On the afternoon that I meet Nick Schulman in his Manhattan apartment, the 22-year-old poker-world phenom - you might know him as "The Takeover" if you happen to frequent high-stakes games online - is celebrating an anniversary. Nearly one year ago, just months after turning 21, Schulman won his first tournament and $2,167,500 in a World Poker Tour event at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut. The victory represented his coming-out as a poker player and informed the world that this lanky kid with the heavy-lidded eyes is a force to be reckoned with.
And if the Foxwoods win wasn't enough, just one month later, he made a final table at the Showboat in Atlantic City. Schulman's parents, who had already made the trek from Manhattan to Connecticut, drove down to A.C. and watched their son finish a very respectable fourth, taking down $74,495. "They came to the Showboat and figured I was the greatest poker player who had ever lived," Schulman says. Then, after acknowledging a dearth of final tables during this year's World Series, he adds, "I had to explain that I'm not going to make money in every tournament I enter."
Michael Kaplan: Long before your win at Foxwoods, people in New York were talking about you. Gin player Mike Sall told me that I ought to write a story on you. And so did Andy Wang, the guy who's shooting a documentary on New York poker clubs. What were you doing, as a 20-year-old poker player, to attract so much attention?
Nick Schulman: I don't know if it was my results or that I was playing high relative to my bankroll. I was a pretty sick guy, playing $100-$200 no-limit and willing to risk whatever I had - about $300,000, all told. So there might have been a perception, considering the stakes I played, that I had a bigger bankroll than I actually did.
MK: Did risking all your money affect your play?
NS: I didn't feel like I had anything to lose. I came from being relatively broke, so the poker money felt like found money. Plus, a few years ago, the games in New York were juicy. In the $10-$20 no-limit games, a number of guys continually lost tens of thousands of dollars each week. You saw a lot of loose call-downs and hopeless bluffs.
MK: These games took place in Manhattan's underground poker clubs - Rounders, Player's Club, and Play Station among them - many of which were ultimately shut down. Did you witness any busts?
NS: I was in a place called Ace Point five minutes before it got busted. Cops came in, raided the place, cut up the tables with saws, checked for drugs. Some of my friends got arrested and all the players lost their money. It's not the kind of situation where you can cash out.
MK: You've made a big name for yourself in a very short period of time. How'd it happen?
NS: I grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and I dropped out of high school at 15. I was miserable and a total degenerate. My friends and I smoked pot all day and did nothing. But at night, I played pool. It filled a void for me. I'd play for hours and lose myself in the game. I got to be one of the city's 10 best and played for money in Brooklyn and Queens.
MK: You were just a kid back then, gambling against grown men. Didn't they feel funny about taking your money when you lost?
NS: Never! People in pool are scumbags. Nobody ever cared about that, and I was happy they didn't. I was making $500 a week.
MK: Did pool lead to poker?
NS: When I was 16 [in 2000] some of my friends from pool started playing poker online. One guy let me use his account, and I really got into it. I read everything that I could - mostly
Super/System and whatever Sklansky wrote - and played a lot. I'm very diligent with things that I want to do.
MK: How small did you start playing?
NS: I played one-table tournaments with $10 and $20 buy-ins. Within a couple years, though, I was playing the biggest games online: $10-$20 no-limit up to $50-$100 no-limit. I'd play three or four tables at a time - in order to maximize my profits - and realized that I could do this for a living. I played online every day.
MK: How long would your sessions run?
NS: Up to 24 hours straight, which can be isolating. You wake up at noon, then, all of a sudden, it's 2 in the morning. You realize that you've spent all day on the computer, smoking cigarettes and eating bad food.
MK: But making lots of money.
NS: That was the thing. If I was making $2,000 an hour, how could I quit? Anything I was doing, I'd wonder if I should be doing that thing when I could be home making all that money. Right now, I honestly wish I had played more back then, when it was really, really great online. Now there are a lot of good players, and the games have gotten so big that I don't play for the highest stakes anymore.
MK: Was it a major transition for you to go from playing online to playing in the New York clubs?
NS: Not at all. In fact, online was more intimidating to me than live. I was playing the highest games in the clubs and they were not as big as what I played online. You could win or lose about $15,000 in the New York club games, while I've had six-figure swings, in both directions, online. But I'll tell you one thing: I will never not be happy winning 15 grand in one night.
MK: You quickly established yourself as a successful live-game player. Was there a change in the way your opponents treated you?
NS: When you're a winning player in poker, people respect you and fear you, and they want to play with you sometimes just to see what you will do. Being known, though, never really did anything for me. I just want to win. I try not to get caught up in the other stuff. I've always played poker just so I could play more poker. You start playing to please other people and you're dead.
MK: What about when you're losing?
NS: After dropping a certain amount of money, to where you can't play comfortably at your usual stakes, you feel broke. You go down in stakes and feel that you
have to win. But that is when I play my best. And I pick good games to play in.
MK: I'm guessing that when you're running good, poker is a little bit of an aphrodisiac. Girls must love it when they hear that you're a professional poker player.
NS: Not really. There is a certain stigma attached to it. They think you gamble for a living, and don't like that. Now, if a girl knew that I was a
successful professional poker player, it might be different. But I'm not going to tell her that.
MK: Let's talk a little about Foxwoods. It was only your second live tournament [his first was a
WPT event at Borgata, which he bombed out of]. Did you go there with any kind of expectation?
NS: I went to Foxwoods a week before the tournament and focused on cash games. I pretty much figured that if I got lucky, I might have a shot in the tournament. But that was it.
MK: When did you realize that you had more than just a shot?
NS: When there were 100 players left. I had a pretty good-sized stack and was playing well. But it's impossible to win one of these things if you're not running good. I was, and at the final table, I had a lot of chips. It allowed me to make raises without the risk of going out. So that part was easy. And at the end, I went in with kings, which is about as good as it gets.
MK: How did it feel to win nearly $2.2 million?
NS: Surreal. But it felt even more unusual when I had to pay out $1 million to the people who had pieces of me. They were pretty happy.
MK: Were you changed by winning a tournament of that size?
NS: That was when I became a professional, not only in my eyes, but also in the eyes of my family and friends. My parents knew I was the real deal, so they were not completely shocked. But a lot of my friends were.
MK: I hear that you turned down an appearance on
Late Show With David Letterman.
NS: That is not 100 percent true. Steve Lipscomb asked if I would be interested in going on
Letterman and I said no. It wasn't guaranteed that Letterman wanted to have me on. But the reality is that I didn't want to be famous. As good as it was, the whole experience of winning felt very strange. My feeling was that I just wanted to go home.
MK: What did you do when you got home?
NS: Went back to playing. I played a little higher, but I could have done more with myself. I could have marketed myself. But I thought it would take away from poker. I continued to play online, but not as much as I had been.
MK: I guess you don't have to.
NS: Well,
don't have to only goes so far. I still have to make a living, and playing online is a good way to play poker in New York. I like to play every day, so online keeps me in touch. I might play $1,000-$2,000 limit on FullTilt. I'll play $50-$100 no-limit or one-table tournaments with $1,000 buy-ins.
MK: Are you still Takeover?
NS: I am. And I also have a few other names - but those are secret.
MK: Have you played in the "big game" yet?
NS: I did, during the
World Series. But I played $2,000-$4,000, not $4,000-$8,000.
MK: Still, you must have been playing against a pretty formidable lineup.
NS: Well, if you've got bad players in there, I'll play. But if it's Phil Ivey, Barry Greenstein, and Chau Giang, I'm not too eager. I don't have anything to prove.
MK: Isn't there something special, though, about stepping into Bobby's Room at Bellagio for the first time and knowing that you're about to play in one of the world's richest, toughest poker games?
NS: I felt it, sure. It's interesting to be in a room with 10 guys I've watched on TV. They may not be my heroes, but they're certainly intriguing characters, and I'd like to pick their brains. There is one guy I haven't seen on TV, David Oppenheim, and he's the best I've ever played with.
MK: Going up against a guy like Oppenheim - who happens to be a heads-up specialist - must be double-edged.
NS: It's interesting. If there are real good players in the game, you don't want to play. If there are bad players in the game, you want to play. But sometimes, if there are truly great players in the game, you also want to play. Then, it's almost worth it. You have the worst of it, but you might pick something up. I played a lot with David over the summer, and I picked up a lot.
MK: Does your playing change when you're in the big game?
NS: You have to play better. I might play a little harder.
MK: Is that because you don't want to look bad in front of guys like Chip and Doyle?
NS: I'm not saying that I am completely egoless, but when you play that big, you really want to win.
MK: Are there specific things that you picked up from playing in that game?
NS: There's no one specific thing. It's more that these guys don't make mistakes and you become conscious of that. If you catch yourself doing something even slightly wrong, you need to step back and fix it. The other players will take advantage, immediately, of your mistakes. Everybody tries to do the right thing and make the right play and capitalize on equity. But the best players do it more and better. They read people better and play their hands better in better spots. It's not what they do better. They just are better.
MK: And I'm guessing that you'll be playing a little more with those guys, now that you're getting ready to move from Manhattan to Las Vegas.
NS: It's the poker mecca of the world. I bought a big house in Summerlin and I'm going to room with one of my closest friends. I'll be playing poker all the time out there, and I think I can do well with it.
MK: Are you going to use some of the Foxwoods money to buy a fancy new car for Vegas?
NS: Yeah. I'll most likely lease something, probably a convertible. I don't know what kind. [He considers this for a beat.] Wait, I've just decided. This is what I'm gonna get: a Cadillac convertible. It will be really cool.
