New partypoker Ambassador Patrick Leonard Believes Player Voices Are Being Heard

Recently, partypoker announced that the United Kingdom’s Patrick Leonard as its newest ambassador. In online poker circles, Leonard needs little introduction, as the 27-year-old player has been dominating online poker games for many years, first in ring games and more recently in multi-table tournaments.

In 2014, Leonard was twice recognized as the No. 1 online poker tournament player in the world by reaching the top of the PocketFives Online Poker Rankings first from Aug. 13-20 and later from Nov. 12-19. Also in 2014, Leonard won his first and only PocketFives Triple Crown. He also won the October PocketFives Monthly Tournament Leaderboard.

However, like all players, success didn’t start straight off the bat. Leonard shared on the partypoker blog his first experience playing a home-game in his kitchen didn’t go all that smoothly.

“I remember very vividly playing as a 16-year-old in a kitchen trying to fit into a social circle,” he said. “They wanted to play cards, I wasn’t really interested. I remember my very first hand very clearly. I had and called down three streets on because I assumed my cards were good. The hustlers that they were made me feel like it was a cooler, I didn’t do so well at the start! I’m very competitive person, I hate losing and as I wasn’t winning in the games it made me become obsessed with poker. I studied, joined forums, reached out to successful players, and over time became one of the more successful players in the home games. This showed me from the earliest moment in my career that hard work trumps all and it’s been what I’ve prided myself on throughout my career. I’m not the smartest guy in poker, I’m not naturally made to be a poker player, but I will work harder than the other guys.”

It didn’t take long for Leonard to improve when he began dominating ring games online. He eventually moved to the tournament arena after ring games became tougher, and he found instant success. Leonard shared with PokerNews how studying is of the utmost importance to improve as a poker player and why doing so with other players is more helpful than merely studying by oneself.

“I think that whilst individual study is crucial in terms of development as a poker player, the people you speak to every day is the most important ingredient to maximizing ones potential,” Leonard explained to PokerNews. “I spent the first three to four years of playing seriously just studying by myself and I think that’s perhaps why I didn’t accelerate as quickly as I should or could have. When I moved to Gibraltar, I lived with Pokerstrategy.com CEO Pavel Stehno and we started to think of poker in a slightly different way, in every spot we always thought ‘could we make him fold aces here?’ or ‘if he has aces, what would make ourselves look really strong here?’ At this time (2009), everybody was very honest and there was a very popular theorem called ‘Baluga Theorem’ that suggested always folding the turn when your opponent put in big pressure unless you had two pair or better. Now I’m not exactly Isaac Newton, but I worked out quickly it was really, really tough to get better than a pair in Texas hold’em.”

Despite his success, remaining in the elite class of poker players is hard work for Leonard. He leans on a large stable of players to help him with his studying, and he recently worked with his coaches to examine different aspects of poker. With that, he used the sessions to improve the performance of his large staking operation.

“I now speak regularly with the coaches from the stable that I own, including “Elmerixx”, “European”, and “Graftekkel”, who I believe are currently the three best tournament players in the world, bar none. We have eight top-top coaches and then 60-plus very …

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