Admit it, you’ve dreamed of running a bar. Invite your friends over for a beer whenever you want, sing karaoke until daybreak, and come up with cocktails that even Jerry Thomas couldn’t imagine. And what if that bar were ocean-side? And visited by sharks?

Such is the life of Mike ‘m8675309a’ Adamo, the lone member of the PocketFives community from the Turks and Caicos. He owns a pub called, appropriately enough, SharkBite Bar and Grill and now spends his entire week behind the bar, cleaning tables, managing the staff, and doing whatever it takes to make the business a resounding success.

“Since September of last year, I have been semi-retired from grinding online,” Adamo said. “I have been playing pretty much only on the weekends.”

Recently, he made the most of his time in front of the computer, winning the PokerStars Sunday Warm-Up this past Sunday for $74,000, the third largest score of his online poker career. Despite his success online, his passion rests with SharkBite.

“It’s nice to be involved with the day-to-day at SharkBite again,” the Sunday Warm-Up winner said. “I feel like I have more of a balance in my life again, actually interacting with live humans at the bar during the week and online on the weekends.”

For the past half-decade, Adamo, despite owning SharkBite, was largely hands-off. However, he said he made a “good decision” to return five days a week and be a lot more visible.

“Poker is really hard now,” Adamo said. “After my World Series of Poker last year, which sucked, I took a two-month break from poker. I grinded the whole six weeks in Las Vegas and it was a bad experience mentally and financially. I ran really badly.”

His post-WSOP break was the first one like it in 10 years. And after it ended, he began splitting his time between running SharkBite and playing shark online.

“Hopefully I can take some of Sunday’s run-good to the EPT Grand Final in Monaco next week,” he said of his plans now. “I won a France Poker Series package.”

Adamo is originally from Toronto, Canada and lived in Bermuda for three years starting in 2003 before moving to Turks and Caicos.

“I originally moved to Bermuda to get an IT job, but online poker was really, really great back then, so I decided to make that my job instead,” said Adamo. “Then, I got an opportunity to buy SharkBite in 2006 and that’s what brought my wife Shannon and me to Turks and Caicos.”

Besides the fact that it’s next to the ocean, SharkBite is a pretty appropriate name for the establishment.

“That’s one of our selling points,” Adamo said. “Every night after sunset, real sharks swim right by our lit-up outside deck. Even after 10 years, I still love watching them.”

In 2010, SharkBite was at the epicenter of rabid fans watching the United States take on Canada in the Olympic hockey finals in Vancouver.

“That was a really fun day at the bar,” Adamo said. “One side was all Canadians, one side was all Americans, and there was a very healthy rivalry going on. When Canada eked out a win, a few of the crazy Canadians jumped onto the roof and were diving into the marina, like a 20-foot drop, just as the sun was going down. We had to remind them that it was almost shark-o-clock and they might want to get out of the water.”

His decision to split his time appears to have been a smart one. Not only is his business booming, but so is his online poker career.

“I’ve been getting super deep in tons of stuff in the last two or three months,” he said. “But, I have been getting a lot of 12th to 18th place finishes in thousand-plus-man MTTs, so it was nice to get a top finish for a change in the Warm-Up. I am really happy about it.”

His largest online tournament score to date came in 2009. That year, one year before the big Canada versus USA hockey game, he finished second in the PokerStars Sunday Million for $292,000. All told, Adamo has $2.3 million in career online MTT winnings and will almost certainly reenter the top 500 worldwide when the PocketFives Rankings are recomputed on Wednesday.

“It’s such a simple life here, hanging with my dogs and wife, going to the beach, and doing some boating,” he said. “It’s a pretty good life. It has been a really difficult couple of years in poker, so I definitely am appreciative of my good fortune. I have been unable to cash in like 95% of my Sunday majors for the last few months, so I guess I’m glad I stuck with it.”