Jonas ‘Otb_RedBaron’ Mols

The legendary Belgian high roller who dominated the 6-max tables in the mid-2010s

Many poker players strive for fame and glory, but Otb_RedBaron has made it to the highest online cash game limits and has remained anonymous for a long time.

He launched his career in 2010. As he admitted later, forum discussions, as well as working with poker calculators and even doing calculations in MS Excel helped him to make his first successful steps. The upside was rapid as he launched his first 2+2 forum marathon two years later (100,000 hands in 20 days on NL500 Zoom) and won $120,000 in 400,000 hands a year later at the same limit.

By 2013 Jonas was in the poker elite, playing 3-max NL10k with forhayley and takechip and by the end of the year he was winning over a million dollars according to the High Stakes Database. A year later, no one doubted that the Belgian was the strongest player ever - and the best poker minds were beating over the analysis of his hands.

Famous quotes

I try to play more GTO and less exploitative style. Just waiting for mistakes and exploiting only the most monstrous ones. But playing close to optimal is difficult because I certainly have no idea what GTO looks like for 100bb stacks.
You could say I'm just building a solid strategy that will work against an average/unknown/strong opponent. A strategy that's hard to find weaknesses in, which forces me not to bet too often, not to fold too often and to be more or less balanced in the most common cases.

Most of the players who win a lot on midstakes are relatively unknown. Publishing your nickname and giving away some information for free doesn’t make much sense. It would be more advantageous for me to remain anonymous, but I don't think it would affect opponents' actions against me. But recording a video of us honestly showing our game would probably hurt the win rate considerably.

Never lost interest in the game, but a few times I lost motivation to grind, especially when I was terribly unlucky in NL100 and NL200 in 2011. As soon as the change started to get better, the problems went away on their own. Before I opened a thread on 2+2, I was also losing motivation due to a very long period of being breakeven. I still love poker and am unlikely to get tired of it anytime soon.