Last month, Woody CrazedZachDeck (pictured) won a pair of SCOOP events. The first was a $215 Studtournament, while the second, which happened nine days later, was a $700 HORSE event. Deck’s reward: $34,000 and two SCOOP titles.

We caught up with him after his HORSE win. He said he was tired, as the schedule-makers “made things tough on Europeans. All of my events started at 11:00pm.”

He used to play pot limit mixed cash games, but those haven’t run in nine years at the mid-stakes levels. As he explained, “I don’t really enjoy limit cash games, but I love limit tournaments. Scott emptyseat88 Fischman taught me how to do the Fischman Flop, so I am well aware of what you need to do when you win a big HORSE tournament.”

He added, “It is easier to accumulate in SCOOP in the early levels because even two-tabling Stud games is hard. All of the no limit MTT regs trying to win the leaderboard miss a lot of information early. They lag and then you know they are playing straightforward poker. That’s not the best plan. I really don’t know how Jason treysfull21 Mercier is doing it. He was playing five tables of mixed games along with whatever hold’em events were going on.”

Deck is up to three SCOOP wins total. His first came in 2012 in a $2,100 Omaha Hi-Lo tournament and meant a bankroll boost of $51,000, his largest online MTT score to date. “Limit tournaments are mostly luck at the end,” he asserted. “All you can do is bang the ‘bet/raise’ button and hope for the best.”

We should probably mention that in the HORSE event, Deck at one point had just one big blind to his name… one. “I’ve lost every single Razz pot I’ve ever played,” he joked. “I honestly have never heard of anyone winning at Razz. Nobody profits. They just play it so they can have something horrific to go on about. I once was chip leader in a WSOP HORSE event in London with 33 left. It paid 27, but I didn’t come close to the money thanks to Razz. That hurt.”

The Lithuanian transplant got his start in poker through a friend’s father. “He was a really enthusiastic Stud Eight or Better recreational player. He took my friend and me to the Indian casino when we were 16 and we played all night, $1/$3 Stud Eight or Better. It was then that we discovered how terrible he was at poker and that it was a game of skill. He was so bad, in fact, that I started immediately winning just by doing the opposite of everything he did.”

Deck is currently camped out in the Netherlands. As he put it, “I still definitely represent Lithuania, but life hasn’t been stable enough for me to remain in any one place, unfortunately. I’m currently a resident of the Netherlands and trying to start a business with my wife. I’m a big fan of a unified Europe and feel comfortable anywhere on the continent.”

“Black Friday has taken away a lot from me,” he continued. “I only play TCOOP, SCOOP, and WCOOP online now. It’s only a few shots per year for me since I don’t play no limit and there literally are no beatable cash games left. I could apply myself to no limit and play full-time if I wanted to, but I don’t enjoy the immense swings I know even the best of the best have in it.”

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