New Jersey’s Dan ‘centrfieldr’ Lupo is exhausted.

He’s also elated. Lupo, one of the top-ranked United States online poker players, won the World Series of Poker Event #46: $500 Online No Limit Hold’em Turbo Deepstack Thursday morning for $145,273 and his very first gold bracelet.

“I didn’t get to bed until about 3:00 am last night because of the tournament,” Lupo said the morning after his bracelet win, “I was pretty wired and I was super excited…I had a tough time sleeping.”

But it wasn’t just the thrill of taking down a WSOP bracelet event from his home in New Jersey that kept him from getting to sleep after the win. Lupo is married with kids and has a job to get to. The newly minted WSOP champion has to wait to celebrate his six-figure score until after he gets the kids ready for school.

“At 5:45 my three and a half-year-old twins came in so I barely slept. I’ve been in an excited state of delirium all day and then just overwhelmed with all the support from my friends in the poker community. So, it’s been pretty awesome.”

It’s nice when things go right in poker and for Lupo, his path to victory in the online bracelet event just seemed to fall in to place.

“The tournament started off and I was in a very hyper-aggressive mood and I was…playing a little crazy in the beginning,” Lupo said when looking back at his tournament. “I had this very loose aggressive table image and I was basically able to capitalize and chip up pretty quickly from that point.

“After the first hour, through the rest of the tournament, I was pretty much in the top ten of chips aside from a few short periods of time. So it was pretty smooth sailing.”

As the field narrowed Lupo won those key flips you need to win and even picked up a little luck along the way. With so much experience in the online arena, Lupo was able to navigate the tough spots of the final table and walk away with over $145,000, which, while close, is oddly enough is not the largest cash of his career.

In March, Lupo took second in one of ACR’s OSS tournament for $145,926 – just $653 more than his WSOP.com victory. Even though the previous cash is technically for more money, for Lupo there’s no comparison as to the achievement.

“This is definitely number one by far in my mind,” he said. “The bracelet, the prestige of that, the excitement of it and winning the tournament outright on top of that. I mean, it’s everybody’s dream and I don’t really get many opportunities because I don’t get out for much live poker. So, the chance to win a bracelet and actually do it playing online from New Jersey…it’s amazing.”

This latest victory puts Lupo in the middle of a fantastic 2019 – one that had him not only cash for matching $145K scores but also found him taking down five titles during the latest PokerStars New Jersey Spring Championship of Online Poker.

Even with all of his success this year, Lupo tries not to get too high about it. He understands that poker is filled with variance and he, along with his tight-knit group of poker friends, keep it in perspective. That’s part of what keeps the #3-ranked player in New Jersey grinding in his day-to-day life.

“I got into work on time today and I dropped my kids off at school,” Lupo said. “I had to talk to them about not throwing their food around my car on the drive in.”

That said, there’s certainly going to be some celebrating in the future for Lupo and his family, after all he’s now a World Series of Poker bracelet winner.

“But it’s a good day and it’s probably better off that I’m busy otherwise I don’t know what I’d do with myself.”