Environmental research or poker? In the future, Nelius danceofthefdeadFoley (pictured) could be faced with that very question. He works as an instrumentation engineer currently, but given a recent string of top-flight online scores, you wonder whether his profession is destined for a major change. In the beginning of September, Foley brought home the gold in the Sunday $100 Rebuy on PokerStars for $79,000.

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In January, Foley was the runner-up in the PokerStars Super Tuesday for $62,000. Three months later, he grabbed third in a PokerStars.fr SCOOP tournament for another $40,000. However, neither in the money finish was a win. Foley echoed, “It’s good to actually take a tournament down. My biggest scores have been for seconds, thirds, and fourths, so this probably ranks a bit higher than other scores I’ve had. Also, it’s always my goal to win big on a Sunday, especially around WCOOP time with the bigger field sizes.”

His Super Tuesday runner-up finish saw him barrel through a field of 439 entrants. Eight members of the final 17 in the tournament were ranked in the top 1,000 on PocketFives and we asked Foley to walk us through its bitter end: “Heads-up play only lasted one or two hands. I ran A-K into two pair on an ace-high board, so I couldn’t do much there. I am going to go bust in that hand 100% of the time even though we were more than 50 big blinds deep. I had played well and run well in that tournament, so I shouldn’t complain or put it down to bad luck at all; sometimes you just can’t win.”

Believe it or not, danceofthefdead is actually a typo. Well, maybe you can believe it since there’s a random “f” in the middle of his name. He explained the background to his PocketFives user name: “The Dance of the Dead is an old picture/mosaic I had seen somewhere once and just liked the name and thought it would make a cool poker name. I actually made a typo when registering for PocketFives. That’s why there is an ‘f’ between ‘the’ and ‘dead’ actually.”

€5 sit and gos with friends while drinking a few brewskis served as Foley’s introduction to the poker world. He told PocketFives, “That was about six years ago. Then, in college, I deposited online and started playing micro-stakes cash games. It took me a few years to get going. I have been playing online tournaments on PokerStars for about four or five years now. I’ve had a pretty decent ROI from them since the start and moved up through the levels over the years.”

As we said, he works in Cork, Ireland as an instrumentation engineer at the local college, collaborating with a group on environmental research. Despite $1.1 million in tracked cashes in his PocketFives profile and a stint at #88 worldwide in the PocketFives Poker Rankings, he has no plans to take time off from his job in order to try his hand at poker.

“I have no immediate plans to play poker full-time,” the Irishman told us. “But, I might take some time off to play the live circuit more, like the EPT and WSOP. I have been to the WSOP the past four years, but just for a couple of weeks and just played the Main Event, so I would like to do the whole series at some point.”

Foley is the top dog in Ireland, which is #17 in our Country Poker Rankings, up one spot on the week. Ireland has a combined PLB score of its top 20 players of 66,245 and is sandwiched in between Romania and the Netherlands on the leaderboard.

If you don’t already have a PokerStars account, qualifiers for the 2013 PCA are running around the clock, so now is the perfect time to sign up. Create your account through PocketFivesto show your support for our online poker community. Get started here.