Player Focus: aejones

Whether you love him or hate him, you won’t find many players who don’t rate Aaron Jones as a top poker player.

Anyone with even a passing interest in the online community will probably be aware of ‘aejones’, either through his NLH cash prowess ($25/$50 and above), his regular presence on various forums or his highly successful coaching videos on Leggo Poker.

But regular five-figure winning sessions hasn’t always been on the cards for the Indianapolis native (who is also studying for a Philosophy degree at Butler University). By his own admission, he has learnt how to take a more ‘professional’ attitude to the game the hard way: “I never read anything about Bankroll Management before I was playing 5-10 with two thousand dollars in my account. I learned things like variance before I read about them- and then reading about them helped me reinforce everything. Most of all, going broke teaches you the stability and level-headedness that is needed in a game like this.”

He hasn’t looked back since: check out this $71k winning session against Ariel ‘DaEvils’ Schneller for an example of how far he has come from playing $5 tournaments in high school.

Jones is also well renowned for his willingness to talk strategy and is one of the most regular posters in the 2 plus 2 forums. While discussing hand histories for hours with the likes of Dani Stern & Jason Strasser, he also introduces concepts such as ‘range merging’ (‘the percentage of time that you are value betting thin and are not sure whether you’re ahead or not’) and ‘backdoor aggression’ (‘to put a lot of pressure on your opponents by building a pot in a lot of different ways’) to a wider audience. Subscribers to Leggo Poker can see these concepts being used regularly in his strategy videos, which have proved the most popular on the site since its inception in November 2007. He charges $750 an hour for short-handed NLH coaching: it’s hard to find any students who don’t think this was money well spent. Along with Jones, the likes of Peter ‘Apathy’ Jetten & Andrew ‘luckychewy’ Lichtenberger can be largely credited for the success of Leggo in the already saturated video coaching market.

Jones is also well-known for a large degree of confidence in his game (which some define as pure arrogance) with a lot of trash-talking in chat boxes during heads-up matches. Jones defends this in an interview with Flop Turn River by saying: “I’ve always been pretty cocky in real life, I guess it has been just a function of my personality (perhaps being an only child). However, a lot of times when I do challenge people to HU matches, it is because I am massively +EV and I want to get them off their game.” An example of his pure confidence can be found in his latest blog post, where he describes his early ventures into PLO. Omaha experts will be shaking their heads with comments such as: “It's literally so hard to make a big mistake, that I think I'm an instant winner at 25-50 CAP” and “It took me a half hour of talking about starting hands with various people who consider themselves good in PLO, and suddenly I think I'm an expert” (also check out the ‘balla’ pics of his new Audi A5).

One of the biggest winners at mid-stakes NLH in 2008, it would be no surprise to see Jones playing even higher next year: but only within the realms of sound bankroll management, of course.