Jimmy "gobboboy" Fricke (pronounced like "Mickey") came raging onto the poker public's radar less than one year ago. It was hard for people not to notice when this young, baby-faced, non-threatening kid wound up heads-up with
Gus Hansen - one of poker's "bad boys" who has a truly intimidating presence - in a match worth millions.
Fricke eventually lost that match, but he collected his $800,000 consolation prize and undeniably cemented his visage in the minds of poker enthusiasts. Just before his
runner-up finish at the
Aussie Millions versus Hansen, Fricke had finished deep in the
PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (
PCA), taking
22nd place for $28,000. Then, in August, he took down a
no-limit hold'em bounty event at the
Fifth-Annual Empire State Championship. Other than that, however, the year has been pretty quiet for Fricke. He's earned $65,000 in
Online Player of the Year-qualified finishes, but has failed to break into the top-three spots of any of those tournaments.
Fricke, however, is continuously learning, and he isn't even close to stepping away from the felts. The 20-year-old Illinois native and self-proclaimed geek (and proud of it, thank you very much) had been playing poker for more than a year before his huge score, and he plans to continue playing for the foreseeable future.
Card Player recently snagged him for an interview, just two months before the next
Aussie Millions. Fricke talked to us about his life before poker and how he got started in poker. He also proved himself to be a font of wisdom beyond his years regarding advice for up-and-coming players and poker strategy, in general.
Shawn Patrick Green: First off, can you tell people a bit about yourself, for those who may not know you?
Jimmy "gobboboy" Fricke: I started playing poker my senior year of high school, in 2005. I started playing limit, but quickly found my way into tournaments and slowly built up my bankroll from small rebuys. I was posting on poker forums constantly and getting better and better, and then I started playing in live tournaments and I had a breakout run at the
PCA and then the
Aussie Millions.
SPG: What did you do before poker?
JF: I graduated high school and then I went to college for about a semester. I failed every single one of my classes because I was just staying in my dorm room playing poker, instead. I
didn't drop out because I wanted to play poker, I dropped out because 1) it would have been a waste to stay there, anyway, because I was doing so poorly, and 2) I just hated college. I didn't enjoy it; I didn't even want to go in the first place. I just wanted to find something that I wanted to do, and poker turned out to be what I fell into.
I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne. I switched out of my major the first week that I was there. I was originally there for math and computer science but then switched into the general curriculum when I realized that I hated computer science.
SPG: What did you do in high school, then? What were your hobbies?
JF: I was into a lot of the nerdy stuff. I played card games like Magic: The Gathering. I was the typical nerd/geek, whatever. I did a little bit of writing for the school paper. I did a lot of acting in the earlier years, but in the last few years I was into stuff like the
Scholastic Bowl, which is a lot like
Quiz Bowl, wherein you answer questions in a competition. I was also on the math team.
Honestly, I just hung out with my math and physics teacher, because he did all of the really nerdy stuff. I'm still pretty good friends with him. He actually predicted that I would be a millionaire before I turned 21 and that I would drop out of college.
SPG: The
Aussie Millions is coming up again in about two months. Are you looking forward to playing in that event, again?
JF: Yeah, definitely. And I'm not just playing the main event this time; I'm playing in all of the tournaments. Last year, I went to the
PCA and the
Aussie Millions, so I didn't have time to play in the preliminaries, but this year I'm going for the whole thing. I'm bringing a lot of friends with me, and they all want to play because I told them how soft the tournament is. They're coming for the preliminaries and all of that, and it will be a real blast, especially since I know some people this time around. People recognizing you is kind of cool, I guess.
SPG: What friends are coming with you? Anyone we'd know?
JF: Yeah, definitely.
Thayer Rasmussen [THAY3R] is coming. My friend
Matt LaGarde [mlagoo] is coming - he won the
Sunday Million in June.
Randall [Flowers] is coming, RandALLin online.
JCarver [Jason Somerville] is coming,
Pechorin is coming. Pechorin is really good, but he's on a hell of a downswing right now. But you haven't seen my name up there lately, either, because I'm on a hell of a downswing, too. But whatever, it happens.
SPG: You're a young guy, and, frankly, you don't look all too intimidating. Do the live-tournament players give you much respect?
JF: I don't think so. I'm sure some of them do, and the ones who I want to get respect from I'm sure do, because they tend to "get" poker. A lot of people whom I've said stuff about in the past just don't seem to get poker.
But not a whole lot of people in poker get a whole lot of respect. You have to be a really big name for that to occur. A lot of the best players in the world - who
I would consider the best players in the world - aren't getting a whole lot of respect right now. And I know that for a fact because I've actually talked to other live players and seen how they react to them. Especially the online players; we don't get very much respect at all. I think of the best online players right now, a lot of them are known, but some of them aren't. But, honestly, when it comes to online poker, it's all about results, because there are just
so many players who are playing. If you don't have a ridiculous stream of results … if you don't get noticed, like
really noticed, then it's going to be hard to get your name out there. And, honestly, I think every online player wants to go on those huge rushes. They want to be there for the money, but they also want to get their names out there.
SPG: Also, considering that you're so young, what are your long-term plans, and how is poker involved in them?
JF: I think poker
is my long-term plan, at this point. I'm not really interested in doing a whole lot else, right now. I think poker's great; it helps me stay social, it's a way of getting money, it's a way of having fun - it's basically everything I want right now. I'm pretty laid back; when I'm not playing poker, I'm really not doing anything useful, whatsoever. When I'm playing poker I can do a lot of things. It helps me travel and it helps me get out there a little bit more. Before I found poker, I wasn't doing a whole lot. But, I mean, that's kind of true of everyone in high school.
Honestly, I can't see myself doing anything else for a while. Especially since I dropped out of school. Just because of the way that I am, though, I think that I could go back and do whatever I wanted to do. But for the time being, I really don't mind doing nothing else.
SPG: Well, that's actually saying a lot considering that you just told me that you're in a terrible downswing. If you can say that, even in the middle of a huge downswing, you must deal with downswings well.
JF: Well, since Australia, I've been on a pretty terrible run, and I don't mind saying that. I've won a Turning Stone tournament and I've had some deep runs online, but nothing like first place. and, unfortunately, the money, especially online, is very top-heavy. But finishes like fifth are still going to help, for sure, especially in something like the
WCOOP [PokerStars
World Championship of Online Poker], wherein the first-place money is life-changing.
If you talk to me after I bust out of a tournament, I'm going to be pretty upset. And yeah, I've gone on some rants, sometimes, with my friends. But poker is very, very swingy, and you just have to handle it. You just have to make it not affect your game, that's the most important thing. If I'm still in tournaments, I'm focused, even if I bust out of another tournament on a huge bad beat, which happened recently. It just sucks, and you have to deal with it. But then, once you're out of the tournaments, whatever - go nuts. I know that a lot of people like to go out and drink when they're really pissed off. I don't drink, but when I get really pissed of, I tend to bitch about it a little bit, but in a hour or two I'm fine. You just come back the next day and you play again.
The real problem comes when you compound your downswings by playing games that are over your head, and I used to do that. I used to play pot-limit Omaha a lot, and I would lose money at the highest limits. That happened over the summer. You just
have to protect yourself against that sort of thing. You have to play what you're good at. I've since stopped myself from playing those high-limit cash games and punting a lot of money at it. I'll just play tournaments, now, and eventually I'll come out of my downswing. Throughout the entire thing, I'm obviously getting better and better. And eventually I'll be able to be profitable in situations in which I wouldn't normally be profitable, because I've been getting better and talking to people. I haven't stopped learning [since the
Aussie Millions], even though I haven't been making money in the meantime.
SPG: You said that you had to learn the hard way to not play over your head, People can say that as advice as many times as they want, but do you think someone can really get that through their head unless they've actually experienced it?
JF: Well, here's an interesting thing. Right after the
Aussie Millions, I received a message from someone well known on the forums, and he was telling me that you have to be careful about your money; people are going to be asking you for money and they want to be staked, and so on. And you have to make yourself not do it. And I told myself, "Of course I'm not going to do that. I'm not stupid with money." And, of course, for the next few months I slowly spewed off money doing stupid things.
I was just talking to a friend of mine last night about this. The first big tournament score you get, you're going to spew off a lot of money on things that you don't expect to do. Everyone has a leak, and for me, that was high-limit cash games. And it's really hard to understand what goes through your mind and how to stop those things from happening every time you take a bad beat or just because you have the money and you feel like you can blow it at the time.
I think that once I get a second really big score, I'll have enough experience in the field not to do that. Obviously there are some people in the poker world that we know of that do this constantly; every time they have a big score, they do something. But I think it would be a great disservice to myself to keep doing that and to be so self-destructive, because I do think that I'm smart enough not to do it, and that would definitely affect my life in a lot of ways that I wouldn't want it to.
SPG: What's your take on the ratio between luck and skill in poker? Are people giving too much credit to the skill component or are people using the "luck outweighs skill" argument as an excuse?
JF: Everyone wants to know what the percentage of luck versus skill is in poker, but what would it do if I said that luck is 60 percent of the game? What difference is that in your head compared to 55 percent? Or 50 percent? Or 2 percent? Or 90 percent? It doesn't matter. We just know that there's some luck and some skill. Over the long-term, yes, it's going to be more skill-based, and over the short-term it's going to be more luck. If I play one hand, it's going to come down to mostly luck to determine who wins the hand. But it also depends upon what type of hands we're talking about. If we're talking about hands wherein I fold preflop almost every time - unless I'm playing against someone who's playing every single pot, then obviously it comes down to skill there - it's mostly luck and what cards you get.
People just want to get definitive facts to tell everyone, but it really just comes down to how it affects your play, and it's very subjective. I don't think that people are thinking about it the right way.
SPG: How do you handle the extraordinary draw outs in big events? Things like set versus set situations or top two pair succumbing to a runner-runner straight?
JF: It just sucks. But that's the thing about the long-term in tournament poker. I've played probably five or maybe six $10,000 buy-in events over the past year, and there were two of them wherein I basically had nothing going and I bled chips until I got it in in a good spot and just didn't win (although I had the worst of it, anyway). Recently, in Niagara, I got flush over flushed where we both were playing two-card flushes. I played it for max value and he just so happened to have the second nuts when I had the third nuts. In situations like that, you just have to consider whether you played the hand correctly. If anyone thinks that you can magically avoid a bad beat just because you're a good player or whatever, or because in the past you've been running hot, that's absurd. You just have to consider whether or not you played the hand correctly.
And there are a lot of people in poker who want to avoid these big all ins so that they can avoid these big suckouts, and that's just absurd. You can avoid taking really, really small edges if you think that you're a good enough player to find some better edges. There was actually a thread on a forum recently about someone folding aces preflop when there were three or four all ins to him because he wanted to avoid a suckout. I'm like, "Are you serious? Why are you even posting this? This makes no sense." And there were actually a bunch of people
agreeing with him, saying "you can find a better spot for things like this." Are you joking?
It all comes down to math, and so many people think they're better than the math at poker. There are a few people who can pass up 5 percent edges. There's less than 1 percent of 1 percent of players who are good enough to pass up 5 percent edges in poker. And there are so many players out there who would be
wise to take a 5 percent
disadvantage simply because they're often putting in their money at much
worse disadvantages than that.
It's funny to me when people think that they're so much better than the math at the game. Especially in short-stacked tournament situations, and that's something that all online players are used to dealing with, at least all of the good ones. And all of the good online players will basically be playing almost perfectly at the end of a tournament, and it's just unknown by the public, because they don't want to care about it, because [they think] it's not playing poker or something like that. Deep in tournaments, you're going to have to be getting your money in preflop a lot. And things are going to happen, but whether or not you win is based on the percentages, and it doesn't matter what way you win.
Actually, it's interesting. I don't mean to ramble, but when someone says, "Oh, man, I ran aces into kings and then he hit a king on me. It's so unlucky." But then I always think, "Well, if he had kings, was he really getting away from it?" What if our hero had kings and
he hit a king on the other guy? Or what if the other guy had kings and he
didn't hit something?
In that situation, when you have aces versus kings, the money is going in, regardless, preflop. There's no way that someone's going to get away from that in a short-stacked situation; no one in that situation is going to be folding. They're playing it for max value, and that's what you should be doing. If you have a strong hand and you believe that it's best, most of the time you should be playing it for max value. Playing live can influence things somewhat, because there are tells and things, but people take those out of proportion. They should really just be playing it for max value, and I think that the online players are good at that, but some of them still have to learn it, myself included.
SPG: Let's say you're in the very first hand of a tournament and you've never played with any of these players before. You have $1,500 in chips with blinds at $10-$20. You're in the big blind and are dealt pocket kings. The under-the-gun player opens for $100 and a mid-position player reraises to $500. It folds to you. What do you do, here?
JF: I definitely go all in. The biggest tell that people don't care about is bet sizes. It's
the biggest tell that someone could possibly have in his game, and most inexperienced players are even worse at this. People who don't play a whole lot will just subconsciously include the strength of their hand in their bet sizes. If someone makes a raise between two and three times someone else's bet - like say [the reraiser in the initial situation] had made it $240 - that is a much, much stronger raise than a raise to $500. And there are obviously exceptions; some people out there over-raise their aces because they don't want other people to just call. But, especially deep in a tournament, when effective stacks are like 10 or 20 big blinds, if someone opens for three big blinds and another person makes it seven big blinds, do you really think they could have a weak hand, there? Unless they're
trying to make it look like they have a weak hand. Nobody raises for that little and then decides to fold anymore, unless they're absolutely at the bottom of the gene pool.
I think [bet sizes] are just a huge thing that so few people take advantage of - and it's free information. Other people do things for information like, and this is another discussion that we had recently online, betting for information. It's such a sham, because you can figure out [in other ways] everything that you want to figure out by betting or raising for information. Instead of using those precious chips that you have deep in a tournament, you can just look at what other people are doing and use their betting lines and their betting patterns and the size of their bets and everything to figure out the information that you want to get, instead of putting in all of these chips and making a pot huge with a marginal hand, and then folding anyway. That's what most people do.
So, in this situation: 1) you have kings, and 2) it's a sit-and-go, so you go all in. If this guy has queens, do you really think he's folding them? People don't do this. You just have to think about what his range is. Let's say the guy's range is queens, kings, aces, and A-K suited. If you know that, even though you're only really ahead of one hand, you go all in, because you're still a huge favorite against his range. Just think about his range, mathematically, and go all in, because he's never folding. He has a third of his stack in the pot, and even if he is folding, it's probably incorrect to.
SPG: Is it any different with pocket queens?
JF: Probably not, just because of his bet size. This is another thing that online players probably have over live players, a bit, is that in situations where we think there's an edge in what we're doing, we can just put in the money. People always say that I'm fearless at the table. Well, I'm fearless because I know that if I'm wrong and I stick my money in, or if I'm right and I get sucked out on, I can just open up another table. And if this is a low buy-in tournament, people are going to be doing a lot of stupid stuff. Obviously, everyone here is putting their money in with aces, preflop; they'll do that at any level. But here, at this tournament, there are probably a lot of people that are going to be putting it in preflop with something bad. If someone has A-K or jacks in this spot, they're probably doing the same thing; they're probably raising to $500. And if they're not, then there's the offside-chance that someone with A-K will say, "OK, well, I reraised and someone reraised me, so I have to fold."
And with queens, you're basically representing what you have, in this situation. So, if anyone knows what you have and still folds incorrectly, that's
huge for you. David Sklansky calls it the "Fundamental Theorem of Poker," which is that every time your opponent makes a move as if he could see your cards, he gains, and every time he makes a move that he
wouldn't make if he could see your cards, you gain. So, if you're representing exactly what you have, and your opponent can basically say, "Well, he's got queens," and he still doesn't act correctly upon that, then you just gained a whole lot in that situation.
SPG: Is A-K weak enough to fold from the big blind in that situation, then?
JF: I probably would be folding with A-K, but it really depends on the buy-in or if they're all complete unknown players, which I'm assuming they are. If it was like a $5 sit-and-go, then yeah, I'd probably stick it in. There are many times that I've joined a $5 sit-and-go to just tilt off. I just go all in every hand. So, it's possible that some idiot is doing that with A-5 because they just don't care. It also matters whether it's a Saturday night on St. Patrick's Day, or whatever. [Laughs] It really depends. There are just so many people, especially online, who do random things. It's probably not wise to fold queens or better or A-K, and, honestly, in a low buy-in sit-and-go, I probably wouldn't be folding jacks.
SPG: What's the most important thing that you've learned in poker?
JF: There have been a few times in my poker career that I've said, "Oh, I have an epiphany," and I've only been playing for like two-and-a-half years. There have been a few times when I've said, "Wow, this is really going to change my game." And I did it, and it
did affect my game. Like when I first started playing really, really loose-aggressive and people would just keep folding to me. That was really just a huge epiphany, because it doesn't matter what I actually have, it matters whether or not they're going to call me. That's learning how to be really, really aggressive. Learning how to fold a big hand in a big spot because you think your edge is small, or you have instincts that tell you you're beat. That's another big one, you have to trust your instincts as a poker player. I think my instincts are really well-honed, but I still need to trust them more. Recently, when I discovered that bet size [tells] were so huge and so underused. I started trusting those, and that's part of my instincts thing. I think that bet-sizing is a huge thing and that no one is taking advantage of it, and that was another huge epiphany.
But there is just so much to learn in poker that there is probably no one thing that is overwhelming, that will make you a huge player, because otherwise everyone would just know that one thing and they would be great poker players. I guess the biggest epiphany that you could ever have is that, "Wow, looking over the past two years, I've gotten so much better. And you know why? Because I worked at it really, really hard. And over those two years that I've gotten so much better, I have no one to thank more than myself. It's because of myself that I've gotten this much better." You have to tell yourself, "If I work at it, and I really try, I'm going to get better at this game." And, at this point, I can't see myself doing anything else than just getting better and better, and hopefully being one of the best, one day.
SPG: Well, thank you very much, Jimmy, I appreciate it.
