What’s and average day at work consist of for you?

On an average day, I get into the office and check my email, make a post on the CardRunners Forum, and then I play some poker. I generally play for a couple of hours at Full Tilt Poker before I go to lunch. In the afternoon, I handle phone calls and take care of whatever projects are going on. Right now I’m working on recruiting new pros.

A lot of people talk about the “poker lifestyle” – what’s that mean to you?

There are a couple of things that come to mind. The first – probably the main – thing is the freedom. Being a poker pro allows me to do pretty much anything that I want or need to do. One of the great things about playing online is that I can play from home or on the road if I’m travelling. In fact, being a successful playing poker for a living has allowed me to travel to see different parts of the world. Freedom is definitely the biggest thing for me.

By the same token, it can be difficult to manage that type of freedom, and the lifestyle can get unhealthy. It’s good to take advantage of all of these opportunities, but it’s important to maintain some semblance of a normal life. I was able to get used to it over time.

What do you do to keep this balanced or relax away from poker?

Outside of work, I’m pretty much doing what any other guy in his 20s is doing: working out, hanging out with my friends, going out, and the like. I make time for doing other things, especially if I’m running bad at the tables, like going to the gym, the movies, or playing video games. Sometimes I’ll go out and buy a couple video games even if I know that I might not play them for a while. If I need a break, I’ll just spend a couple of days focused on that.

Do you still play for fun?

At one point, I got into a grind that lasted for a while. I wanted to make money and felt like I had to play. If I wasn’t, I was missing out on that chance. But lately, and particularly since we’ve come onboard with Full Tilt Poker, it’s a lot more fun. Things have become more focussed on the game – poker itself – than they are on business and I really like that.

It feels pretty good to see yourself as a red pro at the table – it’s something that I’ve looked up to and worked towards since I was first into playing online poker and was just coming up. All of us still sit down to play at various limits, even if there’s not a big cash game going on. We might sit down at a $10 – $20 or even a $1 – $2 No-Limit table. I definitely still play for fun.

What do you say to people who ask you for advice on taking up poker as a profession?

First of all, you have to take playing seriously. Some people look at poker as “just” a game that’s fun to play – and poker is fun. But you have to remember that while it’s fun to play, it’s even more fun to win. You need to really work on your game at all times to make this happen. You can’t treat it like just a game and expect to become a professional. As much as it might sound bad, you have to treat it like a job and constantly seek to improve yourself. Some people don’t see it this way. But once you adopt this mindset, you will improve.

On that note, how did CardRunners come to be?

Basically, we were strong online poker players just like a lot of people out there. We were really successful while we were in college, and people kept approaching us and asking if we could teach them how to play. This worked out fine at first when we just had a few friends who wanted to learn how to play or improve their game. But as the numbers increased, it went from just a few friends to a lot of people who had our screen names from the Internet and the requests became overwhelming. We wanted to gain some entrepreneurial experience, and we thought that this would be a better way to teach people. We’ve really been pretty fortunate.

Is there anyone in particular that you admire or respect as a pro?

I’d say Cole South and Brian Hastings. They’re excellent players but they’re even better guys – really nice and totally down-to-earth. Even though they get tons of questions via instant messenger, forums, and email, they always make time for people. They’ve been extremely successful but it hasn’t changed them as individuals.

Oh yeah – Jen is all about the puppies, the kittens, the Panamanian bloodsucking grill-toothed wombat… whatever. She’s an animal lover and this past weekend, she and a few friends hit the virtual tables to help support one of her pet projects – the Nevada Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

The special $5 + $5 charity tourney raised more than $15,000 for the NSPCA and drew out some big names from both the poker and the extreme sports worlds (if you haven’t seen Howard Lederer throw a 540 McTwist, you’re really missing something by the way). Some of the players who came out for the cause include Jen’s fellow FTP pros Berry Johnston, David Chiu, Scott Fischman, Mandy B, and Marco Traniello, along with folks like snowboarding phenom Shaun White and skateboard legend Tony Hawk.

It’s no secret that we play for peanuts. Combined, the authors of this blog have a bankroll that – on a good day – may be able to buy a cup of coffee and a burrito. Still, that doesn’t stop us from dreaming of playing with the big boys.

Then we see how much money is really moving across the tables in the high-stakes games, and we go back to our 1,000 player Freerolls.

So far this month, our friends at High Stakes Database say one of the FTP’s newest pros – Team CardRunners’ Brian Hastings – is leading the way when it comes to raking in the dough, pulling in about $544K in the Pot-Limit Omaha games. Also running well this month are KobyTAPOUT with $379K and Durr who’s pulled down a little more than $300K.

The always popular Ziigmund is again leading the way in the NLH games with more than $405K in winnings. He’s followed by pr1nnyraid with $228K and, in a distant third, perkyshmerky with $46K in winnings.

This past weekend was every Tilter’s favorite Sunday tourney – the monthly Million. Seven figures worth of guaranteed prize money brought 2,245 players to the tables and pumped the prize pool up to more than $1.1 million.

When all was said and done Piotinus won the tourney’s final hand and walked away with the big prize – nearly $206K in nice green bills just in time for St. Paddy’s Day.

Did someone say St. Paddy’s Day? My god, how did this green beer get into my hand? It’s almost as good as finding a wee pot of gold beneath a shimmering rainbow…

We may just be getting older and crankier (it’s certainly not wiser), but it seems that every day there’s some new Internet whiz-kid tearing up cash games and earning more in a month than the GDP of some small Caribbean countries. Frankly, it’s getting hard to tell them all apart because:

• Everyone looks the same on the Internets and
• We’re much too uncool to understand all the pop culture references and l33t h@X0r language embedded in all their screen names.

Thankfully, some of these young whippersnappers have gotten themselves organized into an easy-to-identify group, which means the big wigs upstairs wasted no time in adding them to our roster of red pros.

So please join us in giving a big Poker From The Rail welcome to Team CardRunners who we hope will provide us with better advice than the Captain, who suggests taking a shot with each new orbit. (Don’t get us wrong, the Captain’s games are fun, but our bankrolls and our livers seem to suffer a little bit more after each session.)

Anyway, look for Taylor Caby, Brian Townsend, Mike Schneider, Brian Hastings, Cole South, Andrew Wiggins and Eric Liu playing under their real-life names on FTP.

Ziigmund (believed to be Finnish pro Ilari Sahamies, who looks like this) is the proud winner of our biggest pot of the week at FTP. The hand went down at one of our $200/$400 Pot-Limit Omaha tables when Ziigmund clashed with TheOcean0 in a hand worth a tidy $319K. Take that lol donkament players.

Just in case you’re wondering what this has to do with poker, Chuck Norris is a real-life poker player. Of course this profile seems to be a little inaccurate, seeing as Chuck Norris would have roundhouse kicked his way to every WSOP, WPT, EPT and any remaining poker tournament titles known to man.

We also found this fact about his poker ability on the Internet – which means it must be true:

"Chuck Norris owns the greatest poker face of all-time. It helped him win the 1983 World Series of Poker despite him holding just a joker, a 2 of clubs, a 7 of spades, a green number 4 from Uno, and a monopoly 'get out of jail free' card.”

Well that’s it folks, stay tuned for next week when we sign Mikey the poker-playing monkey, and reminisce about our favorite scenes from Walker: Texas Ranger.

*Huck Seed did win the Canadian Open Poker Championship Main Event this past week – a $5K buy-in Heads Up tournament that we would normally mention but then we realized, Huck was playing in Canada. Huck also recently finished third in the National Heads-Up Poker Championship – a proper poker tournament on which we congratulate him for his fantastic result.