Earlier this month, norfair18reached $1 million in online tournament cashes, earning himself a fancy new badge in his PocketFives profile. He is one day removed from taking fifth in the Bigger $162 on PokerStars and told us that the $1 million cash badge“feels good. It’s something concrete I can point to. I’m sure my parents would be surprised since they really have no idea what kind of stakes I play.”

His parents have slowly come around to accepting that their son is playing poker for a living, and maybe reaching $1 million in scores will help speed the process along. “Initially, I think they were skeptical,” norfair18 told us. “But, I think that was mainly borne out of good intentions, just parents looking after a kid.”

The six largest cashes PocketFives has tracked for norfair18 have come this year:

2nd place, PokerStars Super Tuesday, $81,000
4th place, PokerStars Super Tuesday, $41,000
1st place, PartyPoker $200K, $27,000
1st place, PokerStars $215 Weekly Turbo, $19,000
2nd place, PokerStars Big $162, $16,000
5th place, PokerStars Bigger $162, $14,000

Those six scores total about $200,000 and norfair18 summarized, “This is the year I had been looking for. I had been playing solid poker for so long, but results in large-field MTTs are hard to come by. I had been playing a lot of cash games to try to even out the variance and then my income was steadier, so I started taking shots at the bigger buy-ins like the Super Tuesday. I played well and ran well and hit two final tables my first few times playing it. Now, I make all of the bigger buy-in online events part of my schedule.”

We’re about to turn the calendar to 2015. You can check out what several members of the community are setting as goals for next year, but we wanted to ask norfair18 what he’s seeking to accomplish. He admitted, “It’s tough to surpass the year I’m having now, so I think I’m going to try to maintain a lot of the success I’ve been having and stay in the top 100 on PocketFives. Many of my scores are within the last couple of months, so I think I could rise up in the Rankings if I put together a good next few months.”

Speaking of the PocketFives Rankings, norfair18 is #42 worldwide on the leaderboard, his highest slotting ever, and is #1 in Mexico by a razor-thin margin. You can find him playing under the screen name aggr0vatedon sites like 888 Pokerand PartyPoker and he has been a member of PocketFives since 2006.

“I’ve always been a self-taught player, so pretty much everything I’ve learned has been on the virtual tables as I’m playing,” norfair18 said of his training. “Little things would click every so often and it has been a constant evolution and adaptation to the game. I have a very competitive spirit, so that drive has helped me improve at a pretty fast rate. I think being extremely competitive is a trait all good players have that makes them successful.”

There are almost 1,400 PocketFivers who have at least $1 million in online tournament scores. Congrats to norfair18 on joining the ranks!

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