Dr. K

I’m Dr. K – otherwise known as drkamikaze or drkamikaze1 online in poker – and I’m a filmmaker, curator, and interdisciplinary (quantitative and qualitative) theorist who has been playing poker for over 20 years.

I initially became a professional player while I was teaching at universities such as UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, and San Francisco State after finishing my PhD at UC Santa Cruz (critical theory and cultural studies) in 2007. I love all poker variants and spend a significant amount of time working in mixed games in addition to NLHE.

Some of my early successes in poker include: 1st in 2009 Full Tilt Mini Series of Poker $500 HORSE, 2nd in the 2009 WCOOP Pot-Limit Omaha Eight-or-Better (PLO8), 9th on the overall WCOOP leaderboard in 2009, 5th in the 2010 WSOP NLHE Ladies Event, 1st in the 2010 Venetian HORSE, and 1st in the 2012 SCOOP Badugi.

Around 2013, I stopped playing professionally while I went back to school to complete an MFA in Film Production at York University. I returned to poker in 2019, and soon after I won my second SCOOP title in May 2020 in NLO8. In 2021, I won my 3rd SCOOP in PLO8.

Over the last several years I have been coaching and studying extensively, especially NLHE, O8, and bounty formats I find that studying any game will help improve my play overall, and my more in depth NLHE and tournament theory studies – along with Monker, HRC, ICMizer, and GTOwizard solver work on Holdem, PLO, and O8 – in the last few years have vastly improved my play and have helped me develop concrete strategies for all MTTs variants and formats.

I’ve founded The Poker Mix because I want to create a space to connect, learn, and grow with others who are interested in new and different approaches to studying and strategy development.