Online Poker: Interview With Frank 'Round42' Rusnak

Frank "Round42" Rusnak went from covering his beat as a journalist for a Chicago newspaper to laying sick beats on his opponents at the poker tables. Taking a trip to the Bahamas and leaving $247,000 richer can do that.

Since snagging that hefty sixth-place payday at the 2007 PokerStars.com Caribbean Adventure (PCA), Rusnak has gone on to improve his already impressive online tournament record by taking down some noteworthy contests, including event No. 7 of the Full Tilt Online Poker Series (FTOPS) V, a $1,000 buy-in no-limit hold'em event, in which he won $262,000.

Rusnak got on the phone with CardPlayer to talk about what's made him so successful, his strategies at the poker table, why he plays in big-buy-in online tournaments, and the tools he uses to become a better player:


Shawn Patrick Green: Where did the name Round42 come from?

Frank "Round42" Rusnak: It came from the movie Rounders, but I didn't want it to be Rounders42 or Rounder42 because I thought that would be way too cheesy, and I wasn't creative enough to come up with anything better. Forty-two was my basketball number.

SPG: You used to be a journalist, correct?

FR: I used to work for the [Chicago] Sun-Times. I worked in the high school sports section and the news section. A couple other guys and I that worked double-duty worked more hours than anybody else in that office. We'd work graveyard shifts from midnight to 8 a.m. and then we'd go home and go to sleep for a little bit and come right back. It was pretty intense, but we were just young guys trying to come up in journalism. You know how that is.

SPG: I definitely do. So, you've made some very impressive scores online. You've final-tabled a Sunday Million and Sunday Warmup on PokerStars, and won both a Bodog $100,000-guaranteed tournament and $1,000 buy-in no-limit hold'em event in the FTOPS that wrapped up last weekend. With so many credits to your name in so many tournaments across so many sites, do you have a preference for a certain site?

FR: If you had asked me this last year, it definitely would have been Bodog. Last year I got second and third in the Bodog $100K, I won my World Series main event package on Bodog, and I won a seat to the Foxwoods WPT [World Poker Tour] event on Bodog, and those were pretty big for me back then. And then I just had this huge downswing on Bodog where I couldn't win anything. Stars has always been pretty consistent for me, though, so I'd probably have to say Stars. But then Full Tilt [laughing] ... it's kind of hard to beat a quarter-mil score on a site, and you've got to kind of show love for that, too. And then on UltimateBet, when I first signed up, the very first tournament I played was the $200K Sunday main event, and I got seventh. I final-tabled their main event, so that site has been decent to me, too.

SPG: What do you think of PokerStars' new crackdown on poker results database sites? [Editor's note: PokerStars recently sent out an announcement that it will not officially allow websites to publish certain player stats that take into account tournaments in which the player lost money (for instance, return on investment, net profit, percent of in-the-money finishes, and so on) unless the player specifically opts in with the site.]

FR: I really don't know what I think. Because it's been so generally accepted that it's OK to track everybody's stats, everyone believes that it's not right now to take it away. But I think that if the stats had never been tracked up until now and PokerStars made the announcement that tracking was going to be allowed, a lot of people would be up in arms. Cash game players don't want their stats tracked because they don't want everybody knowing how much they make. And tournament players … a lot of people say tournament players are in it because they want their names in the limelight, but a lot of times that's not really the case. To be honest, I don't know if I want my complete stats out there for everybody to see. Is it right to have your complete stats and all of your winnings shown? I think it's good and bad. Theoretically, all of the things that they are restricting can still be calculated, anyway.

SPG: To what do you attribute your success so far in 2007?

FR: It started off pretty well for me because of the WPT when I made the final table of the PCA. I finished sixth in that tournament for a quarter million and that kind of set things off. The biggest thing that I attribute my success to, though, was going full time and actually quitting my job. It's kind of hard to compete with all of the full-time pros when you're only playing part time. Even though I still don't play nearly the volume of a lot of players, I think I'm at least getting close with my results.

SPG: So the PCA was really what made your decision to go pro?

FR: Yeah. Prior to the PCA I had sort of told myself, and I told my friends and some other people, that if I get a score of $20,000 online, that's going to be the sign that I need to stop and focus and give it a go as a professional. I'd done well in poker for the previous two years and, theoretically, from a financial standpoint, I could have quit way before that. So, then I go to the Bahamas and get a score of $250,000, and that made the decision pretty easy. I still stayed at the Sun-Times for a month or so, and I didn't really want to leave because I liked it there and I liked everyone that I worked with. But I asked my boss for a week off to go to the L.A. Poker Classic, and he said that two people had already requested that time off. At that point, I just said, "Sorry, I don't think I can work anymore," and put in my two-week notice. I'm still on good terms with everyone and it has definitely been a smooth transition to becoming a professional and focusing on poker as a full-time job.

SPG: You've been known to play in the $1,000 buy-in tournaments online. It seems to me that with tournaments like those, along with tournaments like the $200 (with rebuys) on PokerStars, you're paying a premium to play against an incredibly stacked field. What's the upside?

FR: That's a question that I've been trying to answer for a long time. It's for that specific reason that right now, as I'm speaking to you, I'm playing the $100 rebuy tournament on Stars for the very first time in about a year. I've not played the $100 rebuy in a long, long time because I look at the field playing in it and all of the top-ranked players registered, and I respect most of their games and I think they're all great players. I look at that and I say, "Why am I going to play in that? Why am I going to play against the best when it's probably not tremendously positive EV [expected value]. It may be slightly positive EV, because I do have confidence in my game and I do think that I'm a good player, but I don't think that I could profit tremendously by playing against the best and only the best. But things have been going so well for me that I'm giving it a shot. Like I said, I respect everybody, but my results are right up there with all of them.

I'm just such a huge bankroll freak that I don't want to jump into anything until I'm 100 percent comfortable with the money factor. At this point, my bankroll can obviously handle this stuff, but I just have to be comfortable with it, and I guess I'm getting there. Right now, I think the main reason that I'm playing all of the big-buy-in tournaments is that getting ranked was one of my newest poker goals. I've been playing more and I figured, "Why shouldn't I be ranked just like everybody else?" The money-factor isn't as big of an influence; I'm not really playing for the money, anymore. Unless it's a huge event like the FTOPS, the first-place prizes are by no means going to be life-changing for me and I'm not going to be buying anything that I couldn't have bought before I won. So, it's not really about the money so much as competing for the points.

SPG: You said that you have the bankroll for the tournaments with $1,000 buy-ins but that you aren't necessarily comfortable playing in them. That's a good point, I think, because a lot of times when people think about bankroll management, they focus strictly on what their actual bankroll is and not what their "emotional" bankroll is.

FR: Exactly. And another huge thing that people don't understand about bankroll is that if you make money in a tournament, like, for instance, my $250,000 cash, they think they can go play $10-$20 no-limit cash games, and those are two completely separate things. There are just so many aspects of bankroll management that people are clueless about, and I think that's why my bankroll has continued to go in one direction: north.

SPG: What's your playing style?

FR: I've had some people say that I was one of the craziest people that they've ever played with and then I've had other people say "Wow, you've folded for the past half-hour. You haven't played a hand in forever." So, I think the best way to describe my style is to say that I'm "adaptive," in that I change styles, which I think would be the ideal way for a poker player to play given different circumstances and situations.

SPG: What playing style do you have the hardest time adapting to?

FR: Probably tight-aggressive. If someone is extremely nitty, I probably have a tougher time and I get impatient because they're so unwilling to put their money in the pot. Assuming the blinds are small, that is. If the blinds are huge, then if they're unwilling to put their money in the pot, I'm just going to rape them for their blinds and antes. But if it's a situation where it's deep-stacked poker and the blinds and antes are pretty insignificant at the time, that's where I get a little bit frustrated. But I'm starting to get better, and I'll just bring up a few other tables or play a few sit-and-gos at the same time to make sure that I don't get as frustrated.

SPG: Did you learn from anyone, or are you self-taught?

FR: I would say that I'm definitely self-taught, aside from my buddy teaching me the initial basics, things like "this beats that," and so on. I've got a bookshelf of 20 poker books, all of which I've read at least once. So, I'm definitely a student of the game. I also read the message boards for both entertainment and educational purposes. I subscribe to CardRunners and PokerXFactor, as well. I do anything that I can to improve my game.

SPG: In your opinion, what's the greatest tool for becoming a better poker player?

FR: The greatest tool is taking advantage of all of them. If you're not going to take advantage of all of them, you're just at such a huge disadvantage. Somebody had asked AMAK316 on the message boards whether Annette_15 should do a video for CardRunners or PokerXFactor [beyond the one she did for PokerXFactor that showed her playing a tournament blind] and AMAK said no, she shouldn't do that because she has such an easy style to duplicate, and that wouldn't be good for her. The original poster, who I'm assuming was a small-stakes player, replied, "Oh, but nobody's actually going to watch it and try to do the exact same things." AMAK responded, "I'm sorry bud, I don't know where you play, but where I play everyone does their homework in the big-buy-ins." And that's so true. Maybe there are some geniuses out there, like lilholdem954 [Chad Batista] sounds like he is, that don't need to study the game, but it seems like you need to stay on top of the game to continue to do well. You need to use all of the materials that are at your fingertips.

SPG: Do you have anyone in the poker community that you talk to about hands?

FR: Oh yeah, for sure. I've got guys like A__theKevlar__2 and Anna Wroblewski. She's actually from Chicago and we used to play at the same club in the city. We were never really close or anything, we'd only talked like once or twice, but then I came to Vegas for the Series and we were sitting in the same satellite. She called out, "Hey, Chicago, right?" and I said, "Yeah, you remember!" I told her that I'd been doing pretty well in poker recently and she said the same thing. Since then, we've been talking on AIM [AOL Instant Messenger] about hands and stuff. I also talk to LUHMAN [Chris Martin].

SPG: I'd like to pose a semi-specific hand example to see what you'd do. Let's say you're shortstacked, with around seven to 10 big blinds worth of chips, and you get dealt pocket fours under the gun. What factors do you consider when playing this hand?

FR: How many people are at the table would be the most significant factor. The second would be what the other players' stacks are in comparison to mine. If it's a bunch of people with 100 big blinds, then I'm more likely to be called, whereas if it's a bunch of people with stacks similar to mine, then that increases my fold equity. Other factors would be how other players are playing, their tendencies. If they've been a little bit nittier and they're unlikely to call, then that obviously increases my chances of putting my chips in the middle. Also, my image; what I've been doing recently. If I had just shoved in in the previous hand and I wasn't called, it's a lot more likely that people are going to start catching on to my tactics and they might look me up with a sub-stellar hand, which will be a coin-flip for me, at best. Nobody's going to call me with deuce-trey in that situation. At least, I hope not, assuming I'm not playing against some micro-donks. Nothing against micro-donks, of course [laughing].

Also, what are the sizes of the blinds and antes? What is my M, as in how many rounds I can survive without winning a pot? In certain situations, like the Nightly Hundred Grand on PokerStars, the antes are so minuscule that you're really not picking up that much when you steal the blinds.

Speaking in general, my chips are probably going in the middle with fours most of the time, but there are definitely situations when I'm mucking it.

SPG: Well, like you said, you're usually hoping for a coin-flip if someone calls.

FR: Exactly, and that's my biggest pet peeve about poker players, when they say in the chatbox, "Oh, I knew you had that." The truth is that nobody ever knows anything. It's always a guess, an assumption, or a range of hands that you put somebody on. There are no definites in poker.

SPG: Great, thank you for taking the time to do this interview. I appreciate it.