Scott "emptyseat88" Fischman is one of the few players whose name is truly revered on both the digital and real-world poker felts. He's also one of the few players with the cojones to put up $10,300 on a 16-person heads-up tournament twice in as many weeks. This ex-poker dealer's patient playing style recently landed him a first-place finish in the relatively new PokerStars
Super Tuesday tournament, a $1,000 buy-in tournament, which earned him $75,870. His live tournament winnings alone come to almost $1.9 million.
Fishman woke up at 6 p.m. on Saturday (no, that's not a typo), just in time to give
Card Player an interview. He talked about the new tournaments on PokerStars, his general dislike of the
World Series nowadays, and some strategies on getting started in non-hold'em games and on playing mid-pairs in hold'em:
Shawn Patrick Green: You recently won the
Super Tuesday tournament on PokerStars. Which weekly $1K buy-in tournament do you like more, the
Super Tuesday or the the
$1K Monday on Full Tilt?
Scott 'emptyseat88' Fishman: I've been getting really, really accustomed to the Stars structures. They've recently changed all of their rebuy structures and pretty much all of their other tournament structures. They've added a couple of crucial levels: $500-$1,000, $2,500-$5,000, and so on. I don't know, the new structure just really lends itself to my style of play a little more and I'm really excited about their recent changes.
SPG: What's your playing style, specifically?
SF: It's just a more patient, non-crapshoot style. Basically, their new structures have let us play a lot more at the end, when we're playing for all of the money, as opposed to it being really crapshoot-y at the end, which it used to be. I like to play tight at the end; I'm not one of those guys that's all in preflop all the time or reraising everyone else all in preflop. About a year or two ago, in order to win a PokerStars tournament you had to be … well, for instance,
BeL0WaB0Ve [Kevin Saul] used to win every tournament because you'd have to be this totally super-super-loose-aggressive player at the end when you're playing for all of the money. I don't really like that.
SPG: What kind of strategy worked for you in that
Super Tuesday tournament that you took down?
SF: In the
Super Tuesday I was just really calm. I was always between like 20 and 30 big blinds. I never really had a monster stack; I was just really patient. Especially threehanded, I just remember playing really, really patiently. There was one guy [
acidca] that was playing fantastically, he ended up getting second. He played really well five-, four-, and threehanded, and I just kind of waited and waited and he ended up knocking the other guy out in third. He had a huge chip lead on me, but I still had some room to play because of the new blinds structure.
I pulled up the new structure with the old structure at the same time, and in the old structure, the blinds would have been two and a half times larger when we were playing heads up, so it would have been impossible for me. So, instead of playing $3,000-$6,000 we would have been playing $8,000-$16,000. It would have been crazy.
SPG: What do you think of this new
High Stakes Showdown weekly $10,000 buy-in heads-up tournament on PokerStars?
SF: I really like it, but it's a shame that it's all really good players. [laughing] They make it really tough.
SPG: So you'd be a proponent of PokerStars raising the player cap up from a maximum of 16 to try to get some more dead money in there?
SF: Yeah, well, I'd like to see some satellites. It was open to 32 players last week, but they didn't have enough players sign up, and even if they did have enough sign up it would have been all super-good players. And it's really a tough tournament, being that there's $10,000 in starting chips and the structure is the best heads-up tournament structure that you can possibly find anywhere.
Anywhere. It's better than all of the
NBC [National] Heads-Up [Championship] tournaments that I've played, it's better than the heads-up tournament at the
Mirage [Poker Showdown], and it's better than the heads-up tournament at the
World Series. It's literally 10 times better than any other heads-up tournament, and the problem with that is you're playing against really good players. It just takes forever. On the first weekend that I played, I was up against AwwSnap for almost two hours. He ended up winning a coin-toss; he played really well. And then, last week I played against APerfectGent. We played a really long match again and he just played good poker, so it was tough.
SPG: How did the
World Series of Poker treat you this year?
SF: I really didn't like being down there. I think I played only 11 events, whereas last year I played like 35. I didn't like the changes they made at all. The double-stacks, in particular. Basically, a lot of tournament directors believe that they need to give us more chips to keep us happy. That really means that they want to keep the amateurs happy. Only the amateurs complain that they don't have enough chips to start with. As I pointed out earlier, the more chips you have at the beginning, the fewer chips you have at the end and the more of a crapshoot it is when you're playing for all of the money. It makes it really difficult.
SPG: Well, not only that, but when they upped the starting chips they upped the blinds structure, as well, so it basically neutralized itself.
SF: Right, exactly. And they left it really, really, really crapshoot-y at the end. It was really bad this year. The $5K no-limit event I remember, specifically. I went down there because one of my buddies was the tournament director announcing the final table and it was the first one that was in that box [a sequestered tent;
click here to read more about that] and was totally closed-off to the public. It was a $5K no-limit final table and it was over in an hour and 40 minutes, with breaks and everything. My buddy told me it took around 40 hands to finish, which is ridiculous. You cannot get any more ridiculous than that. It's essentially the same as what's going on with these
WPT [World Poker Tour] tournaments. I remember seeing the Mirage
WPT final table where the average stack was like 10 big blinds and they were playing for $1.5 million. It's a joke. And that comes from them giving us a lot of chips to start the tournaments and things like that.
I really didn't like the structures down there [at the
World Series] and I didn't like the fact that they had basically four tournaments running each day. It just makes total chaos and it was a really uncomfortable scenario. I was not happy at all. It was a total clusterf***.
SPG: What's the significance of your screen name, other than the obvious? Is there any special significance to it?
SF: When I first started playing poker, I realized that I didn't really want to be recognized at the table. I didn't want to stand out. I didn't want people playing extra close attention to me. I guess all that has kind of changed. [laughing] But that was the initial goal of the screen name, whereas it's a little different than someone having "I'mGoingToF***ingKillYou" as their screen name, you know what I mean? They just want everyone to try to go after them. My screen name was more, "pretend I'm not here."
SPG: I can see that. [laughing] Is no-limit hold'em your best game, or do you think you're better at something else?
SF: It varies. I'm a really big fan of pot-limit Omaha, but we just don't really get much of a chance to play it, and I'm not big on playing cash games that much. I really like a lot of the Omaha and I like a stud eight-or-better. I really do like all of the games, actually, but it's kind of irrelevant because you have to focus on no-limit hold'em or you're cutting out your bottom line. It would be kind of silly to log a lot of hours on anything but no-limit hold'em.
SPG: What kind of advice can you give to someone who's trying to break into some of the non-hold'em games?
SF: I would say try one at a time. What I did when I was first starting out was if I was playing no-limit hold'em and I had a bad week, or three or four losing sessions in a row, and was getting irritated, I would go play stud for a change of pace. I would play stud until I lost three sessions in a row at that and then I would try Omaha eight-or-better until I lost three at that. By the time I got back to no-limit hold'em, I'd have a fresh approach and I wouldn't really feel negatively about the game. That's one of the biggest problems that people have as far as a losing streak or running bad. They keep playing the same game every day and just keep beating their heads in.
If you play some of these other games, it's going to help your hold'em game, as well, because there are certain nuances from these other games that cross over to hold'em. So, you can really do yourself a big favor by learning these other games, anyway. Like, when I first started playing Omaha. It's pretty obvious that you're going to run into the nuts more often and you're more afraid of big hands. So, when I switched back to hold'em, I was just a little more wary of big hands. I realized that people can make straight flushes and s*** like that. The nuances of the other games cross over very nicely.
SPG: So you don't recommend that people jump straight into H.O.R.S.E., then, if they want to learn something new? (laughing)
SF: Right. [laughing] No, no, don't jump straight into H.O.R.S.E. Take on the games one at a time. Make sure that you can focus on the little things, because it's the little things that cross over in between each game that make you become better at all of them. And if you try and learn them all at once you're not going to learn all of those small things.
SPG: What's the one thing that, when you learned it, quickly brought your game to a new level? Whether it be a philosophy or a move or what have you.
SF: The one thing that I remember that actually changed me a lot was learning to stay even keel. Learning to not react heavily to a win as well as not reacting heavily to a loss. The more even keel you can stay, the better you're going to be, overall.
SPG: Can you give any tips on playing medium pocket pairs like sixes to nines?
SF: My general rule of thumb when playing middle pairs is that I won't play them at all if it's for more than 8 percent of my stack and I try to limp and call a raise instead of raising myself. If you're the first into the pot and you raise and then somebody reraises, you can't call. It represents too much of your stack. But if you limp and somebody raises, you can call and try to flop a set.
SPG: Awesome. I appreciate you taking the time for this interview.
SF: Thanks, have a good one.
