According to PokerNews, the real identities of three high-stakes online poker players have been confirmed. The news site said, “Macau high-stakes player Paul Phua is indeed MalACEsia, while Chun Lei Zhou (pictured) has stepped out as samrostan, the player formerly known as patpatpanda.'”

Zhou, who admitted being the man behind two of the three high-stakes accounts, told PokerNews, “Yes, patpatpanda is me, samrostan is me. I played for a long time and lost some money. Then, I changed my account to samrostan.” According to data from HighStakesDB, Zhou’s samrostan account is down $6.2 million since the site began tracking it in 2011.

Meanwhile, the patpatpanda account, which also belongs to Zhou, is down $2.6 million lifetime, according to HighStakesDB. As PokerNews put it, “Zhou is down more than $8.8 million” and holds the fourth and 12th biggest losing accounts ever. Despite being in the red, he told PokerNews that he’s not deterred: “It’s okay. Before, I only played No Limit Hold’em games. Sometimes no one played me, so I learned other ring games and lost a lot of money. I love to play poker.”

His patpatpanda account has played three hands where the pot size reached $300,000, the largest of which was worth $553,000 and came late last year. He has also been playing against some fierce competition, including Viktor Isildur1Blom and Ben Bttech86 Tollerene.

On his mentality about playing, Zhou explained to PokerNews, “[Sometimes] I’m so tired, but I keep playing [and] that’s when I lose a lot. Sometimes you have to know when to quit, but I never quit. When I’m winning, I want to bust them. Sometimes I’m running good and they quit. A lot of people quit, but when I lose money, they will stay and play. I will play, too. When they quit, I’m still play, play, play. If I’m winning, I still play. If I lose back, maybe I’ll go to sleep.”

The MalACEsia account, which Phua(pictured) is the man behind, is down $4.25 million since HighStakesDB began tracking it one year ago. However, he has seemingly made up for at least part of that bleeding on the live circuit. According to the Hendon Mob, Phua has almost $3 million in live scores, including a $1.6 million hit for winning a High Roller Event in London in 2012.

Last April, Phua cashed for $340,000 in the WSOP APAC’s High Roller Rebuy and followed that up with a third place finish in the APT Manila Millions for another $405,000. A few days ago, he finished sixth in the EPT Grand Final Super High Roller Event in Monaco for more than a half-million dollars.

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Images courtesy PokerKing and PokerPortal