We chat to Lex Veldhuis about Lev Live, YouTube vs Twitch, and the pressure to play and stream against the best players in poker.
What is it like having a poker festival named after you? Other than Lex Live, the only other I can think of is the Moneymaker Tour.
Lex Veldhuis: It’s awkward when you have meetings about the event and talk about ‘Lex Live’ it feels self-indulgent. In the end, it’s more of a community event, it’s not a poker tour event. At its core it’s a community event and it’s a success if more community people from my stream show up. To them I am sort of the social glue, it’s like Comic Con.
As an outsider, my observation is it seems the core audience is mainly people who don’t go to that many live tournaments normally.
Lex Veldhuis: That’s right. Right now we are scouting for a Lex Live 4 location. The first thing I look for is how many AirBnBs there are. Typically a poker tour looks at hotels, but that’s not what my community look for.
It’s just a completely different angle into live events. A lot of the people that visit Lex Live have never travelled before. So if they have to do two stopovers, it’s not a good location because they might be hesitant to travel. I want to make it easy for them. I want to bring people out of their shells. That’s why I want different locations rather than a staple location, I want people to experience and see different places.
Lex Live also seems to be a festival where activities away from the tables are just as important as side events and the main event.
Lex Veldhuis: In the old days there was a sense of brotherhood where when you bust the tournament, everyone would go to the bar, and that’s what I miss from live poker. I feel like poker can still be like that. We had a situation in Lex Live 3 where a player brought his wife and when he busted the tournament she was at the bar, and she didn’t want to leave because she was having fun playing bar games. Poker becomes the common denominator rather than the thing we are actually doing, and that’s what I love about it.
“Giving up Twitch partner status was right at the time”
You share an incredible amount of your personal life on stream. We have had births, deaths, marriages, house moves, your issues with Twitch and more. Plus you are on stream for long sessions playing. Is that overwhelming?
Lex Veldhuis: It’s weird because I am an introvert. I look at the camera as one person, not as if I am a presenter. It’s a good question because it feels very natural for me to tell people what’s going on. But I draw a very clear line, I don’t share the privacy of people around me. If I have a big fight with someone around me, I don’t talk about it, then I just say I have some stuff going on. But if I am sleeping like shit and I feel like I am not being present with my kids and it’s giving me stress, I’ll share that. I made a decision that I wanted to inspire people and show them what poker was like.
You have Summit1G who is one of the biggest streamers and I like the stream, but he all of a sudden came out and said he was divorced one and a half years before, even though he talked about his marriage a lot. Imagine doing that? How can you expect people to invest in you if you don’t share that stuff?
You famously gave up Twitch partner status to explore streaming on YouTube as well, saying you were unhappy with Twitch and optimistic about YouTube. It’s been a few years, was that the right decision?
Lex Veldhuis: Was it the right decision? Looking back on it, no. Was it right at the time? Yes. I don’t believe in paywalls, I feel like content should be a free economy. From an organisational angle, it’s good because you want the content to be everywhere. What Twitch was saying was if you stream on our site, you cannot stream on other platforms. I don’t work for Twitch, I am just somebody making content. Twitch has made hundreds of thousands of dollars off of me, why would I be bound to one platform?
The only thing that was stopping me was my partner status. If I relinquished that I could be on YouTube. In hindsight, it was bad for me, because the narrative was that I left Twitch. That wasn’t the case at all, I stayed on Twitch and added YouTube.
“I am doing everything in the most mature professional way possible”
You had your first SCOOP win this year – I got the sense it was more relief than joy. Do you feel you are under a lot of pressure to perform well in SCOOP?
Lex Veldhuis: It’s not a public pressure, it’s a personal pressure. I feel like as a 22-year-old cash game player I didn’t appreciate what I had because I was so young. Now I am doing everything I can in the most mature professional way possible, I am putting myself in positions to do that. Having a title solidifies that I am doing things in the right way. Especially in that field, the Titans event.
Your newest #SCOOP champion.@LexVeldhuis 👏 🏆
🥇 $140,278.96
👉 https://t.co/xI3gx3EQkE pic.twitter.com/foYgwV1tDE
— PokerStars (@PokerStars) May 13, 2024
Yes, the final table was a murderer’s row, it included Yuri Dzivielevski, Kahle Burns, Patrick Leonard and Roman Romanovsky. How much edge do you give away against these players by streaming at the same time?
Lex Veldhuis: I don’t think people understand the edge I give up. At most final tables I am going to be in the bottom third. I play a lot of tournaments where I know I am not a winner, but I want to show people what these tournaments are like. Plus there is a marketing thing as a lot of people will watch.
The only thing better players have to do is watch my stream. They not only see a mistake, they get to see me explain my mistake. They can literally hear my thought process being wrong. People should have two pages of notes on me when they play against me. I always say I cannot be a top player while doing my stream.
“To my audience I am a streamer first”
You must miss playing without a stream sometimes.
Lex Veldhuis: With all respect to poker and grinding, if I had to choose between being the best player or the best streamer, I’d pick streaming. If the answer was the best player I should stop investing in all this community stuff and put that focus into study. I have already accepted that I can’t be the best player, I know I cannot catch up to these guys, but I can still be the best player I can be.
The game moves so fast, do you feel a sense of responsibility to your audience to keep your game above a certain level?
Lex Veldhuis: No I don’t. I am who I am, and if I decide not to work on my game that’s just who I am. If people decide that’s not entertaining, I won’t let it get in my way. I don’t worry about it because I know that more people like me the way I am. My sense of competition means I want to be inside the game and roll on with the skills. To my audience I am a streamer, when I was at the final table of the SCOOP I won I kept saying on stream that I was the worst player at the table. It’s not fake modesty, I was the worst player, but I think there is power in that as well. Anyone can beat Phil Ivey in their day, and that is what is so cool about poker compared to soccer or chess.
Lex Veldhuis is a Team PokerStars Pro. You can watch him at Twitch and YouTube.