Life is nice when you are the current king of the poker vlogging game. Just ask Brad Owen.

Owen, a Northern California native, currently lives in Las Vegas and makes his living “playing poker and running a YouTube channel.”

It’s not just any YouTube channel though, it’s the biggest channel in the still-growing poker vlogging space. Owen routinely entertains his fans by creating videos that showcase his life as a globetrotting cash game player, splashing around in the small-to-mid stakes games in every card room that will have him.

One of his most recent adventures took him to Barcelona. There he sat down in front of the 888poker cameras to film the short documentary “Behind The YouTuber”. In it, Owen talks with the online poker site about his entire story from his start in the game of poker up through his rise in the YouTube ranks.

In the video, Owen tells his poker origin story and how he first came to learn about the game of poker through an old-school CD-ROM. Always competing with his “bigger, smarter, stronger” older brother he would play against him and his college friends when he was in high-school with poker was the first game he could finally best his sibling at.

Eventually, Owen moved to Las Vegas with a $10,000 bankroll and found himself living a grinder’s dream. He earned a few thousand a month playing the game he loved while living a modest life in Sin City. However, his then-girlfriend lived in the Los Angeles area at the time and so he moved there to be close and continue his career.

His time in Los Angeles turned out to spell disaster for his first stint as a pro. He went broke. He returned to Northern California. He moved in with his parents. He took a nine-to-five accounting job.

He called that “The most soul-crushing thing that I’ve ever done.”

Like something right out of Rounders, Owen couldn’t deny what he really wanted to do. He saved back up and took another shot at Las Vegas. This time it stuck.

In addition to grinding the Las Vegas $2/$5 games, Owen decided to start his own poker vlog. Well-known poker vlogger Andrew Neeme was just starting to break new ground in the genre when Owen decided to get his own off the ground.

“I think one of the biggest challenges when you first start a poker channel is making that leap,” Owen said. “Putting out that first video.”

In addition to Neeme’s videos, Owen found inspiration in his own family. Unbeknownst to him, his dad had a secret YouTube video. In his Owen’s dad had captured a skunk, which sprayed him. Owen describes as “probably the worst video I’ve ever seen.”

Owen recalls the wild-west nature of the early days of poker vlogging, including the guerrilla filmmaking style of filming his hands without permission.

Nowadays things are much different for Owen and Neeme. They routinely have casinos reach out to them to come and film. After posting a video about the biggest game he’d ever played in at Graton Casino in his native Northern California, Owen’s subscribers shot to well over 100,000. Eventually, he overtook Neeme’s subscriber count.

Today Owen is knocking on the door of 200,000 subscribers. That’s a huge leap in a short amount of time from when he stared his vlog in December of 2016.

“For me to be successful in the poker industry at this point is just a dream come true,” said Owen.