Camped out in Playa del Carmen, Mexico is longtime PocketFives member Randal RandALLin Flowers (pictured). The champion of the World Poker Tour’s Festa al Lago event in late 2010 and its Barcelona stop one year earlier, Flowers originally hails from North Carolina and saw his life turned upside down following Black Friday. Originally pursuing a live poker career, Flowers now makes a living online and works closely with the DeepStacks Poker Tour.

His original intentions were to travel the live poker circuit, but that was easier said than done. Flowers told PocketFives in an exclusive interview, “For the first year after Black Friday, I was under the impression that you could play live and win because I had just done that at the Festa al Lago. In March 2012, I relocated to Mexico and have been playing online ever since. My girlfriend moved down here too and she is taking an online course. I don’t play a lot live now.”

Using services like Poker Refugees, plenty of players have relocated from the United States in order to continue playing online poker. For Flowers, possible destinations included Canada, Mexico, and Costa Rica, three locations that are in close proximity to the United States.

Flowers told us that Canadaseemed “expensive, cold, and there’s a hassle getting in and out of the country, so that wasn’t really the best situation.” Meanwhile, Costa Rica was “a bit more third world than Mexico and the streets don’t have names. I also didn’t know many people in Costa Rica.” So, Mexicomight have been an easy choice: “I had a few people I knew in Mexico like Shaun Deeb and he convinced me that I should come. It’s not bad getting to Playa del Carmen, either. You fly into Cancun and take a bus.”

The revolving door of poker players in Playa del Carmen has included the likes of Marco CrazyMarcoJohnson, Dan WretchyMartin, and Christian charder Harder (pictured), according to Flowers. He explained, “There’s a big group of poker players here. We have a Skype chat for all of the players in Playa and there are 50 people in it now, although I don’t know all of them.”

In the live arena, Flowers took down the Festa al Lago in late 2010 for $831,000 and his second WPT title, but has not recorded a score above $25,000 since.

“The easiest way to say it is that I was running good and then not running good,” Flowers said of his live results. “I wasn’t putting in the volume I needed to for a consistent effort. After 2011 ended, I looked at my Hendon Mob profile and saw that my biggest cash was $10,000, and that was a satellite to a tournament I didn’t cash in. It was a little bit of a lifestyle thing, but I also missed online poker. I missed being able to log in and play tons of tournaments.”

As we said in the opening paragraph, Flowers works closely with the DeepStacks Poker Tour and is headed to Oregon next month for the series’ stop at Chinook Windsfrom February 9 to 18. Flowers told us, “I’m a sponsored pro for DeepStacks, so I will be in Oregon along with Michael Mizrachi. It’s 18 events in 10 days, with a $1,100 buy-in Main Event with a $100,000 guarantee. It’s a three-day tournament, so you get a good bang for your buck. It’s a great job for me and a great opportunity.”

While on the coast of Oregon at the scenic Chinook Winds Casino, Flowers will be putting on a poker course for attendees and interacting with guests: “You can come learn poker and then use what you learned in the tournaments. There are few places that offer both tournaments and instruction. It’s also a TV show, so you can see it air in select markets.”

He is fresh off heading to the Bahamas for the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, where he was able to spend plenty of quality time with his girlfriend. Why? “My girlfriend is a poker masseuse,” Flowers gleaned. “She gets to go down there to work and I get to go down there to work and we both get to hang out. It’s nice to have the option to go on a waterslide or go play a $1K tournament. You can also play online. One of my favorite things is it’s the one tournament of the year where my friends come out.”

Flowers sits at #39 worldwide in PocketFives’ Online Poker Rankings and is #5 in Mexico. He was up four spots when the Rankings were computed on Wednesday and said that 2012 was a solid year: “Life has been great. I wake up and grind six to eight hours and then go do whatever I want. There are a lot of good tournaments on PokerStars that there weren’t when I was playing online last. I was shocked when I logged in to see the number of tournaments I could play all day, every day.”

See what’s brewing in our Mexico poker community.

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