I’m sure it’s a little daunting to look across the table late in the PokerStars Sunday Warm-Upand see Marcel Luske. “The Flying Dutchman” has been around poker for longer than just about everyone reading this article and has more than $4 million in live tournament earnings to his name, according to the Hendon Mob. Playing alongside Luske in the Warm-Up on December 16 was Mat Brown (pictured), who appropriately goes by brownie682 here on PocketFives.

The Warm-Up ended in a four-way chop, with Brown taking home $75,000 and officially finishing in third place. Luske was the tournament’s eventual champion and pocketed the same amount as Brown after defeating a field of over 3,600 entrants.

Down the stretch, Luske’s extensive experience seemed to kick in, as Brown told us in an exclusive interview, “We got to four-handed play and Marcel Luske was making things pretty difficult and the stacks were really shallow. There was a pretty big difference between fourth and first, so I thought that making a deal was a good choice.” Each of the four players who chopped sat on about 25 big blinds when the deal was struck.

Brown continued, “Luske was in third place at the time and the stacks were so close. With the structure of the Warm-Up, the blind levels are quite steep and increase often, so we each would have had about 20 big blinds in no time.It would have been a really high-variance scenario to play on instead of chop.” The amounts awarded in the chop ranged from $71,000 to $82,000. The scheduled payouts ranged between $42,000 and $115,000.

As we said at the top, Luske(pictured) is about as decorated of a player as you’ll find in the European poker world. The Dutch pro has a black belt in karate to boot, so we asked Brown for his take on Luske’s play: “Marcel comes from a live poker background, so his bet sizing was somewhat indicative of that. He was playing very aggro and putting in very large raises pre-flop. The problem was that not many of his hands went to showdown, so getting information on what the sizing meant was hard to come by.”

Brown is over $1.6 million in tracked online MTT cashes in his PocketFives profile and is quickly closing in on $2 million. That milestone will mean a new profile badge and even more honor and respect within the poker world. “It would obviously be nice,” Brown said of achieving a $2 million badge. “The last couple of years have been very swingy for me. It has been rather difficult to keep up the motivation to play and make myself try to play well.”

Despite the downer, Brown has persevered and continues to excel. You can find him at #195 worldwide in the PocketFives Poker Rankings after nearly cracking the top 20 last February. He explained that his love of the game has been driving his continued interest in it: “I enjoy playing and coaching too much, so that probably contributed to me being able to grind through the rough patches.”

When he was 15, Brown was heavily into golf. His golfing buddies began watching the World Poker Tour on television, which would lead to poker games after a round of 18 holes. He narrated, “Before I knew it, we were playing more poker than golf. When I turned 18, I decided to try online poker. From there, I kept playing and trying to learn the game.”

He is a card-carrying fixture of the New South Wales pokercommunity in Australia and told PocketFives that he used to play a considerable amount of pub poker with the Australian Poker League. “I don’t do it as much now since I play a lot online,” he confessed. “There are a few tournaments each year at Star City in Sydney that I have attended. It felt like pub games helped me improve at poker initially, but as I learned more about the game, I realized how many of my thoughts were wrong that I brought over from the League.”

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