In 2020, everyone had their own way of passing the time while they were stuck at home. Some people got deep into video games. Others learned how to bake homemade bread or grow out their gardens.
TJ Jurkiewicz decided to take it as an opportunity to change career paths, walking away from a decade of playing poker professionally in pursuit of nutrition and fitness coaching.
“I had been burned out on poker since like 2018, when I moved to Vegas. I think this town just sucked the joy out of poker for me,” said Jurkiewicz. “During COVID, I saw an ad to get a certification to be a nutrition coach. And I thought that sounded pretty interesting. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”
By July 2021, Jurkiewicz had all of his ducks in a row and officially launched All In Fitness Coaching. Even as poker had become a thing of his past, his experiences away from the table while fighting his way up the cash game ranks presented him with an opportunity and a steady client base in a familiar community.
“I had lived the poker player lifestyle from 2013 to 2020, a professional poker player’s lifestyle,” said Jurkiewicz. “When I first started playing poker professionally I put on a lot of weight, and I knew that the lifestyle was congruent with not being healthy. Then I got in shape while playing poker, so in figuring that out, I knew I had a path to help people the same way.”
In the lead-up to launching All In Fitness Coaching, Jurkiewicz got himself into the best shape of his life, a far cry from both his heaviest point as a poker player and weight maintenance issues dating back to his teenage years, during which he consistently struggled with maintaining a consistent regiment.
Jurkiewicz solving his own longtime search for the key to a consistent diet and exercise plan led him to discover a handful of core pillars for Jurkiewicz to instill in the clients who would soon join him.
“I know we’re all very good at losing weight. We’re just absolutely horrible at keeping it off,” said Jurkiewicz. “I knew I was doing it in a way that a lot of people could do it, too. I wasn’t just eating leftovers out of Tupperware and going to the gym seven days a week, things that I knew people wouldn’t want to do. Poker leads itself to a very unhealthy lifestyle, and I thought that I could connect with these people and show them a way that’s easier.”
Poker players looking to lose weight is not a new idea by any means. Weight loss prop bets pop up every year around the start of the summer, with Shaun Deeb representing the latest player to cash in big on getting smaller. By February of this year, he had already secured an $800,000 windfall when Bill Perkins bought out of their bet that he could get himself down to 17% body fat.
And while Deeb in particular doesn’t seem to be slowing down his weight loss journey, the type of motivation behind such bets is indicative of how many poker players prioritize short-term gains over a more sustainable overall lifestyle.
“There’s always a weight loss prop bet going on. There’s one with a giant group of people that happens before the WSOP every year, but the same people are in the same thing, weighing the same amount every single year. And that that pains me to see.”
Getting out of the cycle of yo-yo-ing weight isn’t typically an easy task, and Jurkiewicz quickly learned that the same approach isn’t going to work for every client. The adaptability skills Jurkiewicz developed in his time as a poker player have served him well as his client roster has grown and he’s gained more experience and knowledge.
“It’s definitely evolved a ton since those early days,” said Jurkiewicz. “I think I made a mistake in the beginning, where I would throw too much at people too soon. I would say drink this much water, eat this much food, work out this much. And it wasn’t like I was asking a crazy amount of volume per metric that I was asking them to track, but I was asking them to track far too many metrics.
“Nowadays, in the first month that I work together with someone, I roll out things one by one, or start very basic in like four or five key areas, and then we just build on that. Instead of giving them everything all at once, now I sort of get people to that point over a period of time, getting to know them more and getting to know their existing lifestyle before we start working together more.”
In getting poker players on the right path in their health journeys, Jurkiewicz has tapped into a positivity that was sorely missing at the tail end of his full-time poker playing days. For the better part of a decade, Jurkiewicz chased the poker dream with ferocity. By his mid-20s Jurkiewicz was playing seriously, staked to play $2/$5 cash games in Maryland and ultimately working his way up to as high as $25/$50/$100.
He moved to Las Vegas like so many other poker players, and despite being almost exclusively focused on cash games managed a significant tournament success. Despite being down to his last $700, and anticipating a return to playing on a stake, Jurkiewicz fired off most of what he had left and made a run to the final table of the $1,000 Tag Team event at the 2019 World Series of Poker. Jurkiewicz and Zachary Gruneberg ultimately finished fourth in that tournament, and despite that success, the afterglow simply wasn’t enough to reignite his passion for the game.
Despite the Vegas poker world sapping Jurkiewicz’s remaining enthusiasm for the game, it’s also the city where he found his calling. He’s helped poker players like Jeff Platt and Matt Affleck achieve their health goals, and by proxy made an impact on the poker world that Jurkiewicz is truly proud of.
“There’s no better feeling for me,” Jurkiewicz said. “Coming from poker where, at the tail end of when I stopped playing, I was getting zero enjoyment, even when I was winning. There was no meaning behind what I was doing. And I’m not saying poker is a thankless, meaningless grind, even though it kind of is, some people do find ways to make it productive. I just wasn’t one of them.
“So to come from that I enter this position where I can help people directly with things that I struggled with directly, and really improve their lives,” said Jurkiewicz. “To have them thank me for improving their lives, ‘You’ve added years to my life, like now I can play with my kids.’ Hearing those things, it really fuels me up and gives me a strong reason to get out of bed some days. I struggle with things, and one thing that I can always count on to be an anchor point is my clients that I know I’m doing a good job for them.”
Jurkiewicz is keenly aware that he has to consistently balance his professional ambitions with his own health and fitness goals. With his poker days largely fading into the background he’s been on the hunt for something else that can consistently fulfill his competitive urges, and he seems to have found an ideal outlet in Muay Thai.
“I’m 35 now, and that made me reflect on getting older,” said Jurkiewicz. “I realized that I wanted to be someone who aged more gracefully than others. I wanted to be in my 60s, still able to hike, still able to travel. And I’ve sort of taken the focus off of present-day me. Right now my goal is to be one of the most in-shape 40-year-olds I can be. Martial arts is my main outlet for exercise these days, I really fell in love with it. It’s much more enjoyable for me than traditional methods of cardio or training. I still lift weights, but it’s mostly for me, outdoor runs, martial arts, and lifting weights a few times a week now, and a lot of mobility work.”
Jurkiewicz currently attends five Muay Thai classes a week in Las Vegas at Xtreme Couture, and in an effort to continue to set lofty goals – the same approach that brought him success early on in his poker career – Jurkiewicz has booked himself an intensive month of training in Thailand at the Fairtex Training Camp.
“It’s great because it’s motivating me in the present day. I do not want to show up there out of shape, because as far as I know, the day starts with a 7 a.m. hourlong run, and then you train for two and a half hours, take a four-hour break and then you train again for two-and-a-half hours. Six hours of work, six days a week. I’m not far off the best shape of my life right now. That’s my goal, and then obviously coming out of that month, I’ll probably even take that up another level. So I’m excited to see what’s possible.”
By pushing his limits and continuing his own efforts in approaching health and wellness, Jurkiewicz will be setting another example of what can be achieved when his clients work with him to find their own best path forward.
“I’m going to struggle,” Jurkiewicz said. “But I want to go in there and get the most out of the experience.”