Jason jdpc27 Wheeler (pictured) has been around the PocketFives community for quite some time. In fact, he’s just a couple of months away from celebrating his six-year anniversary of signing up for our site. Over the last half-dozen years, he has cemented over $3.5 million in tracked MTT cashes.

His latest splash came as a result of a third place finish in the PokerStars Sunday 500two weeks ago that earned him $40,000. He plays as jdtjpokeron PokerStars, the world’s largest online poker site, and told PocketFives in an exclusive interview, “I’m happy with a decent score, but I’m disappointed I didn’t win it. I thought I played an almost perfect game when you look at game flow and table dynamics.”

Wheeler entered the final table of the Sunday 500 as a middle-of-the-road stack, but was in the zone: “I had good reads on most of my opponents and thought overall it was a softer Sunday 500 final table than some of the ones I’ve been on in the past, so I had a strategy to slowly accumulate chips while playing my specific opponents. That worked great and I went from a medium stack to chip leader in control with four left.”

Then, tragedy struck. Another player at the table opened to 120,000, or double the big blind, and Wheeler 3bet to 360,000. His opponent responded by 4bet shoving with J-7 offsuit and Wheeler snapped with nines. Wheeler was sitting pretty until the river, when a jack fell. “After that,” the Mexico poker community member said, “the chip stacks evened out and I just ran horrible or got outplayed. I had three hands against the same opponent where he won all three and they were inflated pots, either 3bet pre-flop or multiple streets of betting post-flop.”

You could tell just by talking to Wheeler that he was highly disappointed with not walking away with the Sunday 500 title. In fact, as soon as he busted, the remaining two players in the field, sanpriand trickyone14, chopped. “If you played well enough to win a tournament; had a really good sense of how to correctly play each opponent based on their position, stack size, and level of aggression; and you know their leaks and exploit them and everything is set up for you to win the tournament and you don’t, it’s obviously a little hard to take because you almost feel like you deserve the win.”

He added, “However, as most of us have come to realize in tournament poker, you don’t deserve anything and you need the right combination of skill and luck.”

Luck aside, Wheeler has amassed over $1.6 million in tracked cashes on PokerStars alone. Still, no one wants to fall short: “What I’ve come to realize is that you can only strive to play well and give yourself the best chance to win. In the case of the Sunday 500, while I did not win the tournament, I was a middle stack for most of it and managed to lock up a significant portion of the prize pool. So, while I’m disappointed I didn’t get the win, it’s hard to be too hard on yourself if you locked up a good amount of the prize pool.”

In June, Wheeler final tabled the PokerStars Sunday $100 Rebuy for $32,000. In March, he won the Ongame Major for $25,000. We asked him to evaluate 2012 now that the year is coming to a close: “I have put in more combined volume live and online this year than I have in my entire career. I feel like everything is clicking and I’m playing exactly the way I want to play in today’s poker environment. I’ve made good money and continue to do well in the game, but it has been quite frustrating because I have put myself in position several times over the past 12 to 15 months to hit some of the more life-changing scores and seemed to come up short in all of the big spots.”

In the live poker world, Wheeler’s 2012 has consisted of eight top-20 MTT finishes according to the Hendon Mob, including a win in a $235 Rio Daily Deep Stack in Las Vegas for $55,000. He evaluated, “I have been knocking on the door for quite some time.” Now, he has the 2013 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure to look forward to.

Coming next week to the online poker world is the reopening of Full Tilt, 14 months after its gaming license was suspended. Wheeler and other high-stakes tournament regs are animated about the room returning to relevancy: “I can’t wait for Full Tilt to open. The biggest gap in online poker since Black Friday has been in the high-stakes tournament arena. Outside of the big tournament series and Sundays, there really is not much to offer a high-stakes MTT player during the week, even after registering across five or six different sites.”

Wheeler elaborated, “For me, the return of Full Tilt is really important simply in the number of options it will present. Maybe I can get back to grinding three to four days a week hard online. As it stands now, it’s much harder to wipe out live MTT variance with online MTT volume as I have in the past. Plus, even though I know it’s silly, I simply ran like god on Full Tilt.”

Wheeler has already scored aPokerStars Caribbean Adventure package and is contemplating a trip to Melbourne for the Aussie Millions. However, with both series running in January, he may have to pick and choose. He evaluated, “I have to juggle family time versus poker and always have to cut some tournaments from the schedule. I’ve definitely believed that my life-changing score is going to come in a live major, as I feel like my edge live is much greater than my edge online, so I basically follow a cycle every year where I play a bunch online and then pour that money into live MTTs.”

He closed by outlining an important distinction between professional and recreational poker players: their postmortem demeanor. “I’ve worked really hard to stay on top of tournament poker and still feel like I am one of the top players in the game today,” Wheeler noted about his #66 post in the PocketFives Poker Rankings. “That’s why to guys like us, it still stings that we don’t win a tournament even though we made a great score, which is one of the hardest things to explain to recreational players of the game.”

If you don’t already have an account, sign up for PokerStars today to play in this week’s slate of MTTs.

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