In the closing weeks of 2014, Michael MacHugh, who is known on PocketFives as SilentPurple, came away with a fifth place finish in the PokerStars Sunday Million, earning a not-so-paltry $78,000. “It always makes for a nice Sunday,” MacHugh said of his final table. “I didn’t really pay much attention until last couple hundred players. I was busy studying. By then, I was always bouncing around the top three, so I was able to take down a lot of pots without much fighting back from the table.”

MacHugh was studying for his calculus exam during the Sunday Million, which that week drew almost 7,400 entrants. He attends school part-time, going to three classes during the week instead of the traditional five. He told us, “I try to use the first half of the day for school. Then, I start playing around 4:00pm and go until Midnight. But, I am mostly a cash game player, so if a good game is there, poker takes priority.”

He made Supernova Elite on PokerStars for four years playing Omaha High-Low and mostly $3/$6, $5/$10, and $10/$20 games. He told us that the first year was rather difficult because “I hadn’t had much experience dealing with bankroll management and such. The commitment to grinding every day was also not easy. After the first run at it, you get into a system and it kind of happens the following years.”

In 2010, he estimated that he spent three or four hours a day 24-tabling to reach Supernova Elite and added, “Split pot games generate a lot of rake, but as the years have gone on, the game has slowed. And with PokerStars putting in $3/$6 NL CAP this year, it pretty much killed the entire game.” Supernova Elite requires one million VPPs on PokerStars in a calendar year.

Amaya Gamingpurchased PokerStars and Full Tilt in June, implementing a variety of changes including increased foreign exchange feesand increased rake. “I think it’s pretty clear that the new owners couldn’t care less about the players,” MacHugh said of Amaya. “The FX fee was a complete joke. They make enough on the rake, but want to tax our deposits and cashouts now too, although there are ways around paying the fee.”

Despite the changes, MacHugh continues to put in volume on PokerStars. In fact, his seven largest tracked online MTT scores all came on that site in 2014, including a victory in the Sunday Supersonic on December 28 for $64,000. “It’s still the only real poker site,” MacHugh said of PokerStars. “The Euro sites are way too small to offer anything for me.” He has almost $700,000 in winnings on PokerStars for his career.

He got started in poker after playing at a Thai restaurant when he was in high school. “I made some pretty good money for the time,” he recalled. “After high school, I didn’t really want to continue school, so I gave online poker a shot and have never looked back since.”

MacHugh has been a member of the Canadian Armed Forces Reserves for over six years and makes his home in Toronto, where he is the sixth-ranked PocketFives member. He has 10 scores of at least $10,000 in online MTTs, nine of which came in 2014. All told, he has 703 tracked scores for an average of $1,000 apiece.

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