Rich Alati has been explaining how he won his $100k bathroom isolation prop bet against fellow poker pro Rory Young – and it was mainly a battle of meditation versus hallucination.
Young eventually bought out of the bet for $62,400, Alati 20 days into his month-long challenge and “stronger than ever” according to Young. But the prop bet wasn’t an easy victory, as Alati explained to The Action Network.
BREAKING: The $100K month long solitary confinement bet between two poker pros is over.
Last night, Day 20 of 30, Rory Young negotiated a buyout and Rich Alati walked out of the enclosed room he had been in since Nov. 21.https://t.co/HRVQGHwWFm
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) 11 December 2018
Preparations
The idea of spending 30 days in a sealed-up bathroom, with no light, no sound and no human interaction – and emerging intact – was ridiculed by most as the bet got under way last month. Alati, however, had a few aces up his sleeve, the first being preparation for his isolated existence.
“So I flew in two days prior from the Bahamas and spend some time familiarizing myself where things were,” he explained to Darren Rovell in a lengthy and revealing interview.
“I’m really good at memorization, so I then arranged the room and remembered where things were. I set up the clothes in one place, my food in another and the toiletries in another.”
He admits that getting around the confines of the specially-adapted AirBnB apartment was more challenging, stating: “The first couple of days, I pretty much crawled. I was feeling around a lot. But then I got accustomed to it and got cocky and bumped my head a couple times. Nothing major.”
So far, so good for Alati, but things were about to get weird…something the infrared cameras dotted about the room for Alati’s safety would never be able to pick up…
Hallucinations
Many people had warned Alati beforehand that hallucinating would be the most difficult aspect of the bet to survive, and sure enough it didn’t take long for his imagination to take over.
“It started with shapes and colors. Then I saw a train,” he explains, adding “…I just had to convince myself it wasn’t real. But that was probably my hardest moment because there was some fear to it”.
Despite being unable to see his nose in front of him, Alati began to imagine “windows on the bathroom, I saw ceiling fans that weren’t there”…and at one point he says the “room was filled with all these white bubbles”.
Rather than allowing the fear to take hold, he says he simply “started to embrace it”, having a “fun bubble party” in his head and claiming that “at one point the ceiling just opened up and I saw the stars and the sky. It was absolutely beautiful”.
Meditation
A huge part of his success in conquering the extreme conditions of the prop bet, says Alati, was that he had “yoga, meditation and prayer on my side”.
A silent retreat in Bali had prepared him for the lack of human contact. He explained: “I knew how to act in that room when it went inward. I knew how to train my thoughts to turn positive when I needed, which put me in a position to succeed.”
“One of the most important things is to be able to find a method to calm yourself”.
Negotiation
It transpires that Alati was approached for a buy-out of the $100k bet even before the halfway point. “On what I now know was Day 14, he asked if I wanted to buy out. I think that was his way of testing to see if I was panicking.”
Alati turned down a $25k offer just two days later, until finally Young made him a good enough offer – $62,400 on day 20. “I originally said no, I wouldn’t take less than $75,000”, says Alati, before adding he “realized my mind was hazy. After a couple minutes, I decided to accept it.”
He explained further: “Poker players take very calculated risks, and we don’t really consider the all or nothing that much. I thought about the fact that 10 days was not going to be a walk in the park.”
With a camera crew on hand to record the end of the bet, Alati explained how he was given ‘eclipse glasses’ so his eyes could become accustomed to the harsh light.
When asked by Rovell: “How were your eyes?” the surprising answer was “They adjusted pretty quickly… 36 hours after I got out of the room, I was playing in a poker tournament in the Bellagio!”
For prop-bet loser Young it wasn’t all bad news either – he cashed in the same event for just over $70k!
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