Microphone Fiend Part ...

Friday, August 15, 2008

Microphone Fiend: DaEvils Interview Part 1

Known as DaEvils on Full Tilt Poker, but better known as FoxwoodsFiend on 2+2, Ariel Schneller is one of the last people you'd like to see sitting across from you on the e-felt.

One, because he'll probably stack you for most of your bankroll. Two, because he may then tell you how it happened in freestyle rap form.

Widely considered to be one of the top five online No-Limit Hold'em cash-game players in the world, Schneller can usually be found sitting in the highest-stakes games with the biggest names in poker.

Extremely confident in his skills (and rightly so, as his ROI attests), he also doesn't back down to anyone, be it Phil Ivey in a $500/$1,000 heads-up session or Phil Hellmuth in a verbal sparring match at the WSOP.

It wasn't always this way though.

PL.com writer Daniel Skolovy had the chance to chat with FWF about his rapid rise through the ranks and found out exactly how he made it.

Daniel Skolovy: What originally drew you to the game of poker?

FoxwoodsFiend: I used to play poker with some friends in high school. We'd play weird variants of Hold'em. We played "Pot-Limit Hold'em" but it was a spread-limit game where the most you could bet was the size of the pot going into that street.

So we would play 10¢/25¢ and the most you could raise and reraise was 35¢ pre-flop. We also played that four of a suit beats one pair. We didn't really know what we were doing but we loved to get drunk and gamble.

WSOP bracelet winner Vanessa Selbst: Another product of the toughest college game in history.

When I got to Yale my residential college had a poker table and I was like "I love poker!" and started playing. Turn[ed] out they played regular NLHE, which I had to learn. I got hooked and played three or four times a week, sometimes throughout the night.

I was motivated to get good because I've always been very competitive and I was losing constantly. The players were pretty good and I was really bad but [I] loved playing so figured I'd have to learn the game if I didn't want to go broke.

DS: Did you always have the mindset that poker was beatable? Or were you just playing, having a good time?

FWF: When I started I didn't have an opinion on whether the game was beatable: I was just messing around thinking I'm some tricky LAG (when in reality I was spewy). I had an ego and I always thought I'd win a ton of money playing poker.

Putting it in terms of "is the game beatable?" was probably more sophisticated than what my approach was to the game, which is that I would just sit down and try and outplay everybody every hand.

I figured out that the game wasn't beatable for me when I went into debt and had to liquidate my Bar Mitzvah money to pay off the debt I'd accumulated the end of my freshman year.

By the time I got my Bar Mitzvah money [I'd] actually won all my losses back and didn't need to go into that fund fortunately, but yeah I was definitely way over my head in that game.

I mean, it wasn't much: I had like $5k in Bar Mitzvah money and owed like $800. So it wasn't as bad as it sounds. I'm not one of those rich kids that got like $50k at his Bar Mitzvah. I come from a fairly modest background.

I started sneaking into Foxwoods the summer after my sophomore year of college. I was only 20 but I had a great fake ID. I'd won a lot of money in my home game that year, ending the year with a $3k roll which I decided I would take to the $1/$2 NL game and grind for a while.

I made the switch to casino poker because I didn't have a summer job or internship and needed something to do, so I figured I'd gotten good enough at poker that I could test my game out in a casino.

DS: And how did you find the transition from home poker to casino?

FWF: The transition was actually weird because I crushed the $1/$2 max $100 buy-in game at Foxwoods for $2,600 in a 17-hour session my first week. I then had like $6k so I took it all to the $5/$5 uncapped game. The $5/$5 game was much different from the Yale game I was used to.

Foxwoods $5/$5 game all about waiting for tourists to make mistakes.

In my home game there were a lot of very competent and tough players. Whereas the Foxwoods game consisted mainly of all the regulars buying in with 2,000 BBs, waiting for some tourist to make a huge mistake and give them all his money.

So instead of playing a tough LAG style against a lot of players that mix it up, I was playing in a very straightforward game where nobody was that tough and I was basically waiting to take money from idiots.

Obviously having my whole roll on the table at all times led me to be very cautious and I played insanely nitty.

DS: You often played with your entire bankroll on the table in those years?

FWF: Yeah; every time I went to Foxwoods I would play with my entire roll on the table. Then I lost it all in a rough session followed by a tilt session in the pit.

So then I would rebuild my roll at the home game, make a couple grand (which was really hard to do at the stakes we played), go to Foxwoods, try running that $2k up to get back to peak, get cold-decked, and go broke again.

For a solid year of my life I was constantly thinking that I needed to make a lot of money and the way to do that was by making big scores. Grinding small stakes wasn't even on my radar as an option.

DS: So when did it finally click? The importance of bankroll management?

FWF: In my junior year a friend of mine staked me at $2/$4 NL online and I made myself $5k or so. It was good for me because online the only way I could play with my roll on the table would have been to play $25/$50, but that was such a scary big game that I instead would play sit-and-gos.

I grinded $100 sit-and-gos and did very well, then moved up to the $200s and then when I ran my roll up to $20k I went and started playing the PokerStars $10/$20 games.

T.J. Cloutier: Poster boy for the make money in poker/lose it in the pits busto cycle.

I crushed those games the summer after my junior year, the summer of '05, and started making a ton of money. The games were mad soft back then but I still crippled my roll often enough doing degen stuff like playing blackjack that I wasn't rolled to play $10/$20.

So after my crushing of Stars I would go through these cycles of making a good amount of money, losing it in the pit, and then grinding sit-and-gos to get back to having enough money, only to lose it in the pits again. It was a vicious cycle.

DS: What was your poison?

FWF: My degen game of choice was blackjack. I started off with roulette but eventually it was only blackjack. It all stopped when I graduated and now it wasn't just gambling and seeing if I could make a lot of money; it was my livelihood and I needed to take it more seriously.

DS: And you were able to quit hitting the pits completely, cold turkey?

FWF: Well I still played some but only small. I would go to the pit with only $2k on me so I couldn't lose more than that but yeah, once I graduated I became a bankroll nit (100 buy-ins minimum for a given level), I stayed out of the pit, and have been very cautious with my money since.

When your parents are paying for college and rent and you're not expected to be doing anything with yourself other than studying it's fine to lose tons of your net worth and gamble a lot.

But once you enter the real world and you're now forgoing the opportunity to go to law school or get a job, you have to show some sort of results and justification for taking such an unconventional route.

So wasting my time gambling it up and blowing my poker winnings and becoming "lol when are you going to learn" kind of thing would have just been pathetic.

DS: Was it around that time you met Krantz and Whitelime?

FWF: I met Whitelime in late 2005 when I was driving down to Atlantic City to play in a WPT. I posted in HSNL to see if anybody needed a ride and he wanted one so on my way down from New Haven I picked him up in NYC and we hung out in A.C.

Whitelime: Into car pooling.

I didn't meet Krantz until after I'd graduated. I was in A.C. with some friends, fslexcduck (who played with me in our home game at Yale) was down there with Krantz independently so we bumped into each other at the $10/$25 game.

DS: The three of you (Krantz (pr1nnyraid), Whitelime, DaEvils) are all considered to be among the best in the world. Do you think that is a coincidence? Or is it because you guys so often put your minds together to think and discuss poker?

FWF: I don't think it's coincidence. I think that at every level poker players network with people at their stakes, mainly through 2+2.

But also in my case I was lucky to be friends with Alex Jacob and Vanessa Selbst (recent WSOP PLO bracelet winner), both of whom became friends with very good poker players and introduced me to them.

What I think this means is it's not a coincidence that a few very good poker players became friends but we wouldn't have been as good as we are now if we didn't pick each other's brains so often.

Living together in Vegas with flawless_victory and just talking so much poker and sweating each other play was an invaluable resource. We definitely would still have been very good but there is no way we would be as good as we are now had we not found each other.

We're such good friends and spend so much time together that we really push each other to be better all the time.

Alex Jacob: Tough home game when it includes USPC champs.

DS: You met Alex Jacob at the Yale home games?

FWF: Yeah, I did. I learned a lot from him, we had a pretty sick game between him, me, fslexcduck (Selbst), actualgod (2+2er who made a good amount in sit-and-gos in college), pete_fabrizio (2+2er who taught me how to play poker) and a few other solid players who could have been pros but decided to pursue other careers.

I like to think that was the toughest college game in history.

DS: It sounds like it. So besides Krantz and Whitelime, are there any other players whose games you really respect online?

FWF: Yeah there are a ton of players whose game I respect - sauce123/PrtectYaNeck, Isaac "luvtheWNBA" Haxton, Tom "durrrr" Dwan, David "raptor" Benefield, mastr, jimmie23, mrdoodles, Phil "OMGClayAiken" Galfond, Brian "Stinger" Hastings, Cole "Muckemsayuhhh/cts" South ... I'm sure I'm missing a lot of people - there are a lot of very good poker players out there - but those are the ones I like having at my table the least.

In general I think that most $25/$50 regs (with very few exceptions) are very, very good players and I could keep listing but I have tons of respect for almost all of my opponents. stevesbets is another example.

DS: I find that last one difficult to believe.

FWF: Yeah stevesbets was just to see how up to speed you are on the scene; he's awful.

DS: Lol fair enough.

Check in for Part 2 with Ariel Schneller tomorrow.

More PL.com interviews:

• Microphone Fiend: DaEvils Interview Part 2
• The Session: Whitelime and Pr1nnyraid
• The Session: Sorel Mizzi