“Playing a lot and finding people to talk strategy with are probably the most important things to do to improve.” Those were words of wisdom from David davidv1213Vamplew (pictured), a former EPT Main Event winner who recently finished second in the PartyPoker $100,000 Guaranteed High Roller, a $500 buy-in weekly tournament that regularly shells out more than $30,000 to its champion.

The second place finish, which earned him $19,000, certainly wasn’t the largest or most high profile one of his career, but it was still significant. As Vamplew pointed out, “It’s good to have a winning day. I’m very happy that I have been putting up consistent results recently and this is one of my bigger successes. I came into the final table 10th of 10, so I have to be happy to end up with a pretty big score. It would have been good to close it out, though.”

Vamplew was the runner-up on August 26, when the High Roller brought out 239 players. We asked him for a scouting report: “The structure of the tournament is great. The only thing I can really find fault with is that it plays ten-handed. Once the tournament gets going, it tends to have a 30 to 50 big blind average stack, which I think is ideal for a high-stakes online tournament.” He added that the field is on the softer side given the buy-in, but called for more players to pony up the $500 entry fee and take part.

Vamplew can be found on the online poker felts nearly every Sunday: “I would say I play a little tighter than usual on PartyPoker since it is ten-handed and in general I know less about my opponents since I don’t play a huge number of tournaments there, so I would rather avoid too many marginal or read-dependent situations. Deeper in the tournament, I’d say it is more important to put the pressure on and go for the win because of how top-heavy PartyPoker’s payouts are.”

The member of the United Kingdom pokercommunity stands at #67 worldwide, his highest position ever, in the PocketFives Rankings and noted that “it is good to see hard work and progress in your game reflected in the rankings system on PocketFives. It can help with motivation.”

Vamplew’sEPT win came in 2010 in London and was worth a healthy $1.4 million. The following year, he made the final table of the WPT’s stop in Venice and banked another $201,000. He has earned nearly $2 million from live MTTs according to the Hendon Mob and said that traveling is the most alluring part of live poker tournaments: “It’s fun to travel and play in different places. Plus, deeper stacks and better reads that are available live mean you can play a different style than in most online tournaments.”

We asked Vamplew to pick two of his most favorite travel destinations expecting to get responses like Las Vegas or the Bahamas. Instead, he said, “It’s hard to pick places, but I would say Tallinnand Pragueare a couple of locations I really like. The cities aren’t too big, they both have a great old town part, and there are plenty of fun things to do.”

His EPT final table saw him go toe-to-toe with the likes of John Juanda and Kyle kwob20 Bowker (pictured). However, to say Vamplew was intimated would be a falsity: “At that point, I didn’t really realize how hard it is to final table a big tournament or what a big deal it was, so I didn’t let anything intimidate me. I had fun, played my game, and ended up winning a lot of money!” We’d say $1.4 million qualifies as “a lot of money.”

In college, Vamplew’s friends turned him onto poker. He joined the school’s poker club, found the online game, and his career progressed from there. Discovering forums like Two Plus Two and PocketFives was a “major factor” in his development.

By the way, if you don’t already have an account on WPT Poker, which makes its home on the same network as PartyPoker, you can sign up through PocketFives, make a deposit, and get one free month of PocketFives Trainingwith the sign-up fee waived, which would normally run you $65. Just click here to get startedand use the code P5WPT.