Q&A With Poker Super High Roller Extraordinaire Philipp GruissemYoung German Pro Talks $4.5 Million Year In 2013 and His Recent Commitment To Charity |
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In 2013 one group of five young German poker professionals absolutely dominated the world of high roller poker tournaments. Philipp Gruissem, Tobias Reinkemeier, Igor Kurganov, Max Altergott and Fabian Quoss cashed for a combined total of $14 million in live tournaments in 12 months, with each member of this group of twenty-something friends earning least seven figures in that period.
Gruissem lead the pack with an incredible $4,494,419 in earnings for 2013. He made seven final tables throughout the year, winning three super high roller titles along the way including the $50,000 WSOP Asia Pacific $50,000 high roller and back-to-back WPT Alpha8 super high rollers.
The 26-year-old pro, known as “philbort” online, originally hails from Aachen, Germany but now calls London home when he isn’t on the road chasing his next million-dollar score. His first recorded live tournament score came in 2009, and in less than five years he has accumulated more than $8 million in live earnings. Card Player recently caught up with Gruissem at the 2014 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in the Bahamas and was able to pick his brain on a number of topics ranging from his personal success, the success of his group of friends and his recent commitment to charity.
Erik Fast: What would you attribute your success in tournament poker? How much of it do you think are inherent qualities you have as a person, and how much was studying, hard work and help from others?
Phillip Gruissem: I think that it is a mix of all of that. It is a decent percent due to work. I have always been very disciplined in poker, not in life, but in poker. I have a skill set that goes along with excelling in poker, but it’s not like I’m a genius so I did have to work hard at my game. One of the biggest parts was definitely meeting the right people at the right time, so that we could share our experiences and thoughts and learn from each other. You have to get lucky at the right time.
EF: So, if I understand you correctly, you’re referring to meeting these other German players like Igor Kurganov. How did that shape your career?
PG: If you have fun in your job you are going to be good. Meeting these guys, these friends, made poker more fun for me and it was easier to work on my game with them. That is another example of luck.
EF: How much of the motivation for your working on you poker game was motivated by making money and how much was just based on a ‘love of the game?’
PG: It was a mix. I really liked the game in the beginning and saw an opportunity to make a side income during University and I saw the freedom that you could achieve with poker and from that point on I was chasing that.
EF: So you picked up the game in high school and were making money on the side during University, correct?
PG: I was studying mechanical engineering in Aachen, Germany. I only had a small side income, but I could see that if I put the time and effort into poker, I could have a good living. At one point I realized that I was kind of doing poorly in both poker and University, and I figured I could only do good at one or the other.
EF: So that was around the time you meet Igor Kurganov and began the process of transitioning into a full-time tournament player on the high roller circuit?
PG: Yeah, I met Igor around the time I dropped out of University. There was no single point. I qualified for a main event here, met some other people there, got staked for some tournaments there. It just develops, there is no inflection point.
EF: Now obviously poker is an individual sport, in which you are playing for yourself not for your country. But in a way people still think of the game in terms of nationality. German players being at the forefront of high stakes live tournaments in recent, and this has become a story in the media. How did this happen?
PG: I think the biggest factor is that we never held back from each other as a group. We always shared our thoughts and our work, and for the most part players from other nations played alone and against each other. Now you see more building up of groups, but we always had this community that helped us a lot.
EF: So you and your group of friends cashed for $14.2 million in 2013, mostly in high roller and super high roller events. Now this number should be taken with a grain of salt because of course you all probably had some of the largest amounts spent on buy-ins, but still, how did your group come to dominate these tournaments?
PG: There a couple of reasons. First off, I do think we have an edge on the fields. I think we did a really good job working hard on our games, but we have also just been extremely lucky on top. To have a run like this you need to play good and run very good. I think that’s what we did last year.
EF: You recently posted a blog about how, in the past couple years, your main motivation was earning money and that over time this wasn’t fulfilling for you. How did you go about balancing your life and finding more meaning in what you do as work?
PG: After I had player poker nonstop for four or five years I got the point where my motivation got lost and it got boring. I thought, ‘Why am I doing this? I have a little bit of money in the bank, but why else am I doing this?’ That sucks. So I was thinking about what to do and I decided that I should try to be an effective altruist, somebody who thinks how he can help other people most effectively. I came to the conclusion that the thing I could do best right now is playing poker, that’s my skill. So if I give a 10 percent piece of my earnings to charity, the better I play the more money I can make and the more impact I can have. So that is a big motivation for me, when playing poker isn’t always fun, I get back on track and stay motivated through that.
EF: So what was your thought process when deciding where your money should go?
PG: One of the most important factors for me was the hours in school people get per dollar spent, because I think education is the place where you can effect the most people in the long run. The people who go to school can teach their children what the earned and on and on. So that was my main focus, and that’s how we came to choose the first charity, the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI). Then I decided that it might be even smarter to pay people (the Effective Altruism charity) to convince more people that an altruistic lifestyle would be the best way to live, to give them money so that they can host events in an attempt to convince people to think about more than just their own immediate surrounding and reality.
EF: So in both cases you were looking to start like a chain reaction of sorts, helping right away but also compounding down the line.
PG: Yeah, these guys are super smart and have a big vision. If there is any chance that this might be a movement, then I would like to support that.
EF: What are your plans for the immediate future? Continue to travel, playing the high roller events around the world and donating some of your winnings to your selected charities?
PG: Yeah. These $100,000 buy-in super high roller tournaments are the most fun and have the most money to be made, so even though I hate all of the flying, I think it’s the best approach for me right now. The level of competition is almost the same as it would be in a $25,000 buy-in event as it is in a $100,000 buy-in, so yeah, it makes sense to play higher for me. 
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