In the November 13th running of the Full Tilt Poker Friday Night Fight, PocketFives.com member ACDollar emerged victorious from the pack for a smooth $29,000. His largest online poker payday ever, the Friday Night Fight marked the latest in a string of scores that include a final table appearance in the Full Tilt Poker $1K Monday for $17,000 and a runner-up performance in the site’s Fifty-Fifty for another $7,600. So what’s the secret to his success? PocketFives.com virtually headed to the East Coast of the United States to find out.The Friday Night Fight is a $535 buy-in tournament on Full Tilt Poker that kicks off every week at 9:00pm ET and boasts a $100,000 guaranteed purse. From each $535 buy-in, $400 is allocated towards the prize pool and $100 is put on each player’s head as a high-stakes bounty; the rest serves as juice for Full Tilt. On the Friday Night Fight event, ACDollar told PocketFives.com, “I like the structure of that tournament. It usually has a smaller field, about 250 to 300 players, and a decent-sized bounty of $100. I was fortunate to flop some big hands early on and get paid off.”
The six-seat tournament had virtually no short stacks once play hit the final table and the New Jersey native recalled, “I took advantage of the large pay increases and the lack of short stacks to come over the top in a few spots fairly light.” He was out-chipped 2:1 to ORLOVSKIY when play was heads-up, but doubled up with Q-9 against A-K after getting all of his chips into the middle pre-flop to bring the two stacks back to even. ACDollar was then all-in with A-J against A-8 after a flop of A-6-7, but a running 7-K brought a chopped pot.
In the final hand of the night, his opponent was all-in with pocket sixes on a flop of 4-5-7. ACDollar held A-5, but spiked an ace on the turn to take down the pot and claim the tournament’s $29,000 payday. The part-time online poker player told PocketFives.com about the heads-up battle: “Momentum is very important heads-up and that’s not my strong suit. However, I got lucky in a few key spots and was fortunate to get the win.”
The 27 year-old has a full-time career in finance and often visits the nearby gambling metropolis of Atlantic City (Borgata poker room pictured at left) to play poker. At home, he hits the virtual felts three to four nights per week after work and, on what areas of poker carry over into finance, ACDollar told PocketFives.com, “I would say that poker players in general have a great ability to read people and that carries over into a lot of different life areas.” Since the beginning of 2009, he’s piled up $89,000 in tournaments that are tracked for the PocketFives.com Online Poker Rankings.Despite his success in tournaments like the Friday Night Fight and $1K Monday, ACDollar admitted that he has no desire to turn pro anytime soon. He explained, “I enjoy poker, but it’s only a hobby. I think the regular person underestimates how difficult it actually is to be a professional. It’s such a grind and that lifestyle is not for me; I just enjoy the game.” He can be found perusing $1/$2 and $2/$4 cash games and online poker tournaments with three-figure buy-ins.
He’s approaching his third year of being a member of PocketFives.com and told us the impact that the online poker community has had on his still-developing game: “As a member of PocketFives.com, I have gotten a lot of great insight into the minds of some of the best players out there. That has helped my game tremendously.” He wanted to extend a shout out to the entire community and looks forward to turning in bigger and better scores down the road.
At the time of writing, ACDollar sits in 41st on the PocketFives.com Sliding PLB for the state of New Jersey. Its population currently trails 56th ranked PocketFiver phatchoy888, who hails from Paramus, near New York City. Here’s how the top 10 in the state stack up:
Congratulations from all of us here at PocketFives.com to ACDollar for his recent success online.
Canada
United Kingdom
Costa Rica
Australia
Mexico
Denmark
Russian Federation
Sweden
Brazil
Germany
