When I Was A Donk With Kevin Schulz

In this series, Card Player asks top pros to rewind back to their humble beginnings and provide insights regarding the mistakes, leaks, and deficiencies that they had to overcome in order to improve their games.

Kevin Schulz is a professional poker player from Palatine, Illinois, a suburb of nearby Chicago. The 28-year-old former table tennis champion and sky diving enthusiast spent years grinding online before making the transition to live poker tournaments.

In 2012, Schulz got his first taste of live tournament success when he finished fourth in a $5,000 no-limit hold’em event at the World Series of Poker for $267,792. Then, in early 2015, he took down the $10,000 buy-in PokerStars Caribbean Adventure main event for $1,491,580.

Here, Schulz talks about why he wasn’t so great at holding onto his winnings early in his career.

“There aren’t a lot of specific hands that stick out in my mind as mistakes. I mean, I definitely didn’t play perfect poker all of the time, but there wasn’t anything that haunted me for years afterward. The biggest problem for me early in my career all had to do with lifestyle choices.”

“I had a big issue with work ethic. I remember only playing when I needed money and, as a result, I would let my bankroll get really low and frequently back myself into a corner. In 2007, it was really easy to make money playing poker, so I spent it just as easily. I would have around $50,000 in my bankroll, and then spend about half of that on a car. I would go out to nightclubs and drop $1,000 on bottle service. At the time, I didn’t just want to play poker for a living, it was almost as if I wanted to party for a living and poker was how I made that happen.”

“In my head, I was justifying my spending by saying it wouldn’t be a problem to make six figures the next year. I didn’t realize that the game would get so much harder and that there would be long dry spells between scores. It didn’t occur to me that I would go broke.”

“Poker is really swingy. Just because you are up now doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way. Earlier this year, I obviously won a lot of money at the PCA, but even now, I’m choosing to live like I’m broke. I’ve completely changed how I look at my bankroll.” ♠