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#820 – 2009 WSOP #78 – Seen & Heard #23 – Markus Golser, the Youngest Pioneer
Last winter, European poker pro Markus Golser brought Johannes Strassmann, an up-and-coming European tournament star, skiing in Austria. Golser, an excellent skier, took off down an expert slope. He didn’t know it, but Strassmann, who had never skied before, followed behind. Part way down the run, Markus noticed in his peripheral vision someone falling down the mountain. He stopped, to see Johannes land in a heap nearby.
“Markus, how did I do?” asked Strassman hopefully.
That’s the kind of influence that Markus Golser has on young poker players in Germany and Austria.
Markus, a youthful thirty-five (he turns thirty-six on July 9), is nevertheless one of the pioneers of European poker. The game’s incredible popularity in Germany and Austria, live and online, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Golser, however, was playing in the back of Austrian coffee houses as a seventeen year-old in the early Nineties. The area’s first card casino didn’t open until he was twenty-one. Even back then, Markus’s stature was such that the manager of the new card casino personally asked him to play and bring his game to the casino.
Except for three months as a teenager, poker is the only job Markus Golser has ever had. He has consistently done well for nearly two decades and can’t imagine doing anything else.
Here is an idea of how old Golser is in “poker years”:
Although he has always been successful in his regular cash games in Austria, he considered a defining moment in his career a World Series final table that make it clear he could play with the best in the world. It was the final table of the $2,500 PLO in 2000, one of the most distinguished in forty years at the Series. The fifth and sixth place finishers were two of Europe’s all-time PLO all-stars, David “Devilfish” Ulliott and David “El Blondie” Colclough. Phil Hellmuth, the biggest name ever in the World Series of Poker, finished fourth. Markus finished third. The heads-up battle spanned the entire history of the World Series, with Amarillo Slim (in what, in all likelihood, was his last WSOP final table) losing to Phil Ivey (in his first year at the World Series).
Markus’s friendship with Johannes Strassmann is testament to his stature as a role model and mentor to young European pros. Strassmann, since the beginning of 2008, has scorched the EPT for over $600,000 and he looks to Golser for more than skiing advice. Johannes clearly looks up to Markus and says his friend “not only knows how to enjoy life, but he has amazing living skills and a great ‘life balance’ which is the most important thing to have in poker.”
Despite Markus’s success, stability, and longevity, he found himself in 2003-04 getting tired of poker. For more than half a year, he didn’t play a single hand. He recognizes now that half a lifetime of travel was wearing him down.
That was when he turned to online poker, and he quickly learned to navigate his way through the new medium and win. His devotion to online poker since has not only kept him on the game’s cutting edge, but he credits it with reinvigorating his love of the game. It also allows him to play some big tournaments live but not to rely on the ever-busier international circuit for his living. His two-year-old son Justin is now the center of his world, evidenced by Markus skipping the end of the Series and the Main Event – something he would have considered unimaginable in the past – to fit in more time with Justin.
Not that Golser is ready to be fitted for a rocking chair or abandon his “other” family, the European players who look up to him. After Strassmann’s debacle on the slopes, the pair bet on whether Johannes can pass Markus in skiing ability in ten years. On June 22, 2019, the pair will return and ski the same slope that proved hopelessly difficult to Strassman one hundred times. At stake will presumably be an equally formidable pile of Euros.
Considering that most poker players don’t have plans beyond the next ten minutes, the wager illustrates that Markus Golser expects to remain a central figure, on the slopes and at the poker table, for a long time to come.
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