Edition #5
Growth and Power
Interviewed by Journal d'Ambroisie, Editors in Chief
“I realised that I had to adjust and rethink entirely what I believed about success”
- An Interview with Fedor Holz
As 2022 was coming to an end, our Editors in Chief found themselves reunited in a Budapest cafe after months of working together remotely. In only a few moments, on the other end of the zoom call they would be joined by professional poker player Fedor Holz to talk about poker and entrepreneurship, and his ideas on growth, power and the importance of community.
Fedor Holz is a German professional poker player with live tournament winnings of over thirty-two million dollars. He is also an avid entrepreneur with various initiatives, from Primed Mind to Poker Code. Speaking to him was a mind opening experience. At just twenty-nine years old, Fedor’s expertise and wisdom is palpable, and his confident mindset, as well as his humbleness, admirable.
Journal d’Ambroisie
Your success has been forged over the last decade or so in the spotlight. What is that like, and what were some of its biggest ups and downs?
Fedor Holz
That’s a pretty big question. My success in poker has been very different over the years. At times, it was very hard to grasp, overwhelming. Afterwards, it becomes more rewarding with a lot of very valuable experiences. My most successful year in poker was 2016, and that was very intense, very exhausting, demanding and exciting all at once. And so very overwhelming. The years following, I would say the learnings and experience and the fruits of it settled in and it became something that I’m overall very grateful for. In terms of the ups and downs, especially within my career, because in poker you’re really on your own, there is no rulebook, no specific path that you follow. Essentially, it’s very high velocity, there are lots of ups and downs, and I am generally also a person that is dynamic, I like energy and things happening.
JA
In this edition of the Journal, we explore the concepts of growth and power. How do you relate to those terms, both professionally and personally?
[Image 1] © Poker Firma
FH
Growth for me is kind of an all encompassing thing that is my life, and that I really enjoy; it isn’t something I consciously set out to do, and truth be told, I feel I have accomplished more growth when I didn’t try to focus on it. Rather, I just let go, and don’t try to go into a particular direction with specific goals. What I do is try to remove barriers, try to reduce friction and bring myself into a high level of energy.
In terms of power, I kind of see both sides of the coin: the first term that I think of in association with power is resourcefulness. I believe it’s great to have people surrounding you who are resourceful, to be able to solve problems, to accomplish things, to help and support, and to make each other stronger. On another level, I also see a certain level of exploitation or dominance, where it’s about having more force over things to try to change the outcome. This is something I actively try to distance and remove myself from, and actively call it out.
JA
In your interviews, and visibly throughout your career in general, you always talk about community and its significance to you. Could you talk about the importance of a community and how it fits into your vision of the future?
FH
I talk about community in a very particular way. Out of my experiences, collaborating with other people has proven to be the most effective way to accomplish things. In hindsight, gathering those people around and creating a well-functioning interaction and group dynamic was probably one of the biggest reasons we have been moving so fast and why we have been so successful.
JA
That’s very interesting, because generally speaking, when someone mentions poker, everyone thinks of it as a rather lonely activity, but this is a beautiful way of redefining it, and building this mindset into other projects you launched as well. Is your experience of growing through communities in poker something that inspired you to launch your other initiatives?
FH
I would say yes. It’s not so much that I picked the theme and set out to specifically work with it, it’s more that I found things I was excited about. There are certain topics that excite me and people who do cool things and are passionate about what they do, that also makes me passionate, and then you just begin doing things that eventually always have to do with other people. For me, the first step is to look for other people who have achieved or want to achieve something similar to my own visions.
JA
In many of your interviews, you put great emphasis on passion and emotional connectedness. How have these approaches shaped your professional life? Where do you think it makes a difference that you approach things from a place of passion against, for instance, rationality?
FH
It’s actually very interesting when this process happens, when I talk about something and someone writes about me talking about it and then I hear someone else repeating that. Whenever I hear these repeated phrases, I believe they fall kind of flat. So when I talk about passion, I don’t necessarily talk about it from a perspective of “everyone should be doing whatever they want to do”, but more about how to actually apply passion in reality. It’s entirely clear for me that people produce better outcomes when they do things with a higher level of intention, which produces a higher quality of life and that’s something I think is worthwhile to put effort into. Nonetheless, there are a lot of visible situations where people are not able to do that, because they need a roof over their head and want to be able to feed their family. At this point, it’s really more about trying to find solutions to improve the general situation. So it’s worth pursuing on an individual level, because the long term reward is very high and for me, it’s really more of a long term equation than anything else.
[Image 2] © Poker Firma
JA
Connected to this, would you say that your other projects outside of poker, specifically your mindfulness app Primed Mind, stem from this mindset? And is this the message you want to pass down to people starting their own projects and careers?
FH
When you say it like this, it sounds much grander than the initial idea, which was very simple. It was more that this particular mindfulness exercise has helped me a lot, I used it a lot and after doing a few tests with my friends who were athletes, they really loved it as well. So after that we thought: why not build an app and make it available for more people and make it mostly free? That’s the entire thought process behind the app – because this is valuable, we wanted to make it accessible to more people. And in the process, I learned a lot about entrepreneurship and how to build a business and how to develop an app.
JA
So does this mean you also regularly practice mindfulness yourself? Is that something that plays an important role in your life?
FH
I guess it depends on what you understand when you say mindfulness. I’m not a very spiritual person, I am not a disciplined practitioner of mindfulness, but I would say that I love thinking about things and reflecting on them. So out of that, a lot of me questioning myself and finding something where I think: there is a way that feels more natural or authentic, and then stepping into it and doing that at a very high pace. This is more my mindfulness practice that leads me to being more open to new ideas and people. And whatever happens, I think the level of me taking myself too seriously is reducing, and my openness towards other perspectives is increasing.
JA
Do you think that it makes a difference that it seems like everything you create and do comes from this authentic place? Does that authenticity come across for people when they use the products you are creating?
FH
I think to a degree, yes, but that’s really for other people to answer. But I would say for myself, if I just tried to think about how I did something and how I felt it connected with others, then I would say I don’t care that much about what people think; that’s how I made the best experiences, when I just do my thing, and if people are curious and ask me something and it brings about something new, then that’s great.
JA
Assuming the amount of interactions you’ve had over the last ten years, is there one that you would say was the most valuable one? Maybe someone who was a mentor to you?
FH
I don’t think it was necessarily the conversations whereby wisdom was delivered to me, it was more the experience itself that shook me, that enabled me to step out of something that wasn’t very good for me. I wasn’t necessarily connected to one person during those times, but there were multiple moments that were emotionally very challenging for me. One of these big moments was definitely when I stopped playing poker. I was very exhausted, I was drained and didn’t enjoy poker anymore. And that was a really important moment because I was very successful. This combination was an important experience for me to realise that whatever I believed about success didn’t seem to be my experience. Then I realised that I had to adjust and rethink entirely what I believed about success or about achieving something.
In terms of mentors, I started working in a trading company in Chicago which was a very cool experience for me, because on the one hand, I was really excited about exploring a new topic, and on the other, that was my first look into a company and what it’s like to work with a CEO, with owners and 200 employers, a structure and set out goals. From that I realised that there are certain things that are amazing and certain things that are highly limiting for me in the entrepreneurial world, and that’s something I have never experienced before. Before, it was just me and my rules and whatever I wanted to do.
Recently, I would say Covid19 was one of the biggest bearers of change for me, because when I started getting more into entrepreneurship and building businesses, I didn’t have many ideas about how I want to live my life or build a business. That time for me felt really unproductive, because instead of lots of meetings, I had one scheduled in two weeks, and that was very frustrating. I got very bored and I procrastinated, and then three to four weeks later I had the most productive week of my life, which showed me how I had worked significantly better having that level of freedom and room for creativity. So really, Corona was my mentor.
[Image 3] © WSOP
JA
That is also something that our audience can resonate with most certainly. And with regards to this, what inspired you to share your knowledge of poker with a new generation of players and to launch your training program?
FH
You really make everything I do sound so great. With Pokercode, it was a very simple process. Many people have asked me for coachings and I’ve done countless of them throughout my career, and I always thought there must be a way to do this better. At this point, I was getting hundreds of messages and I thought it would be nice to record videos. At the time, I also met a very strong poker player, and he said he would create the curriculum. We went on to create a video course that we sold online, and it worked out really well. Shortly after I realized this is very unsatisfactory. I thought people were going to watch it, but I soon realised it was only 15 % of those who watched my regular videos that actually watched my video course I sold online. At that point, I had to ask myself: so many people are asking for it, but what are they actually asking for? That’s when I embarked on a journey of exploration, asking myself questions like: why are people fans of someone? What do they actually care about? Why are they passionate about the game? That’s when we understood, a lot of people who are passionate about poker don’t actually want to get better at it, they just enjoy playing the game, like the mental challenge of it. They enjoy the psychological and emotional element of it, but once they reach the threshold of going more professional, they can lose that interest. Essentially, there is this idea in society that if you do something, you have to achieve a certain level, you need constant progress. So we created a cool training ground that people are intrigued by, where they can just have fun for the love of the game. Especially in Central Europe, poker is often perceived as this game where people gamble their life savings away. I would honestly say that the big majority of people that I know play poker, play in a very reasonable way. I would also add to this that it’s beneficial, similarly to chess, for their mental and emotional development, which is what I want to focus on at Pokercode.
JA
Like you said there is often this negative image of poker in people’s minds; what is your definition of poker then? What is it about and what does it mean to you?
FH
I think it’s actually very easy to grasp. If you were open minded and spent like thirty minutes with it, read some stuff, watched some videos, that you would get a pretty good idea. You wouldn’t get an understanding of the actual life of poker players and how it works with poker pros, but in terms of complexity, it’s very similar to chess, which I also play. There are a wide variety of games that are being played; you can do cash games, or tournaments, with a variety of buy-ins, and I have played mostly tournaments in my career.
JA
How does poker in your eyes relate to power?
FH
Power plays a big role in poker. On the one hand, and especially, in the games that are not public. There, it’s a lot about status and relationships, especially in cash games, where the role of power can be extreme. If you want to play in the best cash games in the world, almost all of them are private. There is an organiser who decides who gets invited and who doesn't, it’s actually quite similar to Molly’s Game, if you’ve seen the film. So while when it comes to tournaments, it’s always very public and official, these private games are all about relationships.
Also, at the table, there is very much a power dynamic between the players. Generally, when I enter the table in a weaker tournament, most people will know who I am, and they are aware that I’m a better player, which they will react to in different ways. There are two types: retreat or attack, and it almost always leads to worse outcomes for them, than if they would just stop reacting. As I am not changing up my game, whether they attack or play too passively, I will win regardless. With strong players, there are always little mind games. One thing I specifically spend a lot of time on is the human psyche: let’s give a very simple example. Let’s say we’re in a situation against each other, where I now have to make a big decision. You go all in, so I have to either call or match you, or alternatively fold in and throw away my cards. I have absolutely no information, you give nothing away, and I’m not sure what to do. You have a choice to make things look a certain way and to plant a seed of doubt in your opponent’s mind. Let’s say I call and you have a bluff: you will start doubting yourself, because I look entirely confident, but in reality, I didn’t know what your cards looked like. Often, these are the situations where people make a lot of mistakes against me, because it will feel like I’m dominating them and all they will recall is how I looked super confident and in control.
JA
Is there also intuition involved, or is it full on strategy?
FH
It’s super intuitive, because generally, humans are very bad liars. There is no particular training for lying, right? There are a lot of cues people give from lips to voice to eyes, whereas when you are telling the truth, there is such a level of authenticity and relaxation. Being intuitive about this is so important. Some people get nervous when they get good hands, some get nervous when they’re bluffing. So what I do is try to piece these small signs together; usually, if you are nervous, 80 percent chance is you’re bluffing, but there is a 20 percent possibility for a good hand. An extreme reverse example would be he’s more relaxed, he turns around, takes a sip of his drink. And so it’s a mixture of observation, very clear data and intuition.
JA
So you’re like a Sherlock Holmes for poker, or a human lie detector.
FH
You got me! It’s interesting, because in terms of what I perceive to be possible for growth, I’m maybe a 2 out of 10, but to other people, I’m maybe an 8.5 out of 10. You also asked me what is valuable about knowing when other people are inauthentic. It is basically the whole basis of my business decisions.
[Image 3] © WSOP
JA
We talked a lot about power, but alongside it, money is also very much at the centre of poker. As someone who “deals with” money all day, what is your perception of it?
FH
For poker players, money is very transactional, because it’s also how you measure your result. We also spend a lot of time with the concept of money, which I think is normal when you go about risking money every day. But in this way, you also take it less seriously, which is quite different from non-poker players. Money is money and an apartment is an apartment. Very often, money is being mistaken for the thing that you pay for and I think that is unhealthy, creating a fake dependency that for example, you’re only able to eat food by slaving away in something you don’t necessarily want to do. So I believe it is important to separate money from like food, a place to live in, because money is essentially a layer of information that can be exchanged and that we can distribute. On the other hand, when you’re emotionally more connected to it, money plays a bigger role in your life. Maybe the more money you’ve made, the more you’ve played and the more mature you are, the healthier your connection to money is.
JA
What advice would you tell to our audience and our community of young pioneering voices who are looking to make a difference in the world?
FH
Think smaller. One of the big fallacies I stepped into multiple times was to feel pressure to think big. What happened right now, is I became significantly more practical, because the things I care about are in their essence, not that grand. There was a project that I planned here in Vienna, and there was a business case behind it to do multiple locations, to have it spread across continents. But what I actually cared about were the people and bringing them together. My advice is: take the smallest step, then the next and then you can figure out whatever comes after. Break things down into smaller steps, focus on them, it will make you move significantly faster. Like even now when I do something in business, things truly really change after a few years. I was not in that mindset and I didn’t used to think like that. Now, after all these years, I have more experiences, I have skills that are more advanced and I can estimate more outcomes. I don’t think you’re going to build something super relevant at the age of 20. You’re going to do something small, get really excited about it and then maybe it’ll tumble down, or take a detour, and then you do the next thing and at some point after five, six, nine, ten years, you look at the repertoire of things you have done and you begin scheming in bigger ways.
JA
That is certainly something to think about for us as well in the coming years and how to approach our projects. Speaking of next year, what are you looking forward to the most?
FH
My birthday. I have a ritual where every year, I bring the people who are closest to me together and for a few days of the year, we’re all in one place. I’m turning 30 this year, so I have something very special planned and I can hopefully get everyone together for 4-5 days. This is normally the most fun week of my year. I’m looking forward to it immensely.
