Poker Articles

By Adam | Published Oct 12 2006, 07:00 PM
Mario Silvestri, a new addition to the PocketFives.com community (Screenname: Deuce2High), and known on many sites as "Pwnasaurus," just had a big couple of weeks in online poker.  His performance was so impressive, in fact, that I felt it necessary to give him a full introduction to all those who read this site.

It started on Friday, September 29th, when he took down the PokerStars $150+12.  This is a tournament that is regularly filled with a large number of the toughest players on the net, and many of those top players will testify that it is an extremely difficult tournament to win.  The Friday night $150 isn't quite as big as certain other days of the week, but it still paid a sweet $16k to first.

That win alone would have been worthy of note, but it didn't stop there.  He won a $100 rebuy on Paradise the very next day, which was worth about $10k.  His weekend was shaping up well, already having $26k in cashes.

On Sunday, though, he made the previous two wins look silly.  Pwnasaurus took down the UB $200k Guaranteed, which paid him an even $45k and placed him in elite company, having won the PocketFives.com Triple Crown.

This $70k weekend would have been enough, surely, for most players out there, but amazingly, Deuce2High was not finished.  He went on to win a $16k "Conquer Canada" Package on Pokerroom on October 10th, and then that night, he won the PartyPoker Super Monday, playing as hezAquik1!  As many of you know, the Super Monday is the biggest prizepool of the day on most Mondays.  On this particular day, it was not the biggest, as Paradise was having a $250k Guaranteed tournament, but the Super Monday still paid out $34k for first, bringing his total wins during the two-week stretch (including the package) to $120k!

I was able to track down some personal info on the person behind these monstrous results.  Mario Silvestri lives in Fort Worth, Texas, where he and two good friends he lives with all play poker professionally. has been playing tournaments for about four years, and he has been a professional for the last year and a half.  He splits his time between MTTs, NL cash games, and sit-n-go's.  I asked, of course, if he'd ever had a run like this before, and he said that he has a few other MTT wins, but he's never done anything that compared to this stretch.  Don't worry, Mario, very few people have...

Mario feels his game has gotten a lot better recently.  He spent the month of September travelling to live events in Aruba and various parts of Europe.  He was travelling this whole time with 3 other online players: Apathy, TheUsher, and Good2CU.  While Mario had a great time on this trip, he felt that the best part of it was how much he got out of the trip intellectually.  He's also played live events in the Bahamas, Winstar in Oklahoma, and in NY, and he'll be playing the WPT event in Canada very soon.

On behalf of the P5s community, I'd like to welcome Deuce2High to the site.  We are certainly glad to have you here.