It should come as little surprise that Austrian pro Mario Mosböck describes himself as being particularly ‘goal-oriented’ - after all, he spent the majority of his youth en route to a career as a professional soccer player.
While many teenagers dream of a pro sports career, few have the opportunity or the ability to make it in the big time. Fewer still have the chance to do just that, and decide it’s not for them. Mosböck is different.
While his Wikipedia page still describes him as an Austrian footballer (under ‘Personal Life’ a single line reads: ‘In March 2024, he won nearly £1m in a poker tournament’), Mosböck made the difficult decision to turn his back on the game and focus on something he felt would bring him more happiness.
Now an ambassador with CoinPoker, Mosböck joined PokerOrg’s Craig Tapscott ahead of the start of WSOP Paradise to discuss his route to poker stardom, and the conscious decisions he’s made along the way which have taken him there.
Watch the full interview above right now, or read on for some highlights.
‘There are no secrets in tournament poker’
You were a talented footballer, but you quit. Why was that?
For me, it was never a decision if I wanted to become a footballer, it was just kind of the next step. I started playing at four or five years old, and then you go to an Academy, and then you go to the next level, and the next level, and when I turned professional at 20 I realized that's an environment I don't feel like I'm fitting in well. I definitely couldn't see myself enjoying the next 15 years of my life.
I was good. Similarly to poker, I had a very high work ethic and was very detailed in my approach, but I didn't see a way where I would be happy doing that for the next 15 years.
Even though you make good money, even though you have a high social status from playing football and everybody thinks it's a dream life, it was not for me. So for me it was a decision that I want to take a step away, see if I miss it, and if I do miss it I go back. And I haven't missed it since.
How did you get your start in poker?
I started playing at 12. I was watching the WSOP coverage and I was just so obsessed, that was the biggest deal and I absolutely loved it.
I started playing on Full Tilt. I was just playing freerolls because I couldn't deposit [being too young], and there was the Chris Ferguson Challenge where he turns zero into $10,000 by playing freerolls, and documented it, and I was really obsessed. I read every book, I watched literally every video of poker available, all the coaching, and that's what I spent my time doing.
After two or three years of grinding the freerolls I managed to build up a bankroll, and then had a huge spin-up. I went from a couple hundred - because in freerolls you win a dollar and then you sit at the 1c/2c table and grind it up - and then I managed to win a couple tournaments in a row and I went from a few hundred to, I think, $40,000.
With school, poker and training to be a footballer, how did you find the time as a teenager to fit it all in?
I remember on Full Tilt you could win a free ticket for ‘The Daily Dollar’, a tournament which started at 2:30am Austrian time. So whenever I cashed the freeroll during the day and I got a ticket, I’d set my alarm to 2:30am, spin up a stack to make sure I got in the money, and once I had a stack high enough to get in the money for sure I’d sign off and go back to bed, because I had school a couple hours later.
I only played like the first two or three hours of each tournament and try to spin it up, and I did that so many times, just setting my alarm at two or three in the morning, I was obsessed.
Then at some point football took over more. I mean, football was always the highest priority; I did it in a way where it didn't sacrifice my ability to focus on the sports, otherwise I could not be a professional, but yeah I just really loved it. I was really obsessed.
Tell us about your experience in the Grindhouse?
I had a group of friends of mine, we knew each other from football, none of them were really ambitious poker players, they just liked poker.
Fedor [Holz] was, like ‘Hey, do you want to play SCOOP together?’. I was, like, ‘Sure, and I have this group of friends. They're not really good at poker, but they're really fun!’ So we rented a house and spent a week together, we didn't barely play any poker, but we had a lot of fun, and then the idea was born: what if we do that for two months and document that? Can you take a random group of players and turn them into winning players?
We did that for two months, and we had Matthias Eibinger and Fedor Holz covering that and guiding us. We were maybe, I don't know, 10 guys and we had amazing fun over the summer. And it was crazy because we didn't spend that much time on actually studying, but we understood what it actually takes to become good at poker, what are the routines, what things to focus on, and that was really the starting point.
Literally everyone in the group became a professional afterwards.
Since then you’ve moved up to playing the highest stakes, at Triton High Roller events, for example. What’s the secret?
There are no secrets in tournament poker. Literally anything you need to know is publicly available - it's not about getting access to the secrets, it's about taking whatever is there and actually trying to implement it.
What is helpful is to filter out the information from the noise: what are the things to focus on, what are the most important things? For example, it's probably most important to play heads-up really well, because if you're a tournament player the difference between first and second is huge, so if you win heads-up more often this will have the biggest boost in your ROI.
Then if you break the game down, for example, maybe 80% of MTTs is just making good preflop decisions, and preflop is not hard, it's just studying it and understanding the ranges, and this part you just need to play perfect - it’s non-negotiable.
Then the flop is more important than the turn, the turn is more important than the river, because it just happens more frequently. So whatever mistakes you make on the flop, it just occurs more often than whatever mistake you might do on the river.
So breaking this down and splitting it into buckets to individually focus on, and attacking the most important parts first - because otherwise it's just so overwhelming - it's just really helpful.
How is the new partnership with CoinPoker going?
They wanted someone on board to be connected to the player base, and I think it’s really important to listen to the players, to listen to the players’ feedback. For example, I suggested to make a public proof of reserves, and they implemented it in just three weeks. That’s the nice thing about working with them: they're moving fast and quickly, and make quick decisions, and listen to the players’ feedback. It’s been great to work with them.
I think there will be a lot of improvements, especially from the product side. There's room to improve, and that's where a lot of the resources are going at the moment.
