Once in a great while, we witness a player seemingly emerge from thin air into one of online poker's biggest forces. Steven PiKappRaider Burkholder and Jordan Jymaster0011 Young are a couple that come to mind, each turning major online tournament scores into highly successful careers during the past couple years. What sets Mark RenRad 01 Darner (pictured) apart from those players is that he hasn't yet hit a six-figure score to boost his profile. In fact, entering 2011, Darner's biggest online tournament score was for $17,300. He wasn't ranked in the PocketFives Top 100. He was completely off the media radar.Fast forward to this week. As of Wednesday, Darner had climbed all the way to #6 in the PocketFives World Wide Rankings and his PLB score of 8,632 was second to only Brian theczar19 Piccioli. He had compiled eight cashes of more than $18,000 in just three months time, including a victory in February's Full Tilt Poker FTOPS Event #20 for $95,100.
So, where the heck did this guy come from?
Darner is a unique entity among the top tournament players in that he plays mostly mid-stakes tournaments. By taking a look at his cashes in 2011, you'll find that the majority of them have come in events with buy-ins lower than $100. He's a high-volume grinder of the shaundeeb mold circa 2007-2008 and it's a system that has done wonders for his bankroll.Darner can often be found 40-tabling multi-table tournaments during the week, which sparked a thread on PocketFives last year that jokingly accused him of being a bot. He popped his head into the thread and denied the accusations, even discussing his grinding schedule and VIP rewards goals.
Some members then began to wonder if it was Darner and another person playing on the account. Darner responded again, saying, "I am one person on both sites. And yes I do 30-table sometimes up to 40 on Sunday especially during multi-entry (tournaments). I did well on the PokerStars TLB last year but that's not why I grind low stakes. I grind low stakes because the value is crazy and variance is nuts if you are just playing HSMTTs."
This is a guy with his head on straight. Game selection is arguably the most important element in being a professional poker player, and with the high-stakes tournaments becoming more difficult by the day, Darner is maximizing his edge by playing more tables against weaker opponents. It's a formula that has equated success for the Orlando pro.
Several players other than Darner have been darting up the PocketFives Rankings of late. This week saw quite a few make a substantial rise, including Aleh cooltwister Plauski (up from 60th to 42nd). Since joining the site in January, Plauski has piled up a number of big wins, his biggest coming in the Full Tilt Poker $1k Monday Million on March 14, where he took third for $118,800. He also won the Full Tilt Friday Night Fight on April 1 for $65,600.
Also making giant leaps this week were Shyam s_dot111 Srinivasan (pictured -- image courtesy of CardPlayer, 44th to 28th after taking down two large Sunday tournaments in the last 30 days), Chris Big Huni Hunichen (61st to 41st), Matt papamat25 Iles (81st to 54th), Paresh chimpoo14 Jain (85th to 57th), Alex Kadabra Keating (112th to 69th), Jon EMSBas Spinks (113th to 72nd), hummylun (114th to 77th), and Mike Pipedream17 Dietrich (122nd to 87th).Stay tuned to PocketFives for the latest movers in the World Wide Tournament Rankings.
Article written by: Brett bertminatti Collson
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