in blitz matches. There were dozens of kids more qualified to receive this award than me, and I had no illusions about that.
What I was jealous of the lifestyle that the Samford afforded Greg- he had quit UMBC about a year after starting, and the Samford enabled him to not work, sleep in every day, play and study chess, etc. To a 20-year-old racking up student loans this lifestyle sounded pretty good!
Q: In the end, you chose Pomona College where you graduated in Russian and History. How exactly did you choose those particular majors at that particular college?
A: I chose Pomona College, as it was the most prestigious and appealing school that I was admitted to. Believe it or not, I also had vague ambitions of playing college baseball. Once I got there though, I quickly realized that I wasn’t even good enough at baseball to make their team.
California is quite far from Philadelphia, and I liked the idea of “striking out on my own.“ As for my majors, politics was a subject that always interested me in an academic sense. I started studying Russian because I often heard it spoken at chess tournaments. I used to joke (sort of joke) that I wanted to be able to make sure my opponents weren’t cheating when they conversed in Russian during my chess games.
Q: How did chess fare during your study years? I recall you mentioning in one of the episodes you didn’t work seriously on chess after the age of 18. Is that correct?
A: My chess fell by the wayside pretty quickly. I couldn’t afford a car in college and thus couldn’t really get to any tournaments. Without competing I didn’t have much desire to study chess, so I played blitz when I could, and played a few tournaments a year, but I didn’t spend nearly as much time on chess all in all.
Q: One of my favourite episodes of the Perpetual Chess Podcast is the episode nr. 42, featuring notable entrepreneur and anti-college advocate James Altucher. Although I don’t agree with him about everything and am not the biggest fan of his marketing methods, I learned a lot from his blog and books.
Considering you ended up doing something completely unrelated to your studies I am really curious about how you look back at your college years today. Where do you stand in the whole „College is not worth it“ debate?
A: Yes, I really enjoyed the James Altucher interview as well! I also do not agree with him on everything, but I am sympathetic to the arguments he makes about the cost-effectiveness of college. I think that the R.O.I on elite institutions is still decent despite the hefty tuition, but I think it would be an economic mistake to borrow $50K a year to study the humanities at an average university. As a parent, I think about these questions a lot, and I hope that the structure of American universities is changed in some way before my kids reach college age. Hopefully, you have a better system in Croatia! 8
Ben Johnson as a Young Adult
Q: In any case, time flew by, the „finish college“ mark was checked and adulthood knocked on the door. According to the About page on Perpetual Chess Podcast (you seem to have a lot of them :P), you said you worked two years after college in an office job. What kind of job it was?
A: After university, I took a job as a Legal Assistant/Paralegal in New York with the intention of going to Law School. Basically, my work entailed getting various documents for lawyers and sometimes scanning them for particular words, etc. The work was boring, but New York was fun.
Q: Where did this sudden transition to the law come from? Did you even try to find a job within your field of expertise (Russian/History)?
A: Not especially. Here in the US, it was fairly common to just pick a field of general interest within “the humanities” in University and then pursue a general job once graduating. I selected subjects to major in because one must pick a major, but I never felt like I had a clear sense of what my professional ambitions were. For such kids considering a career in law is fairly common, and my mom is a lawyer, so it was always a possibility in my mind.
Q: You mentioned the work in the office was boring. How fast did you figure out that the traditional 9-5 work might not be for you?
A: My decision not to work 9-5 that came about through trial and error.
After I finished working as a Legal Assistant/Paralegal I decided to apply for law schools despite seeing a lot of unhappy lawyers at my law office. I felt like I didn’t know what else to do. While applying to law schools, I decided to teach chess for a year for Chess in the Schools.
Working at Chess in the Schools was when I became good friends with Mike Klein, (of chess.com and chesskid.com) as well- we were friendly from the US Chess Scholastic circuit, but started work at CIS the same year and ultimately became good friends and were roommates for 2 years.
Once I was teaching chess I realized I enjoyed it much more than office work, and fairly quickly decided not to pursue a career in law.
I should mention that during these years, I also had been playing poker by this point for a few years. Me and a few other chess players, including Greg Shahade, IM elect Donny Ariel and our friend Yakov Hirsch, who is a USCF expert, all became immersed in poker together and began to make money as poker became increasingly popular and lucrative. In my mind, my nascent success in poker was another reason to freelance as a chess teacher rather than immerse myself in the rigors of law school or a more traditional 9-5, as it allowed me more time to play poker and see what came of it.
Ben Johnson as a Poker Player
Q: Ah yes. Poker! Everyone listening to your podcast has heard you mentioning it and discussing it on air. 9
Can you tell us when did you start playing poker? How did you come into contact with the game?
A: Yes, those who have been with Perpetual Chess from the beginning may have heard more poker mentions than they desired! I hope that I have gotten better at “sticking to chess“, or at least avoiding a lot of poker talk on the podcast as time has gone on.
I had discovered the world of poker via the movie Rounders in 1999 and ordered my first poker book a few days after seeing it.
As I mentioned above – I soon started playing it together with some other chess players. And earning some money.
Q: It sounds to me you started doing it as a hobby first. When did you realize it might become a career?
A: I was playing poker as a hobby while working from 1999 to 2003. Although it was a hobby, I developed an ambition quite quickly of playing it for a living. In 2003 I started to have a lot of success playing poker, both in tournaments (which there is sort of a record of) and in online “cash games” which basically are buy in with what you want and leave with what you want. You also aren’t tracked publicly. You can sort of trace the timeline of my poker career by seeing my tournament record here. I also “multi-tabled” online, and was pretty successful with that as well.
(Note that although these are big numbers, they are “net winnings” and don’t reflect all the tournaments someone buys into and doesn’t make money in. Despite the buyins, overall I was doing very well in tournaments though. )
My first “big score” was in September of 2003, the beginning of the school year. The Borgata Poker Open for $11,000. That was the tournament that allowed me to finish paying off my student loan debts, and I continued to have success in cash games from there. So I finished out that school year from 2003-2004 as a chess teacher, then transitioned to playing poker full time in June 2004 by which point, I had a couple of even bigger tournament scores, including winning $80,000 for coming in 36th place in the Main Event of the World Series of Poker in 2004.
Looking back now, the money I was winning is hard to fathom, as I work pretty hard to earn a normal wage here in 2019, but at that time there was just a ton of money flowing into poker, and if you read some books, had good emotional control and had some luck you could have results like I did, without being a poker genius.
Today, that is not the case!
Q: Yes, I have heard several times that the “Golden Era Of Poker” is behind us. Can you elaborate for the uninitiated? What made the difference?
A: A confluence of events led to an explosion in the popularity of poker. Probably the biggest factor was that a “hole-card camera” was invented that let people watch broadcasts of poker and see the players cards. This made everyone think they could be poker champions too, so lots of people tried poker online and at casinos. As a result, games were extremely profitable in the 2000s, as it turned out most people weren’t so good! 😉 Once new “fish” stopped entering the pond, the fights for the old ones got more intense, and it became harder to make good money.
Q: Poker also started gaining more prominence… of authorities. We all know the example of Francisco Vallejo Pons 10. There were other events. For instance, 2011 is also when the US government unexpectedly shut down the biggest online poker sites, known to poker players as “Black Friday”.
In a previous interview, Polish FM Kamil Plichta – who also makes a living out of poker, told me his parents weren’t satisfied with him “devoting time to that stupid card game”. How did your parents react when you told them :D?
A: My mom would have agreed with Kamil’s parents! In her defense, she had seen me come up on the short side of a few gambling encounters with chess hustlers in my teens, so I think her suspicion was warranted. My success at poker ultimately sort of won my mom over, but she has a bit of hippie-ness in her heart, so even when I was making a lot of money playing poker I think she would have preferred I be a broke poet rather than a rich poker player.
Like most parents, she mainly wanted me to be happy though.
On the other hand, my dad is an optimist by nature, and an avid sports fan, so to him the idea of competing to make money was one he could get behind right away, and he was my biggest fan when I was competing in tournaments regularly.
Q: You are definitely not the first chess player who fell in love with this particular card game. You already mentioned some names. There are other renowned examples, such as Jen Shahade or James Altucher. Even some world class player, like Hikaru Nakamura, Peter Svidler, afore-mentioned Francisco-Vallejo Pons or Alexander Grischuk have played it. Or still do.
In the podcast, you also mentioned several world-class poker players who have achieved 2200-2300 levels in chess.
I also know two lesser-known examples: Croatian IM Goran Djurović and the above-mentioned Chessentials guest Kamil Plichta.
Is there a reason why so many chess players get involved with poker? Can you reveal the secret behind this connection between two games that seemingly have nothing in common?
A: I think the mentality that chess instills is perfect for poker. In chess when you lose, you must honestly assess what you did wrong. There is invariably lots of study involved.
In poker, there is so much variance that one can avoid that question and blame luck if so inclined. Chess players generally are willing to look past the variance and “take responsibility for their results,“ and that goes a long way in poker.
The other thing is that chess has often attracted a type of person that is not interested in conventional academic pursuits and conventional jobs. Since seemingly every chess player knows another chess player who has become a poker pro it is a natural avenue to explore if one is seeking to avoid real life 😉
Q: Have you ever met some of the chess greats in a poker hall? Does your friendship with Jan Gustafsson stem from there? 11
A: I have played poker with one of the original chess to poker cross over heroes, Dan Harrington, who reached about 2400 USCF and has had great success as a poker tournament player and author. Similarly, I am old friends with FM Ylon Schwartz, who is a chess lifer who made 2 million + in the World Series of Poker Main Event one year. I have not played poker with any true chess legends, like Hikaru, though.
As for Jan, I knew him through Greg Shahade before any of us were into poker, but our time as poker pros overlapped. Following my biggest poker tournament success, in Baden, Austria in 2006, I and another friend went to Hamburg to see the city and visit Jan. We had a good time.
Q: How is the process of improving at poker similar to the process of improving at chess? What does the poker training routine consist of?
A: Well is has changed a lot since my heyday. Back then, the 3 ways to improve were:
- Read books
- Study with computers. Programs like Pokertracker collected all of the hands you played online and helped you figure out in what situations you were making money and in which you were leaking it
- Talk over hands with other players
These days those things still apply, but there has also been an explosion in “poker solvers,“ something Jen Shahade talked about on Perpetual Chess, and that she discusses in her fun new poker podcast, The Grid. I still play a bit of poker, but I have not had the time or inclination to keep up with this amazing technology, instead, I try to learn from those who make videos synthesizing the information.
Q: As the old saying goes – all good things come to an end. In 2011, you said farewell to professional poker after 7 years. Can you tell us why?
A: As I explained above, it became more difficult. After some great years making 6 figure income, my earnings were slowing down significantly. I wasn’t working as hard on my game as I needed to be. I was also tired of traveling to casinos for tournaments and wasn’t particularly interested in traveling/moving just to chase the best games, which was becoming increasingly necessary.
Plus I had gotten quite interested in financial markets and trading starting in 2008 during the financial crisis.
After the “Black Friday”. I decided to focus on trading stocks- something I ultimately devoted 5 years to.
Q: Oh, I didn’t realize you were trading for so long. I think in the episode with Altucher you said that you weren’t that successful (as in – say – poker) and that you were “somewhere around zero” in total. Is that true?
A: Well, if you consider opportunity cost and cost of living trading was not even a break-even endeavor for me. I devoted years to studying, practicing and journaling trading, and I am proud of the approach I took despite a lack of success.
Q: How come you decided for day trading? I have done some investing on the side myself and literally, every book, from Benjamin Graham’s Intelligent Investor to A Random Walk Down Wall Street advised against it and recommended buy and hold instead.
With hindsight, which trading strategy would you recommend to a young investor?
A: I tried every trading/investing approach under the sun, and ultimately was drawn to day trading futures markets. I liked the combination of data analysis and pattern recognition that it required similar to poker. Based on my experience, I cannot argue with those who argue against it. I would guess that 1% of people that attempt to day trade find a way to consistently generate income, and I was not amongst that 1%.
With hindsight, I would not recommend any trading strategy to a young investor. Passive investing is the way to go. Even the “value investing” espoused by Benjamin Graham is having a tough go of late, as value investing is now taught in every business school in the world. If you are looking for an edge in a market the financial markets are about the last place I would look! Sorry to be so cynical, but this is also the advice that I heard and read as well before I ignored it and insisted on going and making my own mistakes! 😉
Links where you can find more about Ben
Perpetual Chess Podcast Website
Perpetual Chess Podcast Patreon
Perpetual Chess Podcast on Apple Tunes
Perpetual Chess Podcast Facebook Group
This is the first part of the interview, in which we talk about Ben’s early years, his adulthood and time in college and how he got into poker.
The second part of the interview, in which we talk about his trading years, his transition back to chess teaching, about Perpetual Chess Podcast and his family, is available here.
- As every regular visitor of Chessentials can testify
- Which went into hiatus in 2017
- At the moment of writing
- Which had nothing to do with me self-inviting myself to be a guest on his Podcast. I swear
- As you will note, the interview is rather lengthy
- Or anything else, for that matter
- Which is not something I often do – VN
- I am not sure – I have written an entire “anti-college” article. Although it is true that education in Croatia is free – VN
- Almost. Every. Episode. Sometimes I am not sure if I am listening to chess or poker podcast :D
- For those of you who don’t know the story, Paco Vallejo essentially played a bit in 2011 and then in 2016 got a huge six-figure tax receipt from the Spanish authorities
- Jan has been a guest on Perpetual Chess three times already. The warm relation between him and Ben is especially apparent in his third appearance