Coaches Bio:
Hey, everyone! I have been playing poker now for almost fifteen years. Like a lot of people my age, I started during the ESPN Chris Moneymaker boom just playing twenty-five and fifty cent cash games with my high school friends. Then I got introduced to online poker! I remember grinding mini-steps on Partypoker and just starting out busting small bankrolls on Full Tilt and Pokerstars while watching Phil Ivey battle people at the "Rail Heaven" table and just how epic everything was. I basically would just rinse and repeat, running up a few thousand dollars and then busting. Over and over this cycle repeated until I won a free roll tournament to the Aussie Millions. I remember it was a "10 Gold Chip freeroll" where only 1st place won a $16,500 package to the Aussie Millions. I came into the final table in last place and somehow ended up winning! Instead of the package and forcing you to go they gave you the money in your account. At eighteen, that was by far the most money I'd ever had in my entire life, so I decided to just pocket the money and use it to build my bankroll. Playing mostly Limit Hold'em cash games, I cooked that roll up to $100,000, so I decided to go to Australia and play the series. My two best friends and I took a semester off from school at Penn State and booked the trip. That month in Melbourne was one of the best months of our lives, and not just because I won the $1000 Limit Hold'em for $45,000! Tony Dunst convinced me that since I came all this way to Australia that I should YOLO it and enter the Main Event the next day. I didn't know about selling action or staking. I didn't even know it existed; that's how rookie I was. I bought in and somehow ended up luckboxing my way to 6th place, a huge TV-final table, and $215,000: I was officially on the map. Shortly after, I won the Sunday Warmup for $125,000 and rose to #4 in the world in Pocketfives rankings for online players.
Unfortunately, my career kind of went sideways after Black Friday and my life took a dark turn as I became very addicted to opiates, mainly Oxycontin. It was tough for me to find traction in my personal life, so I checked into my first rehab. Although I absolutely wanted to quit doing painkillers, I had no intention of giving up drinking and smoking weed. So that first rehab didn't work out. After another year of pain, suffering, and giant mistakes, I decided that my life was completely out of control and I needed to check myself in for rehab with the intention of being 100% done with everything. After going through the in-patient rehab for 30 days, my plan was to go back to school. Poker was in limbo and a big question mark in my life. A lot of my support team considered my poker playing as a huge trigger, if not the driving source of my opiate addiction. But to this day, I maintain that my poker playing had nothing to do with it besides maybe affording me a little too much extra cash to spend on substances. In the spring before I was all set to go back to Penn State in the fall, my old backer, Eric "SHEETS" Haber, sent me a message asking how I'd been doing. He'd seen my social media posts and said it seemed like I was doing well and was in a good space again, and so he wondered what I was doing that summer. I told him I was just getting ready for school, just trying to do the next best thing for myself, and then he asked how I would feel about going out to Vegas for the WSOP and doing some business together. I wasn't sure at the time if my family and friends would be supportive, but I knew that poker playing was (and still is) my best skill and that deep down that was exactly what I wanted to do; so, I said HELL YEAH and booked the trip out!
That was a legendary WSOP for me, as I final-tabled three big-field NL Hold'em events, finished 4th in a $1000 for $105,000, 8th in the Monster Stack $1500 for $162,000, and then 3rd in a $1500 for $270,000. I was fresh, sober, and back in business. Since then I've never looked back, adding two WPT final tables at Borgata where I chopped with Jesse Sylvia for $620,000 and another where I got 3rd for $320,000. I started a VLOG with my best friend TJ "Behind the Grind" and then that summer we final-tabled the WSOP Tag Team Event and came potentially one flip away from winning two WSOP Gold Bracelets, ultimately finishing 4th. Currently I am enjoying grinding the Pennsylvania poker sites from home and just recently have gotten into coaching and streaming. I am greatly looking forward to building out both of those platforms and am also extremely excited for the WSOP this Fall/Winter!!!