The past couple of years have been referred to by many as the Year of the Brit thanks to the quite frankly brilliant performances by British poker players in major tournaments around the world. European Poker Tour events have been won by the likes of David Vamplew, Liv Boeree, Roberto Romanello, Rupert Elder, Jake Cody and Toby Lewis but one country has been getting it quietly as they say, Germany.
The latest addition to Team Betfair Poker, Hans Vogl, recently took part in the inaugural IFP Nations Cup representing Germany. His team was lead by Stephan Kalhammer and included Moritz Kranich, Sandra Naujoks, Tobias Reinkemeier and Sebastian Ruthenberg and they played a new format of poker, Duplicate Poker, which according to the Internation Federation of Poker, “removes the element of luck” from the game because every person at each table receives the same cards, as Hans explained to Betfair Poker after his German side won the Team Event! I caught up with Hans late last week and we chatted for almost an hour, here are some of the snippets from that conversation.
Yorkshire Pudding – You have played a lot of online poker in the past, how have you sent he game change in recent years? Even at the low stakes I play there are players three and four-betting that was previously unheard of outside the bigger stakes.
Hans Vogl – It is getting tougher and tougher to play poker for a living. I from some friends who used to be really big winners in the past and one friend of mine started with a $5 bonus on a site and ran it up to $500,000 and lost everything again but he used to play $10/$20 and sometimes $25/$50 but now he plays $1/$2 and he says that these games are much tougher than the $25/$50 games from four years ago.
Yorkshire Pudding – Do you play much live poker? Would you agree that it is a difficult way to make money from the game?
Hans Vogl – Until recently I had not been playing much online but I sometimes playing in my local casino mainly €2/€5 No Limit Hold'em and the quality of the play sucks, it isn't so strong. But if you have a bad beat, or a setup hand, losing money takes quite a long time to get the money back. Additionally you have quite big expenses, for example at the recent event in London I stayed on the couch of a friend but I could easily have spent £150 per night just on a room and then you need food too, the expenses can become quite harsh. First you have to earn this money before you even make a profit.
I also have friends who are live pros and play mainly poker tournaments who travel from one destination to the next and every one of them is having wild swings. They bust out, play cash games but with flights, food and even some small things like laundry you play a lot of money in the hotels. They also have to rent a flat back home that they never live in so they are spending so much money.
It is quite exhausting also, sitting in a casino for 15 hours with bad nutrition and so on and some of the bad mannered people at the table, then there are much better things to do with your time.
Yorkshire Pudding – How is your own poker game going? Have you started to put more volume in on Betfair Poker?
Hans Vogl – I haven't had as much time as I would like to play because of the team event in London and the Betfair Poker Live event in Spain but now I will start going full steam! Hopefully it'll work out nicely!
Yorkshire Pudding – So what is your usual game? Do you play primarily cash games? What stakes can we find you playing?
Hans Vogl – I'm mixing it up, playing a lot of cash games, mainly $1/$2 and $2/$4 and I have started playing more short-handed poker more, which I used to play, and also quite a lot of SNG. These are my two main focusses at the moment. I am happy to play in dedicated multi table tournaments but I prefer to be able to get up and leave when I want, I am used to playing for two or three hours, having a break then returning to the tables again.
I am also trying out some Pot Limit Omaha because I think there is big potential there in the future. It is so swingy but is very good fun.
Yorkshire Pudding – How is the poker scene in Germany right now? There are some very good German players such as Sebastien Ruthenberg and Tobias Reinkemeier who always seem to be in the big European events then there is the biggest one of them all right now, Pius Heinz who took down the World Series of Poker Main Event. It seems like there is a very strong core of German players at the moment.
Hans Vogl – Absolutely. Poker is very strong in Germany and I am expecting it become stronger in years to come, mainly because we had some very good players who started three or four years ago like Pius Heinz and they are building up nice bankrolls and are now taking shots in live tournies and they are having some great results.
Like you said we have a World Champion, Benny Spindler won EPT London and is kicking arse in the Omaha games.,our team really did a good, good effort in London too. Each week you read about a German player making a final table here, winning a tournament there and then you have many who are winning the biggest games online. You also have Marvin Rettenmaier leading the rankings right now.
There are a lot of guys out there that are just brilliant players and have some very big potential
Yorkshire Pudding – I have been fortunate enough to work on various poker tours and I have noticed at these events that the German players all hang around with each other, rail each other and spend dinner breaks together, much like the Scandinavians have been doing for years, the Americans do it and it seems Germany is following suit.
Hans Vogl – It is absolutely like what you say, overall the atmosphere is great. A real team spirit and this was seen in our team event at the weekend. Nobody said a word if someone misplayed a hand, we hung out on an evening, talked a lot at team meetings etc. Some of the guys even live in the same neighbourhood now in London, I know Fabian Quoss, Ruthernberg, Reinkemeier and Spindler do so they see each other almost every day now, which is an advantage because you get to discuss more hands and learn from the other players.
Yorkshire Pudding – You recently took part in the Duplicate Poker team tournament that Germany eventually won. It seemed like a really fun, different format, a little like Bridge where everyone has the same hands in the respective seats. They say it takes away more of the luck and makes the game one more of skill. Was it good fun?
Hans Vogl – It was great, really cool stuff. I would also say this even if we had not won it because it was such a fun event. In normal poker you are always playing for yourself but it is such great fun to represent your country and a team. The format was sensational, it was super cool to play and everybody received the same the same cards so Table 1 Seat 1 received the same as Table 2 Seat 1 and so on. Each team has six players with one substitute and we has a player on Table 1 Seat 1, Table 2 Seat 2 and so on and so on, so it was guaranteed that each tea received the same hands.
Yorkshire Pudding – It sounds like a really good idea but I don't know how easy it would be to do on a grander scale such as at the World Series of Poker.
Hans Vogl – We were actually chatting in our team about it and that this format would be a great tournament at the WSOP, but you would have to make it a $50,000 or $100,000 buy-in to narrow the field to high rollers and super pros and the like.
Everything in London worked so quickly because all the cards were shuffled already and they only took them out of a suitcase and started to deal. Compared to a normal tournament there was a lot of effort to prepare card decks and so on and of course if a mis-deal happened the entire tournament had to stop whilst a new hand was dealt because it may have given an unfair advantage to anther table.
Yorkshire Pudding – Do you think the luck factor was removed from the game completely?
Hans Vogl – The luck was still there because the outcome of the hand depended on the quality of the player and the development of the hand. An example was we had queens in my position. In position one the queens were and on position three were jacks and position six had deuces. It worked out that in the end the jacks sucked out on the queens. The flop was queen, eight and a small card, the turn a nine I think and the river a ten.
On my table the queens hit the flop, top set. The money went in completely on the flop against the Frenchman's pocket jacks. On table three that Sandra Naujoks played the action went raise and re-raise from the deuces and a re-reraise from the queen and she laid down the jacks and it came down to an all in with deuces against queens in a hand that Sandra would have won with her jacks! So she didn't win the points with the jacks and I lost the maximum with the queens even though we both played it perfectly. I got my money in as a 98% favourite and she did not invest much money as an underdog!
This hand happened in the final and cost us a lot of points and yet we still one, showing the quality we had in the team but also that it is not only skill in the game, luck is still involved to some degree. But it was still a really cool event and the structure was fascinating.