From Freshmen Dreams to WSOP Success: The Journey of Alec Torelli

During the World Series Of Poker in 2023, a young American managed to snag 11^th place in the Main Event and secure a payday of $700,000. His name was Alec Torelli, pro poker player and founder of ConsciousPoker.com.

PokerListings already reported about these result last year but with the World Series coming up, we got a hold of Alec. In the upcoming weeks, we’ll dive into the world of Alec Torelli, poker player, business professional, and poker trainer on his channel ‘Conscious Poker’.

In the first episode, we’ve turn back time all the way to the roots of his poker career, including how he ended up turning pro and moving to Australia at such a young age.

While Torelli’s a well-known poker personality, what’s his superhero origin story? Let’s find out!

Melvin PokerListings: Hi Alec, it’s a pleasure to have you here. Last year, you managed to set a deep run in the WSOP Main Event of 2024, but where did it all start for you? What made you play poker? And what drove you towards the point of going professionally?

Alec Torelli: Hi Melvin, PokerListings, it’s great to be here. Let’s start from the beginning. So like many people from my generation that came up when watching Chris Moneymaker win the WSOP Main Event. Poker became cool. I was captivated by the sexiness of poker and the excitement, and all my friends were playing after school. So poker kind of became the cool thing to do.

I was 16 years old and was still in high school, and I was never really good at sports. I quit football my freshman year and didn’t make the basketball team either.

I may not have been competitive at sports, but won $12 my first time playing poker with friends. I feel in love with the game, felt in my element and believed early on it was something I could excel at.

This was my chance to beat all the jocks that crushed me on the field. I saw poker as a game I could finally be competitive at, one that I was missing in sports. I loved poker right from the start and fell in love after that first session.

I began playing in high school, with friends through home games. Soon the games got bigger and more serious, moving from $5 buy ins up to $20, which was a lot of money for us at the time.

When I started to play poker online, I realized all my friends were getting jobs to make extra income. I thought, “well, if I can make 50 bucks here, 20 bucks there, maybe I don’t have to get a summer job and I could just play poker instead!”

Not only did I intrinsically enjoy the game itself, but I just loved the idea that I could make money playing a game. Many of my friends played video games, which have little utility outside the game itself. Online poker was similar, except real money was at stake.

When I was 18 years old, I came to a pivotal point in my poker career where I realized I had to either quit school and play poker, or quit poker and focus on school. I couldn’t do both.

Melvin, PokerListings: What made you decide to start playing poker in the end? As it’s quite a big decision to drop out from university, and put it all on red, let’s say.

Alec Torelli: It was actually a lot more calculated.

One Sunday, as I was staying up late to play online, I was foregoing social activities, I missed class because I ran deep, finishing around 5:00 am. I missed my economics class (again), and decided I needed to take a break from poker for a few days and really figure out my next steps.

I wanted to evaluate what I want to do next and really make a decision one way or another, because I felt half pregnant with both school and poker, neither getting the attention it deserves. I evaluated my options, and narrowed it down to either quitting poker and focusing on school, or taking a year off and giving poker a try.

It was a tough decision because quitting poker meant not playing again until semester break or during the summer. Or, I could take one year off of school and focus entirely on poker.

I decided that the asymmetry was to the upside for poker and to the downside for school. Because if I stayed in school and never played poker, I would always wonder “what if”. Taking a chance on poker was only going to get harder when I graduated because now then there are job opportunities and more social pressure. I kind of saw my life progressing quickly where there wasn’t space for poker.

Melvin, PokerListings: Poker seemed to be dominating your decisions at all times. Did you have the roll at that time to fully go for poker? Or how did that come together?

Alec Torelli: The conventional wisdom is that it gets easier to do things later because you’ll have more time, resources, money, or “fill in the blank”. But I realized that easiest time to do it was now because the least risk was taking one year off of school.

If I lost all the money I saved up, $20,000-$30,000 dollars, which of course is a lot of money for an 18-year-old, it’s not that much money in the grand scheme of the whole scope of your life. Sure, I could lose everything. At that point I’m one year behind everyone else in university. They’re a sophomore and I’m a freshman. That’s the worst that can happen.

But the upside is that I could travel the world. I could play this game I love, and become a professional poker player.

I can compete at a high level. I could live my poker dream, right? So the asymmetry was to the upside. The risk wasn’t that great and the reward was huge.

When I framed it like that, I knew what the right decision was and what I wanted, but the only thing holding me back was fear. And like in a poker hand before you bet it all on the river, knowing it’s the right spot, I knew I had to commit and go all-in.

Melvin, PokerListings: When looking at your live poker results over the years, one of the first registered cashes in a tournament goes back to 2007. Not in the US due to your age, but in Australia.

Alec Torelli: Yes! I moved to Australia when I was 18 because I couldn’t play in the States, and wanted to compete on the live circuit.

While I was there, I really excelled early on with a good run. I won the biggest tournaments in online poker at the time, and made a million dollars playing cash games in 2007. So I was one of the biggest winners on Full Tilt, which was the biggest site in the world at the time. That early success propelled my career forward at a young age.

In the next episode of the story behind Alec Torelli and Conscious Poker, we will go more into detail concerning his preferred poker games and what made him open a poker training site. Stay tuned for the next episode, coming online throughout the next week.

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