Alec Torelli is 36 years old now, but he vividly remembers being 16 years old and enamored by in the ESPN coverage of Chris Moneymaker’s WSOP Main Event win.
“I was like, that’s what I want to do with my life. That’s where I want to be, with these players that are here at the WSOP competing for the Main Event bracelet,” Torelli said.
Torelli has spent most of his poker career focused on playing cash games, so his Hendon Mob profile isn’t busting with big tournament results. The last time he cashed in a live poker tournament, Barack Obama was the President of the United States of America, Stranger Things, Westworld and The Crown hadn’t aired their first episode, and everybody was on the verge of obsessing over Pokemon GO.
“I don’t really play that many tournaments because for me, there’s only one tournament that is important,” Torelli said. “I think about the 16 year old me that always wanted to grow up playing poker and my one poker dream that I haven’t accomplished is winning the Main. I don’t have any desire to win a $3K side event. It’s just not meaningful to me. So I haven’t played any tournaments other than this one.”
Now he’s one of 21 players on dinner break on Day 7 who are still in contention for the 2023 WSOP Main Event title, and the bracelet that goes with it. He started play on Thursday with the sixth biggest stack and has survived through the opening three levels of the day. His first WSOP Main Event cash is going to be massive, as he’s already guaranteed $345,000.
“Frankly, in my life, I haven’t played the Main Event as often as I thought I would, because I was in Macau playing high stakes poker. I was there instead of playing the Main so I just haven’t had as many at-bats as I wanted to,” Torelli said. “But I also felt like I wasn’t quite ready to be, you know, Main Event champion. I wasn’t at the point in my life where I thought it was mature enough to be able to make this kind of run and have the emotional control to ride through a [10]-day tournament.”
In the months leading up the 2023 WSOP, Torelli started preparing himself specifically for the Main Event. This included upping his physical fitness regimen, which resulted in him dropping 10 pounds. The Las Vegas resident believes that being physically fit helps with the mental side of the game.
“If you can really master yourself and like push yourself to work very hard in the gym. You kind of build this like mental fortitude that is very important for tournament poker, because there’s a lot of these ups and downs,” Torelli said. “So it was really important to me to have my mindset be as strong as possible, because I knew I came here and play 10 days in a row, you know, one mistake, and I’m out of this tournament.”
It might have been the Moneymaker win that first caught his attention and led him to a career as a poker pro, but once he started reading and learning as much as he could about poker, he became enamored with another player – Doyle Brunson, who won this tournament in both 1976 and 1977. As Torelli first started making a name for himself in the online poker world, he was tagged to be one of the original “Brunson 10”, a group of young players chosen by Brunson himself to represent DoylesRoom.com.
When Brunson passed in May, Torelli reflected on his friendship with the 10-time WSOP bracelet winner and what it meant to him. Arriving at the Horseshoe to get ready to register for the Main Event, Torelli ran into one of the Brunson memorial banners in a hallway.
“Walking through the hall here at the WSOP and there’s Doyle’s photo. It took a lot out of me just seeing that after he passed away. We were close, and I looked up to him and I read his book when I was in high school. Super System was the first book I read,” Torelli said. “I read his stories about him being a professional and I looked up to him and he was a mentor to me. Just walking by his memorial photo here in the Main Event, it kind of gets me choked up, you know?”
Deep on Day 7 of the tournament that Brunson helped to make famous, and the very event that Torelli first watched on ESPN 20 years ago, he realizes that he’s on the verge of accomplishing something that every poker player has dreamt of.
“I didn’t get into poker to get rich and to make money. I got into poker to compete and try and be the best. So for me, the Main Event is that opportunity,” Torelli said. “It’s fucking incredible to be here. It’s really, really surreal.”