Matt mjw006Wakeman (pictured) is in the midst of a heated audition to be the next member of PokerStars‘ Team Online Australia. It’s not an easy task, either. He must prove his worth to the world’s largest online poker room, which might be a little easier when you take into account that he’s the #2 Aussie in the PocketFives Sliding PLB. Wakeman has over $700,000 in tracked cashes to his credit, including a $25,000 haul for winning the PokerStars $215 Turbo $25,000 Guaranteed on November 1st. He also just took down a Triple Crown.

“They have short listed a few Australian players for Team Online Australia,” Wakeman said of PokerStars. “They contacted us all about a month or so ago and we are basically trying to show them what an asset we can be to the company. It’s a great opportunity and an honor to even be considered for something like this, so I’m trying to make the most of it and really working hard on a lot of things away from the table.” He’s a resident of Newcastle, where he owns the top Sliding PLB score.

Wakeman is an enigma of sorts. He has over $700,000 in tracked cashes, but his largest score to date is $30,000, which came as a result of a final table in the PartyPoker $250,000 Guaranteedin May. He also final tabled the PokerStars Sunday Warm-Up in mid-August for a $21,000 cash infusion.

It turns out that Wakeman only transitioned to MTTs in the last six months. Prior to that, he could be found at heads-up sit and go tables, where he made a living for two years. He assessed, “I haven’t really had the same number of opportunities to get it done and book that huge score. It is definitely something that I really want to do, but you can’t always have it your own way.”

At the time of writing, Wakeman was #23 worldwide in the PocketFives Poker Rankingson the strength of owning the 18th best PLB score. He’s also #30 in the PocketFives Pro Poll, an honor he doesn’t take for granted: “It is flattering. I definitely don’t consider myself to be anywhere near a lot of the guys like Flush_Entityor Jymaster0011 (pictured) or anyone like that. I think I’m a couple of classes below them and have a lot to learn. In my opinion, there is a big jump from being 30th to being in the top 10.”

On why he migrated from heads-up sit and gos to MTTs, Wakeman told us, “The thing I love most about poker has been the constant learning. Even though I really loved playing heads-up sit and gos, my learning curve had slowed. I wanted a new challenge and MTTs really provided that for me. I got to start as the fish and start all over again.”

When he made the jump to MTTs, he faced a brand new set of challenges: “I had a lot of trouble sticking with a lot of these guys in reading pre-flop dynamics when I first made the transition, so that certainly took a lot of time and effort to get my head around all of the new ranges. Also, the hours were a big difference. I went from being able to take breaks whenever I wanted to being stuck for 12 hours a day with only five-minute breaks. That’s tough.”

Wakeman got his start in poker by catching the game on television and, as he put it, “being amused at how the WPT commentators made such a big deal over the play going on. My friends and I started playing home games after that. I’m a really competitive person, so once I started playing, I realized there was a lot to it and wanted to get as good as possible.” He’s since turned in nearly 1,000 tracked cashes and joined PocketFives earlier this year.

He ultimately stepped his game up after finding PokerSavvy and explained, “I got a free trial, watched some videos, and was amazed at how these guys thought about the game. I wanted to be just like them. So, I opened an account and tried it out.” He became an instructor at that site and now has his sights set on climbing even further up the PocketFives Rankings.

Check out the PocketFives Poker Rankings to see who has been dominating online.