Card Player Poker Stories With Nick Schulman

Poker Stories is a new, long-form audio series that features casual interviews with some of the game’s best players and personalities. Each episode highlights a well-known member of the poker world and dives deep into their favorite tales both on and off the felt.

Click here to download or subscribe to the Poker Stories podcast on iTunes.

Age: 32
Turned Pro: 2003
Hometown: Manhattan, New York
Live Tournament Earnings: $8.35 million
Best Score: 1st Place – 2005 $10,000 WPT World Poker Finals ($2,167,500)

The Highlights

On pool hustling as a teenager…

“I was gambling pretty young. I really kind of loved that life. There were a few pool rooms in New York City that were the action rooms, which means that all of the tri-state gamblers, pool hustlers and rounders would all show up at once. It was a fun atmosphere. I played everywhere from the U.S. Open to weekly tournaments.”

On NYC underground games…

“From 18 to 21 I was around the New York poker club scene so much that I might as well have been a chair in the room. It wasn’t the Mayfair Club, but it was similar. Even some of those players would frequent these clubs. [It] was a very vibrant scene. We would play like $10-$25 no-limit and the games would play quite big, sort of juicy. But there were games [everywhere], from Queens to Brooklyn, in barber shops and restaurants.”

On losing a seven-figure bankroll…

“It went well for the first month or two, maybe even three or four. But [overall] not good. I found a way to kind of blow threw that million pretty fast. It’s just one of those things, I wish I could go back and talk to that kid, like Morgan Freeman in Shawshank Redemption. But I can’t. So that’s kind of how it went. It was like an egregious amount of spending, very ambitious investing that didn’t go my way, a lot of staking.”

On one of the biggest pots he’s ever won…

“I won about a six or seven hundred thousand dollar pot in no-limit. It was actually in New York, years ago. I had kings and got it in preflop versus Q-10 suited. You could imagine the player who had that Q-10 suited was a very creative player. He put that seventh bet in, and I thought, ‘wow, it’s happening, you know, he has aces.’ But there was nothing I could do. I asked him if he wanted to run it twice, and he was like, “nope.” And I was just [thinking], ‘please start dealing the cards, right now. I just want to get this over with.’ We flipped them up and he was kind of laughing. It came 8-9-2, so he immediately flopped nut outs. The turn was a deuce, and the river was a four, and it was pretty sweet. I remember every card of that one.”

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