– General Information –
Garrett Adelstein is an American professional poker player. He was born on May 16th, 1986 in Tucson, AZ. He’s also appeared on the American reality TV show Survivor: Cagayan – the same show another famous poker, Jean-Robert Bellande was a cast member of.
As a poker player, most people know Adelstein from the Live at the Bike live streams. LABT streams mid-to-high stakes live cash games on their website and Twitch from the Bicycle Casino in Bell Gardens, CA. Not only is Adelstein a big winner in these games, but he also draws attention with his aggressive and creative play style.
– Key Career Dates –
- 2005: He starts playing high stakes shorthanded NLHE cash games online for a living.
- 2013: He appears on CBC’s reality TV show Survivor: Cagayan.
- 2016: He comes in 143rd in the $10,000 WSOP Main Event for $49,108. That is his biggest single live tournament cash to date.
- 2017: He starts appearing on the live streamed cash games of Live at the Bike.
– Garrett Adelstein’s Career –
→ Beginnings ←
Adelstein excelled as a student in both high school and college. According to his Survivor cast bio, he was the valedictorian of his high school class of over 500 students and graduated Summa Cum Laude with Honors from the University of Arizona.
As for poker, he stated in a 2014 interview that he got into poker thanks to the Moneymaker effect. In 2003, a simple accountant from New Jersey took down the biggest poker tournament in the world for $2.5 million. His story captivated America, and as a result, millions started playing poker across the country. Traffic on poker sites tripled. Young Garrett Adelstein was one of the many players who fell in love with the game of poker during the Moneymaker boom.
By 2005, he was playing high stakes shorthanded cash games professionally – this is what his profile on the Run It Once website states. He transitioned to heads-up play with time. After the infamous Black Friday events in 2011, he started focusing on live cash games.
→ Live Tournaments ←
And Adelstein has been focusing on live cash games ever since. So much so that his Hendon page shows only 4 cashes from an 8-year period, from 2008 to 2016. Three of them are from the World Series of Poker.
Those 4 cashes put Adelstein’s lifetime live tournament earnings at $171,875, modest by professional poker’s standards.
His only cash outside the WSOP is from the 2008 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. He played the $8,000 NLHE event in the Bahamas, and finished 24th out of a field of 1,136 players for $48,000.
→ World Series Of Poker ←
Adelstein hasn’t won any WSOP gold bracelets yet. He has a total of 3 cashes for a combined $123,875.
He has two ITM finishes from the biggest poker tournament each year, the WSOP Main Event. He finished 143rd in 2016, the year Qui Nguyen won. That year the Main had 6,737 entries. Adelstein got $49,108 for his performance, which is the biggest live tournament cash of his career.
In 2010, he finished 222nd in the Main Event. That time, the field was considerably larger – 7,319 players entered the $10K championship – so even though he busted almost 100 positions earlier, he got almost the same amount of money as he did in 2016, $48,847. In addition, he came in 25th in the $5,000 Triple Chance No Limit Hold’em event for $25,919.
→ Live Cash Games ←
Garrett Adelstein is best known for playing on Live at the Bike’s live streamed cash games. He’s been playing there since 2017. Over time, he became a fan favorite thanks to his lively table presence, frequent wins, and ambitious plays.
Over the years he’s played many memorable hands in front of the LATB cameras. Here are a few.
In September 2017, he called a $7,600 river bet with nothing but Ace high. That hero call of his, quite astonishingly, happened to be correct.
We’ve also seen an extreme river decision from him from the other end of the spectrum, an insanely tight fold. Adelstein made the second nut straight on the turn against his opponent’s nut straight. With no flushes or boats on the board, he still managed to lay it down on the river. Doug Polk made a video about the analysis of his play in that hand.
To show that even Garrett Adelstein is human at the poker table, here’s a clip of him folding the best hand on the last street in an over $100K pot.
Also in 2017, he appeared on PokerGO’s revived version of Poker After Dark. He played a session of $200/$400 NLHE with a $100,000 minimum buy-in.
He got dealt Aces over Matt Berkey’s Kings pre-flop in a hand during that session. Even though there was a King on the flop, Adelstein was lucky enough to turn an Ace and so a $400,000 pot went his way.
Aces, kings, and an ice cold runout build a $400K pot when @GarrettAdelstei & @berkey11 collide on #PokerAfterDarkhttps://t.co/TeDeb5Xmhx pic.twitter.com/UJKXucHZip
— PokerGO (@PokerGO) November 21, 2017
→ Online Poker ←
Adelstein played under the screen name G-Man on PokerStars and other online poker rooms. Unfortunately, none of the websites preserved his results, neither cash games nor MTT’s. We know from his Run It Once bio cited above that he mainly played high stakes short-handed and heads-up cash games.
→ On the Show Survivor ←
Garett Adelstein appeared on the 28th season of the reality show Survivor. That season aired on the American network CBS between February and May 2014.
The show was filmed in the province of Cagayan in the Philippines. Three “tribes” of cast members competed in a wide variety of physical and mental challenges. Each week, a player got voted off by the audience. Adelstein was sent home in the second week.
He wasn’t the only poker player in the show’s history. American cash game pro Jean-Robert Bellande was also a contestant on a previous season. Meanwhile Maria Ho appeared on a very similar reality show called The Amazing Race.
→ Sponsorship ←
Adelstein started creating poker strategy content for the website DeucesCracked. In 2014, he moved to Phil Galfond’s poker coaching site Run It Once. Although he’s still listed as a coach, he hasn’t produced any content for the site since October 2014.
→ Scandals ←
His appearance on Joe Ingram’s podcast
This could be hardly considered a genuine scandal. However, it is quite remarkable how openly he talked about his very personal struggles with depression on Joe Ingram’s podcast.
He was the guest for the second time on the Poker Life Podcast in April 2019. Even though Adelstein’s life seems glamorous to most from the outside, he too had to struggle with mental health problems. At times he didn’t leave his apartment for weeks.
His depression even took a toll on his poker game.
“One thing that a lot of people who are depressed suffer from is perfectionism. So, for me, if I were to play poker poorly one day, if I were to skip a day in the gym, I would have this mindset where I go ‘everything is fucked’. The house is on fire. Like, nothing’s worth doing anymore ‘cause I’m no longer perfect, right? So that would lead me to, whatever, not play poker or play poker poorly” – Adelstein told Ingram and his audience.
Luckily, he also said in the interview that through therapy his mental state improved significantly.
2018 has been the best year of my life. After a lifelong battle with depression, this was the year I dedicated myself fully to beating it (CBT❤️), finding a level of peace I couldn’t imagine previously. For those of you fighting the same battle, you are not alone. Keep fighting!
— Garrett Adelstein (@GmanPoker) December 30, 2018
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