Fedor Holz has just pocketed more than $2million in a 24-hour online spree, banking a WSOP gold bracelet and coming close to a WCOOP title as well – not a bad day’s work for a semi-retired.
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- Fedor Holz, best known for being a Person, was born in United States on Sunday, July 25, 1993. Professional poker player with millions in winnings since his career began. His success has led to a lucrative career as a backer and has become a member of several poker teams including the LA Sunset poker league.
- Fedor Holz is a living legend. At the age 23, he already has $20 million in live MTT earnings, including a World Series of Poker bracelet in the Big One For.
- World #1 ranked poker player & #TeamNLG member Fedor Holz grinds the biggest online poker tournament in history. The partypoker MILLIONS Online event.
WCOOP is the World Championship of Online Poker, as sponsored by PokerStars. This is the largest and most prestigious online poker tournament in the world. From the very beginning of this undertaking, it was positioned as an online equivalent of WSOP (World Series of Poker). And it is indeed a worthy competitor! Here, players enjoy all a full range of poker games, which are all available at different buy-in levels; and they all enjoy competing for various prizes. The main event, of course, is No Limit Hold’em!
Fedor Holz had started playing online a lot before he came on the scene of live tournaments; and that was surely a wise strategy. We won’t delve into the differences by exploring the advantages and disadvantages of online and live poker games. But for Fedor, who played under the alias CrownUpGuy and was about 20 years old, online tournaments were better; as they allowed him to gain more experience and to build up his confidence. And we know that, according to him, confidence is a great skill; so he used an online poker as a good chance to develop this crucial skill required for further wins, and by the way, not only in poker either!
WCOOP 2014
2014 was the year of his first major success in WCOOP. There were 2,142 players, and the prize pool was $10,710,000. Of this amount, more than $1.8 million was allocated for the main event winner. Fedor Holz won this event (September 28) and got $1,300,000; at that point, this was his best result ever! He had won tournaments before this event, such as the EPT Barcelona Series; but his result at the WCOOP’2014 certainly marked the appearance of a new poker star.
Here is the final standing. Fedor ‘CrownUpGuy’ Holz became the champion and outperformed a truly brilliant group of professional poker players:
| 1st. | Fedor “CrownUpGuy” Holz | $1,300,000* |
| 2nd. | Yuri “TheNERDguy” Martins | $708,251.21* |
| 3rd. | Neckbrake | $651,430.61* |
| 4th. | Elior “Crazy Elior” Sion | $780,227.61 |
| 5th. | Faraz “The-Toilet 0” Jaka | $945,000* |
| 6th. | Daniel “19Dan86” Rudd | $769,813.52* |
| 7th. | Dylan “Pokerl)evil” Hortin | $214,200 |
| 8th. | MaltLiquor40 | $160,650 |
| 9th. | Viktor “Isildur1” Blom | $107,100 |
At the climax of this event, only two players remained at the final table: Fedor ‘CrownUpGuy’ Holz with 10♥ and 10♣, and Yuri ‘TheNERDguy’ Martins with 4♣ and 4♥. The flop was 8♣, 10♦, 4♦, the turn — J♦, and the river — 10♠. That was an unforgettable end of the game with four tens of Fedor Holz beating full house of Martins, who had gone all-in.
WCOOP 2015
This was a buy-in for $51’000, a real high-roller level, that obviously attracted the attention of big names. Fedor Holz did not win this tournament. But he performed well, having won $126,500 and finishing the 6th in the final standing. He was stopped sixth by Nikita “fish2013” Bodyakovskiy from Belarus in a rather dramatic game — with even better cards till the river.
Fedor’s cards were 5♣5♠, Bodyakovskiy had A♦7♣. The flop came Q♣2♥8♠, the turn T♦ still with good chances for Fedor’s pair. But the river was 7♦, which gave Bodyakovskyi the best pair.
The final standing was the following:
- Ben “Ben86” Tollerene $616,518.34
- José Ángel “Cejakas14” Latorre $560,412.13
- Nikita “fish2013” Bodyakovskiy $594,069.53
- Nopaleva $230,000.00
- Mike “Tîmex” McDonald $172,500.00
- Fedor “CrownUpGuy” Holz $126,500.00
WCOOP 2016
Even though there were only 28 players in the 2016 WCOOP Super High Roller tournament, the prize pool was $2,800,000, and the buy-ins were $102,000 — twice as high as in 2015! It was the largest online tournament ever. And the competition was very tough, especially with 3 re-entries.
This high-profile battle with leading professionals attracted a lot of attention and was broadcast on the Internet for thousands of poker fans who watched the poker news and analyzed the game.
By the end, there were only three players left:
| Seat | Name | Chips |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | bencb789 (Sweden) | 152,585 |
| 5 | Fedor “CrownUpGuy” Holz (Austria | 481,033 |
| 7 | salfshb (United Kingdom) | 206,382 |
All of them had a nice record for winning past PokerStars online tournaments. Three remaining players were looking to achieve great results in major PokerStars tournaments. And the ambitious Fedor Holz wanted to improve his 6th last year result, recalling his decisive success in the WCOOP 2014.
Salfshb ended up third after the clash with bencb789, and the final pair was the following:
- bencb789 — 475,241 chips
- Fedor Holz — 364,759 chips
Looking at the numbers, the players agreed on a chip-chop deal, leaving only $56,000 on the table.
CrownUpGuy had A♣ 3♠ and opened on the button for 12,624. Bencb789 with K♠ 4♠ called, and then 2♠ 6♣ K♦ came for the flop. Bencb789 check-called 13,450 on this flop. And then 63,446 on the turn which was 4♣, that already gave him two pairs, kings and fours. T♣ river made Holz think. But in the end, he went all-in for 316,035, bluffing. Bencb789 thought it over and then called with 27,270 chips left for two pair, kings and fours — which was a right decision against Fedor’s clever bluff.
Thus, the final standing was the following:
- bencb789 — $1,172,360.60
- Fedor “CrownUpGuy” Holz — $1,067,639.40
- salfshb — $560,000
As we can see, the title did slip from CrownUpGuy’s hands in 2016, and he didn’t become the champion. But at least he won a lot of money again! And his 7-digit paycheck, the second he has gained in the past three years, was without a doubt a great success in this Super-High Roller online tournament, in particular; and indeed, a truly notable achievement of his entire poker playing career up to now!
08:5921 Jul
(Photo: Cardplayer.com)
You’re young, incredibly successful, at the top of your game and your peers consider you one of the very best players in the game. So what do you do? Retire from full-time play of course! At least, you do if you’re Fedor Holz, who this week decided that playing poker – the game which has made him millions – is not what he wants to do for the rest of his life.
Those millions of dollars – eighteen and a half of them to-date, not even including his online winnings – have been the result of a huge run this year, earning over $10million since January and including 2nd spot in the SuperHigh Roller Bowl this May ($3,500,000) and taking down the $111,111 High Roller for One drop last week at the WSOP ($,981,775).
Heaters simply don’t get any better than this: Holz is now Germany’s all-time number 1 tournament earner, holds top spot in the Global Poker Index rankings and sits at 9th place in all-time earnings world-wide. For many this would signal the time for a push to become the Greatest of all Time!
For Holz, however, it signals the right time to consider other pursuits, telling Lee Davy of CalvinAyre.com:
I feel I can have even more impact elsewhere. There is more valuable information out there and I want to collect it and use it.”
What this other sphere outside of poker might be, Holz is not yet sure – but his meteoric rise to the top of poker has obviously drained his energy and forced him to reconsider his life goals.
“Do I spend my time on the right things whether that’s poker or anything else in life? It’s a very important question for me,” he explained – although a complete withdrawal from the game is not what he intends, despite some reports.
Part-time maestro
First of all, people may misinterpret quitting poker,” he explained. “I will still be on the circuit. I will play Barcelona, Aussie Millions, maybe a short Macau trip, and maybe a short Vegas trip next year, and Monte Carlo.”
Holz continued:
The thing is, this freedom of just saying no I don’t want to play for the next four months is important. I have not had that before. In the past four years, I have taken two vacations off. There has been no relaxing, orientation. I had this goal, and I always set new goals until I got where I am.”
Burn out. It happens at some level to almost every player in every sport who, having striven so hard and overcome so many obstacles, finds their will and energy suddenly disappearing. The question ‘why am I doing this?’ gets asked more-and-more often, and the answers sometimes remain elusive.
Money=Freedom?
Holz is a multi-millionaire and makes money even when he’s not playing by staking other top-flight pros. His good friend Rainer Kempe – who took the SHRB title in a long heads-up battle against Holz – shared a chunk of his $5million first prize with Fedor.
Holz, however, doesn’t see money in the same way as many. He told Davy:
Fedor Holz Wiki
Society clearly teaches us the wrong value system. Money is overvalued, and freedom has very little to do with money,” he explained. “We always think that money is connected to how we feel but it’s a very short-term feeling and what I have learned through coaching, and giving back to people, I realised that this is the only thing that gives me joy. That’s why poker is not the thing I want to pursue. It only takes. It’s very selfish. There is no lasting place for it in my life to do this for a living.”
Fedor Holz Poker Course
Holz is not alone
Other poker players have had similar epiphanies when they reached a high level or scored life-changing wins.
When Peter Eastgate became the youngest-ever WSOP Main Event champion at the age of 22, he had the poker world at his feet. And most of his $9.1million in his pocket, having no stakers to pay off when he beat Ivan Demidov heads-up to snatch the bracelet.
And yet, just a few years later, Eastgate had renounced the game of poker, blown massive chunks of his payday on sportsbetting, tried and failed to launch a career in biomedicine and has been all but forgotten by the poker world.
When I started playing poker for a living, it was never my goal to spend the rest of my life as a professional poker player,” explained Eastgate. “My goal was to become financially independent. I achieved that by winning the WSOP main event in 2008.”
Describing his time as the youngest Main Event winner (which only lasted a year until Joe Cada took over that mantle) Eastgate explained why he was taking a break from the game:
In the 20 months following my WSOP win, I feel that I have lost my motivation for playing high-level poker along the way, and I have decided that now is the time to find out what I want to do with the rest of my life.”
Fedor Holz Poker Strategy
This break, with a few exceptions, was to last almost until the present day.
Of course, money DOES allow one a lot of freedom: Holz’s view doesn’t change certain aspects of life and the modern-world – but Eastgate explained how, to him, the millions weren’t hugely necessary in order for him to change his life.
I didn’t by any means lose all my money. I’m economically independent and I changed my lifestyle to a pretty normal one. My spending levels are the same as of any regular guy, so I have money for the next 70 or 80 years. I don’t live a jet set lifestyle
His lifestyle didn’t require him to keep his WSOP bracelet either, an eBay auction which raised $147,500 saw the proceeds going to UNICEF and prompted one poster to comment:
Sold for $147.5K going to UNICEF. Peter Eastgate is one classy individual. My hats off to him.”
The still-young man from Denmark managed to avoid all the tax problems and (sportsbetting aside, where reports of him losing millions were not completely inaccurate) most of the controversy which surrounded his two predecessors.
Since 2014 I’ve just been drifting around, pretty much like in the three-and-a-half years leading up to when I started going back to school,” he told Pokerlistings, though he quickly added, ”I’m not bored. After spending so much time by myself I’m not bored anymore. But if you look at it from the outside, it would sure look boring. I know I don’t want to carry on like this for the rest of my life. I need to set some goals, find a passion one way or the other.”
Back to the wunderkind Fedor Holz…
…and it’s unlikely that he will go along the route of Eastgate, drifting happily but uncertainly through life until something grabs his attention the way poker used to.
Holz is a driven character, answering Davy’s question ‘Are you hard on yourself?’ with the candid:
Extremely, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing. You just have to keep it in line so it doesn’t hurt you. I have always wanted to go to the limit and beyond. I want to find out how far I can go?”
The Future
So where will Holz go if or when poker takes a cameo role in his life?
The thing I have to think about the most is education. Not in the typical sense but in lots of different ways. Learning about life, not in school,” he explains. “When you want to learn something, it’s very inefficient how we go about it. Unless there is someone within your circle who can teach you, then you can get lost. I am surprised how little interest people have in learning hundreds of useful things.”
Holz doesn’t only mean the current education systems which are in place, but rather:
I am talking about everything. There are no limitations. The system we have today for learning things is terrible. I had to go out there and intensely look for these people. There is very little in the form of communities or platforms for this, and this is an area I can contribute towards.”
His own education in poker was a relatively quick but hard-earned one, the young German explaining that self-improvement is “draining.”
I am super burned out now. As soon as I busted the Main I knew I was done. I have these phases a lot. It’s very exhausting mentally. You have to keep going without showing weakness.”
Not showing weakness – as Davy says ‘being robotic’ – doesn’t strike a chord with Holz though.
I am not robotic at all. It’s control over emotions that you gain. It distinguishes you very strongly from other people. There is very little time in life where you train this.” He adds, “I don’t want to develop myself more in this way. I don’t want to be more distant and defensive about things. Doing something else in another area may bring back this childish, naive joy about a lot of things.”
Given his rise to stardom in the poker world, it’s hard to imagine Holz not making a big impact in whatever field he decides his main future lies.
For poker fans, however, the likeable German will have to prove that he can combine a new life with his (relatively) old one. And we wish him all the best for the future!