It’s hard to believe that 2015 will mark the 10th year PocketFives has been around. One of the members of the poker world who signed up for our site in Year 1 was Ari Engel(pictured), known to many in our community as BodogAri. He has $2.3 million in tracked scores online plus another $1.4 million in the live arena, according to the Hendon Mob.

In the last few weeks, Engel won a PokerStarsSpring Championship of Online Poker $109 No Limit Hold’em event for $187,000 after a four-way deal. Engel said, “I’m feeling good. It’s always really good to get a big score. They don’t come very often, so it’s good to get them.” A total of $2.1 million was handed out to 2,700 in the money finishers.

“There was definitely a lot of money on the line,” Engel said of his motivation to chop. “I am always open-minded to chops because I have gotten good deals over my career, but I’m not necessarily looking for one. There were two players who didn’t seem as experienced, while another guy and I were co-chip leaders and he seemed experienced. The short stacks wanted to chop and we all agreed to look. I got a little more than ICM and, with so much money on the line, I had to deal.”

Interestingly enough, this was Engel’s first six-figure tracked online score. He has 42 cashes of at least $10,000 and said of his performance over the last nine years, “I have run really well to get the results coming consistently. One of the things that has helped is I play lower buy-ins than people with my record would play. Even this tourney was a $109 buy-in tourney, so there weren’t a lot of experienced players. It’s a little easier to do better in those kinds of fields.”

Engel has been focused on lower buy-in tournaments ever since this author can remember meeting him. We asked where his approach came from and he responded, “I’m so nitty outside of the tables and it has definitely affected the choices I have made regarding tournament buy-ins.” He added that he doesn’t play nitty in tournaments themselves, however.

Engel has also been heavily into poker training and famously ran a “Poker Batcave” of sorts in Las Vegas. “A challenge a lot of coaches get into is that being a good coach doesn’t take the same skill set it takes to be a good player,” BodogAri told us. “It’s about condensing your thoughts into good sound bytes. If you asked a lot of great players, I don’t think many of them could condense their plays and rationally explain them. A lot of them could, but there are plenty who couldn’t.”

As you’ve probably guessed by now, Engel will be entering many of the $1,000 and $1,500 buy-in events at the World Series of Poker at the Rio this year. He has 16 WSOP cashes for $100,000 total, but has made a name for himself on the WSOP Circuit, where he owns six rings, two shy of the most ever (Alex Masek, eight). His first ring came in 2007 in Atlantic City and his most recent was last year at Foxwoods (pictured).

As we said at the top, almost 10 years have passed since Engel signed up for PocketFives, back then a quaint community that had just developed a system for ranking online poker players. On the changes over the years, he said, “The game has changed so much. Even if I took my mind now and went back in time, I wouldn’t play the same way I do now or did back then.”

SCOOP and other big-time tournament series take place on PokerStars. If you don’t already have a PokerStars account, sign up through the links on PocketFives and deposit to get a 100% up to $600 bonus along with one free month of PocketFives Trainingwith no sign-up fee. Register your PokerStars account here.

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