Scott "SCTrojans" Freeman came out of nowhere this year to start tearing up the online poker leader boards. He started making
Online Player of the Year-qualified cashes in March of this year, but he didn't start taking poker seriously until May. In the short amount of time between then and now, he's racked up 41
OPOY-qualified finishes and has earned almost $490,000 from those finishes alone. His consistency has landed him in sixth place in the OPOY standings, despite his late start to the year.
Freeman also found success when he entered the 2007
World Series of Poker main event. He made it far enough to bubble the final two tables, finishing in 19th place for a huge $333,0000 payday.
Card Player had caught up with him during the main event for an interview on Jon Friedberg's
Stacking Chips, which can be found by
clicking here. His extremely short career in poker has been paying off, big time.
Card Player snagged Freeman for an interview just a few days ago. He talked poker strategy, but he is known for his no-nonsense, say-what-he-means attitude, and that came out in spades when he opened up about who thinks is the most overrated player in online poker and why he thinks getting backed in tournaments is usually a dumb idea:
Shawn Patrick Green: Your two final tables this weekend bumped you into sixth place in the OPOY standings. Congrats!
Scott "SCTrojans" Freeman: Thank you.
SPG: So, only finishes in the top 20 of OPOY-qualified tournaments give you points, and yet you've earned points from 41 tournaments so far this year. That's an amazing achievement. How many online tournaments do you play each week?
SF: I used to play a lot more than I do now. When I got out of school in May - and I hadn't really played in many tournaments before May - I started to play in every tournament, all day, every day. So, I put in an insane volume of tournaments in May, June, and July. Over September and October I haven't really been playing in many tournaments. I play all day on the weekends, and then on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday I play in the evening tournaments, just the bigger ones. So, I play more than 50 tournaments a week, now. But in August, we had a TLB [tournament leader board] competition, and I played 1,000 tournaments that month.
SPG: How were your results in August, then?
SF: They weren't nearly as good as they have been these past two months, but I still did fairly well. I don't know why, but my final table statistics were terrible, I couldn't win a tournament to save my life. I just couldn't close anything. I had like 36 final tables with four wins. Or maybe 41 final tables with four wins, something like that. But last month, I won half of the final tables that I got to.
I don't know if that was influenced by the number of tournaments I was playing in, or what have you, but this last month was definitely better.
SPG: Of those 41 OPOY-qualified finishes that I mentioned, seven of them were for first place. That means that you win the entire tournament 17 percent of the time when you make it into the top 20. What's your secret to following through like that?
SF: I don't know. I don't know what it is about me, but I have a hard time really focusing. This is going to come off kind of strange, and I don't want to say that I don't
try my hardest, but when I get deeper into a tournament, I definitely focus a lot more energy into that tournament. Especially when I get down deep, or to the final table, you know? That's definitely when I play my best poker.
When I'm five-tabling and all of the tournaments are in their first few levels, I don't know why, but I kind of neglect some of the tournaments a little bit. As it gets deeper, as my equity increases, I just dedicate a lot more focus on it. I definitely play better that way. I pick up on a lot more player tendencies, how people are playing against me, and whatnot.
But, this last month, I won pretty much every single big tournament that I got deep in, and that's obviously just a case of running well. It's not going to happen every time.
SPG: Your biggest online poker score this year was for $67,000 for taking down the
$1K Monday on Full Tilt.
SF: Yeah, that's my biggest score ever, with the exception of the
World Series of Poker main event.
SPG: That tournament is notoriously stacked with amazing players. Keeping in mind that you undoubtedly adjust to your specific table, do you go into that tournament
planning to play differently, in general, than you would in something like the
Sunday Million on PokerStars?
SF: Of course. You
have to play differently against different players. It's not really a choice, you know what I mean? But then again, tables can be soft even in the $1K events. I remember going down to my final two tables and I recognized like three names, which is absolutely absurd. I was blessed with a really weak final two tables, which made it really easy.
But you
have to treat it differently. When assigning different hand ranges for players or when you ask the question, "What are the hands this player
can have?" which is a question you find yourself asking multiple times in every hand, you just have to adjust that range to the type of player you're playing against. Not necessarily whether they're good or bad, but whether they're aggressive or passive or they open a lot of pots or they're really tight preflop, and things like that. You just have to adjust to every single player, and as I play poker and get better and better, I understand how important it is to alter your play based on the players at your table and based on the players in the hand.
When I started playing poker, that wasn't really a concern of mine. I was focused more on playing my position, my chip stack, and my cards. As I play more, and as I start to get better at poker, I understand that all of that stuff is not nearly as … it's still
important, but adjusting to the player that you're playing against is quite possibly the most important part of tournament poker.
SPG: What moves or plays would you almost never use against an unknown player?
SF: Against unknown players, I tend to believe their reraises, their three-bets, and I hardly ever four-bet all in thinking I have fold equity. I just tend to believe their raises a lot more than those of a good, aggressive player. It's not uncommon for some of the better, aggressive players to be three-betting with nothing or opening with rags, and things like that.
That's the main thing. A lot of the good, aggressive players have a much, much wider range than the average player. So you have to give unknowns more credit until you learn a lot more about them.
SPG: What moves would you use more frequently against a player that you're confident thinks at a high level?
SF: It kind of gets into a crazy mind-game sometimes. When you know that there's a situation where your opponent can be opening or raising with almost any two cards, you might think about three-betting and reraising them with any two cards, yourself, and hoping to take down the pot. And, at the same time, if you open the pot and one of these aggressive players three-bets you in a spot where you're pretty confident that he's reraising you with a very, very wide range of cards, leaving you with fold equity, sometimes you have to four-bet, possibly all in, with rags, as well. It's just a mind-game.
At the higher levels, against other good players, there are so many situations where the cards don't even matter. So much of the game is preflop when you're deep in the online tournaments. It's usually raise, reraise, and fold.
SPG: What leaks do you currently have in your game? If you tell us now, you'll be forced to patch them up. [Laughs]
SF: I tilt a lot; I still do. I tend to stop caring about a lot of tournaments. Especially when something goes wrong in one or two tournaments, I tend to tilt or not play my best or throw away a couple of other tournaments. That's definitely my biggest flaw.
Also, a lot of times, I give my opponents too much credit. I try to think that they're playing optimally. What I happen to do a lot is I say, "What would I do if I were him?" And I think that they're going to act based on that, based on what I would do, and that's not really the case. And I find myself making a ton of mistakes assuming that my opponents play like I do.
And then also, and I'm getting a lot better at it, but my deep-stack, post-flop play in tournaments - "cash game play," people call it - I struggle with. There's a lot of improvement to be made there, for me, post-flop, but I believe I'm getting a lot better than I was a couple of months ago.
But I think that my short-stacked, preflop play is pretty close to optimal.
SPG: What you said in the middle there, about always thinking about how
you would play a hand and kind of assuming that
they would play it that way, that's exactly how I am. It's one of my biggest leaks, as well. I "get into their heads," but it's really just me getting into
my head. [Laughs]
SF: Exactly. [Laughs] I think a lot of players are like that, too. I always hear people saying, "God, I would never do that." Yeah, that happens all the time. It's really frustrating.
SPG: What's the most underrated asset or philosophy a poker player should have?
SF: Fearless aggression. The ability to move all in with nothing and the ability to fire multiple bluffs with nothing. I see so many players - especially the weaker, lower-stakes players who don't know much about the game - ridiculing top players for things like, "Oh, he went all in with 7 high," or "How do you put all of your chips in on a draw?" And these people on the rail, they have no clue. That ability to put all of your chips in with nothing in a spot like that, the aggression … when you believe that your opponent is weak or you have some evidence that your opponent is going to fold, you have to be willing to bite the bullet and put all of your chips in. I can't tell you the number of times I've been all in with 8 high in the last week. You have to be able to have that relentless aggression in you somewhere. You can't play that really, really, really passive game anymore.
SPG: What's the most overrated asset or philosophy?
SF: People overrate players who win. I'm trying to think of some overrated players.
SPG: [Laughing] That's awesome.
SF: I don't want to mention any names. [Laughs] OK, well, for example, there's this guy ********** [name omitted at Freeman's request], you've heard about him, I'm sure.
SPG: I've definitely heard of him. [Laughs]
SF: He's winning everything. He won the … [Freeman lists multiple wins in very big tournaments, which have been omitted for the sake of the player's anonymity]. He's got a bagillion whatever-points on all of the leader boards, but he's not …
good. There's nobody that would disagree that he's a monkey.
So, people don't understand that there's so much … I don't want to call it luck, because that's not the right word, really. But winning a tournament does not mean anything. Anybody can win a tournament on any given day, and if you just have that run of luck - that positive variance, as people are starting to call it, nowadays - if that just happens to hit you at the right time …
It's going to hit someone, there's no doubt that it's going to hit somebody, and it's hitting ********** right now. And a lot of people that don't understand the game of poker are giving him too much credit for his results. He's not a bad player, or anything like that, though. The amount of money that he's won in just couple of months is nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, nowhere
near his expectation. He's hit the goldmine. Don't mention his name, obviously.
People can say the same for me, too, because my results have been absolutely ridiculous. And I understand that results don't mean much. I try to never, ever, use my results as a reasoning to show that I'm a good poker player, especially a good tournament poker player, because I understand how much luck and so on goes into winning these multitable tournaments. The only real way to judge how good of a poker player someone is is subjectively in watching them play and seeing the decisions that they make.
But I hear ********** is a really nice guy. And, for what it's worth, he
is really super aggressive. He bluffed off his stack in the $100 rebuy on Stars the other day. So, the most underrated asset of a poker player that I specified is definitely something that ********** has. That's important.
SPG: What stumbling stones, if any, did you experience on your way up the ranks?
SF: It's really weird, my poker playing lifetime is very short, I started playing tournaments in May. So, my rise was really quick. People talk to me, saying, "Oh, you've never experienced a downswing," blah, blah, blah, but I had a $30,000 downswing in the middle of the summer, and I just had another downswing of more than $20,000 just a few weeks ago. I understand that people have bigger downswings than that, so maybe I haven't had many stumbling stones, other than small downswings. I mean, I haven't had much time to, you know?
In my first live series of events, I was really fortunate and had a huge score, so I haven't really struggled live, either.
The only thing is that I say too many controversial things at my table and on message boards, and I get a lot of negative feedback. That's the only thing that bugs me. That's really the only bad thing that's happened to me since I've started playing. Nothing financial, nothing really emotional, nothing physical - actually, I'm getting fatter. I don't exercise
at all.
SPG: What's the best relatively low-risk way to shoot up the ranks?
SF: Just play a high volume of tournaments. The more you play, the larger your sample gets, obviously, and the smaller your deviation will be. So, the more you play, the less you'll feel the swings. That's how I controlled it, for the most part, especially when I was starting out and didn't have that much money. I just played in so many tournaments that my deviation was very low. And even during a bad week it wasn't that bad because I was playing in so many tournaments.
Other than that, just bankroll-management issues, which are fairly obvious. If you don't play too high, the swings are not going to destroy you.
Or, just get a backer, like most people are doing, nowadays. It's absolutely absurd how many people are backed. You've probably heard some of the stories. If you were to take a look at the list and the number of pro players who are backed ... they're just giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars. But, that's just the financial security of not having to worry about it, you know? It's so sick, they're all just giving away money.
There are some reasons to get backed. For instance, if you're not bankrolled enough for the bigger tournaments, and you feel that the amount of money that you're going to profit in those tournaments that you can't normally play is greater than the amount of money that you're going to be giving away in the smaller tournaments that you actually
can play. That's like the only time that it's profitable to be backed. But that's very, very, very rare. Other than that, it's just the financial-security issue.
SPG: It's pretty likely that the top-five contenders in the OPOY have their eyes on you. How do you rate your changes at taking and holding the top spot through the end of the year?
SF: Zero. I don't know. Who knows, actually; I play more than most of them. It would take a huge, huge, huge score, I think, to get up there with
Isaac ["westmenloAA" Baron] and
ch0ppy [Matt Kay] and all of those guys. They're pretty far ahead of me, so it would take like a
Sunday Million win or something. The
FTOPS [
Full Tilt Online Poker Series] is coming up, I guess. If I actually end up winning one of those events, I could get back in the competition.
SPG: Great, I appreciate you doing this interview, Scott. Thanks!
