It’s always good to wake up every Wednesday and check out the PocketFives.com Online Poker Rankings, which are recalculated weekly. When the latest Rankings update came out on October 8th, one PocketFiver made a gigantic leap. He was up a whopping 22 spots in the Rankings from #47 to #25. His name: Mario TheRealPokerccini Puccini. Hailing from Hamburg, Germany, Puccini stormed into the PocketFives.com Rankings just two weeks ago and now holds the fourth best PLB score overall. He’s ranked 23rd in the Pro Poll and quickly gaining the respect of his peers. We sat down with Puccini to talk about his success in September as well as the origins of his poker career.
He explained his recent success fairly succinctly: “I just played a lot of tournaments on PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker and caught a nice upswing. I’ve been running a lot better.” He scored $41,730 for 12th place in Event #5 of the recently-completed PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP), a $10,300 buy-in High Rollers event. About one month ago, he took down the $320 buy-in $100,000 Guaranteed on PokerStars for $25,000. In late July, he won the Nightly Hundred Grand, padding his wallet with an extra $28,721. He notched 85 cashes in tournaments that are tracked for the Rankings in September, piling up $190,000 in winnings in the process.
Also last month, he logged a second place finish in the $100 rebuy on PokerStars for $14,130 one week after taking fourth in that tournament for $8,624. On September 23rd, he finished eighth in the Super Tuesday for $10,000, the day after finishing as the runner up in the $120 buy-in $30,000 KO Guarantee for $5,232. On September 11th, he won the $200 buy-in Turbo $30K Guaranteed on Full Tilt Poker for $14,820. Other accolades include a third place finish in the Sunday Two Hundred Grand for $11,885. He finished second in the Full Tilt Sunday Mulligan on the last day of August for $28,000.
On his WCOOP cash, he noted that the deep-stack structure played to his advantage: “The structure was pretty nice in all of the WCOOP events I played. In the $10,000 event, I took an early hit to my stack against Annette_15 holding Q-Q on a 4-6-8-A-A board. She had pocket sixes, but the structure allowed me to come back.” On the differences between the WCOOP event and the $100,000 Guaranteed, Puccini commented, “This tournament is a little slower than normal multi-table tournaments on PokerStars, but in comparison to the WCOOP events, it is pretty fast.”
He got started in poker by learning the game from a friend while in the United States. About a year and a half ago, an online poker school called Poker Strategy gave him $50 on PartyPoker and he started playing $10 max No Limit Hold’em. He told PocketFives.com, “I only knew Five Card Draw then. It was fun to play, but there was such a big luck factor involved. I saw that Texas Hold’em was not all about luck, which was pretty interesting.”
So what advice would a rapid-riser in the Rankings have for aspiring poker players out there? He explains, “Play aggressively at the bubble because normally most players are playing tight, so you can accumulate a lot of chips just by stealing pots.”
When the Rankings were calculated on October 1st, Puccini was 47th in his first week in the top 100. On the Sliding PLB for Germany, he’s way out in front of the pack with over 7,000 points. Trailing him are goodvibe and bastet, each with fewer than 5,500.
I suspect that we’ll be hearing a lot more from this poker prodigy in the near future. Congratulations to Puccini and all ranked PocketFivers this week. Check out the PocketFives.com Online Poker Rankings for more information.
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