"Tell these Aussies not to leave me carrying the flag by myself, my shoulder hurts." This was Ivan Zalac, from Sydney, who has made a bit of a name for himself over the past couple of years as a regular on the poker circuit Down Under. He was talking to a reporter from Australia, who has seen Zalac at just about every major tournament in the region.
Zalac sits today beneath a black PokerStars cap, on which he also has a PokerStars patch, with a grey WSOP-AP hoodie hanging off the back of his chair and an Aussie Millions sticker stuck to the back of his phone. There's no doubting how Zalac spends most of his time (playing poker), nor in which continent he does it.
He has been steadily amassing chips through each of the first ten levels of play in Macau, even after many of his countrymen have been heading out of the door. Zalac is now up to about 125,000 and cruising -- but he's been here before. At the APPT event in Cebu in May last year, Zalac was chip leader at the end of day one. But he would bust before the money, taking home only a min-cash from a side event, when the trip promised much more.
Indeed, he had led that tournament from the very first hand, when he eliminated and opponent and never looked back. But that was, he said today, not the way he likes to go about things. He prefers the slow and steady accumulation, which has helped him to master his chosen game.
"I'm an online satellite specialist," Zalac said. "I play them all: the $33x, the $320, the $520...I started as a dumb amateur, but I think I'm top ten on the ANZPT now."
Didier Guerin, one of Zalac's countrymen, confirmed Zalac's amazing skills as a crusher of satellite tournaments. "I asked him if he'd qualified for Queenstown (an ANZPT event) and he said he'd already won, like, 20 packages. Then I told him once that they'd started running sats to Sydney and he said he'd won eight already."
Zalac only started playing poker seriously about four or five years ago, before which he worked as an IT specialist in the pet industry. It was a relatively late conversion to a game most associated these days with young whizzes. He is in his mid 40s, is married and has three "great kids" aged 18, 16 and 13, but he now lives the life of the poker professional, hammering the online tables when he is at home and travelling the circuit, mostly alone.
"They like the perks," he said of his children. "My oldest daughter came here to Macau last time."
Zalac clearly has the game to make a significantly bigger score than his current stats suggest. Although his live recorded tournament cashes total a relatively meagre $64,470, he has made seven final tables at either APPT or ANZPT stops, in both Omaha and hold 'em events. And he is back at it here this week, having qualified online again, of course.
"When some of the regs found out my screen-name, they were surprised it was this middle-aged guy grinding the sats and not some young internet punk," Zalac said.
But once this "dumb amateur" has the breakthrough performance he is surely due, the word is sure to spread fast.
A reminder on how to follow our coverage from Macau. There is hand-by-hand coverage at the top of the main APPT Macau page, which includes chip counts. Feature coverage will filter in beneath the panel. All the information about the Asia Pacific Poker Tour is on the APPT site, and PokerStars Macau also has its own home.