Player Focus: Markus Golser

Markus Golser is one of Europe’s top all-round cash game pros and is a veteran of the highest limits both on and offline.

Despite being a Full Tilt sponsored pro and a regular at the nose bleed games on the site, Golser has been on the circuit long before internet poker took off and made his first tournament cash back in 1996. He first caught the poker bug playing 32 card draw poker with his friends at the age of 17 and when a casino was introduced to his native Salzburg, Austria, he learnt to play seven card stud and hold ‘em when he turned 21. After a number of cashes on the national scene he was invited to play his first event abroad in 1999 by the manager of the Nova Gorica Casino in Slovakia. Golser won the NLH Main Event, which gave him $21,000 and a package to Las Vegas to play in that year’s Tournament of Champions. Though he didn’t cash, he took to the ring games and made over $90,000 on the trip before touring the big games of Europe and never looking back.

Despite being a cash (in particular PLO) specialist, Golser has tournament winnings of over $845,000, putting him second on the all-time Austrian money list. His resume includes 5 WSOP cashes, 4 EPT money finishes and one in the WPT; the 2004 Grand Prix de Paris, where he finished 10th for $30,483. The closest he came to a bracelet was in the 2000 World Series, where he final tabled the $2,500 PLO event only to bust in 3rd for $48,750. The biggest cash of his career came in the 2007 EPT Prague, where he came in 5th for a cool $222,431 to polish off his most profitable year to date. High Stakes DB shows he made profits of over $670,000 for ’07 on the FT tables, most cleaning up in the cash games (this is despite a downswing of nearly $1million earlier in the year). He also found time to make a major score in the 2007 WCOOP, when playing as ‘jumper17’ finished runner-up in the $1,000 Limit Hold ‘Em event for a further $83,776.

Golser continues to turn over tidy sums online and David Benyamine described him as one of the best PLO player in the world; high praise indeed. He is certainly the most talented player ever to come out of Austria and it is testament to his skill that he looks set to become their top tournament winner despite ring games being his bread and butter.