Fedor Holz Chooses To End Epic Win Streak On His Own Terms

German poker pro Fedor “CrownUpGuy” Holz has known for a long time that he would never “fit well into a regular job.” Luckily for him, he found poker at the right time and used the card game to set himself up for life. He’s just 23 years of age.

Since the start of 2015, Holz has won roughly $20 million playing poker, a run that nearly matched the $24 million two-year period Dan Colman had in between 2014 and 2015. Holz’s heater has been more evenly distributed and has come thanks to more events, as Colman won $15 million in a single event during his heater.

Holz puts most of the credit on the people he has surrounded himself with. He’s humble enough to admit that venturing into the world of poker on his own would have not worked out nearly as well.

“Without my friends I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am today,” Holz said. “I’ve always approached poker in a very social way, trying to create a surrounding for me to grow and learn fast, and I’m very happy that I met such an amazing group of people that I can call close friends today. We had and have quite a special environment, always supporting each other.”

With that said, Holz “spent every free minute thinking and playing poker,” so his success is also very much his own. Card Player had the chance to find out where the passion for poker all began.

Love of Games From The Beginning

Like many of the top poker players in the world, Holz grew his intellect and built his competitive spirit playing games as a youth. The love for mental pursuits also fostered a hard-working mentality that later gave him results in poker.

“I’ve always been into games of any sort,” Holz said. “When I was nine years old, I discovered chess and got really into it for about a year, competing in the national championships.”

Dan Smith, the man who Holz beat heads-up in the 2016 World Series of Poker $111,000 buy-in High Roller for One Drop, also comes from a competitive chess background. Many other players have proven the crossover potential between chess and poker, thanks to the parallels in planning out moves or lines of play well in advance.

“I think I played at around a [provisional] level of 1,700 when I was 10,” Holz said.
Despite perhaps having a future in the game, Holz eventually decided it was no longer for him. You could call it restlessness, but Holz always knew the game he played seriously had to be fun at the same time. Why else would it be worth the amount of time investment required to be elite?

“I stopped for the same reason I stopped doing a lot of other things: because the stream of information slowly dried up,” Holz remembered. “It became more work than playing a game and challenging my mind, and I felt like I couldn’t progress fast enough anymore.”

Throughout the years, Holz maintained a love for the physical sport of soccer, which he still plays to this day. That game was also important in his development as a competitor and strategic thinker, Holz said.

Why was poker different for Holz? Why didn’t he stop playing in favor of a new game well before his historic heater over the past two years? Why didn’t poker studying begin to feel like work?

For Holz, he found poker at the right time in his life, when he had the wherewithal to treat it as more than just a challenge. It was soon to be viewed as long-term project.

“At some points [in the past], I did find the studying felt like work,” Holz said, “but this time I was older and had a more professional approach. So I tried harder to find new ways to keep up my hard work and sustain a natural passion for the game.”

Part of his strategy has been to use cash games to sharpen some of his skills, but he really put his time into tournaments, a format that he said is much better suited for his approach to education.

“I use online as a training place,” Holz said. He plays as high as $50-$100 no-limit online, “just to improve” his game. Holz admitted that he isn’t expecting to beat $50-$100 because it’s not his home, but it is a great place to learn.

“I’m not a cash game player,” Holz said. “I’m not patient enough, so it has to be [a cash game] where the hourly is very high and you have to focus every minute. I’ve actually been doing pretty well in live cash games, but it’s so few hands. I also ran pretty well in the biggest game I’ve played in. It was a $2,000-$4,000 game. [In Las Vegas], I played $500-$1,000 and lost slightly, but it was just five buy-ins or something. It sounds like so much money, but it’s just [variance].”

Holz is keen on finding new avenues in life to take, so it was no surprise that during his eight-figure upswing in poker he was flirting with the idea of semi-retirement.

Growing Up In A Hard-Working Family

Though poker was never purely about the money, which is a common perspective among the high-stakes poker community, Holz did see it as a way to possibly avoid a regular job. Holz and his two sisters were raised by a hard-working mother. It was an upbringing that helped give Holz the ability to combine his talent with determination.

“I had a very challenging childhood,” Holz said. “I grew up with a very loving, but young mother.”

Practicing and learning to become a great games-player first began as an escape of sorts for Holz. It was later that the bankroll aspect of poker showed itself to have benefits other than funding the next tournament.

“Money was never the driving force,” Holz said. “It is nice that it’s part of poker to keep it highly competitive and to be able to pursue it fulltime, but I think passion for the game and the extreme learning curve were mainly important to me.”

On a familial level, however, Holz admitted that the “nice” benefit of being great at poker has given him an important feeling, perhaps one that allows him to be so confident at a young age.

“It’s very fulfilling that I can support my family with a game that I enjoy that much and something I worked hard for,” Holz said. “They are very happy.”

Given his later success as a poker pro, it’s not that surprising that school wasn’t the best fit for him.

“I think it was stuff a lot of kids have to deal with at some point,” Holz said. “I skipped two classes in school. I’ve always been the youngest and got bullied for some time.”

It was hard for Holz, the oldest child in the family. “Growing up with…two younger sisters that take a lot of attention was very challenging for me,” he said, “but also a great learning experience at the same time. My mom took good care of us, but also worked a lot.”

You could call his poker friends his second family, and they along with his mom and sisters have helped him attain the kind of success nearly all players can only dream of. “I think I have a really good group of people around me,” Holz said. He added that he relies on feedback from his close circle of friends, a resource that has allowed him to constantly improve and evolve as a poker player.

The Start of The Historic Run

In September 2012, Holz was playing heads-up in a €500 tournament in the Czech Republic and went on to finish second. It was his first final table ever. Holz wasn’t a winning player at that point and his bankroll was tiny, so the score of $19,000 was crucial. “It made me a winning player in poker,” Holz said.

The score came after about a year playing the game, so Holz becoming profitable in the game took a lot less time than most. The “natural passion” for poker originated from a natural talent. The informatics student was now ready to leave university studies and take poker to the next level.

Just months later in February 2013, Holz was deep in a World Poker Tour main event in Austria. Though he went on to finish 10th, for a score of a little more than $17,000, Holz had his first deep run in a high-stakes live tournament. By the end of 2013, Holz had career winnings of about $100,000 thanks to deep runs in several other European tournaments. Less than three years later, he would be ninth on the all-time tournament money list, leapfrogging the likes of Poker Hall of Famers John Juanda and Scotty Nguyen.

He had racked up another $150,000 worth of tournament scores prior to the fall of 2014, when the tournament that arguably changed his life took place. Holz was the last person standing in the 2014 PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker $5,200 main event. He outlasted a field of more than 2,100 elite poker players.

“I called my mother and after that my roommates and I went to a cafe right around the corner and got some delicious breakfast,” Holz told PokerStars in the aftermath of the win. “That’s our ritual after shipping something big.”

He said that some of the $1.3 million in prize money was going toward buying his family a house in Germany because “it would increase their living quality by a ton,” adding that the title was also a very defining moment for his career. Holz had a three-to-one chip lead going into the final hand of the tournament, a crazy pot that helped ignite an improbable run.

Holz was dealt pocket tens, while his opponent held pocket fours. Both players flopped sets, and on the river Holz improved to quads and raised his opponent all in. With fours full, Yuri Martins made the call and was shockingly eliminated. Holz ran very well to pick up a massive cooler at that stage of the tournament, but his win launched him to poker stardom. He had never even cashed for a six-figure amount prior to the WCOOP main event. Though nearly all of his success is in the live setting, Holz said it’s “hard to say” whether or not he would have become a poker pro without the Internet.

Holz had a couple of small scores in the winter of 2015, but exploded last spring with back-to-back final tables in high roller events in Monte Carlo for a combined $740,000. Then in June, Holz finished third in the $10,000 no-limit hold’em six-max at the WSOP for an additional $268,000. He capped off the 2015 WSOP, his rookie year there, with a 25th place finish in the main event for $262,000.

He had three additional scores each worth about $111,000 prior to the $100,000 buy-in WPT Alpha8 Las Vegas in December. Holz had all the chips at the end of the 45-entry tournament, collecting nearly $1.6 million in what was his ninth final table of the year. His year-to-date earnings stood at about $3.5 million.

He was already on a huge heater, but it turned out he was just warming up.

Taking His Poker Resume To New Heights In 2016

His results could have resulted in an inflated ego or an unrealistic assessment of his skill set, but for Holz the run represents success in putting himself in the right situations to make it possible, rather than the heater itself. In other words, he knows how well he has run and is thankful for the rush.

“This kind of run is nothing you are expecting at all,” Holz said. “In my career, I just always wanted to make sure that I’m in the best spot I could possibly be in. I invested a lot of time into my tournament game starting out online, working together with some of the best players in the world. If you mix that with the dedication to travel to every single live stop and grind non-stop you can increase your chances drastically, but they will still be slim.”

According to Holz, winning the WSOP main event is less likely than what he has accomplished, if you take a hard look at the numbers. Holz admits that the tournaments he has been winning have been with small fields. To his credit, the competition couldn’t be any tougher.

After the seven-figure score at the Bellagio in late 2015, Holz wasted almost no time for an assault on the all-time tournament money list. By the end of 2016, he would sit within the top 10.

Holz decided to enter the $200,000 buy-in high roller at a WPT stop in the Philippines. He found himself at an extremely tough final table with the likes of Colman, Phil Ivey, David Peters, Steve O’Dwyer and Mike McDonald. Holz eventually emerged the winner and pocketed $3.4 million. By month’s end, he made another high roller final table, this time finishing sixth in an AUD$100,000 buy-in at the Aussie Millions. He had three more six-figure scores prior to the start of the 2016 WSOP.

As the 2016 WSOP was beginning, Holz made the final table of the $300,000 buy-in Super High Roller Bowl, the most expensive tournament of the year. The event attracted 49 high-stakes poker players, gamblers, and businessmen, and Holz found himself second in chips to start the final table. The winner was to receive a whopping $5 million.

Though he took the chip lead from Rainer Kempe during their hours-long heads-up match, Holz eventually succumbed to his fellow German poker pro. Still, Holz pocketed $3.5 million in what was his largest score ever. Holz later admitted that he had about one-third of himself in the event, saying that his money management strategy is to have less than two percent of bankroll at risk in any one tournament. The Super High Roller Bowl score did allow him to keep more of himself going forward.

While the WSOP was unfolding at the Rio, Holz decided to stick with some high roller events at Aria on the Las Vegas Strip, and though the fields were small, he incredibly went back-to-back-to-back in the five-figure buy-in events. Around 10 of these events ran all summer long. He cashed for about $1.3 million in total from the tournaments, which each drew approximately 40 players.

“I do grind a lot, so obviously it’s more likely that you win tournaments in a row if you play a lot more tournaments,” Holz said just days after he won the third. “I think I’m one of the regulars who plays the most live tournaments. So, it is just more likely that I win three in a row. And the fields are small, so it’s less unlikely than people think. But I ran pretty hot and feel great about it.”

He could have stopped winning right then and there and still have had one of the sickest heaters in the history of tournament poker. However, his biggest lifetime score was still to come.

In early July, Holz entered the $111,111 One Drop High Roller, a super high-stakes event that drew a huge field of 183. Holz didn’t have the luxury of a big stack in the later stages, as he entered the final day in sixth position out of the 13 left. However, at the final table Holz ended up eliminating three players in three consecutive hands. He was then the chip leader and had another shot at a $5 million payday ($4.98 million to be precise). Holz eventually found himself heads-up with Smith, and despite surrendering the chip lead at one point, he was able to capture his first WSOP bracelet in just his second summer playing there.

The WCOOP title and his WSOP bracelet are the two highlights of his career, he said.

“Normally I am good with words, but this time I really don’t know what to say,” Holz said after the bracelet win. “I just feel so overwhelmed and I didn’t think that it would be like this. I just feel like I’m in heaven right now.”

The run didn’t stop there, as a month later he was the winner of the EPT Barcelona €50,000 high roller for nearly $1.5 million. It was his sixth tournament win and fourth seven-figure score of the year. Then in September, Holz finished runner-up in the PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) $102,000 buy-in super high roller event, pocketing another $1,067,639 after a heads-up deal.

Retirement?

Despite the exhilaration of winning millions, Holz said that the summer was “exhausting” for him. He grinded more than 10 hours each day. Holz wanted to make the most of his time there, and he often played high-stakes cash games when he wasn’t in a tournament. He was able to bring tons of money back home, but it took its toll. He said he likely won’t play a full schedule of tournaments in Las Vegas next summer.

“I feel like poker gets you into this rush where you always want more and more, and now I want to calm down and play a little less and focus on other things,” Holz said.

He said that upon returning home after the WSOP he knew his body and mind needed a lot of rest.

According to Holz, the nature of tournament poker, where anything but a first-place finish can feel disappointing, also wore him down a bit by the end of the summer. This sentiment is coming from someone who has won nearly 20 percent of the tournaments he has cashed in. He wants to reduce his volume to about 20 percent of what it was this summer, and focus some of his time and money on investing. Holz doesn’t want to depend on poker for his income long-term.

“My main intention is pretty clear,” Holz said of some of the confusion on the Internet regarding his poker plans. “I’m not going to pursue poker anywhere near to how I did it in the past. I’ll continue to play the highest and most profitable live events, and I’ll still play online occasionally, but my focus will be on different things now. The whole ‘retirement’ thing is just funny with the €1,000,000 One Drop coming up soon in mid-October.” ♠