Playing Poker with A Little Bit of Magic: Interview with Eric Froehlich
Interview with Eric Froehlich
Eric and I met the way I’ve met a lot of my friends these days — through Twitter and Twitch. Eric’s a cool guy with an interesting background in Magic and poker. If you’re not familiar with Magic: The Gathering, it’s a collectible card game centered around wizards who cast spells, summon creatures, and use artifacts in order to defeat each other. He’s also insanely smart having started college-level math in the seventh grade.
We started off the interview with a little bit of history on how he got to be where he is today and his experience at a gifted and talented elementary school.
Before he started playing poker, he was a fifth-grader interested in the popular card game going around at school, Magic: The Gathering, asking his parents for his first card set. That year, all the students were trading and playing the game. However, by sixth grade, the kids had all moved on from the game but Eric had not.
He tells me that in the early days, his parents would even play the game with him and remembers his dad reading him the rulebook to teach him how to play. Eventually, Eric moved on to play in junior tournaments and started to win money although he didn’t start seeing serious cash until about high school. He said he was making $4–5k a tournament… as a high school student.
Needless to say, he loves the game, and it has been important in his life from a very early age. Eric told me several times during our talk that no one watches more Magic than him mentioning that he is constantly streaming it on Twitch as background noise or just for pure entertainment.
His first Magic tournament was in Washington D.C. which was just a twenty-minute drive in for him from where he lived. His dad would take him and as much as it embarrassed him sometimes, Eric admits he loves that he has these memories with his dad now. In fact, his dad would even participate in the tournaments but would rarely make it to day two. On the otherhand, Eric often would make it to the finals. He tells me his parents were always supportive and didn’t even have a problem with him leaving college to play poker because that’s what made him happy, and they put happiness above all else.
Eric did extremely well in these tournaments and was often placed in the top ten. He continued to do tournaments throughout high school, but he never told anyone what or where he was going since he felt it was too nerdy to share in a time that he was struggling to fit in. In a meeting he had with a school counselor, they told him he had set a new record for most days missed.
Despite missing all this class, Eric was not struggling in school at all. He was able to sleep in class and remember the entire lecture allowing him to recall things during the test so he never needed to study, causing him to feel like he didn’t do anything to acquire his intelligence.
Despite his twenty-six years of experience with Magic: The Gathering, Eric is doubtful that he could make it today in tournaments since the way people study the game now is so different from when he was playing it regularly.
In college, Eric’s mom was diagnosed with multiple brain tumors that she needed to get removed. Luckily they weren’t cancerous and all she lost was hearing in one ear which was the best-case scenario. A few days after all of this, he played in an online qualifier for the world series of poker and took a semester off of college, days after his 21st birthday, putting his magic playing on pause.
To hear Eric Froehlich’s full story and all about his poker career, check out the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or here:
