Mario Mosböck met with hochgepokert for a detailed interview. In it, the former Bundesliga footballer talks about his first steps in online poker through to tournament successes in the most expensive live tournaments on the globe. And also how the Lower Austrian striker became a poker ambassador for CoinPoker and the Triton Series. – In the second part of the comprehensive interview, it’s about how Mario Mosböck emulated the Chris Ferguson Challenge, how his mom finally had to write a letter to Full Tilt Poker, and how a “Wayner Gang” was ultimately responsible for one of the biggest poker careers in the German-speaking world.
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Click here for the other parts of the big Mario Mosböck interview:
Part 1 – From garden to pro kicker
Part 2 – From Wayner to High Stakes Crusher
Jan Schwarz: How did you start playing poker?
Mario Mosböck: I started on Full Tilt Poker in 2008 as “xxmmarioxx”, which was also my favorite poker client for a long time. For that time, it was a sensationally good product.
Jan Schwarz: And were you able to achieve success under that screen name?
Mario Mosböck: Well, I had a few screen names there, because I was only 12 and later I also played under my mom’s name. For two years I ground all the freerolls under my name, won a few dollars from them, played them up to a few hundred and lost everything again, and then had to go back to the freerolls. But then, as a 13-year-old, I won a $5 Rebuy Tournament for about $3k. After that, I went to my parents and told them that I was playing Full Tilt Poker and that I didn’t know how to withdraw the money. (laughs)
Jan Schwarz: Yes, what you say to your parents as a 13-year-old…
Mario Mosböck: And then my mom wrote an email to Full Tilt Poker saying that it was her account and she had only chosen her son’s name for it, but that she was actually the one playing, and asking if Full Tilt Poker could change the name to hers. Full Tilt Poker then got back to her, said “no problem at all, Mrs. Mosböck”, and paid out the money to her after the name change. (laughs)
Jan Schwarz: On other sites, you then played under a screen name that suggested you were living your dream. Which dream did you mean, and when did you start living it?
Mario Mosböck: Good question. I think it was the dream of football and poker. I think the origin of the name was an email address I created with that name. I don’t really know exactly anymore, except that everything in my life in 2018 fit perfectly.
Jan Schwarz: It’s interesting that screen names become an aura over time and with success, something you didn’t have in mind during the 2 minutes of registration.
Mario Mosböck: Yes, I also identify with my screen names, and I also identify other players by their nicknames; they become a kind of character. I’m very proud of mine and happy with them. And things also went very well online under them.
Jan Schwarz: What were the important key stages for your poker career… apart from the $5 Rebuy success on your mom’s account (laughs)?
Mario Mosböck: The Chris Ferguson Challenge, in which he turned $0 into $10,000, was completely crazy to me. That’s exactly what I wanted to do. I had also started with $0 and so I just had to play as well as he did. And I thought to myself, “I can do that”. In April 2011, I had a very successful Mini FTOPS. And a $20 Rush tournament with about 6,000 runners brought me over the $10,000 threshold with $18k for 2nd place. Two or three more tournaments that I won in the following days brought my FTP bankroll to $28k.
Jan Schwarz: In April 2011, Black Friday also happened in poker. Was your mom able to cash out the bankroll before that?
Mario Mosböck: Fortunately, we were able to withdraw it after Black Friday, during the time when Full Tilt Poker came back again.
Jan Schwarz: $28k is quite a sum, especially as a 15-year-old! What did that do to you and your poker vision?
Mario Mosböck: For me, it was nice and a confirmation that I could play poker and do it profitably. And so I continued to do it as an ambitious hobby over the next few years. I then met Fedor Holz through a mutual friend, and every now and then we played on Sundays at Hannes Speiser’s house. Over the years, a friendship developed. – However, poker was not a dominant topic for me; it only became one in 2020.
Jan Schwarz: What happened in 2020?
Mario Mosböck: At that time, I was traveling as a semi-pro, so to speak. I thought I was already good, although I was definitely much worse than I thought I was. And in the summer of 2020, we decided to grind the big online series in May together. We rented a house, and I invited a few friends. And that was so great that we said we would do the same thing again in the summer.
Jan Schwarz: And what kind of guys were they that you invited?
Mario Mosböck: Really cool guys, but they were all beginners, so they couldn’t really play poker yet. Among others, they were Roland Rokita, Fabian Bernhauser, Stefan Nemetz, Florian Gaugusch, Florian Fuchs, Matthias Auer, David Hagmann, and me – and in the end, we also took in Fedor (laughs). We called ourselves the “Wayner Gang” because we completely fulfilled all the clichés of a whale flying to Las Vegas. We were absolutely clueless (laughs). Since 2017, the 10 of us have been a Vegas group, and we are still the closest of friends today.
Jan Schwarz: Those were great prerequisites for the summer in the Grindhouse (laughs)…
Mario Mosböck: Hannes from Pokercode visited us in our private Grindhouse in the spring, and with him, the idea arose to do it under professional guidance and documented by cameras in the summer. For Fedor’s poker school Pokercode, it was a really cool promotion to film the “Pokercode Grindhouse” with a camera team and accompany 10
