The beautiful thing about poker is that everybody thinks they can play.
If you're a poker player and you show up at a casino at 8 a.m., you're going to be by yourself or with some people that are rocks and just don't give you any action.
Not having the online game has made it more difficult. There are a lot of young and upcoming players in poker. But you don't get to see them because TV has sort of been taken away.
The competition has improved tremendously. In 2003, I could teach a guy how to play poker in an hour and he could win some money. Today, it would take days. The game has gotten so much tougher. So I will spend my time with my family and play when I can.
When I had a full-time job, I really wasn't that busy, but now I'm really busy. I guess that's a good thing.
But I want people to understand that poker's not all glamorous, it's not all being on TV and making tons of money. It's a hard life. It's a lot of travel. It's a lot of weird hours.
I used to sports gamble a lot and I was getting killed on that but then I found poker and really enjoyed it. But it was a hobby more than anything else. I played it every day but only on pretty small stakes.
My favourite movie right now is probably 'Hitch', a Will Smith thing.
If you want to make money and have action, you need to work from like, 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Those are the hours. That just doesn't fit with a lot of people's schedules. And that's just the start of it. You've got to realize what you are getting into.
Although I have to say, it's become a lot harder for me since I won the world series because everyone wants to beat me. For example, bluffing is really tough now, because there's always someone who calls me on the off-chance that they'll then be able to say they read a world champion's bluff.