Robert Kuhn isn’t afraid of a little hard work. Whether it’s multi-tabling online every day or reviewing some of the hands he played during the daily grind that caused him angst or working on creating ways for his poker income to go to work for him, Kuhn seemingly can’t – or won’t – say no.

If you were paying attention during the World Series of Poker Online bracelet events on WSOP.com in July, you saw the fruits of all of that labor on a nearly daily basis.

Kuhn first crashed the WSOP party in Event #2 ($1,000 NLHE 8-Handed Deepstack), picking up a middling cash of $2,881 for finishing in 47th place. The next day, the 30-year-old Las Vegas resident put his name on the marquee by outlasting 2,090 other players to win Event #3 ($400 NLHE) for $115,850 all while livestreaming.

“That was my longest Twitch day by a lot. I have three or four different ones where I stream for 12 hours. That was a 15-hour stream. That was a long one,” Kuhn said. “But, when you’re deep in that kind of tournament, you’re not tired. You’re not tired going for hundreds of thousands of dollars and a bracelet. You’re just not. In my mind, I felt it was like 5:00 in the afternoon and I looked out, and it was 3:30 (in the morning). I was like, ‘Yeah I’m not sleeping for a while basically.’ So, that was pretty fun.”

As the final table approached, Kuhn was attempting to learn as much as he could about his opponents. He quickly discovered that for many of the players still in, this was a bigger buy-in tournament than they normally play. The apparent calibre of the remaining field when the final table bubble burst provided Kuhn with an extra bit of something most people would say he doesn’t lack; confidence.

“I thought I had a very high chance of winning. I had a read on every single person. I knew their average buy-in. I basically knew who they were. There was only one guy I really couldn’t find out much about and it was the guy I got heads up with, unfortunately, and that guy gave me some troubles,” Kuhn said. “I knew there were guys who were going to be folding to three-bets. So, I was getting a little out of line in plenty of spots, as you should as the chip leader. ICM is a real thing and a lot of these guys are just happy to get there.”

Some may have first discovered Kuhn in the weeks leading up to the WSOP after he and Matt Berkey got into one of those Poker Twitter beefs that thirsty poker fans can’t seem to get enough of. While there was never a “Heads Up For Rolls” payoff, the poker gods did prove they have a sense of humor when it just so happened that Berkey was the one working with David Tuchman on the WSOP livestream for Kuhn’s final table.

“One, I do not dislike Berkey. I know there’s a lot of people that want to create this narrative, that I dislike Berkey. I dislike his philosophies on how he plays certain hands. There’s a big difference. Two, he’s an articulate person and he’s accomplished a lot,” Kuhn said. “Now, do I like his poker game? No, but look, I don’t like a lot of people’s poker game. If that hurts your ego, that’s a ‘you’ problem, not a ‘me’ problem.”

Even though he was focused on the eight players standing between himself and that bracelet, Kuhn did get a good chuckle when he realized that it was his newly-discovered nemesis in the booth that night. Kuhn heard from his friends that the Twitter spat didn’t spill over into Berkey’s commentary that night.

“Kudos to him for not making this little internet feud thing go into that kind of spot. He’s doing his job. He’s doing the commentary. He doesn’t need to bring that up,” Kuhn said. “In my eyes, it’s squashed. Good luck to him. That’s the last thing I said, ‘Good luck on the felt’”

Over the three weeks that followed it felt like Kuhn was a mission. At some point semingly each and every night, Kuhn’s ‘bustinballs’ screenname would appear in the top 20 chip counts, an ode to his ability to build stacks. He cashed nine more times and spent a considerable amount of time atop the WSOP.com leaderboard.

The bracelet win and leaderboard chase might have put Kuhn’s names on the mind of poker fans for the first time, but he’s not some whiz kid newcomer. Kuhn’s been playing online since before he was in college and spent some time living and grinding in Mexico after Black Friday. He won a pair of PokerStars Spring Championship of Online Poker titles, one in 2015 and the second in 2017, and poker was going well enough for him that he wanted to diversify his income sources and he began looking at businesses to open.

Kuhn moved back to Ohio with the intention of opening up a restaurant. A few roadblocks prevented that from happening but Kuhn started flipping houses all the while continuing to play poker. In 2016, he made the move to Las Vegas and got it on the Airbnb game.

“I bought my second house, and then I bought my third house, and then it was just absolutely crushing,” Kuhn said. “I made Superhost as fast as you can get there. I had 92% occupancy rate, averaging $400-$500 a night per house. At the same time, I was in high stakes private games at the Aria and Bellagio and Wynn. We played a lot of places.”

Kuhn then experienced an ugly form of deja vu when the government literally came knocking on his door to eliminate an income stream without warning.

“It was like Black Friday version two. I get a bunch of code enforcement (officers) coming to my door. They come knocking on my door,” Kuhn remembered. “I’m like, ‘What the hell did I do?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, we know about all your Airbnbs.’”

When Kuhn first started renting out houses to Las Vegas visitors there was no law on the books to stop him. That changed in 2018 when the city passed a bylaw that restricted short-term rentals unless it was your primary residence. Kuhn was forced to get out of the Airbnb business and saw all of that income go away with it. The businessman in Kuhn wasn’t done yet, however.

All the while playing in high stakes cash games in Las Vegas, Kuhn also had a stable of students paying upwards of $300 per hour. Over the past several months, Kuhn has been working on taking that online. Throughout his chase of the WSOP leaderboard, Kuhn was also involved in the minutiae of getting ElitePokerCoaching.com off the ground. On August 1, just hours after the WSOP.com bracelet events wrapped up, Kuhn put the site online. Launching a business while in the midst of chasing WSOP glory came down to a few things Kuhn’s previous businesses taught him.

“Not sleeping is one of them. My sleep schedule went down. Thankfully with the Airbnb stuff, I was running that for almost four years. My phone was on all night long and I’ll tell you what, I probably got four hours to five hours sleep. I got pretty used to it,” Kuhn said. “I used to have a (personal assistant) when I had Airbnbs, so that helped me a lot. So, maybe I’ll just get a PA again to help me, because it’s a lot of work and every single video that gets uploaded, that gets uploaded to elitepokercoaching.com, has to be reviewed by me.”

With all the attention a new business needs, Kuhn wanted to stay in Las Vegas and dedicate his time to managing the company rather than travel to Mexico to chase down more WSOP gold on GGPoker. The first few weeks of operation went well enough that late last week Kuhn made the trip south of the border to get back to the tables and cement a place in WSOP history. Clearly little more hard work isn’t going stop him.