Fedor Holz has been playing poker for 16 years - since he was 16 years old, in home games with school friends, on $1 sit-and-gos, grinding through nights without sleep. He lost his bankroll eight times before he found his footing. And now he has $50M+ in live earnings and a coaching community of 10,000+ members. In this interview, produced in Seefeld for and with our partner Taenaatak, he explains exactly how that happened.

Fedor Holz - exclusive interview, March 2026 - produced in partnership with Taenaatak Thailand

How it started - school friends and 50-hour grinds

Fedor didn't grow up in a poker household. He started at 16, in one-cent-two-cent home games with seven or eight school friends. One of them had a chip set. Two of them kept winning.

"They always won against us. I was like, wait a second - are you cheating or what? I want to understand what they're doing." That question - not the money, but the puzzle - is what pulled Fedor deeper into the game.

The early grind was exactly that: grinding. Weekends were 50-hour sessions at a friend's place. No sleep. $1 sit-and-gos, 20 tables at a time, 180-player tournaments. He was building volume before he even knew what volume meant.

The three moments that shaped everything

Fedor identifies three milestones when asked what shaped his career. Not tournament wins. Not big scores. The structural shifts that made everything else possible.

The first was quitting his studies. "Without that it would have never worked." It wasn't socially accepted. People around him didn't think it was a great idea. He did it anyway - partly because he'd moved out at 17 and had enough distance from family expectations to back himself.

The second was 2012 to 2013 - the year that didn't work, followed by the year that did. "I was struggling. Losing, winning, losing, winning, losing. I lost my bankroll eight times." Then in January 2013, he packed everything into a container, did a world trip, moved to Vienna, and started to win consistently. Something had reset.

The third milestone was building his group. A circle of people who were all ambitious but not yet successful - and who went to the top together. "That was the first idea of what Pokercode would be years later."

Why Pokercode exists - and how it started as something different

The origin of Pokercode is more honest than most founding stories. People kept asking Fedor questions. He did expensive one-on-one coaching. After the 15th session, he realised he was repeating himself.

"I was talking the same things all the time. I have to do this better." The initial idea was simple: make one great video. A masterclass. Put everything in there, 10 to 15 hours of content, and sell it. That was it.

It sold. But it didn't feel right. People weren't really watching. "I was not satisfied with the initial product." So he added live coaching. Then other coaches from his circle. Then membership. Then the community became the product itself - the Discord, the 10,000+ members, the group dynamic that Fedor had always believed was the real driver of improvement.

The name came from Fedor's own relationship with the game. "For me, poker is solving puzzles all the time. Once you figured out the code, you kind of know how things work." He's never been a machine repeating memorised lines. He thinks in concepts. Pokercode was built to teach the same way.

The one thing that separates improving players from those who plateau

When asked what advice he gives younger players, Fedor doesn't start with strategy. He starts with character.

"The main characteristic is emotional stability and resilience. I find it more important to be resilient than to be smart or good at pattern recognition." Because the moments where you make bad decisions - and you will - will outweigh every good decision if you can't recover from them.

He also identifies the mindset that holds most players back: building self-worth around results instead of competence. Social proof - what other people think of you, whether you won or lost this session - becomes the measure of how good you are. It's the wrong measure entirely.

What does work? Consistent work over a long time horizon. Not three months. Three to five years. "If you put in 50 good hours a week, you're really dedicated, you just keep doing good steps - two, three years, you will be successful. There's no way around it."

The really good thing about your competition

One of the most striking moments in the interview is the simplest: Fedor's assessment of the competitive landscape at low and mid stakes.

• Your competition is lazy. At average stakes, anyone who puts in consistent, structured work can beat the field. Intelligence is a smaller factor than most players assume.
• To reach the top 1,000 in the world, you don't need to be that smart. You need to work hard. The players who plateau are the ones who procrastinate, beat themselves up, and have no clear improvement goals.
• Resilience is the competitive edge. Not solvers, not theory. The ability to deal with setbacks, variance, and tilt - and come back stronger - separates the players who improve from those who don't.
• Focus on competence, not results. Consistent win rates over time give you real feedback. A single big score tells you almost nothing.
• The real enemy is in the mirror. Not the players at your table. Not variance. The procrastination, lack of clarity, and inability to take a long view are what actually hold you back.

Poker's future - and what Fedor hopes for

Fedor sees poker as a game with enormous potential - mentally stimulating, highly skilled, and capable of teaching resilience and character in ways most games can't. But he's honest about the challenges.

"Poker also puts the worst characteristics out in yourself." Unethical behaviour, soft cheating, short-term thinking - these are real. His hope is that the community holds itself to a higher standard. Not as an abstract value, but because the environment you maintain has direct consequences for everyone in it, including you.

He ends with something he notices every year at the Pokercode bowling event for members: "There are only nice people. People you really feel have a good energy, good attitude, good vibes." That's not accidental. It's a result of the culture the community was built to have.