Jeff Haney on how professional poker player Outhred found out the real money is on television game shows

Wednesday, June 27, 2007 | 7:23 a.m.

One night this spring, Greg Raymer saw Alex Outhred, a fellow professional poker player, on TV playing for high stakes in a competitive event requiring brainpower and strategic decision-making.

But it wasn't a poker tournament.

It was the popular game show "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?"

Outhred, whose biggest poker tournament prize came last year in a World Poker Tour event at Mandalay Bay ($184,745), won $500,000 during his recent appearance on the Fox trivia quiz show hosted by Jeff Foxworthy.

"I didn't even know he was on the show, and my wife says, 'Hey, they've got a poker player on,' " Raymer said. "I come into the bedroom where she's watching TV, and I'm like, 'Well, hey, that's Alex.'

"I ran into Jeff Foxworthy a few weeks later at his golf tournament and he said he just had a poker player on his show. It was kind of the small world thing going on."

Raymer, the 2004 World Series of Poker champion, will team with Outhred and former World Series main event winners Phil Hellmuth and Joe Hachem on the staff of instructors for next week's World Series of Poker Academy Main Event Primer, a three-day series of seminars and tournament drills at Caesars Palace.

World Series bracelet winner Scott Fischman and former FBI agent Joe Navarro, an expert on nonverbal communication, will also be featured at the camp (July 3-5, $2,199, wsopacademy.com), the latest in a series of popular seminars conducted by the academy.

Outhred doesn't plan to offer much specific advice on how to ace TV quiz shows, although he drew on his poker experience while he was trying to prove he was smarter than a fifth grader.

Contestants answer trivia questions for an increasing amount of prize money, but a final incorrect answer can send them home with the minimum prize of $25,000.

"It was very similar to poker," Outhred, of Los Angeles, said. "You don't risk large amounts of your stack thinking, 'Well, I hope he doesn't have an ace.' If you're going to risk a lot of chips, you better be sure he doesn't have an ace."

Once Outhred was guaranteed a $500,000 payout, he opted not to try for a final question worth $1 million. As it turned out, he would have known the answer (Who was the first secretary of the Treasury? Alexander Hamilton.)

"Every poker player I've spoken with told me I made the right decision," Outhred said. "You can't kick yourself for making a good fold just because you would have flopped quads."

Outhred, who studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Michigan, always thought he would be a teacher or social counselor, but came to poker instruction in a roundabout way. He comes from a family of teachers and is a distant relative of psychologist Abraham Maslow, famous for proposing the "hierarchy of human needs" in the 1950s.

When he became interested in poker, Outhred applied the psychological concept of "stage development" to his learning curve at the tables.

"Poker can very much be understood through the framework of stage development," Outhred said. "There are some epiphanies you can't have unless you've had five epiphanies before that one."

Raymer, who won $5 million for his victory in the 2004 main event, will focus on no-limit Texas hold 'em strategy as well as 7-card stud high-low eight or better - the E in the mixed-game event known as HORSE - at next week's camp.

"Even though no-limit hold 'em dominates the tournament circuit today, I'm not sure that's going to be true down the road," Raymer, of Raleigh, N.C., said. "I think people are starting to say it feels a little boring, a little one-dimensional to always be playing no-limit hold 'em."

Raymer has advanced to two final tables in this year's World Series, placing fourth in a 7-card stud high-low eight or better event ($41,460) and sixth in a 7-card stud event ($19,680). Outhred placed 12th in a hold 'em tournament ($21,435). The main event begins July 6 at the Rio.

"I'm not entirely happy with how it's going because I'm behind on the money total," Raymer said. "Both of my final tables were in smaller events, so they weren't big paydays. I have gone deep in lots of tournaments, and even the ones where I didn't cash I performed really well.

"You get to the stage in any tournament where everyone has very few chips and luck is a much bigger factor. I just have to be a little less unlucky at those stages."